"I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen."  Lloyd Dobbler,  Say Anything


"I gave him my heart, and he asked for a loan."  Pamela, Story of My Damned Life 

Memorial Day, 2012

TELLING YOUR GHOST GOODBYE

And if you

After 25 years, return to the sand and the silver

Glint of gum wrappers and lead weights on broken

Line, return to the spot where he removed your

Swimsuit so deftly and laid you there and drew you

To him after he drew you your 27-year-old body

Perfected in ink with a wash of grey at twilight

The magic hour when the sky is violet and the first

Stars pock it like rain on water and below them

The lake is gray as zinc and the waves are wrinkles

looking for someone’s brow but not yours for you’ll be

Ivory forever—and beautiful.  What you didn’t realize

Is that ivory cracks and after he dies on this same spot

Find her poor 

Where you were first filled up with his child a quarter

Of a century ago you would crack and craze you would

Unravel like fishing line or shot silk or kapok you’d float

Into the air into the water, waves would wash over you

When grief finally beached itself like a hull in the sands

Of your heart.  The water moves back and forth and in

And the fossils wash up on the sand and a bass 

Flares silver green and falls into the water and you

Slip out of your swimsuit and you look at your breasts

That have pleased one man and two children and your

Belly that cocooned babies and the scar that one man kissed
When you first made love after your C-section and

No Ithaka 

You were shy and he said  It is coming home o it is

Ithaka---the only sure thingis your pubic hair that is still

So gold and you wonder Breast Belly Crescent

Scar Cunt; can this body so set in its ways ever

Know another can it ever please another will another

Wander over the ocean To find it and feel at home?

And you slip into the water as though you were slipping

Back into your slip and you float and it is satin

Shock it is cold and clinging and your breasts bob and

Your pubic hair’s gilt in the late afternoon sun

And you think maybe this body has done right

By you and you can do right by it and you climb on the rock

Won't have fooled you; she has given 

Where you last lay on top of him and you lie there dripping
Till you dry and you leave off your sundress, your sapphire
Slip, your sandals, your sunglasses, your car keys, your

Lingerie, you gather them all up in a towel, and naked you walk

To the water and look at yourself your face wavers and his words

Echo You are to me always beautiful even when I’m not here I will

Find a way to tell you I will make sure you see it too and you do  

See that maybe there is still a kind of beauty to you still

That of the figurehead who's bare breasted and ravaged

By salt and wave a beauty that hints still at a different
Beauty one maybe he still sees and you promise him you’ll

Promise to love and honor and cherish someone else and you

The beautiful journey to you

Scatter his ashes, you scratch his name in the sand, you watch

Water fill the letters you have carved so deeply that it will be late

Morning before the last serif has been erased by the waves

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Neon Trees - Animal (ACOUSTIC LIVE!!!)

"Take a bite of my heart tonight."   Neon Trees, "Animal"  


"Please, sir, can I have some more?"  Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist         

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Chris Isaak - Lie To Me (1987)

This is the third best, "Wicked Game" is second, and "Black Flowers" is my favorite.

Three songs by Chris Isaak on my iPod.

Two new poems in the world.  One of them is good.  Really good.

One trip to Nashville last week where I rocked my cowboy boots and heard my friends Nickole and Will read.

Have a great weekend.  I need to write.  And read.  And mull this all over.

This vole this levo this evol ovel olve veol thing.  

God is Great but Christians Often Aren't

Gratitude Journal: 

As a Christian, I'm grateful for: 

1.  Anne Lamott:  Her books, her spirit, her unapologetic love for Jesus.

2.  Gifts of the spirit:  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith.  True Christianity's not crabbed, or cribbed, or crooked, or cynical. 

3.  Praise:  I believe with all my grinchy heart that's why we were put here.  God has no need of us, or anything we do.  This is the one thing that we can give to Him, who's given us so much. 

4.  Simplicity:  Two rules--love your neighbor and yourself; and love God with all your heart, soul, and strength.  If what you do hurts your neighbor, stop it. Stop it right now.  

5.  Trust:  I don't think about whether a park bench holds me up. I'm grateful to sit there, in the sun, as the clouds scud by, watching Raleigh and Hoots run down the path.  I'm grateful for this moment.  I'm grateful for my child and her joy.  I don't think about whether  I love her, whether I love it here on this planet.  I sit here, still, and know. 

