Shades of Red

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Shades of Red

A man will tell you
if you say
The dress was coral
that he doesn’t know
what color that is.
It’s a funny joke
that a man can’t identify
shades of ruby, rose or russet.
Don’t specify
cadmium, crimson,
carmine or cardinal
or burden him
with the fiery folly of mauve,
maroon and magenta;
these will topple him
into a raspberry of despair;
you won’t get to his heart
through his stomach
describing anything as
candy apple, cherry,
tangerine or strawberry.
Just call it red.
You and I know
it doesn’t mean he
doesn’t care about the dress;
it may mean he doesn’t understand
the subtle species of your feelings
separated into seed packets
in the complex filing
system of your spirit;
it means he would like
you to hit the broad red
side of the barn
with your meaning
so that he can love you
with his strong brick red heart.


May 2012

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Wisława Szymborska on loan

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Everything’s mine but just on loan,

nothing for the memory to hold,

though mine as long as I look. . . .

. . .

I won’t retain one blade of grass

as it’s truly seen. . . .

. . .

Salutation and farewell

in a single glance.

~ From the poem “Travel Elegy”
by Wisława Szymborska, 
who bid us farewell February 1st

"Think of your spine ending inside your head, not at the top of your neck, and feel your head floating there atop the spine," my Alexander teacher tells me as she helps me relearn the posture of a child, one of many tactics of a strategy I am waging to alleviate the pain of repetitive strain injury that radiates from my hands up to my neck. So I focus on the essence of that physical relationship, and the unlikelihood of carrying around an eight-pound weight upon something as thin as a spine, like a Chinese circus performer balancing a white plate vertically on the end of a stick. It is almost easier to picture my head invisible, like those of vestal virgins standing in stone along the lane of the Roman Forum. Those heads are gone from their bodies—weightless in their absence—yet their essence remains, sacred in memory and imagination. However I think of it, there needs to be mindfulness of my head and spine as one, in flow.

What is hidden within flesh and bone? What radiates in spite of them?

The 2009 head shot of Wisława Szymborska, above, magnetizes me. The face was on loan to her for a lifetime, evolving with age, yet momentary as a sunrise. It is now just a memory, a hint of earth on a bronze brow, eyes brown stones embedded in the palest rose sky, cheeks hill pastures in the morning sun, a trace of lipstick on an upwinged smile about to fly.

Wisława returns to the sky and the soil, a bridge between hello and good-bye. At birth and death, we attend to essence as to a smudge stick of dried and bundled sage, carefully lit at the start, held closely above a candle flame. Then small rosy ember-buds sketch fragrant shadows on air for a time, until at last they burn out, just dried leaf-sticks with singed heads. Yet how wild, musky and holy their scent remains as I hold them to my nostrils, opening heaven to earth, and earth to heaven, as if their flame never burns out at all. Wisława's writing strikes me as weight born like effortless floating, all flame and fragrance simultaneously . . .

. . . For surplus and absence alike,

a single action of the neck.            

 my sage smudge stick smells like heaven to me

Poem "Travel Elegy" by Wisława Szymborska from the selected poems titled 'view with a grain of sand' published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993

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Poem: Winter blur

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Winter blur

I
How strange suddenly
to read the word ermine
and think of a
woman’s neck,

warmed, blurred
with white fur, and not
to see the long stoat’s
winter skin—alive, bounding;

II
O marquise winter moon,
rustle of skirt on the balcony,
and the agony to fly;

when a man feels your whiteness,
he soars; toward what, I wonder:
the sun’s reflection, or some
other light, conquering within?


January 2012

Poetry should be heard.

Notes:
stoat: mustela ermenia, or ermine
marquise: this shape, a cut of a diamond 

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Poem: Woman and cloud

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Woman and cloud

From her propped hospital bed
the old woman who nearly died
a few days ago now talks and
talks, while a continental drift of cloud
passes over the hospital and suburbs.
They are each unaware of the other,
the sheeted woman and the gray cloud;
both snowcapped, and round at the edges;
both moving in the minimal float
that seems a physical impossibility
when gravid with so much fluid;
there is much winter to come, and harshly;
they hold it up like a woman’s flounces.

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Poem: Endless

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my mom

 

Endless

Fingering the past and its memories
like beads of stone

or bone, like the ivory necklace
of your mother’s you wore,

its carved spheres, milky with river
filigrees, soapy soft,

lotioned almost
like your face skin before bed

oh pressing mine, kissing me good night on my
adolescent pillow

where I was growing, thrumming into myself
drawing pictures of women’s bodies

the way I wanted mine to be
under

forbidden bone, outlawed tusk
engraved for a beautiful woman

to wear upon her neck
hanging down on her bosom

circling, rotating, revolving
in the endless orbit of a life

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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National Poetry Month: Prose Poem

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It's National Poetry Month, and suddenly my well has run dry. When I had no particular excuse for writing and posting poems, they popped out, the way babies do sometimes. But just as soon as I tried writing a poem for April 1, the first day of this month devoted to verse, I went into labor of the sort I experienced with my first child: many, many hours of pain and hand wringing and nothing happening.

In fact, not only did the labor last long with little consequence (I finally got a dose of Pitocin after ten hours of labor with dilation to just two out of ten, and that helped speed things up: she was born three hours later), but she was incredibly late. My due date was April 2; she arrived April 30. That would be like the whole of poetry month devoted to expecting her immanent arrival, daily.

She finally did arrive, though I thought she'd never come out. She just took a little more tinkering and tweaking than we expected. And what a masterpiece! Some of my best work yet. This month we celebrate a golden milestone: Lesley turns 30 on the 30th.

