IN FLORIOGRAPHY, THE HYDRANGEA MEANS COLDNESS

-->

 







TO YOU, WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Dear Joe,

           It’s raining (all the words for weather, how they gather); and I’m fretting about what I’ve left out—the gardening fork and the spade and the rake—as I sit here with a cup of coffee, after polishing an iron skillet I’ve had almost all my life.  I’m curled like an ammonite in my favorite kitchen chair, here at the old oak table, here in my midlife body with its familiar Tin Man creaks; the same ache in my hands as when we’d write for hours at this same table, how you’d rub the moons and boats till they sailed free in my wrists. And I think of the cups you gave me—this is one of them, its transferred flowers so like my hydrangeas which you called water flowers, their litmus blues and pinks—and I wonder whether this rain will savage or salvage their hangdog heads; how it was you who told me coffee grounds change their colors, and I think again of how you’d lower your head as you counted the iambs, tapping on your acid-washed thighs. Oh, Joe, unlike me you didn’t miss a beat.

           Now that I’ve had a second cup of coffee (which is also joe, which might be a reason I’ve always liked that name), and I have screwed up so many things, including my caffeinated courage, I’ll do what I haven’t done in decades—I’ll send you a letter. I have never been able to write about you, but I can write to you, Joe, and I can’t help it now, words are dripping like water in the buckets we set out during storms in that leaky upstairs flat. And even though I’m thinking of all the reasons I shouldn’t be writing to you, all the things I have to tend to, I think maybe today I ought to recall the things you and I didn’t attend to, by the river, looking for arrowheads, before you lit out for school and how you promised you’d be back before it rained in hell. (Only you could pun on Milton; you’d  read everything).

           The world may be, as you once insisted, a magnet, and the sky, as I put it, dark as cast iron, and the rain that you showed me the trees by the river call down might flatten the corn (tassels blonde as you were) and the cornflowers (blue as you said my eyes were). And I truly have more sense than to stand out in the rain, waiting for Satan to start beating his wife; I was raised better, but I don’t care, something is pulling at me, and I want to be at the river’s edge, and I’m here in the kitchen wearing a pink and blue apron and imagining the Ohio as rain dimples the water.

           And I think like the farmers and their Almanac say, we need this rain that’s drumming the roof (your fingers, drumming your thighs), because everything here’s been drier than the rooster tails your old Chevelle sent flying, as you pulled away, waving out the window, glasses glinting in the sun, and me shading my eyes against all that brightness and wondering what heat Florida has that Kentucky doesn’t. I remember the night before, how you’d counted the freckles on my nose; how the humidity and the ferric flecks in my blood drew me to you all the more, how the turntable played Rust Never Sleeps, and how we didn’t either, as we engaged in what the Baptists among us might call carnal and what you’d call total immersion.

           And I’m thinking of all the letters that I wrote you, as you immersed yourself in poetry, and where they might be. Did you save them? Did you burn them? I know you read them, because I have your answers, and I have your theory of poetry—like the rake and the spade and the gardening fork, I have spread them out before me—the best part is what’s left out (to display, to hide), and I think of how we’d call poetry hide and see; and I don’t think we saw, dear, what was right in front of us, plain as the freckled nose on my face or the rattlesnake under the chokeberry; I think of what’s lying ahead of me and I think of what I’ve left on and under the earth. I think the best part of being with you, Joe, is coiled inside of me like the centrifugal force in that rattler, and I think that’s truly what I’ll leave out till I light out myself.

           Once a year or so I can’t sleep; I think of the dead rising up incorruptible, and I kick off the quilts and reread Hart Crane, who was your favorite, and I surprise myself all over again with how familiar the dead become.

           I want to stay here, on this earth, Joe, and I don’t believe in dying for love. That’s for the Greeks, not for the likes of me. I’m thinking of Narcissus, swallowed up by water, and of Persephone, swallowed up by earth and coming back, and that’s how grief is, dear one, it comes back. Even though I have an iron backbone, I think of rusting, sometimes; I think of water dark as coffee and the undertow of the river, and I waver.

Sometimes yours truly,

Pamela  

Share |

Horses, Horses, Horses

Share |

IF I'M ALIVE AND WELL, WILL YOU BE THERE HOLDING MY HAND?

for you I would strip
these kid gloves off, finger by
finger, so slowly

showing red-ribbon
scars and scratches quick-torn nails--
how from the tunnel

unhouseling my
self from gravest dirt I clawed
my way back to life

Share |

Awaiting an Entrance--Back to Blogging

FREEWRITING IN WHICH I IMAGINE DEGAS' ACTRESS AS A BOXER

And in this corner, buttoning her gloves, as her attendant fans out the fan of her hemline, our actress prepares her entrance.  Note the peephole, a small moon in the upper left corner; note the absinthe of her dress; note, instead of the boxer's canvas, the threadbare Aubusson with its muted yellows and oranges.

Is she going to be met with applause when she enters, stage right, to become the spotlight's focus?

I love the diagonals, the pastel smears and strokes, the wasp waist of the actress, and especially the bare hand/gloved hand that almost center the drawing.  The sinister first is concealed, as the dexter still fastens.  That arm pose is very mannequin-like.  Is she, like the dropcloth setting she'll soon stand before, only a prop?