Yet sometimes I can't sit still.  So I'm stepping up on my soap box.  DOMA supporters, I'm talking to you. 

I'm not grateful that the joy and peace and goodness that characterize my understanding of Christianity are drowned out by the cranky, the critical, the crazy, so I am standing my ground here, saying that God loves us all, and accepting that love is a personal decision I'm glad I made.  I believe in religious liberty and in the right of the believer to examine her heart and evolve in her understanding of love. 

I also believe--and as a student of history I will stand firm on this--that this country was founded on the Constitution of the United States of America and not on the Old Testament.  For that I'm extremely grateful. However, both the Bible and the Bill of Rights say "For all." 

As Christians, can't we say for all?  Can't we be inclusive? 

I'm also going to add that I love all my friends, and I wish for them all the same freedoms that I have, including the ability to marry that Harv and I had.  The church I attended wouldn't marry us (I was divorced).  Nonetheless, the state took care of Harvey and me, and by love and by law we had 23 years of joy and bliss and passion and intellectual challenge and just plan laugh-out-loud love.  And there were other benefits:  Harv could be there when I almost died of a stroke.  He could be there when my children were born.  I could inherit his benefits for Raleigh and me when he died.  I have his name--my choice, his children, again my choice, and his legal benefits--a civil right protected by my government. 

Who am I to deny this to others?  And who are you to deny it, either? 

Abraham Lincoln's great speech at his second inauguration, as he attempted to heal a country divided, gives us these great words, "With malice toward none, with charity toward all."  Can't we as Christians live this?

For the pretty one

THIS WEEK'S TRIVIA

1. Moths have no stomachs.
2.  J isn't found in the periodic table.
3. There's a constellation inside every apple.
4. The average dream lasts about 20 minutes.
5. This has lasted longer than 20 minutes.  Oh my.   |

From Best New Poets 2011

HOUSEWIFERY:  AN ANNOTATION

    To wash corsets:  Take out the steel; use hot water;

    one teaspoon of borax to every pail of water;

    place the corsets on the washboard,

    scrub well with a clean brush, using very little soap;

    do not boil the corsets, but if very yellow bleach in the sun;

    rinse well; rub in a little starch; iron when quite damp.

                                                                                                Victorian Pamphlet

Artifact A:  Corsets

Untightening the laces and unhooking the busk; I am on (wash)board with this whole idea of containment.  Now there’s no one tightening the laces or hooking the busk, or admiring the torso so torqued, so misshapen, which I used to read as miss-happen.  And that’s what happened—you miss-happened, and honey I miss you. 

Artifact B:  Borax

20 Mule Team—that’s what it took for me not to cast myself in the fire with you, the stubbornness of 20 mules for me not to go West with you; but part of me did, that day; most of me burned that afternoon, as well; and the cupric-green flames that borax produces when it’s tossed into fire (the Emerald City Green of the Wonderful Wizard) are the fires that stoke me now, something naturally unnatural.  When combined with water, borax also bleaches, releasing hydrogen peroxide bubbles into the boiling brew of the laundry kettle, quite the opposite of bluing, and I am blue, navy blue powder blue Alice blue wanting-to-rise-but-kept-down, hell, held-down blue without you.  All these shades are what Degas called “dead color.” 

Artifact C:  Water

Takes on the shape of something else, of whatever it’s put into; the mattress has taken on your shape; I have taken on the shape of a secret grief, that surprising containment, like pregnancy; only instead of something growing, something’s shrinking it’s my soul my smile my sense of self.  Eat me, says the mushroom, drink me, says the little flask, and like Alice, I never know how grief will shape me next.

Artifact D:  Place

A location, a gesture, the home you were and are to me.  Look for me under your boot soles, wrote Walt Whitman at the end of Leaves of Grass.  I look there.  Not at home.  I look above me and see the curl of your curls in a cloud.  Cumulus, you’d correct me.  Not there, either.  In the plume of my breath after a cold walk?  No.  I inscribe your name in the steam of the mirror.  The “H” looks just like the frame of a house going up.  No place like home, incants Dorothy.  Without you, home is no place.

Artifact E:  Washboard

Ribs.  Ribbons.  Ribaldry.  Bone of my bone, and your bones are now ash.  I long for something-the scythe of a rib, the dice of your knuckles.  I would be your reliquary if you’d let me.  Corrugation of the tin roof of the old farmhouse, where we made love by the fireplace.  Rain falling heavy and my hair falling over your face.  The only bridal veil you ever wore, you teased.  I consign that memory to flame. 

