thanks by w.s.merwin

Thanks

By W.S.Merwin  

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

taking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

thank you we are saying and waving

dark though it is

W.S. Merwin, "Thanks" from Migration: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by W.S. Merwin.

Our world in stupor lies: Auden

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

wild woman in Irish myth: my people, me!

Grief and anger as a stimulus for transformationThis is a post from Dr. Sharon Blackie's blog. She is a mythologist, psychologist and writer.
https://theartofenchantment.net/2016/11/10/the-wild-woman-in-irish-myth/

It seems that everyone knows about the wild men in Celtic mythology. The enigmatic Brittonic figure of Lailoken, who almost certainly, somewhere along the line, became conflated with Merlin, leading to the legend of Myrddin Wyllt, the wild man of the woods. Suibhne Geilt, Mad Sweeney from the old Irish tale Buile Shuibhne (‘The Frenzy of Sweeney’): the subject of a fine body of poetry which extends from Yeats to Heaney. It’s a story we seem to have seen before: everybody knows about the men, but somehow, nobody focuses on the women.

So let’s take a look at Mis, the most colourful and original wild woman of Irish mythology. (There are no great poems about Mis, but I’d like to think there will be, some day.) Mis was the daughter of Dáire Dóidgheal, a powerful ruler from Europe who set out to invade Ireland. He landed with a huge army in Ventry, County Kerry, and a fierce battle followed which lasted a year and a day. Dáire was eventually slain by the hero-warrior Fionn mac Cumaill, which ended the battle. Mis came down in the aftermath to look for her father, and found only his dead body, bleeding, on the beach. Mis was overwhelmed by grief, and flung herself across her father’s body, licking and sucking at his bloody wounds to try to heal them, just as an animal might. When this failed to restore him to life, madness overcame her and she rose up into the air like a bird and flew away into the heart of the Sliabh Mis mountains.

Mis lived in the mountains for many years, and grew long trailing fur and feathers to cover her naked skin. She grew great sharp claws with which she attacked and tore to pieces any creature or person she met. She could run like the wind, and no living thing was safe from her. They thought her so dangerous that the people of Kerry created a desert stripped of people and cattle between themselves and the mountains, just for fear of her.

The king in those parts, Feidlimid Mac Crimthainn, offered a reward to anyone who would capture Mis alive. No-one accepted, for fear of Mis, except for a gentle harper by the name of Dubh Ruis. Dubh Ruis enticed Mis out of hiding, and made love to her. He coaxed her into a pool and, over a period of days, washed away the dirt and scrubbed away her feathers and fur. He combed her hair, and fed her, and made a bed for her. And eventually, he brought her back to civilisation, and married her.

This is some of what I wrote about Mis in If Women Rose Rooted:

Sometimes, madness seems like the only possible response to the insanity of the civilised world; sometimes, holding ourselves together is not an option, and the only way forwards is to allow ourselves to fall apart. As the story of Mis shows, that madness can represent an extreme form of initiation, a trigger for profound transformation.

… Mis is the original wild woman, that archetypal madwoman who lives deep within each of us. She speaks for us all: for the rage which we cannot express, for the grief which eats our heart out, for the voices we have suppressed out of fear. This old story shows us a brutal descent into darkness during which all illusions are stripped away and old belief systems evaporate, and in doing so it suggests that the extremities of madness or mental breakdown, with their prolonged, out-of-control descent into the unknown, might offer us a path through which we can come to terms with the truth. Like other legendary geilta (the Irish word for madwomen) Mis is driven to extremity in her grief, shape-shifting into bird form, flying away into the hills and woods, growing fur and feathers, eating wild and raw food, leaving the intolerable world behind her. But a geilt cannot emerge from her madness and come back to the world until she has achieved some kind of personal transformation. Through her ordeal – her removal from society and her time spent in the wilderness – she must find a way to reclaim a more authentic sense of identity and belonging. She finds it with the help of a man; she finds it in the union of the masculine and feminine.

So, there we have her: Mis. The furious feminine, all fierce hag energy, wailing her grief into the mountains. A necessary fury, a transformative fury.

I love the story of Mis; I believe it contains a necessary lesson for women in these times. Sometimes, anger and grief is a necessary precursor to transformation. Sometimes, we need to let the wild woman rage. To grow feathers and fur, and run wild through the woods. Sometimes, we need to bite. To stop being nice and talking about love and light and thinking that we can make the world a better place just by pretending that it’s so, or that we can make Donald Trump a better man by sending him love and light through the ether. (Yes, I’ve seen that proposed as a solution to yesterday’s catastrophe by women I’d expect to know better. It beggars belief.) These are dark days in our history, and dark days for women. If women want to change that, we need to take hold of that pure, honest energy which fuels our necessary rage and grief, and use it next for transformation. Find the hag energy. Use it. Transmute it; transform it. It’s what all good alchemists do, and women are born alchemists.

What I particularly like about the story of Mis is that her transformation comes from bringing together both male and female energies. Dubh Ruis is a gentle man; he literally loves her back to life. Like Mis, women can’t do this work alone. Fortunately, there are still good men out there, and I believe that between us, we can do the great work of turning the base metal of a decadent and decaying culture into gold.

Halloween with Katie Kat Joy

My mom was fixated on always making homemade costumes for her kids. These were not slap dash outfits. My mom would buy patterns, fabric and then spend a few hours sewing our costumes. I usually won first prize at our church's halloween party.  the one year I did not win was my favorite costume. I was Glenda the Good Witch, according to my mom, but, unlike Glenda, who dazzles in pink or lavendar in The Wizard of Oz, mom put me in shiny, sparkly black clothing with a heavily beaded cape. I think the cape might have actually been an adult fancy-dress cap, the kind one would wear to a formal attire event. Mom probably picked it up at a garage sale, for she never wore that cape. My mom never went to a formal event, as far as I know, not once I was born.

I even won the year I had to wear a costume I loathed. Mom made me a full blown nun costume, with all the layers that robed nuns wore in the early sixties, plus a large wooden rosary to signal the piety of my pretend St. Therese, the little flower of Jesus. As I walked around the church fellowship hall, parading before the judges, many of them nuns, I knew I would win and I hated that I would win. I hated, most of all, that my mom was steadily pressuring me to declare that I wanted to be a nun.

I loved my Glenda the Good Witch costume, although I knew going as a black-dressed Glenda made my chances of winning slim. None of the judges noticed that I shimmered, in black. No one got that I was Glenda. I looked like an ordinary witch, dressed in black. Still, I loved wearing that shimmering, veltvet and balck sequined cape, pretending I was a good Glenda, even dressed in black.

I remember begging my mom to let me sew on some pink and purple sequins but mom was invested in her Glenda vision. And, in the hindsight of more than fifty years, I am happy some other girl in my age  group got to win top prize one year. I won all the other years until I aged out of Halloween costumes.

So, once I had a daughter, naturally, I made my daughter's costumes, but I was not as dedicated to making everything from a pattern and fabric. I made Katie's costumes but not with sewing patterns. I made her outfits out of cleverness.

One year, when she was two, my sister gave Katie an outfit perfect for a calypso dancer.  It was a two-piece cotton knit dress, with slanting hems for the top and also for the skirt. The outfit was way too big for Katie when she received it. By the time it fit her properly, several years later, Katie refused to wear the somewhat odd two piece.  It still seems endearing to me that Katie's then-college-age aunt had bought her a funky, but way oversized, outfit. And it seems even more endearing to me that I saw its poential as a Carmen Miranda costume. It had a top that had ruffles on the sleeves and showed some bare belly. The skirt was slanted in length. It was supposed to go from knee to heel but Katie was too small for the outfit so we had to hitch it up. The cotton fabric had wild flowers printed on it. And all I had to do was tack up the skirt so it didn't trip her when she walked.

I bought a bright blue kerchief, to match the main color of the calypso dancer outfit.  I tacked down that bandana so it could be pulled onto Katie's head like a hat. And I bought a bunch of small plastic fruit that I stitched by had onto that kerchief hat.  Carmen Miranda! Carmen alays wore fruit atop hats on her head as she danced. And Carmen Miranda wore ruffling, slanted hem skirts that sworled and flashed a little leg as she moved.

