Adimpleating Time and Space

I adimpleate my teacup. I adimpleate my gas tank. I adimpleate my time on this planet till I can be with Harvey again.

Today: Library (ILL), Mailbox (fixed up and mail picked up). OneWord writing (a retread of one of my childhood superheroes). Cats fed and wrangled. Thrifting with no bargains in sight. I found a skirt but will wait till it's reduced from $3 to $1 on Friday. If it's not there, I'll adimpleate my shopping cart with something else.

I make a pie. I make a bed. I make a mess of things. I start over.

PS Can you tell I adopted a word today?



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One Word: Cowboy

TO GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE WE GO


Cowboy is pruning my grandmother's yellow roses; Cowboy is carefully cutting them where they fork like highways on a road map. Cowboy wears a straw hat and overalls; he doesn't wear boots or blue jeans or a hat like Roy Rogers does, what Daddy calls a Stetson, so how he can be a cowboy? He doesn't even have a horse, and he has rakes and shovels and big old scissors instead of a shotgun or a pistol. Cowboy is older than Daddy, and I don't know why Grandmother calls him yard boy. He is taller than a yard by far, and Grandmother calls what he works in garden and what he works on lawn. I don't understand how I can be a girl at 5 and he can be a boy at maybe 40. Maybe my mother will explain this to me one day, but right now she says hush and swats me with a rolled-up Ladies Home Journal when I don't.

Rob Brezney's Astrology and Chilly Receptions

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In the 1925 silent film The Gold Rush,Charlie Chaplin plays a prospector during the Alaska Gold Rush. After a series of adventures, he finds himself stuck in a remote cabin on Thanksgiving Day with a ruffian named Big Jim. They're out of food, so Charlie gets resourceful, boiling his right shoe in a big pot and serving it up steaming hot. What the audience doesn't know is that the movie prop is made of sweet licorice, not leather. So while it may seem that dinner is a hardship, the actors actually had no trouble polishing off their meal. I see a similar scenario in your near future, Cancerian: something like eating a "shoe" that's made of candy.

_______

Well, maybe that will make it tastier when I put my foot in my mouth. (I have had shoes that were brand-named Candies, but that's beside the point). I have been awfully distracted lately and curt and abrupt. I know that my children and I have lost the most precious person in the world to us, that I have had shingles and lupus and insomnia and kidney infections, but that's no excuse for being rude. And I've been ruddy rude. I hope the universe will accept my apologies. I swear I will be a better daughter, mother, teacher, in-law, outlaw, and friend as soon as these steroids wear off.


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Housewifery

Continuities
by Walt Whitman

(From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist)

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

__________
Nothing is ever lost--All the King's Men.

I feel lost. I am not nothing, because nothing is ever lost. I must be something.

Excuse my brief foray into self-esteem.

Today's ONEWORD.COM: MARKET

To market to market and home again home again...Harvey and I loved going to the Nashville flea market--pralines and pashimas and spices and odd bargains on frankincense and myrrh...He always told me we should set up a booth there. I told him Lie down with fleas and get up with bargains. We both loved the marquetry of the market--treasure of postcards and rhinestones and ribbons and pottery in tiny rectangles of booths--fountain pens and pharaohs, cabinets and candy jars and programs for dance cotillions...We made the unexpected purchase and regretted the bargains that got away...the pink crocheted gloves, the angel print that wouldn't fit in the car, the ABC blocks that were tramp art... I regret everything--every trinket we didn't purchase, every second we spent apart from the pleasure of just looking. I remember so many things--the giant red Buddha (nearly 4 feet tall and he's only a bust) and recall Harvey's delight in him--a child's face when he sees a pony captured perfectly on a 42-year-old canvas. I look at the pink and black (and monocled!) penguin and remember Harvey rushing to tell me that he'd found a treasure, and I said, No, first you have to see this amazing cookie jar. No, you have to see what I found--and as we quibbled he led me toward the corner of the Mule Barn, exactly where I wanted to go. When we reached the booth, what we'd debated turned out to be the same thing--that cookie jar! The dealer had already wrapped it. I knew that one of you'd be back...We only had $8 between us, five for him and three for me, and that's the only thing we could buy that week. We were so poor we couldn't afford laundry so went to in-laws the next weekend to wash clothes. But we--no I--have that cookie jar and that Buddha and these memories: A plique-a-jour dragonfly, a pair of Chinese temple screens, 25 Bakelite bracelets, 15 globes, an Art Deco sculpture, the Matisse print that turned out to be real and not a reproduction...and so many months of holding hands and sharing popcorn and picnicking out of the back of his grandparents' old Crown Victoria...pimiento cheese and Pringles and Pepsi and peanuts and paper plates and Pamela and Harvey and I thought it would never end...but it did.

I'm going back to the Nashville flea market in the spring, and I'm going to discover the perfect inkwell. Half of the journey is anticipation, imagining what you'll see. I half-expect to glimpse his firefly-green shirt an aisle over, to hear his whisper behind me:Whatever you're selling, I'm buying. We won't even haggle over the cost....

