A small thing

Into the road without hesitation,the other side as certain as the grass and hawk weed parting there, for the brief passage of fur, ears back, paws leaving and returning to the surface of the soft and grassy earth. And then I was there behind the wheel; unprepared for its smallness, for the sudden quiver and tenderness there in the road among the potholes.

There was an instant; a fraction of a second really when we both wavered, I could feel it. I could feel the inevitable, sliding of the future toward this instant, now.

I could see the rabbit's honey eyes, his small slight body, ears erect, brown, no bigger than a loaf of bread.

I hit it. I couldn't help it. It happened so fast.

I cried the whole way to the store; the boys all watching my display of emotion anxiously from the quiet of the truck's cab.

When we returned I couldn't help but look, there, at the side of the road among the quartz pebbles and daisy petals, blood spilling from it's small crushed skull, wasps and flies already there, and later, when we passed again its small body and been lifted into the hazy summer air.

How this began

Going through an old hard drive tonight I found this poem written May 5, 2004... three weeks before I'd find out that I was pregnant with Bean.+++

Today I heard that the Voyager satellite, sent up into space the year before I was born, is now nearing the edge of our solar system. Some scientists think it will encounter a shock wave, before going into the space beyond. My life feels like this, nearing it’s known edge, careening, orbiting, drifting off course around some other center I have not quite named or found, but feel. I expect to be thrown up soon, with force upon taking the risks I know I should take but do not yet understand. I imagine that amidst the white-hot vibrations of shock it will be the memories of things, the words and honey comb and lightening storms, that will cradle me. Giving birth, when the moment is right to a new self, among the nebula and stars. +++

I had no idea how spot-on I was. A poem, like a tear in the stage curtain of the present, and there I was behind it, peeking through.

I also found this, from August, 2009. A quickly scribbled note about a conversation with Bean:

"I fell from the sky mommy. I was a star, and I fell into your tummy." If you look back, can you find any inklings, notes, or snippets about the time when life as you know it now began?

Go out and see

go out and see what is for oneself

notice stories trying to fly.

+++ What is your story today?

April begins

At 5:43 a.m. I wound the window open so that there were two inches of screen exposed between me and the things of the early morning world: the smell of mud and moisture, and also the song of robins, and the other birds I do not know the names of;

and together my boys and I lay in bed, my eyelids still heavy, closed, the little one sitting with his pacifier lopsided in his mouth, the bigger one tucked into the crook of my arm, and T, there, completing my outline, and we listened to the day come softly.

Out the window the clouds were pretending to be mountains, there, across the gulch, beyond the pond, where the world ends, among the maples with their new red buds now flush with pollen, the fog was there below the sky with shoulders hunched, the sun hesitant and milky.

Today, oranges for breakfast, and also a promise on the radio that has everyone watching the thermometer with skeptical glee; balmy sweet undeniable spring on the cuff of all this mud, finally.

So it’s April.

+++ I wanted to tell you how much I loved reading all your random things. So much fun. Thanks for sharing them!

And I wanted to tell you that yesterday was the half way mark for days left for funding for my book project…To celebrate I've posted a new update and a drawing that has to do with the little painting above and something else entirely delicious over at kickstarter... so go take a peak and become a backer if you haven't already.

FYI: I’ve had a couple people email me asking how the Kickstarter funding works—so I thought I should clear things up quickly: If you become a backer you are only pledging an amount. You will not be charged at all—unless the entire funding goal is successful…and then you’d be charged in May. More about the whole crowdfunding process and how I feel about it over at Magpie Girl.

Today: lots of things including sunshine (or so is promised), a much needed run, and writing. Always that.

What's on your plate today?

Before you knew what your life was like

Flipping through a book of poems by e.e. cummings I found flower petals by the dozens from a time in my life when love was a dreamy and girlish thing (embodied by the poem, above--one of my favorites.)

I wanted to be loved the way e.e. loved his women in his poems. I understood little, if anything at all about how love endures and changes; how things get messy and slip; how you become soft in the middle, or are caught like plastic bag rustling and rustling in the bare branches of a tree before spring comes to mask it with blossoms and green.

I haven't seen flowers for months (it's still winter here, for another month at least.) And I think about the girl I was then; how I I had a crush on everything beautiful; how my life orbited around boys and their attention (specific boys, and also the general boy populous); how I had abundant energy and time, but no certainty or focus.

I wonder if I would have believed me--describing who I am today? I still have a crush on everything beautiful. And my life still orbits around boys--three, specifically; the biggest of whom still brings me flowers. Somethings stay the same.

What were you like then? Before you knew what your life would be like?