I put the largest, brightest pink bangle earrings I could find on her ears. I made her cheeks as rosy red as I could, using lipstick to get them very bright. I used heavy eyeshadow, but no eye liner. I had to make do with the very limited make up I had on hand, not knowing, back then, that one can buy Halloween costume make up, I made do with what I had.

Oh, and from Goddess only knows where, I had found a big fat chunky beaded hot pink necklace that draped down to her navel -- and her navel was just a bit exposed by the weirdly slanted weird top. The bright pink jumbo beads were a surprisingly effective detail, making the whole outfit pop.

She looked awesome. I still have photos of that costume. She won a prize at the Children's Museum Halloween party that year. And I sent her out trick or treating on Halloween with her dad dressed as Carmen Miranda. I guess it was his turn to take her trick or treating.   He must have had his own ideas for a costume. He returned her to me in regular clothes, no make up and her Carmen Miranda outfit dumped in a bag like it was fit for the trash.

Somewhere along the way, I found a photo of her dressed up in kinda sexy kitten costume. I get the kitten ears, the whiskers eyelined onto her face but I never would have put my two year old in a skin tight, leopard pattern thing comparable to a bathing suit plus black tights. That leopard print cat outfit was lined with 'fur', although not real fur. It was actually  kinda sexy and she was two.  Age inappropriate. I never said aloud, to anyone, that I thought her sexy kitten outfit was age inappropriate because that costume happened during the divorce years. I could never say anything about her father, to her or to anyone, that did not seem to sound like bitterness. Was I jealous of that costume, the sexy kitten? No way, although I may have resented that his family rejected my very clever Carmen Miranda get-up. That hat with the tiny plastic fruit tacked onto it was genius.

He was entitled to pick her outfit, of course, for his turn on Halloween, although I imagine his sister the spastic medical doctor, the hag who, praise Goddess, never had children of her own to destroy, probably picked it out. Or his daffy mother. Both those women would think nothing of sexing up a two year old for halloween. And Katie's pose in the one photo, which I also still have if anyone doubts my description, appeared to be coached:  she was slinking it up for the camera. A two year old slinking?

Geez, couldn't they have had her come to my door in costume and say trick or treat? You know, act like her other was a part of her life and her Halloween? Nope.

That Carmen Miranda costume was awesome. Homemade. And easy peasy to put together.

It was just about as awesome as the time she was a punk rocker, with black and white pipe cleaners stuffed into a pony tail on top of her head to evoke the idea of a mohawk, which was the rage for punk rockers in the early eighties.

She won the prize for best costume in her age group for the punk rocker, as a Halloween party at the Children's Museum.  As I have written elsewhere, whenever someone asked her "Honey, you look great. what ar eyou supposed to be?" She answered "I am Strawberry Shortcake."  I had painted half her face white, the other half black, with a black star on the white eye side and a white star or skull or whatever my drawing ability was up to, on the black side. I bought a bunch of cheap chains at a real hardware store that sold chains by the foot and draped her with chains. She wore an adult white male t-shirt, painted with a skull and crossbones and black leggings.

She looked totally awesome as a punk rocker.

The reason she told everyone, when they asked what she was supposed to be, that she was Strawberry Shortcake, was because she had begged me to buy her one of those cheap boxed costumes at Target In those years, such a bit of junk was mostly a mask with the cartoon character's face and then a very cheap vaguely princess sheath. Cheap junk, the kind of costume my mother had trained me to scorn.

Katie must have had much faith in me. And rightly so. I nearly always gave her what she wanted but my punk rocker idea was so clever that I couldn't give it up, esp. for a cheap boxed junky thing from Target.

Now my mom, in her prime, probably would ahve bought a sewing pattern for Strawberry shortcake and sewn a strawberry sprigged dress for Katie and made her a wig with red yarn, then made freckles on her face with eyeliner pencil. I could have done that, sure, but the punk rocker idea was just too good to give up.

I did make it up to her. I found a very large doll cradle at a garge sale in scruffy shape. I cleaned it up, paitnted it white and made a mattress, blankets and pillow for her actual Strawberry Shortcake doll.

I have a photo of Katie in her strawberry sprigged nightgown, for I made matching night gowns for Strawberry and Katie, and Katie tried to get in that doll cradle. It ws a large cradle but Katie was too big for it.

I wonder if she remembers that I made her matching nightgowns for Strawberry? And what about the matching outfits I made for her American Girl doll Samantha?  My sister stole that doll and all its accoutrements. I had told sis she could go into my brother's storage and take Katie's books for sis's kids but sis just took everything for a child, including all her Samantha stuff and Katie had a lot of Samanta stuff, even the official brass bed.

Katie also tried to get in Samantha's brass bed, and she bent it. We never quite got the kink out but no matter. It was only a doll bed and she was such a good little girl.

I made Katie and Samantha very fancy Chrismas dresses one year. I worked so hard on those dreses. I even had-sewed stretchable seam binding on the inside seams so the dress was as well made on the inside as on the outside, like a real rich girl. Samantha was, in the stories that came iwth her, very rich so I wanted Katie's Samanatha Chrismas dress to be tailored like a rich girl's tailoring.

I wonder if she remembers that I used to make her matching clothes for herself and a few of her dolls?

How can she just dump me when I did so many lovely things for her?

Oh, I just now remembered what I set out to write about. My initial point was brief:  on Halloween, I would let Katie eat as much candy as she wanted, even if she wanted to eat it all. She would always get wild on her sugar high and I reasoned that aif she ate it all in a day or two, the nights of sugar highs would end sooner. Many parents voiced opprobrium for this choice but katie loved it. And it wrked for me, getting the sugar out of our lives quickly.

I can hear her now, running through our house in Minneapolis, squealing from all the sugar, and she would keep saying "Really? You mean it, I can eat another candy bar?" And I would feel a bit like the Queen of Sheba and so purely loving and generous as I said "Really, I mean it. Eat all you want".

And I would silently pray that she ate  it all fast.

some parents doled out one piece of candy a day but that seemed wrong to me. That kept a kid on sugar for months, at least until the Chrismas crap snacks kicked in.






For the great Hlloween snowstorm of, I think, 1992 (maybe another year) Ktie nad I were staying temporarily with joni and Cary. We were supposed to move into our new home on Nov 1st but after the Halloween blizzard, or moving company called and said "We will get to you last, it will be at least a week, maybe more, because your stuff is in storage. all our other customers are under pressure to get out of spaces that have new folks moving in. With your tuff in storge, you are not a priority."

And then Katie and I trudged to the Lilnden Hills retail strip, most just to get out, but we bought some food. And Ktie was shocked when I bought the last large plastic sled at the hardware store. Everyone in that store was sorry that ad not spotted and nabbed that large, plastic, purple sled. Katie thought I bought it to give her a luxury pull all the way back to Joni's.

I never told her that I bought it so I could buy a 12 pack of diet coke and pull the diet coke home. It was a very long sled, plent of room for her and th diet coke.

The day was marred in one regard:  I bought three packs of Byerly's frozen wild rice soup, one for me, one for Katie and one for Joni. I bought some other soup for Cary because she usually made a show of being a vegetarian and that wild rice soup had chicken or ham in it. Cary was angry. I tried to give her mine, she turned up her nose. I did not enjoy that soup. And when we went back the next day to buy more for Cary, the store was basically sold out of everyting. It was just a neighborhood shop, not a full blown grocery store.

The kids sang Christmas carols while trick or treating in a full blown blizzard. I enjoyed that.

Many tol dme Katie's costume was racist. I had put on my beautiful, elaborately patterned Huajacan poncho, a large Mexican straw hat and painted a mustache on her face, for it was not a feminine costume and I wnted to signify maleness. But many folks said it was racist. How is making your kid look like a mariachi player with a mustache racist?

I loved being a mom. Loved all such complications of life.

I sed to hope, so happily and fervently, that I'd be a grandmother some day. Now I sincerely believe I would keel over dead if I were to learn I have a grandchild I ahe een denied a relatinship with.

I'm never going to get over losiong Katie and I feel my unrelenting heartache sapping years off my life. And that's okay by me. I'm ready to go. Give me my Katie or give me deth. Please

Auden's Funeral Blues

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

An old, much beloved, friend of mine is facing his mother's death this week. I have shared e.e.cummings "I carry your heart in my heart" to remind him that his love for his mother and her love for him will always buoy him. I will directly share this poem with him once she has passed.

