On New Year's Eve, I Light the Last Lucifer

Burning the Old Year

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,

lists of vegetables, partial poems.

Orange swirling flame of days,

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,

only the things I didn’t do

crackle after the blazing dies.

Helen Frankenthaler, A Green Thought in a Green Shade, 1981

This is one of my favorite paintings. It's also one of the few paintings that's inspired by a poem (rather than a poem written in ekphrastic style). The poem is Andrew Marvell's "The Garden, which you can read here: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/garden.htm

I hope some day to write a poem that accurately captures a painting to the degree that Frankenthaler captured Marvell's poem.

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Post Cleave: Annotated with Arrows

O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I may be with you,

As I walk by your side or sit near or remain in the same room with you,

LIttle you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

This snippet from Leaves of Grass I found in Harvey's journal from the first year that we were married (1987). Afterward is some of the most beautiful writing that I have ever read about one person's love for another. It would probably make this blog carry a NC-17 rating to post it, yet I'm glad to read it.

I was truly loved, before I was even able to understand what love is. I have a glimmering now...because I live in a world where love isn't. With a son who's just become engaged (YAY), a daughter who's preoccupied with being 14 and establishing her own identity, and parents who are still lucky enough to have each other after 57 years of marriage (they've been sweethearts since the ages of 14 and 13), I don't really fit in anywhere.

I am an adjunct in teaching and I am an adjunct in the lives of others. I don't have anywhere to make a profession right now. And no one really needs me.

Every day I ask myself these questions:

• How did I have such a love?
• Why did I lose such a love?
• What did the universe gain by taking Harvey away from me?
• Does he miss me? Does he see me? Do I make him proud?
• Why don't I dream of him? Or if I dream of him, why don't I remember my dreams?

I have prayed and fretted and cried and yelled and written and recited all the possibilities and I just don't know about #2, 3, 4, and 5. (I understand the first one. Harvey was able to show philia, eros, and agape, the three dimensions of love, at the same time, to the same person, without losing his sense of himself and his art. Is it because he was a sculptor first and foremost that made him understand multiple dimensions, multiple depths? I don't have any sense of a three-dimensional self, not what Whitman had, what Harvey had. Is it an XY thing? How do I change my creative DNA? Will there be love--or poems--again? Is everything going to be linear, the point before, the flat line between, then the ending point?)

I am an airplane in a stall, and I am the meadow awaiting its flaming descent. I am a meteor burning through space, and I am the crater it pounds into the earth.

What I'm not doing is writing. Reading poetry and writing it are just too hard this week.

Say a little prayer--or even a big one--for me. I miss my desk and my journal. I hate my desk and my journal. Equal measures, yin and yang, solar and lunar eclipse, umbra and penumbra without alpha, without omega.

If a sundial measures "only the enlightened hours," then I am the shadow that falls across its face.

What do I do next? How much more resolute can I be this New Year?

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Happy Boxing Day/Feast of Stephen

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Lost for Nearly A Century...Waterhouse's Boreas

Boreas: Goddess of cloud, goddess of grey, goddess of frost. Do those daffodils and crocus shiver as she, cashmere-cauled, passes by? Storm-grey, shawl-grey, cloud-shriven...

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'Veni, Veni, Emanuel' by Mannheim Steamroller

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From Manger to This Is My Body

The skin's just a slipcover for the skeleton, and this 14th-century rosary reminds us that we need to remember our armature, what holds us upright. Rumi is one of the poets who hold me upright, whose words I hold to my heart. Here's a little Christmas thought:

A Christmas Story

The son of Mary, Jesus, hurries up a slope
as though a wild animal were chasing him.
Someone following him asks, "Where are you going?
No one is after you. Are you the one
who says words over a dead person, so that
he wakes up?" I am. "Who then could possibly
cause you to run like this?" Jesus explains.