Artifact F:  A Clean Brush

Wouldn’t smell like your hair, when you had hair.  (I have your ponytail, a curly queue.  It smells like sugar cookies and cigarettes).  Lately you’d kept your curls so short.  Your hair fell so moleskin sleek against my skin.  I couldn’t wash your pillowcase for weeks, till the watermarks of my tears salted out your scent.  Vanilla wafting from an oven once made me weak in the knees.  Now I can’t walk into a bakery without having to spin on one heel and leave. 

Artifact G:  Well.

Wishing.  Deep water.  Cold water.  Fare thee.  Charon fares thee.  A four-letter word.  Dark river.  Cold river.  Baptism.  I am totally immersed by this longing to plunge straight down into Styx.  They say from the bottom of a well you can see diurnal stars.  I look for the constellation of grief.  I’d call it Jailbait, I’d call it Honey, I’m home.

Artifact H:  Do Not Boil

How can I not?  I am bubbling over—a makeshift mutiny.  I am a cauldron, a caldera, a Calder sculpture in the wind.  I am a crucible and in a crucible.  Throw in a little bluing, pull me out with a pole, and send me straight through the wringer washer.  I’ll emerge flat white, good as new.  I’ll be a doily, a dolly, a pinafore hung in a closet with pantaloons and pomanders.  I’ll smell very faintly of lavender, from lavende, meaning to wash.

Artifact I:  Yellow

Ivory keys on the old piano.  Your favorite shirt.  The wild canaries we saw at the park.  You sang and sang and sang.  Miner’s canary, you have gone before me.  Your heart in its cage of ribs.  My finger in its wedding ring.   Locket.  You on one side and me on the other.  Gravestone.

Artifact J:  Rub In

Or rub out.  Erase.  Rubbings over stone.  Charcoal smudges.  Smudges on my fingers as I release you to the rose garden.  Fingerprint ink.  Eyelash between finger and thumb.  Make a wish, you’d say.  I already had mine.

Artifact K:  Quite Damp

Damp?  Tamp it down, put it in your pipe and smoke it.  Suck it up.  Not to cry has been impressed on me from childhood.  Iron backbone, stiff upper lip.  Now I’ve tears enough to turn the Sahara oasis; I’m hard pressed to compress my distress.  I’m weighted between pages of the books you haven’t finished reading.  We found four-leaf clovers and faded roses in the brittle family Bible, discarded in a box outside the Goodwill, the day we found our piano.  Someone lived, you said, and someone else forgot. I’ll remember.  Box of books, Bible, piano with its missing black keys, missing pedal.  Damper pedal:  Another word for it is sustained.  

Pamela Johnson Parker 

(for Harvey Parker, 1964-2010) 

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Neon Trees--Everybody Talks

Hey, honey, you could be my drug 
You could be my new prescription.

And maybe you are.



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Training Day

Since the last time I went to the gym (1998), most things are the same, but others are different.  I could use most of the machines/light weights (30 to 60) without a problem, but the hanging knee lifts were new.  I did ten of these this morning (10 straight, 10 each oblique), and I think I am going to die.  Of happiness. I had forgotten my body could do these things.  I hope on Friday it can do this again.  Without wilting.

I bought the world's sexiest vintage dress--black and white and wiggly.  I want to wear it by my birthday (10 weeks away).  I'll see what I can get done in that time period.  

Today:  Two weight circuits.  Three miles--and one dog--walked.  Porch swept.  Son sent off to his new life in Chicago.  Essay revised.  

Tomorrow:  First Zumba class.  Lord help us all.  I am--or was a good dancer--but maybe not anymore.

Friday:  More weights.  Yard sales.  Praying thank you for what I have.  Praying that what I get is what I want.

How+to+Do+Hanging+Knee+Lifts -- powered by LIVESTRONG.COM

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Stevie Wonder - If You Really Love Me (Where I'm Coming From)

If you can find a better live performance, I'd love to see it.  Stevie, Stevie, Stevie, I really do love you.  (I told you and I told you so, too).

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Stevie Wonder - For Once In My Life

I won't let sorrow hurt me.  I won't.  I won't.  I won't.

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My heart is broke/But I have some glue

This is my favorite Nirvana song, and among the reasons I wish to own a piano is to play this.