I knew this friend in Minneapolis. He came to some of the five-day intensives my biz partner and I offered in the eighties. And he occasionally helped me out with some childcare. Katie liked him and was glad when he would pick her up from her great AfterCare program at the YWCA. then he'd either take her to his house, which was a cornucopia of delights for any child of any age or else take her to our house. And he would buy her sme frozen yogurt at the corner of Lake and Hennepin.

I remember so well how good it felt knowiong my little girl was in such sweet, loving hands.

And Craig, the friend I am writng about, hit it off with my mom. Not many hit it off with my challenging mom although my mom regularly said that as an artist, she felt she had much in common with 'the gays'. My baby bro is gay and mom lived with him and his partner for many years and she often voiced that lunkheaded line about how, as an artist, she had a special connection to gays. My bro and his long-gone, longtime life partner (he's dead but they broke up before he died. . . ). Craig was in the Minneapolis Gay Men's Chorus. He invited my mom to come see his Christmas show and she made a special trip to Minneapolis to see that show. She visited us regularly and Katie and I were not her only kin in the area. My mom's parents grew up in Minnesota and mom (and me, I guess) till have lots of blood kin in MN. In the early days of mom's clan, there was no birth control and always big families. Thirteen kids. Nine kids. And then they all had kids so the list of relatives neverending.

But that one time mom came to see Craig. When I ased her why she made a special trip just for one gay men's chorus show, she repeted her grating line about as an artist, she had much in common with 'the gays' but she also said, and no one who knew him, or knows him, would ever deny this, Craig is a sweet peach.

So his mom must be a super sweet lady if she raised such a sweetie.

I wonder if my Ktie remembers Craig. I also wonder if she has any appreciationo for the intereting parade of humans we shared our lives with. No suburban vanilla for me. I think she longed for upscale, suburban vanilla but, geez, how many people does she know ever had a deformed dwarf named Cheryl as her babysitter? And does it ever cross her mind that by exposing her to the wide range of humans that I did that I was opening her world in ways few children get.

I love this Auden poem.  Maybe Katie will read it when she learns I have died. Although how would she learn of my death? No one in my life now even knows her name.  Everyone knows I have a daughter who shuns me named Katie but no one I know knows her last name. Why would they?

moonlight

I ducked out of my evening date early, the event I attended just didn't grab me. He was angry and wouldn't go out to eat. If I have any talent that amounts to being at agenius level, it is finding easily angered men. Or maybe men get more easily angry at fat women, like they are thinking "hey, you are fat so I can treat your shabbily".

Anyway, feeling bad and wanting to cheer myself up, I remembered that the movie "Moonlight", based on the play called "Black Boys Look Blue in the Moonlight", a picture that has been called full of poetic grace, is showing at the Embarcadero Center. It will turn up in Berkeley eventually. I hope. I hope. I hope.

I don't like to go to movies in SF and pay for BART when I live within a block of three multiplexes that tend to get all the movies eventually. But there I was, going home alone, which was not what I had anticipated, and feeling, um, incomplete. I so totally wanted to walk to the Embarcadero Center and see Moonlight. Well, I wrote that wrong. If I were a person in a Marc Chagall painting and I could have floated down market and then cut over to the Embarcadero Center, I really wanted to see the movie. I didn't know the show times. My knees creak all the time these days and I sincerely believe I'm going to end up getting a new left knee. I limp. I am in serious pain.

So if I had the magic ability to fly or the magic ability to stop my left knee from painfully creaking and if Moonlight was showing soon to the time I was on Market Street, I wanted to go. I had my iPad so I could have found free wifi, like at the Westfield Mall to see the film show times.

Then I got to a BART statirway. I couldn't see an elevator to BART. There are almost never any down escalators down to BART tations. My knees hate the tall stairwells required to get into the bowls of our underground transit system. I have to take the steps two feet on each step, like the old lady I am.  teps don't hurt. My pride is hurt, as people always rush by me. So far, no one has said anything unkind about my slow teps. And I usually use a BART elevator or escalator.

I was at some BART steps. Moonlight was still about four blocks away. I still didn't now when it started. And I knew I could be home and live it up with some lemon sparkling water and a green smoothie. So, because I really am a stiff old lady, I hobbled down those stairs, then hobbled to my building once I got to Berkeley. And I'm thinking about the smoothie.

The way smoothies happen for me if I have to think of all the ingredients for a little bit of time:  let me see, I have to think, is there kale? I like kale better than spinach in a raw smoothie. Do I have lemon? Check. Kelly gave me four of her abundant meyer lemons a day or two ago. Apple?  Check. I actually bought a frozen bag or organic apple slices -- in hindsight, a foolish choice, since it is apple season and pink ladies are tasty and these apples have no name. But they have convenience. Who needs convenience with an apple and a smoothi in a Vitamix?  I just cut the apple in half and toss it in. I just cut a lemon in half and toss it in. I toss in some fresh finger, rind and all. Cinnamon if I think of it.

I have done my thinking. Time to make, then drink, my greens.

I had kinda stopped doing raw green smoothies, because I was very sick for several months. Very very sick. But now I am back on coumadin and transitioning back on is hard. I had to eat a stable amount of greens daily and I don't eat stable mounts of greens. I just toss in whatever I feel like. Or, when braising spinach in garlic infused olive oil (yum!), I don't measure. I use a whole lot cause it cooks down.

But my coumadin test are all over the place and it isn't fair to my dear primary doc to take up her time.

A secret:  I love my primary care doc, in a perfectly platonic way. I left her for another primary doc last year and when I told her he actually said "We should get together for lunch." Aww. . . . shucks.

I left her because no one was monitoring my coumadin. and, bless my doctor, she doensn't know how to monitor couadin like Gwen did, the nurse practitioner who monitored my coumadin for years.

Isn't this a dull, run-on post? someone who loves me recently said even my most rambly, run-on messes always have something good in them. Cutting out everything but the good is the work of writing that I skip and why I don't submit.  I won't edit. It's boring. The fire of first draft is awesome sauce. Editing is boring.

Anyway. If Moonlight doe not turn up in Berkeley by this coming Friday, I'll make a date with a friend in SF and see it at the Embarcadero Center and pop for the BART costs.

SF is every bit as charming and beautiful as everyone thinks but I don't hang out, don't get to savor the city, explore its endlessly fascinating neighborhoods. I need a boyfriend. For SF adventure. And please, goddess, let him have a car so we can take impulsive drives in the country and go camping with ease.

Helga, The Thorn Witch and Katie

Frida was way cool. A visionary artist, she overcame severe physical crippling, took female lovers openly when no one did that openly and painted what she saw in her own being, painted things no one had ever seen. But she also endured open, chronic abuse from her husband, Diego Rivera. Not my idea of a female role model to mend the damage of endless princess fairy tales.

Do you know the Tomie de Paolo book, Helga's Dowry? Helga is a troll, beautiful by troll standards but poor so the cute troll she crushes on tells her he must marry a troll with money, a fat dowry. She, Helga, goes out and generates great wealth and then, sure, the pretty boy wants her.  As she went about acquiring her fat dowry, the troll king took notice and he fell for the powerful woman. She rejected pretty boy before the king proposed, accepted the king and lived, one hopes, happily ever after.

That was my first feminist take on princesses that I read to my Katie. I give it to any little girl who crosses my path. So if you are expecting a chick grandchild, send me your address, and I'll give the baby Helga's Dowry. An oldie these days but still a goodie, imho.

For Katie's first 2.5 years, we lived in Omaha. I all but haunted the one good children's book store in Omaha, prowling for female protagonist children's picture books. A proud day was the day the book store owner told me my determination to give Katie different female book characters had her whole staff more aware of the need for books for girls. There were other bookstores and I haunted them all and all the clerks in them knew what I wanted:  female protagonists for children's books. This was pre-internet when one could not just google to find what one wanted.  One shopped.

Another favorite, and I have a spare copy already, but it is a little more advanced, like age 3 for smart kids: The Thorn Witch. Oh my gosh, Katie and I loved that book. She took it for show and tell in her kindergarden. The kindergarden teachers would read any books the children brought. After school that day, Katie morosely told me that the teacher read it all wrong, that she didn't know how to use the voices that I used. I was a proud mama that day and until Katie complained about the teacher reading in monotone, I did not know Katie loved how I gave every character their own voices, in every book.

My daughter loved me then. What happened?