Morning Poem # 6

Patience is granular like sugar, and every child hungers for it the same way that tongues crave sweet, darting out from parted lips, darting like small boys into traffic or towards sharp sticks, always used with the poorest of judgment (which is also how wars begin)

and if it had color, it would be milky and soft, and quite the opposite of the vermilion rage that springs with sudden heat and sting like a rash along the slender, tender curve of a throat provoked for the hundredth time by the lollygagging, jelly-boned determination to find exactly where the line is drawn;

and it is feeling the clean hard click of teeth meeting and words held or shoving fists into pockets or maybe after gripping a sticky palm a little too hard, it is to inhale again softly and notice the way the chickadees have returned to the woods, and how the light is mellow like honey in a jar

Morning Poem # 4

The clouds are gossamer and the moment never lasts If we take daddy’s ladder, he says, looking out the window at the way the sky is rent, gold light spilling through the torn clouds, then we could put it on the top of that tall, tall hill and reach the sun, it would be hot, but I what I really want is to catch a cloud.

I would sleep with it at night, it would be soft against my cheek, and in the morning I would take it for a walk.

His cheeks flushed still from sleep, his hair still tousled, soft. On the couch pulling on corduroys for school, he stretches fingertips to toes touching both sides, so tall, and while he’s grinning big and wide, the cat arches her back by the door, the pot fills with water, the morning sky grows clear.

Red: a poem in images

Morning Poem # 2

Things I don’t know how to do: I don’t know how to shuck an oyster, deep-sea dive, wear a space suit, read tax code, or order drinks at a bar. I don’t know how to play ping-pong or play with the small irrelevant moments of time that are handed to me to make into something useful; mine. I don’t know how to hang glide, or feel content dangling mid-air in uncertainty between projects or moments, waiting for things to take place or unravel. I don’t know how to fish, or reel myself in on a slender line or balance in thigh-high waders surrounded by the splashing my boys make in my life, always with the compulsion to throw rocks, and yell; always driven to try for whatever it is they cannot do.

Morning Poem # 1

Seismic waves traveledfrom the place where things were tilted and tossed; where a warren of market stalls collapsed under concrete; where yesterday mangoes and coffee, lemon grass, coconuts, bushel baskets of gnarled ginger and sugar were haggled for and exchanged, hands touching other hands each belonging to someone with loved ones, or now without, to here. The waves spread out in circles, and every pebble, every small speck of sand moved silently, in a minuscule way to these vibrations. Silently, and unseen, the waves traveled through the bedrock underneath my long dirt road and all the while I was just here caught up in doing things that matter only a little: spreading butter on the fat crumbs of toast brushing cat hair from my sleeves kissing someone in the warm cocoon of bed before the day started at it again, with inclement weather and dirty socks and dishes in the sink, and gratitude is hardly enough.

At it again

Today I felt like maybe, finally, I might be making progress. I can't really describe the way I've felt for the past couple of weeks, other than to say that I've felt like I've been drifting somewhere above myself, above my life. Out of touch, maybe, or tangled. Desultory. Haphazard. And this week has been all about coming down to earth. Getting on top of things. Organizing. It was a busy month, and maybe that is my excuse. Introverted by nature, non-stop wedding parties and a week long visit with my dearest of dear friends, and a weekend visit from my sister and her husband, packed my September to it's gills. Not to mention freelance work was eating up all my spare moments. The result: dislocation, distraction, doubt, disillusion, despondency. (Okay, so I'm suddenly alliteration drunk. But you get the idea.)

Either way, for the past couple of days since all the fun ended I've been moping about the house, doing heaps of laundry. SIDE NOTE: I kind of want to write another entire post about laundry, actually. How I had this groundbreaking moment watching my friend fold my laundry precisely, neatly, into these perfectly stacked rectangular piles of shirts and jeans and sweaters. Groundbreaking as in: it never occurred to me that the purpose of folding the damn laundry might be expanded to a) fitting more in one's drawers neatly and b) to reduce the amount of wrinkles in any given garment. I honestly have been folding laundry all these years because it's what you're supposed do with laundry, right? I mean, who doesn't fold laundry? But truthfully, I never put thought into it. Now, I am reformed. See? I simply must post more about this (with pictures!)--it's become a new obsession.

It's taken all week to sort myself out. But finally I'm starting to get the hang of my life again. I have my submissions calendar sorted out and some clear-cut goals, and some long term novel goals (40k words by the end of October) and some maybe sort of plans for an autumn party with the community of friends I am gradually starting to make here, and it all feels good.

It kind of astounds me how easily I got knocked off kilter in the past two months. I've felt so alarmingly fragile, up to my neck in angst and uncertainty that I've had hardly anything to post. Things have felt tenuous and flimsy around here financially lately, and that too adds to my apparent state of internal vertigo. My mind has been twirling all day long, but when I've come up for air, there has been nothing to put on the page. No way to capture the tightly wound, tugged-at feeling that's lodged itself in the pit of my stomach except maybe to say that a part of me has been feeling a little like a kite caught up in a tree, thrashing about in the wind. But less so today after eight loads of laundry, and listening to Selected Shorts while making apple sauce.

So. Hmmm. All this brings me to October.

I have plans for October. Real, practical, concrete plans to disentangle and make things happen around here, including more organization and less stress.

And I'm thinking of doing morning poems again, as a way to slip back into writing for real. I have done morning poems in the past, and have loved it when you have joined me. I've gotten so much this exchange. These small scraps of joy and arc and moment that we capture, first thing, before the blur of the day takes over; before the laundry piles up.