I hope she returns to her dressing room, after wild applause and seven curtain calls; I hope she pulls off a glove with her teeth and relaxes in her threadbare Japanese kimono as her face, unadorned by maquillage, glows white as a snowdrop.  I hope there are white roses and lilies wafting their scents for her; I hope there's a carriage waiting in the alley.

I hope she escapes, unscathed, from the withering pens of critics.

I hope we all do.

We'd Have Been Married 27 Years

Share |

Robert Reid 

IN ICTU OCULI

“Sorrow is my own yard,” William Carlos Williams, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”

                        My irises are blue,

Last November when winter was balmy,

            Unexpected, sabers slashed up through

                        A scrim of gold gingko leaves, in early

                        milky with cataracts, still

December the last iris unfurled

            Its frills, sinuous scallops bisected

                        Central from ciliary—blue ink pearled

                        I should have seen

From your fountain pen, blue lines crisscrossing

            Your atlas, blue veins traversing your wrist.

                        An unseasonal gift that Christmas morning

                        the cyanotic nails, looked

Blossom on the white wicker tray—the vase

            That held the last iris was delicate,

                        A milky blue.  “There’ll be more,” you say, “next

                        more closely at your hands,

Spring.  We’ll have iris for years and years.”  Blades

            Of green slice through the earth, this autumn,

                        Your ashes in winter’s bedded gardens.

                        not what they held.  

Back to It: 4631

For such a very long time, I've turned my back on this blog as a focus for daily writing practice, and I've begun to miss it.  I want to resume writing here, as I need a record of the little thoughts that aren't going into my fiction, teaching, poetry...I want a place for musing.  My notebooks are filling up with sentences that are as beautiful and true as I can make them.  I need a place for marginalia, for mosaic, a field where I feel free to play.  

As in this sketch by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, I think I'll turn my back on the desk and look into the mirror, see what I can write, what I can make up.  I miss this daily/weekly/monthly responsibility of writing and saving images.  I think FaceBook may have ruined blogging for me.  We'll see if I find anything interesting, or useful, or extraordinary to say.  

I've read over some of my old posts, and they're good.  This is not good.  But still, practice makes, if not perfect, at least more supple.  

So here goes:  Today I am interested in an article about a man who kept a Bonnard and a Gauguin hanging in his kitchen for 40 years:  

Galle(r)y Kitchen??

The article doesn't mention the Fiat worker.  I'd love to hear his side of the story.  Maybe I should write it...

I know that I should write, and write more.

Notes from Underground--Time Out

"If is the middle word in life." Dennis Hopper, right before reciting Rudyard Kipling on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970. 

What if? If only? If...when.  If...then. 

I don't know. I think people my age have forgotten we are a lost generation, just as lost as those Americans on whom Miss Stein's pronouncement fell in the 1920s. An entire generation of us was lost, as AIDS killed us, so many of us. I miss so many of my friends from the 1970s and early 1980s, all the pretty boys with their pretty smiles and their pretty tongues barbed as a cat's; all the the smart boys with their sonatas and their sonnets and their paintbrushes and photographs. I miss those photographs. I miss laughter and louche looks and champagne for no reason. I miss platinum-edged china and paper plates and the proper use of salad and shrimp forks with both. I miss Faruk and I miss Sam and I miss Danny and I miss Jon ("I took the goalpost out of my name, sweetness"). I miss Jimmie mocking my Kentucky accent and teaching me how to buy a dress and curl my hair. I miss being able to wear fur and Frye boots. I miss automats and egg creams and pizza by the slice slapped on a sheet of wax paper at 1 a.m. I miss waking up at 11 a.m. and drinking mimosas till happy hour. I miss Happy Hours. I miss the trek from Russian Tea Room to CBGBs to the corner deli. I miss the hours I used to spend with my friends, the hours they didn't have left.

if only...

If only every day, I didn't curse Ronald Reagan, the prejudices that prevented treating a pandemic, and the entire staffs of small-town hospitals. If only every day I didn't know in my bones, in the dreadlocks of my own DNA, that science could have killed the AIDS virus back in the early 1980s, could have classified it and cultured it in a petri dish and crushed its replication, could have prevented its spread as well as clarifying care and cures for others. There could have/should have/would have been a vaccine by now, a cure by now...if only there weren't Republicans in office...if only there was a heart and an art to public health...if only the word "pariah" ddn't come to be redefined in so many cities and small towns...if only suffering people were treated as well as dogs and cats and cars are treated. So much wit, charm, beauty, talent, heart we lost; there are so many words we will never read, so much music we will never hear, so many paintings and photographs we will never stand before, amazed...So much might have happened, so many might have lived, and lived well, if it weren't for the ilk of Ed Koch, for drug companies who'd rather turn a profit than save lives.

If only...

I remind myself that I am alive, and I am healthy, and I have memories. I am thankful for that.

I am thankful for Ward 86, SFGH.

I am thankful my friend was treated with compassion when he was dying.

I am thankful I was there.

I am thankful that I was alone afterward.

If only...

In my own person, in my own personal grief, I wish that I could remember everything. I forget sometimes that I am a witness to one of the great tragedies of our times.

I forget that it is the duty of the witness to testify.

But people, it is so hard.

Be patient with me these days. I am writing from my very nerve endings.

Share |