Imagine me reading this line with a screechy, shrieky, loud voice "You stole my blackberries and now you have to pay for them. Now, will you come quietly or will I have to carry you in this?" and then I would wave an imaginary gunny sack, just like the one on the page of the book,  in Katie's face. She giggled and snuggled me a little closer every time I waived (waved?) that imaginary gunny sack at her. In the book, The Thorn Witch is threatening to put Charlotte in the gunny sack but Charlotte capitulates and walks along as she is told.

Violet and Charlotte had picked blackberries for a pie to contribute to a Halloween party. Turned out the Thorn Witch lived in the blackberry brambles.

Long story short, at the end, the girls make another blackberry pie for the Thorn Witch, then give her the recipe. TW thanks them and said "I had no idea you could make anything so delicious with my blackberries."

There's more to this. There were four books in the seires. I bought all of them. And I have gifted sets to a few little girls over the years. The Thorn Witch  is, hands down, the best book about these rag dolls turned into little girls.

you carry me with you

"You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage."
-Anais Nin

This reminds me of the great e.e.cummings poem "I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart". Or something like that.

medicine for melancholy

Medicine for Melancholy is the name of the first picture directed by Barry Jenkins, director of a new, very interesting-sounding movie, Moonlight. Jenkins is a black man and he tells stories of blacks. Medicine for Melancholy is on Netflix streaming, set in SF. I recommend it.

Moonlight is based on a play called something like "Black Boys Look Blue in the Moonlight". It got a majorly enthusiastic review in the NYTimes. I can't wait until it opens in Berkeley, which it surely will soon.

In the NYTimes, the director talks about his frustration that it took eight years to put out a second film.  I guess his genius needed some incubation.

His first film, Melancholy, was interesting, especially since it is set in SF eight years ago, when the rising housing crisis had already purged so many blacks out of SF and the male character in the movie really cares about this purging. The female is a harder read. For me.

I don't see the medicine in Mr. Jenkins first picture but I am eager, eager eager to see Moonlight, said to be poetic, lyrical, visceral and tough. Like life?

Might I but moor

Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with three
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port
Done with the Compass
Done with the Chart
Rowing in Eden

Ah-the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!

~ Emily Dickinson, "Wild nights - Wild nights"

I lived in Amherst, MA for two years. I visited ED's home several times so I could go into her room, see some of her small handmade books of poems she bound together with ribbon, imagine her gazing out the windows in her bedroom, imagine her sitting at the top of the stairs when her family had company. She seldom  joined the company but would listen to all the conversation just behind the door at the top of the stairs.

What I wondered about the most, and there is no answer for this, is whether or not she ever had sex.  She did have at least a couple friendships with males for which she felt passion but it would have been so far out of her cultural values to have been anyone's lover. And there are no letters to indicate she had lovers. Then again, she asked her sister, Lavinia, to burn all the correspondence she had received over her lifetime when she died. And Lavinia did. Were there declarations of love in some of those burnt letters? or indications of more details of the very few males she, at least, had crushes on.

She loved some men.  Did she make love to them physically?

I decided, standing in her bedroom one time, that she never did have sex but being the finely wired being that she was, she understood passion, sex, love and joy.

No one knows.

Gallup Walmart, day after Xmas 1999

My sister lived in Gallup, NM for just one year. My daughter and I visited sis and her daughter for Xmas that year. My sis, a single mom, underpaid school teacher at the time, did not have some basic kitchen tools, which I learned as we hacked together our Christmas dinner without, for example, a good cutting knife. This was in 1999.  We stayed through that New Year's, being family.

So the day after Xmas, I headed to the only place in town that sold kitchen stuff, Walmart. I do not generally patronize Walmart but when in Gallup.  Stock in chain stores in poorer communities is different than stock in more middle class communities. I had known this before I spent Christmas and New Year's in Gallup, NM. I was surprised, even so, by the junk kitchenwares on offer.

I was also surprised that basic kitchenwares were all but sold out, suggesting that many Navajos (the largest Navajo reservation begins just outside Gallup and spans into Arizona) had bought things for their Christmas dinner. Walmart, as Walmart stores often do, had come into the market, wiped out local vendors and became the only store for most of life's basic needs. And then they stocked that store with junk products.

Still, I scooped up what I could for my sister's kitchen. A cheap frying pan (with teflon, I believe), a  not-well-made stirring spoon. Knives were sold out. Pots were sold out. What I wanted was to shop in the kind of store I was accustomed to, a middle class store with quality, but not very high end, kitchen wares.

Then, having gathered up the few choices I had made to buy for my sister and got in line, there was a very long line. Lots of Xmas gift returns and post-Xmas sales had the store packed. People were lined up in one single line, waited for a cashier to beckon them over. And it looked like all the people all around me were Navajos. My white college age daughter and I stuck out.

Yet one of the cashiers, and most of them appeared to be Navajo, called out to me even though I was deep in that long line and said "You, white lady, I can check you out here." That whole long line of Native Americans looked at me, then looked at the cashier, then looked around at themselves and those around them. And I did the same looking.

I shooked my head, waived a thank you. The cashier offered again to take me next, as if she thought I might not have heard her offer of white privilege and I said "No thanks. I'm good." I wanted the moment to be as small as possible. I had a sense that to the Native Americans, such moments of overt white privilege were so common that most expected me to partake of the offer to privilege me. I had no sense that I had scored any points with anyone but myself.

We took a side trip to Santa Fe, overnighting in a motel. On that trip, I bought my sister a few more kitchen supplies. A stock pot!

sooth with this Wendell Berry poem

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

a kiss we want with our whole lives

There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of Spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl
to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild Darling!

At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face into mine.
Breathe into me.

Close the language-door,
and open the love-window.

The moon won't use the door,
only the window.

--Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th century

a cracker in a Wisconsin wood

My first car was, when I bought it for $300, an antique blue VW Bug. I called her Helen after Helen Hayes from the Love Bug movies. I loved Helen even tho the floor under one of the back seats was totally rusted to the outside, with a board over the hole. I knew Helen's days were numbered but I just had to own a VW Bug once in my life.

On my drive from Chicago to Minneapolis for law school, in my new old beater,  I had car trouble in no-where Wisconsin. A state trooper helped me get my car to a very remote, rural car repair place run by such a strange man. I believe the trooper chose the car repair place solely because it was very where my car broke down. There was no repair garage. Just a junk-filled piece of land with a rusting trailer home in the back.  It did not appear to be a thriving business. He fixed my car quickly but as he worked, he chatted me up. When I said I was from Chicago, he said "I should go to Chicago, find me a new woman, this one I got now," and he jerked his head towards the trailer where he lived with some unfortunate woman before he went on "This one I got now aint no good no more, gotta get me a new, young one." Only he said 'young'un' and spit some of his chew out as he said it, as if he wanted to emphasize his contempt for the unfortunate woman he already seemed to believe he owned. I vaguely suspected he thought he was flirting with me. I believed he had no idea I found him repugnant.

The woman inside the old, shabby trailer kept peeking out behind curtains, rustling a bit, so I knew she was not only there but heard what her man said to me about her. I wondered if she was jealous of 24 year old, 'young un', me. She had no worries where I was concerned.  And she probably knew that.

I felt safe because that state trooper had delivered me to that strange, tobacco chewing and spitting man. Pig would be a more appropriate way to refer to him. A part of me kept expecting to hear twangy banjo music and see a gaggle of creepy neanderthals, or cross-eyed children with six fingers on one hand,  appear from the surrounding woods.  I had gone to college in Wisconsin and thought of it as a very civilized place. I was quite surprised to find that creepy guy, his creepy house trailer and his creepy-seeming life in my beloved Wisconsin.

I had an impulse to invite the woman cowering in the trailer to get in and drive away with me but I did not act on it.  I kept thinking "I am just imagining how weird this man is" and "He can't be violent, the state trooper wouldn't have left me here if he were". And I also thought "Maybe he buries his victims behind the trailer, in them there woods and no one has figured out he is a serial killer." And, finally, "How long until you are done?" That question I said aloud. He did the repair quickly. He obviously had no other business and was very eager to earn some money. He charged me very little, an amount so low it surprised me. He was probably just a poorly educated, damaged man. His line about getting a good woman down Chicagey-way, which is how he said Chicago, had creeped me out and tipped me that he had probably never been to Chicago. I almost suggested that Milwaukee or Madison might be closer to find a new good woman but my saner self kept all my thoughts to myself.