Are you in? The rules are really simple. Show up at the page every morning and write a poem. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be much of anything. All it needs to be is a small handful of words tossed up to the gods; an offering, a gift, a start to the day.

Laundry

A solitary plastic chickenfalls from among the denim and fleece; the lint trap is full again. This thing we do: wearing clothes, then washing them, goes on forever. Sometimes I like to imagine (at the a red light next to a Mexican boy with oily cheeks who is driving an El Camino, or walking through one of those superstore warehouses, where everything is wrapped in plastic including the last of summer’s succulent watermelons, each green globe swaddled in cellophane) everyone naked or feathered, or adorned in something less fretful and persnickety than the clothes we need so many of (rain boots with polka dots, and heels that sink into the soft sod as we try to run towards our friends at parties, and also negligee and belts and jackets made of wool or down) but we are human; adept at hiding things. Notes, lipstick stains from kisses, favorite marble; the small small bits of other people’s hearts and thoughts; ourselves. We are thieves, mimes, fakers with our clothes all pressed or stained, our laundry bulging with the remnants of things that tumble out unexpected, or get lost.

Life has been a little like this lately

And like this.

And I sit feeling everything

Today the sound of fans and windmy heart breaking and gathering in the turning air; a racehorse with an ankle turned, tendons like rope, continues even then towards the line, nostrils flared, hay soon and cool, cool water.

The sky is spread with shreds of clouds, the leaves are moving, fluttering, the air winnowing around the tiny furze on the swallowtail’s wing and I sit feeling everything: damp hair falling on my shoulders stems on the table of eaten strawberries small circles of berry stain, pollen scattered from the bouquet of daisies with their bending stems in the glass jar and the way I am uncertain now.

Other things know nothing of this the poplars and the meadow grasses bend and bend and bend again in the wind.

You & Me Now

It's night and things have maybe stoppedspinning for a while. You walk over to me, arms bare. Anything can happen now; everything is. But when come to me in your red t-shirt in the semi-dark; when you reach out, and fold your around my shoulders, I can feel the heat of you through the cotton, and I can hear your heart, and even if we lose everything we'll still be rich because of this the way I can press my face against your chest and feel like I am home.

this, in my heart

The birds don’t care about the stock market dips.The weather is unknowing of the forecast: clouds, even when there was call for sun. Things keep right on brazenly living, bursting, growing, with such a stark indifference to the tumbling of our souls.

Some days we’re just on this earth. Other, truer days, of it.

We have forgotten this. How to speak with our hands close to the ground, our fingers whispering with worms, our hearts wild like the hearts of salmon spawning. They swim upstream. They know how to leap, and to leap again, upwards, improbably against the current even as bears wait.

We are the only ones that are caught, feeling so much, trying for so much, for flint against stone, for a spark, or for a thousand bucks, for a cleft, a notch, a hold on all that we cannot hold. So much that on some days we’re deaf and busy in our little boxes, and on others, the song of the vireo is enough

and everything breaks open.

Recuperating

Tonight I feel like lint flicked from a pocket on the breeze, or like a piece sky blue ribbon caught in a snarl of twigs, or like a small field mouse, ears transparent and patterned with intricate veins betraying a tiny fluttering pulse, curled into a nest of fuzz and scraps of cloth beneath the woodpile logs. Unraveled, scattered, tired. My heart beating in my temples. Trying to learn what recuperating means, as I realize that instead of rest I've been holding everyone else together these past few days. Doing too much. Hard not to. I haven't learned yet how to protect my energy without being selfish. How to take care of myself without hoarding my time. Is there a way to balance this, as a mother and as an artist? The filament feels so flimsy between me and the world tonight.

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you’ve ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven, Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

From Morning Poems by Robert Bly (© 1998 Robert Bly)

glimmer

In the cool dark of the bedroom, afternoon, after work, after many hours awake and fragmented by the needs of the day, push-pull, ache in the throat, thirsty for quiet, and now I’m face down among the bedclothes and the cat comes up and brushes against my foot. Just this. Fur on skin. I take a breath.

Morning Poem # 3

Swallows swoop in at the barn doorand their feathers, bones filled with air, brush up against the corrugated metal roof.

The air is rife with musk and hay and the hot piss of sheep pressing against each other in woolly urgent nearness.

The sky bends down closer to the earth now; blue tucking the edges of the vermilion mountains in;

and every vine heavy with wild grapes bittersweet.

Morning Poem # 2

Because his small hand fits into my palm still,I hold my breath and feel the gills of my heart pummel inside my chest.

There is no way for keeping this; like stacking bags of sand against the jetty, crumbling no way to keep back his tide of growing up.

“I’m you’re a little bit big boy,” he whispers against my cheek in the dark then moon gets caught in the branches on the hill

and I’m begging that this filament these slender fish bones of love and the flotsam of our days will keep us when he is taller than my head,

and turns to walk the other way.