I say the Great Name over the deaf and the blind;
they are healed. Over a stony mountainside
and it tears its mantle down to the navel.
But when I speak lovingly for hours with those
who take human warmth and mock it, when I say the Name
to them, nothing happens. They remain rock,
or turn to sand. Other diseases are ways for mercy
to enter, but this nonresponding breeds violence
and coldness toward God. I am fleeing from that. As
little by little air steals water, so praise
dries up and evaporates with foolish people who refuse to
change. Like cold stone you sit on, a cynic steals
body heat. He does not feel the sun. Jesus was not running
from anything. He was teaching in a new way.

(translation, Coleman Barks, from The Essential Rumi)

I resolve to teach in a new way. I resolve to head toward the unknown, rather than fleeing. I resolve to carve out a space for compassion. If Jesus teaches me anything isn't it first to love myself, then to love my neighbor, and to realize by doing this I'm honoring God, loving Him with all my heart and soul and strength by loving what He has made--my neighbor, myself?

I'm not very good at love, but I'm better than I used to be. For my New Year's resolution, I ask that I can show someone else the type of love I've been shown, the type of love I've learned.

Help me. Thank you. Help me thank you.

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Blue Father Christmas with Sparkles and Straw

The presents are purchased, the tree is lit, and the Siamese hasn't eaten a single ornament.

My antique postcards wait in an album for my enjoyment on Christmas Eve, when Raleigh and I will wrap gifts and eat chocolate and twirl peppermint canes on our fingers. I'll probably cry a little more, but for now I'm all cried out. There's no understanding how much I dread the night before the night before Christmas, when Harvey and I always had a date.

I bought a beautiful red dress but don't have the heart to wear it, even if it is--ahem--a size 10, just like I used to wear back in the 20th century. I guess I can pretend to wear it on New Year's Eve, even if I don't have the place to wear it then, either. I canceled my New Year's Eve date. In fact, I have called off dating this particular person. In general, and in its specifics, dating truly sucks. I met someone who liked me but hated kids--not specifically mine--any kids. Because my one true desire--besides the Harvey book being published--is to be a grandmother, this relationship was doomed. I didn't like the high-school stress of it, either. I don't want to pretend to like someone. I want to like someone again--to have conversations about art and Aristotle and poetry and physics and gardening and God and fairy tales and frescoes and geography and goldfish--and I just didn't like conversations about nothing but politics and the past. (This was someone I had known in college; one of us hadn't changed and the other had changed too much).

I know that this makes me a bad girlfriend candidate and maybe even a bad person. Many of my friends, both married and single, remind me that I am too old to be picky. I think that maybe I'm just too picky to be old, because I don't care about looks or money, and I do care about kindness and intellect. Is that such a weird perspective?

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Although it's been said, many times, many ways...

Merry Christmas to you!

Here's a post from 6 years ago, this date. I cannot believe how different my life was. This year's tree has only 100 ornaments on its 6-feet frame. It's beautiful, but it's not a Harv tree.

Nothing in my life but my children and my poems are Harv reminders these days. To write I miss him is the lowest form of understatement. My broken arms will never be whole, never be wholly around anyone else.

Meme-meme-meme-meme-meme (5 random facts)
1. I have a vintage dress in a crossword-puzzle print. It was my grandmother's and dates from the late 20s/early 30s. I think this dress started my obsession with Art Deco (See #2).
2. My Bakelite bracelet collection includes rhinestones, end-of-day, swirl, clasp, chain, polkadots, carved, apple-juice, tricolor, creamsicle, rope, and inlaid mother-of-pearl. Unfortunately, there's no Pierrot bracelet--at least not yet. Harvey and I also have a Bakelite radio that works.
3. Our 10-foot Christmas tree this year has over 2500 ornaments on it. This is not even half of Harvey's collection. He is a total Christmas fiend. When the sales clerks at Hallmark see him, they wish they were paid on commission. I've never met anyone else who loves holidays as he does. He likes to decorate for Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Fourth of July--you name it, he celebrates it. Harvey even made me a pin for Groundhog Day.
4. My son and my daughter were both published authors before the age of 12. Daniel won a national contest for short fiction when he was 11.
5. I've caught a tiger shark before. I still cannot believe I landed it. It was a baby, but still--a SHARK?