Perhaps he had noted that my car was packed to the gills with all my worldly goods and wondered if I were seeking a new life, a new man. Nope. I was just headed to law school and I told him that but I don't think he got what that meant. Once, while in law school, a man delivered a dozen roses to me and asked how I was home during the day. I said I was on Christmas break from law school and he said "Oh, like a program to be a legal secretary."  I did not say, only thought, "No, like a program to become a fucking lawyer, you nitwit."  I did not tip him, my revenge for the legal secretary chauvism.

I also had an impulse, which I also successfully suppressed, to express my revulsion for the man. That car repair experience was so much like a scene out of the early part of the movie 'Deliverance'.

I drove from Minneapolis to Chicago and back a few times every year for the next twenty years or so, on the same interstate that gently banks through the soft rolling hills of Western Wisconsin. I love that drive. For many years, I always took note when I was near where I had that car repair. I sometimes thought I might pull off the interstate, drive along the frontage road to see if the trailer was still there but I never did. Instead, I usually stopped at the original Norske Nook in Osseo. The Norske Nook was famous for its many, many kinds of pie.  In this part of the world, any good pie shop will sell you half slices of pie so you can try two kinds of pie. It was fun slowly making our selections, for my daughter eventually joined me on these road trips. She loved the Norse Nook.

I sometimes had hopeful thoughts about the woman in that trailer, as I rushed through that part of the WI intersate, recalling how she had peeked at me behind her curtains, trying to convince myself she was happy.

Neither of those people were happy. That semi-toothless, chewing tobacco spitting man was never going to Chicago-way and was never gonna get a better woman than the one over in the run down trailer.

That trailer wasn't even properly mounted. Its tires had been removed and it was just plopped on the ground. It must have had running water, for I saw no outhouse.  I had spent my college years in Wisconsin but that trailer was my first glimpse of poverty in WI. My first up close glimpse of poverty in America, even though I grew up in Chicago. I did not know poor people growing up, although Chicago had its share of them.

I spent a lot of time abroad as an undergrad, living in Mexico, then Colombia, then Spain.  I saw the most poverty in Colombia. As near as I, and the other American students in my program could tell, Colombia offered no social support for the poor, disabled and elderly.

So I had seen lots of poverty up close during the year I lived in Bogotá, and I met that car repair trailer living man post-Colombia. That car repair trailer man seemed more impoverished, of mind, soul, heart and money, than the hordes of beggars I saw daily in Bogotá.  He was so creepy.

I keep hearing that jangling banjo music from the beginning of the movie Deliverance.Creepy.

your silence does not protect you

As Audre Lorde said, 'Your silence will not protect you.' You deserve your own love directed toward you.

when you weren't very lovable

If anyone has loved me when I wasn't being very lovable, they hid that love well. No one loves me like this.

everything you want . . .

Everything you want
is on the other side of fear
There is only love and fear
And fear is not real
It is a projection of your doubt

a projection of your lack of trust

you meet your destiny

6 exercises to open heart

This is a beautiful summary of core work.

fear is suppressed hate

Two things must be completely avoided during occult training.
We should never harm anyone through deeds, thoughts or words
intentionally or not.Secondly, the feeling of hate must disappear
in us, otherwise it reappears as a feeling of fear; for fear is suppressed hate.

We must transform the hate into a feeling of love, the love of wisdom.
Rudolf Steiner

 I am a lonely traveler. I have harmed people I love and they abandon me. I am weak. I am flawed. But I feel no hate and no fear. I forgive myself even if any I have harmed cannot. In doing so, I transform my flawed self into a loving one.

true love will find you

True love will find you in the end
But only if you are looking
Can it find you
Don't give up until
True love will find you in the end
This is a promise with a catch
Only if you are are looking
Can it find you
True love is searching too
But how can it recognize you
Unless you step out into the light
Don't be sad
I know you will
Don't give up until

True love will find you in the end

salute the love ability, summon endearment

every heart sings incomplete until . . ..

Every heart sings a song, incomplete,until another heart whispers back. - Plato

The Golden Tunnel

I have been living in a golden light in recent months, steadily imbued with a deep sense of feeling loved and loving. But right now, I've stumbled and fumbled into a bit of a black hole. I feel like all the nonsense I've been spouting about love is pure, unadulterated baloney and I'm an idiot. But still, I am also thinking maybe I can be in the golden light and in the black hole simultaneously.

w/the wings of a wren

This stanza from Sexton's poem, Words, floated through me all last evening:

Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren

This morning, as every morning, I am flying with the wings of a wren. But, still, flying, so that counts for something.

an uncommon bond

waiting for when we are needed

 To whoever keeps trying to use feedburner to follow my blog:  you will keep getting the same posts from this date because I have cancelled the feedburner option. You have to look at my blog in real time. You can no longer use a feed to read my blog.

WAITING TO GO ON
…It must be
we are waiting
for the perfect moment.
It must be
under all the struggle
we want to go on.
It must be,
that deep down,
we are creatures
getting ready
for when we are needed.
It must be that waiting
for the listening ear
or the appreciative word,
for the right
woman or the right man
or the right moment
just to ourselves,
we are getting ready
just to be ready
and nothing else.
Like this moment
just before the guests arrive
working
alone in the kitchen
sensing a deep
down symmetry
in every blessed thing.
The way
that everything
unbeknownst
to us
is preparing
to meet us too.
Just on the other
side of the door
someone
is about to knock
and our life
is just
about to change
and finally
after all these
years rehearsing,
behind
the curtain,
we might
just be
ready
to go on.
...
From ‘Waiting to Go On’: in ‘River Flow:
New and Selected Poems’
©David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

I saw the bud-crowned spring go forth

this is a very long poem.  I think of Emerson as a political philosopher. I tend to forget he was a poet.

May-Day

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,
With sudden passion languishing,
Teaching Barren moors to smile,
Painting pictures mile on mile,
Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,
Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
The air is full of whistlings bland;
What was that I heard
Out of the hazy land?
Harp of the wind, or song of bird,
Or vagrant booming of the air,
Voice of a meteor lost in day?
Such tidings of the starry sphere
Can this elastic air convey.
Or haply 'twas the cannonade
Of the pent and darkened lake,
Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade,
Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,
Afflicted moan, and latest hold
Even into May the iceberg cold.
Was it a squirrel's pettish bark,
Or clarionet of jay? or hark
Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,
Steering north with raucous cry
Through tracts and provinces of sky,
Every night alighting down
In new landscapes of romance,
Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
By lonely lakes to men unknown.
Come the tumult whence it will,
Voice of sport, or rush of wings,
It is a sound, it is a token
That the marble sleep is broken,
And a change has passed on things.

  When late I walked, in earlier days,
All was stiff and stark;
Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,
In the sky no spark;
Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,
Struggling through the drifted roads;
The whited desert knew me not,
Snow-ridges masked each darling spot;
The summer dells, by genius haunted,
One arctic moon had disenchanted.
All the sweet secrets therein hid
By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.
Eldest mason, Frost, had piled
Swift cathedrals in the wild;
The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts
In the star-lit minster aisled.
I found no joy: the icy wind
Might rule the forest to his mind.
Who would freeze on frozen lakes?
Back to books and sheltered home,
And wood-fire flickering on the walls,
To hear, when, 'mid our talk and games,
Without the baffled North-wind calls.
But soft! a sultry morning breaks;
The ground-pines wash their rusty green,
The maple-tops their crimson tint,
On the soft path each track is seen,
The girl's foot leaves its neater print.
The pebble loosened from the frost
Asks of the urchin to be tost.
In flint and marble beats a heart,
The kind Earth takes her children's part,
The green lane is the school-boy's friend,
Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,
The fresh ground loves his top and ball,
The air rings jocund to his call,
The brimming brook invites a leap,
He dives the hollow, climbs the steep.
The youth sees omens where he goes,
And speaks all languages the rose,
The wood-fly mocks with tiny voice
The far halloo of human voice;
The perfumed berry on the spray
Smacks of faint memories far away.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next into the farthest brings,
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

  The caged linnet in the Spring
Hearkens for the choral glee,
When his fellows on the wing
Migrate from the Southern Sea;
When trellised grapes their flowers unmask,
And the new-born tendrils twine,
The old wine darkling in the cask
Feels the bloom on the living vine,
And bursts the hoops at hint of Spring:
And so, perchance, in Adam's race,
Of Eden's bower some dream-like trace
Survived the Flight and swam the Flood,
And wakes the wish in youngest blood
To tread the forfeit Paradise,
And feed once more the exile's eyes;
And ever when the happy child
In May beholds the blooming wild,
And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,
'Onward,' he cries, 'your baskets bring,—
In the next field is air more mild,
And o'er yon hazy crest is Eden's balmier spring.'