This year for National Poetry Month I would like to present poetic forms. I want to try new forms I haven't before, like a cinquain, sestina, triolet, etheree and a rondel. I may write in forms I've already tried, like villanelle, sonnet, tanka and haiku. Besides attempting my own, I'll also post examples by other poets.

Today's form: prose poem. Prose poems are prose pieces that aren't broken into verse lines, but still include other poetic traits, such as metaphor, figures of speech, lyricism, and heightened emotion. One way of writing a prose poem is a letter, which I'm using. It's followed by a sweet prose poem by Amy Lowell.

Here's my prose poem to the baby I waited and waited for in our little house in Pasadena, California, thirty years ago.

To My Unborn Child

Dear Baby ~

I was thinking of you so I thought I’d write.

How are things? I’d love to hear from you.

Your room is ready.

I filled two brown grocery bags with avocados from the trees and the ground out front. I only picked the ones that were heavy and ripe, like my breasts. Dad took them to work to give away.

Did I mention your room is ready? I straightened the picture above the crib last week. I’ll teach you how to do that. See your grandpa taught me. He did it constantly. He couldn’t go through a room without straightening a picture. It’s OK if you don’t get it right at first. You just have to practice. After a while you’ll be straightening things for everybody like Grandpa.

Madeleine, our beagle, keeps misbehaving. When we let her outside, she keeps digging under the fence and getting out. One of these days she’s going to get hit by a car. We should probably tie her up. What a pain. I hate giving her a spanking. I just really have no idea how to train her.

Well, I miss you. Wish you were here.

I love you,
Mommy

She came, and then we had to learn everything;

but the loving came oh so naturally

The baby who finally arrived

And another prose poem:

Bath

by Amy Lowell

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
     The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. 
     Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

 Amy Lowell

1874-1925

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Mother's Day

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me and Mom on my wedding day, April 8, 1978

Mom with Peter in 1982

Mom and Lesley in 1981

Mom at around age 5

Lesley, with her cousins Lauren and Kelly, dressed up in my mother's old clothes; photo circa 1991

a list in the back of her devotional book

with some of the names of people she prayed for every day;

she also prayed for every world leader daily;

and of course she prayed for us kids every day too

When Don, the kids and I moved to Istanbul in 1986, she had put cards and gifts in Lesley's and Peter's backpacks to open at the start of each flight of the long journey:

1. Detroit to New York

2. New York to Frankfurt

3. Frankfurt to Istanbul

One of the cards had a music-playing chip inside that started playing Zippidy-doo-da when you opened it. The kids had that card in their toy box for at least two years, the cover eventually ripped off and just the inner white card with the tiny white button that would play when you pushed it. One day it suddenly played Happy Birthday instead of Zippidy-doo-da. I guess chips like that have more than one song in them.

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another kind of tea bag

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. . . "for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at."

T.S.Eliot
4 quartets
p 14

Looking in my fluorescent magnifying mirror,
dabbing dots of concealer on the bags
under my eyes as the magazine for aging women
who want to stay beautiful shows,
I suddenly feel the register in the room's music
deepen and know that my Auntie Sue is sitting behind me
on the worn chair that was Aunt Edith's. O both these women
had eye bags to beat the band.
"Aunt" Edith, my mother's stepmother
with that gene that creates these features on your face
like a nose or a mouth or a chin but that don't
start growing until somewhere after 40 about the time earlobes
also seem to have grown longer,
Aunt Edith whose pedigree and provenance I know nothing of
and never cared to because I didn't like her. But
Auntie Sue, my dad's sister, was different.
The woman had the most glorious eye bosooms
in the history of womankind,
reminding me of the women gathering tea
on the hills by the Black Sea,
their soft burlap tea bag carried in front
like one large breast
growing as they stuffed in more leaves.
I wish I'd had more time with her,
because what she carried in her eye bags was fragrant,
like that black tea, not poisoned like Aunt Edith's Chernobyl tea bags.
Auntie Sue whose humor was her pedigree and when you aimed
a camera her way said she'd break it,
whom all of us adored and never had enough of in her 92 years.
She might as well have lived by the Black Sea she was so far away
in Virginia where tobacco leaves grow but here she is, sitting behind me!
- smiling her wryness as I try to cover what we got from her mother,
and she says: One day you won't be able to cover them Ruthie
but just be sure that what you carry in them is fragrant.


*Note: On April 26, 1986 the worst nuclear accident in history occurred in Chernobyl, Ukraine (then USSR) and the radioactive cloud it released contaminated the tea growing along the Black Sea in Turkey, which was while we lived in Istanbul. There was a tea crisis, and the tea already in stores sold out in a day.

a birthday

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"She sat there filled with champagne.
She talked about hashish and its effects.
I said, 'I have known such effects without hashish.
I do not need drugs.
I carry all that within myself.'
At this she was a little angry.
She did not realize that I achieved those states
without destroying my mind.
My mind must not die, because I am a writer.
I am the poet who must see."

- Anaïs Nin, talking to June Mansfield,
wife of Henry Miller, in Henry and June

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Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France,
February 21, 1903 (died January 14, 1977).
Her diary was her closest friend.

Power to diaries. Power to blogs.
Power to the word, to the poem,
and to a clear mind.
Observe, feel, tell the details.

See in · · · out · · · through · · · across · · · beyond · ·
· · along · · · around · · · within · · · underneath · ·
· · outside · · · past · · · into · · · behind · · · ahead · ·
· · onto · · · toward · · · until · · · upon · · · among · · · at · ·
· · over · · · on top of · · · inside · ·

No one else sees the way you see.

window on
rue des Barres, Paris
May 2006

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"They've messed with the wrong one now!"

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To read more about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, go here.
To read more about Rosa Parks, go here, or read her autobiography, Rosa Parks, My Story.
To see the story of the restoration of the bus, go here.
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