Happy Mother's Day, Miss Moon, Ms. Radish King, and all you other mothers.

Oops--that doesn't sound right.  All you other wonderful moms.  Much better.

And to Daniel, to Raleigh, thank you for making this day possible.  You're the glue.  I love you with all of my grinchy little heart.

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ENCHIRIDION, VADE MECHUM

PROLOGUE:  For the first time in 18 months, you're happy.  You wear your amber jewelry and you smile for the camera, and your students send your flowers.  And out of nowhere, you have succumbed to this succubus, this incubus, this incubating new feeling.  

This is and isn't you.  So you decide to write, because you have been asked to write a poem.

PROEM:  I will not fall in.  I will not fall.  I will not.

For I have had this terrible disease before, and all of the symptoms are there again.  Butterflies.  Pit-of-the-stomach dropping like a car over a steep hill.  Guitar string tightening from throat to pelvis.

How in the world can this be happening, and how do I stop it?   Brake lines bleeding.

I cannot.  I cannot.  I cannot feel this way.  Again.  Ever.

(But I know how to do it and I am so good at doing it, and I am so good at pleasing another person, and I want like the Velveteen Rabbit to be loved because I am real and o my god I am too old for this, and and I feel that my real self is ceding to the shape of a windowpane, or a status message, or a real estate tag--REDUCED).

POEM:  The Second Story

The wind in the water maples waving hello
Goodbye

The tides going out
The tides coming in
Ebb flow ebb flow

Tell me the story she said of the princess
In the tower, whose hair hangs heavy to the ground
Whose hair ripples
Whose hair makes a rope

You are in the tower
The tower in Tarot tells you
This is
Love this is
Rooked
and you are
Rooked
you are a black bird
and
this is
Destruction

You’re a lightning rod

Yours truly isn't yours anymore.

In and out the window
Fenestration defenestration indefensible

Where are you when you are not with me
And when you’re not with me where am I

The jigsaw puzzle pieces falling into place

The male with his knobbed protuberance
the female with her wasp waist
how she waits to be entered

they're both cut off
they're amputees

POSTSCRIPT

when I lost my husband I fell in
love with Walt Whitman
and with Walt Whitman I have revisited my own amputation

familiar family liar this family is a lie now without a father
without a mother
no longer do I cook or look for
anyone to smile
oh god I miss a smile
not a damned emoticon

I am a country without an
atlas, Vespucci in exile
his own obsessions with maps

I will never go anywhere

The moon is on the rise
The light is in her eyes
The moon is on the rise
The light is in her eyes

Watch as they both cloud over

Retinal detachment
Hemorrhage
Rest face down in a frame
Fall face down in front of his ashes
and see if you can rise

Widget widow wide open widdershins
Whipstitch whirligig wombrella

Nightmare that my womb was a parasol
and all of its shadows were covering me
My poor womb
that empty purse
that bag of marbles

The moon is on the rise
The light is in her eyes
The moon is on the rise
Why does he repeat only these lines

Aaah aahh the sough of his voice
as he sought out the wind sloughing through the trees

you hear it in your ear you hear him tell you
the sun's this wildflower
against the red sky

MANTRA:  "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls." "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."  "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."

Picasso Picasso Picasso

WRITTEN IN CHALK ON A SIDEWALK:

From your chimney smoke I shape new constellations.

Rilke penned these words before The Final Solution.

How the stars in the tarpaper spark.
dedication for my manuscript

If I sit here long enough, if I fit here long enough, if I fit my fingers to the keyboard, will anything spark through them.

I write my Picasso mantra and nothing else
Lost in a dream of chalk and chiggers and cheroots and cherubs

Why did you want me o darkness
until you could have me

A FEW MORE LINES FROM SEAN HAYES TO CLOSE OUT THE SHOW

Come on come on the road you're on the darkness

Primitive eyes and old-fashioned hearts

AND TWO FROM ME WHICH ARE HYPNAGOGUES

nothing recognizes nothing in the darkness.

wasn't I something once

Amy Winehouse - You Know I'm No Good (live)

I cheated myself like I knew I would
I told you I was trouble 
You know that I'm no good

Not the story of my life, but the story of many lives around me.

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Robert Johnson - Love In Vain Blues (Takes 1&2) (1937)

This is Teacher Appreciation Day, and I received this in my inbox. How in the world do you interpret that?