  Not for a regiment's parade,
Nor evil laws or rulers made,
Blue Walden rolls its cannonade,
But for a lofty sign
Which the Zodiac threw,
That the bondage-days are told.
And waters free as winds shall flow.
Lo! how all the tribes combine
To rout the flying foe.
See, every patriot oak-leaf throws
His elfin length upon the snows,
Not idle, since the leaf all day
Draws to the spot the solar ray,
Ere sunset quarrying inches down,
And halfway to the mosses brown;
While the grass beneath the rime
Has hints of the propitious time,
And upward pries and perforates
Through the cold slab a thousand gates,
Till green lances peering through
Bend happy in the welkin blue.

  As we thaw frozen flesh with snow,
So Spring will not her time forerun,
Mix polar night with tropic glow,
Nor cloy us with unshaded sun,
Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance,
But she has the temperance
Of the gods, whereof she is one,—
Masks her treasury of heat
Under east winds crossed with sleet.
Plants and birds and humble creatures
Well accept her rule austere;
Titan-born, to hardy natures
Cold is genial and dear.
As Southern wrath to Northern right
Is but straw to anthracite;
As in the day of sacrifice,
When heroes piled the pyre,
The dismal Massachusetts ice
Burned more than others' fire,
So Spring guards with surface cold
The garnered heat of ages old.
Hers to sow the seed of bread,
That man and all the kinds be fed;
And, when the sunlight fills the hours,
Dissolves the crust, displays the flowers.

  Beneath the calm, within the light,
A hid unruly appetite
Of swifter life, a surer hope,
Strains every sense to larger scope,
Impatient to anticipate
The halting steps of aged Fate.
Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl:
When Nature falters, fain would zeal
Grasp the felloes of her wheel,
And grasping give the orbs another whirl.
Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball!
And sun this frozen side.
Bring hither back the robin's call,
Bring back the tulip's pride.

  Why chidest thou the tardy Spring?
The hardy bunting does not chide;
The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee;
The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee,
The robins know the melting snow;
The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,
Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,
Secure the osier yet will hide
Her callow brood in mantling leaves,—
And thou, by science all undone,
Why only must thy reason fail
To see the southing of the sun?

  The world rolls round,—mistrust it not,—
Befalls again what once befell;
All things return, both sphere and mote,
And I shall hear my bluebird's note,
And dream the dream of Auburn dell.

  April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
What joy in rosy waves outpoured
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord.

  Hither rolls the storm of heat;
I feel its finer billows beat
Like a sea which me infolds;
Heat with viewless fingers moulds,
Swells, and mellows, and matures,
Paints, and flavors, and allures,
Bird and brier inly warms,
Still enriches and transforms,
Gives the reed and lily length,
Adds to oak and oxen strength,
Transforming what it doth infold,
Life out of death, new out of old,
Painting fawns' and leopards' fells,
Seethes the gulf-encrimsoning shells,
Fires gardens with a joyful blaze
Of tulips, in the morning's rays.
The dead log touched bursts into leaf,
The wheat-blade whispers of the sheaf.
What god is this imperial Heat,
Earth's prime secret, sculpture's seat?
Doth it bear hidden in its heart
Water-line patterns of all art?
Is it Daedalus? is it Love?
Or walks in mask almighty Jove,
And drops from Power's redundant horn
All seeds of beauty to be born?

  Where shall we keep the holiday,
And duly greet the entering May?
Too strait and low our cottage doors,
And all unmeet our carpet floors;
Nor spacious court, nor monarch's hall,
Suffice to hold the festival.
Up and away! where haughty woods
Front the liberated floods:
We will climb the broad-backed hills,
Hear the uproar of their joy;
We will mark the leaps and gleams
Of the new-delivered streams,
And the murmuring rivers of sap
Mount in the pipes of the trees,
Giddy with day, to the topmost spire,
Which for a spike of tender green
Bartered its powdery cap;
And the colors of joy in the bird,
And the love in its carol heard,
Frog and lizard in holiday coats,
And turtle brave in his golden spots;
While cheerful cries of crag and plain
Reply to the thunder of river and main.

  As poured the flood of the ancient sea
Spilling over mountain chains,
Bending forests as bends the sedge,
Faster flowing o'er the plains,—
A world-wide wave with a foaming edge
That rims the running silver sheet,—
So pours the deluge of the heat
Broad northward o'er the land,
Painting artless paradises,
Drugging herbs with Syrian spices,
Fanning secret fires which glow
In columbine and clover-blow,
Climbing the northern zones,
Where a thousand pallid towns
Lie like cockles by the main,
Or tented armies on a plain.
The million-handed sculptor moulds
Quaintest bud and blossom folds,
The million-handed painter pours
Opal hues and purple dye;
Azaleas flush the island floors,
And the tints of heaven reply.

  Wreaths for the May! for happy Spring
To-day shall all her dowry bring,
The love of kind, the joy, the grace,
Hymen of element and race,
Knowing well to celebrate
With song and hue and star and state,
With tender light and youthful cheer,
The spousals of the new-born year.

  Spring is strong and virtuous,
Broad-sowing, cheerful, plenteous,
Quickening underneath the mould
Grains beyond the price of gold.
So deep and large her bounties are,
That one broad, long midsummer day
Shall to the planet overpay
The ravage of a year of war.

  Drug the cup, thou butler sweet,
And send the nectar round;
The feet that slid so long on sleet
Are glad to feel the ground.
Fill and saturate each kind
With good according to its mind,
Fill each kind and saturate
With good agreeing with its fate,
And soft perfection of its plan—
Willow and violet, maiden and man.

  The bitter-sweet, the haunting air
Creepeth, bloweth everywhere;
It preys on all, all prey on it.
Blooms in beauty, thinks in wit,
Stings the strong with enterprise,
Makes travellers long for Indian skies,
And where it comes this courier fleet
Fans in all hearts expectance sweet,
As if to-morrow should redeem
The vanished rose of evening's dream.
By houses lies a fresher green,
On men and maids a ruddier mien,
As if Time brought a new relay
Of shining virgins every May,
And Summer came to ripen maids
To a beauty that not fades.

  I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,
Stepping daily onward north
To greet staid ancient cavaliers
Filing single in stately train.
And who, and who are the travellers?
They were Night and Day, and Day and Night,
Pilgrims wight with step forthright.
I saw the Days deformed and low,
Short and bent by cold and snow;
The merry Spring threw wreaths on them,
Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell;
Many a flower and many a gem,
They were refreshed by the smell,
They shook the snow from hats and shoon,
They put their April raiment on;
And those eternal forms,
Unhurt by a thousand storms,
Shot up to the height of the sky again,
And danced as merrily as young men.
I saw them mask their awful glance
Sidewise meek in gossamer lids;
And to speak my thought if none forbids
It was as if the eternal gods,
Tired of their starry periods,
Hid their majesty in cloth
Woven of tulips and painted moth.
On carpets green the maskers march
Below May's well-appointed arch,
Each star, each god; each grace amain,
Every joy and virtue speed,
Marching duly in her train,
And fainting Nature at her need
Is made whole again.

  'Twas the vintage-day of field and wood,
When magic wine for bards is brewed;
Every tree and stem and chink
Gushed with syrup to the brink.
The air stole into the streets of towns,
Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns,
And betrayed the fund of joy
To the high-school and medalled boy:
On from hall to chamber ran,
From youth to maid, from boy to man,
To babes, and to old eyes as well.
'Once more,' the old man cried, 'ye clouds,
Airy turrets purple-piled,
Which once my infancy beguiled,
Beguile me with the wonted spell.
I know ye skilful to convoy
The total freight of hope and joy
Into rude and homely nooks,
Shed mocking lustres on shelf of books,
On farmer's byre, on pasture rude,
And stony pathway to the wood.
I care not if the pomps you show
Be what they soothfast appear,
Or if yon realms in sunset glow
Be bubbles of the atmosphere.
And if it be to you allowed
To fool me with a shining cloud,
So only new griefs are consoled
By new delights, as old by old,
Frankly I will be your guest,
Count your change and cheer the best.
The world hath overmuch of pain,—
If Nature give me joy again,
Of such deceit I'll not complain.'