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Dali Invented the I-Phone

Joni Mitchell, "River"

It's coming on Christmas, and I wish I had a river.

I wish you joy, I wish you peace, and I wish you love.

And for the Radish King, Queen Bee of Beethoven Day, I wish you a little Robert Downey, Jr.

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Poets and Artists, Issue #30

On pages 48 and 49 of this fine journal, I have an ekphrastic poem. (Click on the image and flip through to read). As always, I am honored to be among the poets and writers Didi chooses for her beautiful magazine.

(PS The baby Jesus is in there, appropriately enough for this Advent season. And so is the tesselated crucifix).

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Poetry Sucks! A Night of Poetry, Music and Bad Language

I went down to Nashville to run errands for my family and meet up with the fabulous Nickole Brown, Heather Foster, Jacklyn Dre Marceau, and Chet Weise, where I planned to be a member of the audience, rooting for Nickole, Jacklyn, and Daniel Pujols to read their stuff. Nickole, however, became ill and had to cancel, so I was invited to pinch hit. To a standing room crowd/packed bar/grill at Dino's in Nashville. To a room of people expecting Nickole and her virtuosity.

I didn't even have my newest poems. Or my chapbooks. Or even high heels.

Poems were printed, a copy of my first chapbook was excavated, and I made it to the microphone. The audience was generous, and Jacklyn and Daniel were really, really good.

I read my new poems for Harv. Some people seemed very moved. (I think sometimes it's better to be authentic than to have a big stage presence or a virtuoso voice--although I wish I had both. This was a huge compliment to these poems, which are my latest love letters to Harvey).

Chet was an amazing host, and it was great to see MFA folks again.

Here's a photo of me, with the Pabst halo making me look as though I'm some sort of redneck Giotto:

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

Instead of two turtledoves, I give you this--Dan and Amy at her art show.

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Stille, Still

Last night I dreamed a dream whose palette was these colors, these tints, and I dreamed that I was holding Harvey to me by his curls, and I spoke these words in French, which are Baudelaire's (but not really Baudelaire's):

Je veux longtemps plonger mes doigts tremblants
Dans l'épaisseur de ta crinière lourde

(I want to plunge my trembling fingers
Like swords into the thicket of your hair--translation by me)

When I awakened, I was lost. When I awakened, I was cold. When I awakened, I longed for Lethe.

I clench your name in my teeth like the obolus for Charon. Nothing but Death can take it from me.

(I look in the mirror and see what Sylvia saw in "Mirror": I see wrinkles and dark circles and quite a bit more than a bit of Medusa. And I care--but not very much--because who would want me anyway, with all this depression that just won't stop. I bought a red dress and from the shoulders down I guess I pass, but I need a Sleeping Beautyrest type of sleep).

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Mittelschmerz and the Manger

Is this some secular annunciation, and/or a painterly form of radiography: An interior scene of the female body outside its swaddling clothes, with the halo of the egg, not in the ovary/tube but also inside out?

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Richard Manuel - You Dont Know Me - Tokyo 1983

It's one of the songs I associate with Christmas, especially December 1986 (when I was so sure that I would never fall in love, ever). Despite my misgivings the Band goes on the playlist of An Idiosyncratic I-Pod Christmas.

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Stevie Wonder - Ave Maria

He gives me hope.

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Dolly Parton Hard Candy Christmas

This is so true.

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Remembering You Through Your Favorite Artist

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Michael Buble w/Naturally 7 - "Stardust" on Ferguson 7/10 (TheAudioPerv....

Naturally 7 rules this. And I'm a Buble fan.

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"The Secret of Poetry is Cruelty," Jon Anderson

To the Roaring Wind--Wallace Stevens

What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.
_______________________________________

Western Wind--Anonymous

Western wind, when will thou blow
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

I'm just an empty valise these days, an empty vase, an empty as.

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From 50 Watts: Alpha-Best

What do you make of that kite?

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San Francisco, Here I Come! Bernini's Medusa Leaves Italy for California

She is my touchstone, my cameo: Not the incident, but the agony of becoming.

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