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K. Henderson Fine Art: Jack-in-the-Box - oil painting

K. Henderson Fine Art: Jack-in-the-Box - oil painting:

_____

This is the first cousin to my own Mr. Jack, whom I've had for decades and who reigns supreme from my Hoosier cabinet in the dining room.  I love him, and Ms. Henderson has captured him perfectly in this painting (oil on Masonite).

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Henri Rousseau, Sylvia Plath--Ekphrasis 101

Henri Rousseau, The Dream
_____


Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies--Sylvia Plath


A Sestina for the Dounier

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you
Came to be lying on this baroque couch
Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye
Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,
Set in intricate wilderness of green
Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lilies

Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies
It seems the consistent critics wanted you
To choose between your world of jungle green
And the fashionable monde of the red couch
With its prim bric-à-brac, without a moon
To turn you luminous, without the eye

Of tigers to be stilled by your dark eye
And body whiter than its frill of lilies:
They'd have had yellow silk screening the moon,
Leaves and lilies flattened to paper behind you
Or, at most, to a mille-fleurs tapestry. But the couch
Stood stubborn in its jungle: red against green,

Red against fifty variants of green,
The couch glared out at the prosaic eye.
So Rousseau, to explain why the red couch
Persisted in the picture with the lilies,
Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,
And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon
On a red velvet couch within your green-
Tessellated boudoir. Hearing flutes, you
Dreamed yourself away in the moon's eye
To a beryl jungle, and dreamed that bright moon-lilies
Nodded their petaled heads around your couch.

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch
Accompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon
And the snakecharmer's song and the gigantic lilies,
Marvelingly numbered the many shades of green.
But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye
So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,

Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch
To feed his eye with red, such red! under the moon,
In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!

_____

Henri Rousseau, The Snakecharmer
_____

Snakecharmer--Sylvia Plath

As the gods began one world, and man another,
So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
With moon-eye, mouth-pipe. He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.

Pipes water green until green waters waver
With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
And as his notes twine green, the green river

Shapes its images around his songs.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues

Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes,
Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom
Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes

Is visible. The snake-scales have become
Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast
Of tree and human. And he within this snakedom

Rules the writhings which make manifest
His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes
From his thin pipe. Out of this green nest

As out of Eden's navel twist the lines
Of snaky generations: let there be snakes!
And snakes there were, are, will be--till yawns

Consume this piper and he tires of music
And pipes the world back to the simple fabric
Of snake-warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes

To a melting of green waters, till no snake
Shows its head, and those green waters back to
Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.
Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.

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What It's Like to Get Up, Get Dressed, Go to Work, and Go Home

WIDDERSHINS 

You come to me in a dream that’s a wash of grey over pen and ink lines (Koh-I-Noor ones you loved to draw); you’re wearing your pearl-grey suit because grey suits you; your hair curls like smoke, the way it once did when you smoked, you ask, Pamela, do you see me? I haven’t been this thin in years! You’re flat black construction paper; silhouetted against the garden, a man twirling a cane 

 in a Kara Walker landscape; you tell me now you’re perspective, you’re negative space, you’re an old negative in an envelope of deckle-edged photos, the dark triangles that will hold them in an album are scattered before you like so many Escher birds, they will scatter and wing to the four corners of what has become my earth, your berth. You’re insubstantial as ash at the end of a cigarette, still 

suggesting a shape before it falls or before it’s tamped out in a tray; you’re the rectangular box that holds your ashes and the starbursts of your bones; you’re the alphabet of ash I scatter and then tamp into the garden; you have become no more and no less than you wanted—H, E, P—you have become a man of letters, ones that you’ll never write, you have been swallowed up by the shade 

of the gingko and its fans, you have become caught in the dreadlocks of the willow, in the needles of the pine and the thread of the garden spider as she begins to spin her orb; you leave behind only a memory of your words—your alphabets, your calligraphy—as I spill some more of your ashes around the mulch-black bed of the iris, the faint furrows of the day lilies, the haloes 

around the trellis-twined roses; these are the lines I imagine that I’ve penned and inked as I walk widdershins in the garden, against the rotation of the seasons, countering the clocks, as I dress in your black sweatshirt, your black baseball cap, as I carry your shears, your scythe, your ashes, as I scatter more of you north to south, south to north, right to left, left to right--as I am left to write.