  Ah! well I mind the calendar,
Faithful through a thousand years,
Of the painted race of flowers,
Exact to days, exact to hours,
Counted on the spacious dial
Yon broidered zodiac girds.
I know the trusty almanac
Of the punctual coming-back,
On their due days, of the birds.
I marked them yestermorn,
A flock of finches darting
Beneath the crystal arch,
Piping, as they flew, a march,—
Belike the one they used in parting
Last year from yon oak or larch;
Dusky sparrows in a crowd,
Diving, darting northward free,
Suddenly betook them all,
Every one to his hole in the wall,
Or to his niche in the apple-tree.
I greet with joy the choral trains
Fresh from palms and Cuba's canes.
Best gems of Nature's cabinet,
With dews of tropic morning wet,
Beloved of children, bards and Spring,
O birds, your perfect virtues bring,
Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,
Your manners for the heart's delight,
Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof,
Here weave your chamber weather-proof,
Forgive our harms, and condescend
To man, as to a lubber friend,
And, generous, teach his awkward race
Courage and probity and grace!

  Poets praise that hidden wine
Hid in milk we drew
At the barrier of Time,
When our life was new.
We had eaten fairy fruit,
We were quick from head to foot,
All the forms we looked on shone
As with diamond dews thereon.
What cared we for costly joys,
The Museum's far-fetched toys?
Gleam of sunshine on the wall
Poured a deeper cheer than all
The revels of the Carnival.
We a pine-grove did prefer
To a marble theatre,
Could with gods on mallows dine,
Nor cared for spices or for wine.
Wreaths of mist and rainbow spanned.
Arch on arch, the grimmest land;
Whittle of a woodland bird
Made the pulses dance,
Note of horn in valleys heard
Filled the region with romance.

  None can tell how sweet,
How virtuous, the morning air;
Every accent vibrates well;
Not alone the wood-bird's call,
Or shouting boys that chase their ball,
Pass the height of minstrel skill,
But the ploughman's thoughtless cry,
Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat,
And the joiner's hammer-beat,
Softened are above their will,
Take tones from groves they wandered through
Or flutes which passing angels blew.
All grating discords melt,
No dissonant note is dealt,
And though thy voice be shrill
Like rasping file on steel,
Such is the temper of the air,
Echo waits with art and care,
And will the faults of song repair.

  So by remote Superior Lake,
And by resounding Mackinac,
When northern storms the forest shake,
And billows on the long beach break,
The artful Air will separate
Note by note all sounds that grate,
Smothering in her ample breast
All but godlike words,
Reporting to the happy ear
Only purified accords.
Strangely wrought from barking waves,
Soft music daunts the Indian braves,—
Convent-chanting which the child
Hears pealing from the panther's cave
And the impenetrable wild.

  Soft on the South-wind sleeps the haze:
So on thy broad mystic van
Lie the opal-colored days,
And waft the miracle to man.
Soothsayer of the eldest gods,
Repairer of what harms betide,
Revealer of the inmost powers
Prometheus proffered, Jove denied;
Disclosing treasures more than true,
Or in what far to-morrow due;
Speaking by the tongues of flowers,
By the ten-tongued laurel speaking,
Singing by the oriole songs,
Heart of bird the man's heart seeking;
Whispering hints of treasure hid
Under Morn's unlifted lid,
Islands looming just beyond
The dim horizon's utmost bound;—
Who can, like thee, our rags upbraid,
Or taunt us with our hope decayed?
Or who like thee persuade,
Making the splendor of the air,
The morn and sparkling dew, a snare?
Or who resent
Thy genius, wiles and blandishment?

  There is no orator prevails
To beckon or persuade
Like thee the youth or maid:
Thy birds, thy songs, thy brooks, thy gales,
Thy blooms, thy kinds,
Thy echoes in the wilderness,
Soothe pain, and age, and love's distress,
Fire fainting will, and build heroic minds.

  For thou, O Spring! canst renovate
All that high God did first create.
Be still his arm and architect,
Rebuild the ruin, mend defect;
Chemist to vamp old worlds with new,
Coat sea and sky with heavenlier blue,
New tint the plumage of the birds,
And slough decay from grazing herds,
Sweep ruins from the scarped mountain,
Cleanse the torrent at the fountain,
Purge alpine air by towns defiled,
Bring to fair mother fairer child,
Not less renew the heart and brain,
Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,
Make the aged eye sun-clear,
To parting soul bring grandeur near.
Under gentle types, my Spring
Masks the might of Nature's king,
An energy that searches thorough
From Chaos to the dawning morrow;
Into all our human plight,
The soul's pilgrimage and flight;
In city or in solitude,
Step by step, lifts bad to good,
Without halting, without rest,
Lifting Better up to Best;
Planting seeds of knowledge pure,
Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

we must risk delight

another poem on last day of poetry month 2016. . . . I've posted two fierce poems today.

A Brief for the Defense. by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

poetry is what he thought but could not say

I've posted this fiercely beautiful, and moving, poem before.  I love to reread this one.Today is last day of poetry month 2016.

*********************************************************************************

What He Thought by Heather McHugh, American  poet

We were supposed to do a job in Italy and full of our feeling for ourselves
(our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the Mayor,
mulled a couple matters over. (what’s cheap date, they asked us: what’s flat drink)
Among Italian literati we could recognize our counterparts: the academic,the apologist, the arrogant,
the amorous, the brazen and the glib.
And there was one administrator (The Conservative),in suit of regulation gray,
who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic — and least poetic — so it seemed.
Our last few days in Rome I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written:
it was there in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor
(was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn’t read Italian either, so I put the book back in the wardrobe’s dark.
We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make our mark, one of us asked “What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori or the statue there?”
Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn’t have to think —
“The truth is both, it’s both!” I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say.
What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statue represents Giordano Bruno, Brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say the Church.
His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being:
God is no fixed point or central government but rather is poured in waves, through all things: All things move. “If God is not the soul itself he is the soul of the soul of the world.”
Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die they feared he might incite the crowd
(the manwas famous for his eloquence).
And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask in which he could not speak.
That is how they burned him.
That is how he died, without a word,in front of everyone.
And poetry —

(we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)
—
poetry is what he thought, but did not say.

A Woman Speaks by Audre Lorde

I've been neglecting poetry month, which is April. I have a couple days left!

A Woman Speaks
By Audre Lorde
Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.
Audre Lorde, “A Woman Speaks” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde.

modeling self acceptance to toddlers with nudity

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Cheryl left her home when she was fifteen.   Her father had long since disappeared and her one older, half-brother was also long gone. She knew he lived in Maine but had no way to contact him. She kept track of her mother  after leaving home but, for the most part, they did not have a relationship again until her mother was at the end stages of dying of cancer. Then Cheryl took her in for the last months of her life. And she did so grudgingly.   ©
Cheryl is unusually tall, about six feet two inches,  very thin, with a crooked nose that turned left then, somehow, right, she still managed to appear appealing, if not quite beautiful. She had never cut her hair so it was quite long, below her hips. It was also very thin and it billowed behind her as she moved through the world, a cloud of a goddess gliding along. Then, and now that she is in her fifties, she appeared to float along the ground rather than walk, her hair down to her hip billowing around her as she walked. One had a sense that she floated a few inches off the crowd. That she glided, and did not walk as mere mortals do. She had and still has an ephemeral air. She is a finely wrought energy.
 ©
It was no surprise to anyone who knew her, or anyone holding stereotypes about hippies in the early seventies, that Cheryl landed in a hippie commune just outside of Baltimore, the city she had grown up in. It was a commune that consisted mostly of therapists and wannabe Waldorf teachers but they were all hippies.©

There were several homes rented by the group, all chosen for their proximity to one another.©

Just as Cheryl joined this group, the young adults with children decided to open a Waldorf School.

Now that I have sent my daughter to a Waldorf School, sat on the board of a Waldorf school for many years and even completed a Masters in Anthroposophical Community Development, I know that everyone who teaches in a Waldorf School is supposed to be grounded both in Waldorf pedagogy and Anthroposophy. Back in the seventies, there were two fledging Waldorf teacher training programs in this country, one on each coast. There was no training in Baltimore. And the "Waldorf" school Cheryl's hippie commune decided to start had no Waldorf trained teachers, although everyone working in the school did their best to apply Waldorf principles.©

Waldorf is more than art combined with hippie values. Waldorf education, beginning in preschool, is built upon solid pedagogical theory. A Waldorf teacher approaches every child with reverence and every lesson offered to children with even more reverence.

I am skeptical about the foundations of the Baltimore Waldorf school, in the Cheryl years,  based on Cheryl's early hippie escape from normal life. When that school opened, it hired by-then-seventeen year old Cheryl, along with a teenage boy, to run the preschool. Cheryl had been living with and hanging out with many young adults who, apparently, tended to forget she was a minor, and, for all her seeming maturity, was still a child. Heck, she was probably having statutory rape sex with some of the guys in the © commune. 

The preschool was really a day care program for the children of all the hippies, regardless of their roles in the school. The preschool would accept children whose parents did not work at the school but few parents from outside the school community chose a preschool run by high school drop-out teens. Imagine having two high school drop outs, both 17, running a "preschool". Babysitting, sure, they were qualified to babysit. They were qualified to keep the children alive, feed them lunch and snacks and take them on outings to the park, two by two. To bill that preschool as a Waldorf preschool with  Waldorf preschool teachers was a big stretch.Having said that, I acknowledge that Cheryl told me all the 'teachers' in the school had ongoing training.  Every summer, most Waldorf teachers, with or without Waldorf teacher training, take continuing education programs to prepare them for the coming school year. If a teacher's class was heading into the third grade, the teacher usually spends part of his summer at a class about Waldorf pedagogy for the third grade. Etc. ©

Years later, after Cheryl and I had parted ways as business partners or friends, I got to know the administrator of the Baltimore Waldorf School, which was the same embryonic Waldorf School that gave seventeen year old Cheryl her first job. I met that administrator in my Waldorf School Administrator program at Sunbridge College, in suburban New York City. He was professional, well grounded both in Waldorf pedagogy and Anthroposophy. He assured me that all of the teachers at his school finally had Waldorf teacher training or were regular certified and licensed teachers who, during the summers, received Waldorf pedagogy training one grade at a time. And he assured me that he remembered Cheryl, for he had held off enrolling his children in her preschool group, waiting to enroll his kids in kindergarden with a real, adult teacher. ©

Cheryl and I became business partners in the mid-eighties. We offer five-day intensives that we invented as we went along. Encounter groups, I guess. Metaphysics. We relied a lot on A Course in Miracles. We offered all our training for self-determined fees which turned out to be great marketing. Folks would sign up thinking they'd get a free five-day training in metaphysics but they did not count on the workshops being so great that they would end up paying us, often and of course not always, a lot of money.  Cheryl and I found that the more equanimous we were about how much money we were paid, the more money we got. We learned to be totally accepting when someone paid nothing. Invariably, if someone paid nothing, someone else wrote us a check for two grand. And this was in the eighties.
When she and I were still partners, for I don't know what she does these days, we used the fellowship hall of a Unity church. The pastor charged us a percentage of whatever money we received so it was affordable. And the pastor was a great guy who became our friend.©
Cheryl traveled from Baltimore to Minneapolis every other month, doing her intensive in Baltimore in the in-between months with me traveling to Baltimore every other month.  We fell into the habit of always having lunch with Reverend Phil the day before our next intensive in Minneapolis. 
Phil loved our lunches. He said his parishioners didn't tend to see him as a friend, but as a religious counselor and teacher, so they did not hang out with him over lunch. Since his entire life revolved around the church, he did not have, he told us, a lot of social friends. He had a wife and they were happy. And of course they had friends.  I guess he just liked being treated to lunch by us, for he was always very happy about those lunches.

We always went to ethnic restaurants for those lunches. Ethiopian, Burmese, Afghani. The Afghan one was my personal favorite, it was close to Phil's church and we had fallen into the habit of going there. Phil got bored with Afghani food one day and asked if we could go to a deli for sandwiches. of course we agreed.
That deli lunch stands out for me because of the stories shared over those sandwiches.
Phil began our lunch conversation by recounting his and his wife's recent dinner party. They had invited six couples over for dinner. The invitation had said "Please bring the story of your most embarrassing moment to share."  Phil and his wife had thought their invitation was a clear signal to have fun but most of the invited guests had declined to accept the invite. Only two couples accepted and attended that dinner. Phil laughed hard, and so did Cheryl and I, as he speculated on people's possible reactions to their dinner invitation. What the heck did those people think Phil and his wife expected people to share? He told us he and his wife had thought people would bring funny stories and that their invitation would get the party off on a fun note.
After cuing up the somewhat failed dinner party invitation, Phil shared with us his most embarrassing moment that he had shared with his smaller-than-anticipated dinner party. I don't remember Phil's story.
Then Cheryl asked if she could tell us about her most embarrassing moment. Of course Phil and I wanted to hear it.
When she was seventeen, working at her first paid job as a Waldorf preschool teacher, Cheryl and her teenage boy preschool co-teacher had decided the children, toddlers ages two, three and maybe four, needed lessons in accepting their bodies.

As a sidebar, I have to say that I have never met a toddler who needed this lesson. I also have to point out that I am sure Cheryl and her co-preschool co-teacher did not consult any of the actual teachers, or actual adults, at that school with their plan.  Although some teachers might have agreed with the idea that teaching very little children to accept their bodies was a good lesson, I am very sure no actual adult and teacher would have approved Cheryl's lesson plan for the day in question.
Cheryl and her male preschool co-teacher decided to spend the day in the nude and to inite the children to go nude that day. They did not insist that the children go nude. No child chose to be nude that day and this reinforced for Cheryl her conviction that the children needed work on accepting their bodies.

Again, I have to share a bit of my experience with toddlers. Many, but probably not all, toddlers will happily remove their clothing to run nude under a water sprinkler on a hot day. Many toddlers might remove their clothes impulsively and forget they are naked. Few toddlers, I believe, when  invited by persons they perceive as adult authority figures, ever accept such an invitation and then strip to nakedness in a group.

I totally get why the kids declined to go nude when Cheryl suggested it as an option. If she and her co-teacher had instructed the children to take off their clothes, they probably would have obeyed. The child would have been confused but obedient. Thank goddess it was an open-ended suggestion that the children all felt free to decline.

So there was nude Cheryl and her nude male co-teacher, spending the day in the school's garden, outdoors, with about ten fully clothed toddlers, with Cheryl and her co-worker hoping that at some point the children would grok something about nudity and strip of their own accord.

All Waldorf schools schedule regular marketing tours,especially back in the early seventies. Enrolling students so the school could pay its bills was a constant challenge. These tours tend to happen at the same time each month, like the second Tuesday of each month from 10 a.m. until noon. Adult teachers would factor the tour into their day's lessons plans, striving to be doing something appealing when the prospective parents of paying students came to observe the school to good advantage.
On the day Cheryl decided to teacher her toddlers her idea of how to be comfortable in one's own body, the day she and her male co-worker spent nude with a group of children not their own, the marketing tour group came out into the garden.

Cheryl, bless her seventeen year old naivete, forgot she was nude and warmly greeted the tour guide, a friend of hers, and then began introducing herself to the prospective parents who were checking out the school with an eye to enrolling their children. Tours meant tuition. Cheryl noticed that the tour guide and those on the tour were acting strangely. They did not look at Cheryl directly. They acted uncomfortable. It took naive seventeen year old Cheryl a minute or two to even register that she was getting strange reactions. I think she had to actually have her nudity pointed out by the tour guide, also a school employee and, very likely, Cheryl's friend.

At that point, the tour group hustled back indoors and Cheryl felt the most embarrassed she ever had.
This is the story Cheryl told us in that deli with Reverend Phil. I wanted to ask her how the rest of the school's faculty had reacted to Cheryl's choice to have two nude adults spend the day with other people/s children without their parents knowledge or consent but the moment to ask never seemed to arrive.  I wanted to hear that those two dopey teenagers were supervised more closely after that day spent in the nude with the children. Lunch, after all, is only an hour.  As soon as Cheryl had told us her story, we paid the check and moved on with our day.