One Word: Materials (Not Enough Time)

alencon lace (I see you through a veil)

broadcloth (the prairie sprawls and undulates),

burlap (kittens in a sack you rescue them)

calico (aprons and flour sack frocks cut up for your quilt)

cambric (handkerchief of the Lord, I embroider an H)

canvas (an artist's model shivers in the corner, the artist is you the model is me)

chino (you called them your lawyer pants, wore them when you were permanently pressed for funds)

corduroy (kings cloth, Thomas Hart Benton's furrowed fields, fretted like your old Gibson)

crepe (my 20s de chine dress cut on the bias, flowers over my hip bones petals and branches over my ribs),

denim (your thigh sliding through the wicket of mine in the doorway where we first kissed),

felt (wetting wool, rubbing wool, a congress of wet sheep in an Irish pub we visit),

flannel (your shirt still warm from your skin, I steal it for a quick trip to the kitchen)

gabardine (your three-piece suit with its vest, its watch chain and fob, the suit I couldn't bury you in)

gingham (cheery kitchen curtains with cross-stitched roosters, I am scrambling the first eggs I'll make for you)

lame (drag queen who made you laugh your lustiest at "You're Not Woman Enough to Take My Man" and the swaggering hips of the singer, the waterfall of gold over them),

linen (the tan and black suit I wore on our first Easter, the one that fits again because I can't eat/don't cook without you)

madras (a plaid we didn't like, a city we wanted to visit)

muslin (that impossibly small antique blouse, leg-o-mutton sleeves and lace collar on which you pinned for me a cameo)

nylon (your thumbnail sends a millipede skittering down my stocking)

organza (the sheer fabric, the topnotes of gardenia in a perfume you picked out),

satin (slick sheets you'd throw off the bed)

serge (the ocean's undertow, all these layers stitched together)

silk (one of the few fabrics that will shatter, as mirrors do, as I have)

twill (classic fabric, archaic contraction, twill never be better)

velvet (the feel of your skin, there)

wool (it made you itch, o I would scratch your back)

worsted (these days the way they're woven, warp and weft and what's looming)

_____________
I encourage you all to go to the oneword site. I always get good practice from this. Today's efforts are turning into a freewritten abcedarian. I wonder if I can keep any of these images or lines.

Rest in Peace, Henryk Gorecki, 1933-2010

The 21st Century's Dorian Gray

Perhaps the most beautiful face in music!



Perhaps the most beautiful bass line. And the best high notes since Roy Orbison.

For years these were my theme songs.


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Remembering Anne Sexton, Born This Day

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

_______
Oh, Anne Sexton, mistress of metaphor, sweetheart of simile, wonderful poet and playwright, beautiful woman in torment, how I wish there were more work of yours to read. Someday, I'll write about how important you are in my understanding poetry, but not today. Today, I don't pick up the carpenter's toolbox, but there were days before Harvey came into my life, came for me, when I understood the hammer and the awl and the T-square, knew every step of the dance in iron shoes. Because of you, I understand transformation. Because of you, I understand it hurts.

(I hold in my hands today a copy of Transformations complete with personal correspondence, a gift from my friend Chet. I love this book).

Takei Takeo (A Journey Round My Skull)

In the darkness that floods each day, is there a prism?



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Two Books, Two Dozen Years, and Today

I'm holding my second chapbook, Other Four-Letter Words, which just came in the mail. It's available from Finishing Line Press and it's a beautifully printed book. Here's the link through Finishing Line:

http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm

The book should be available via Amazon very soon, as well.

If you want to see (and hear) other poems so you have a feel for my work, go here:

memorypalacewalk.com

I just went to the link for A Walk Through the Memory Palace, and I made the mistake of listening to "Archaic Fragments." Harvey is the primary reader in that poem, and I am just destroyed to hear his voice.

On this, the day that we first met 24 years ago, it's fitting that I hold in my hands the book dedicated to him.

FOR HARVEY
SONG OF SONGS 5:16

That verse isn't on the dedication page. Here's my translation from the Hebrew.

His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely.
This is my lover and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

Harv was sweetness itself, and he was altogether lovely. I know I'll never have another lover; I'll also never have another friend like Harvey.

Instead of the sweet mouth, I taste my own brackish tears. Sorrow pervades everything that I do, even the happy moments. It's my own yard, as WC Williams' speaker puts it in "The Widow's Lament in Springtime;" it's also my shade garden, my rose bed, the plot of land I bought for our marker.

REWIND: I forget for a few seconds that he's gone. The first impulse I had was to call Harvey and tell him, Hurry home, honey, and bring the champagne. He would have enjoyed the serendipity of the book showing up today.

FAST FORWARD: I remember a line from a poem ("Rehearsal for Living Without You," in the new book): These garnets I hold are cold fire. Harvey loved to give me garnets--I'm wearing one of the rings today. Neither of us knew they were the widow's gemstone. Garnet to Garnet--Is this the way? wrote Emily Dickinson. Is it? Is it? Is it? The needle's frozen in that song's interrogative groove.

Poetry's Final Examination: Trust Your...

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader of poetry.--Robert Frost

I don't agree with all of Frost's aesthetics, but I believe this, with all my heart and both my ears.

For Radish: Handel's Dixit Dominus on youtube

I'm thinking of you today and praying for peace for you today. I hope that you find comfort in music, art, and books. Even more importantly, take comfort in the fact that you have reared a man of gentleness, sensibility and kindness in a world that usually offers none of these to its children.

I wasn't sure whether to choose Mozart or Handel, but I picked Handel because of the violins.

Next Book Cover?

I'll Have a Cup of Tea and Tell You...

After a day shopping with my daughter and trying on shoes and funny accents with my daughter and trick-or-treating with my daughter (she went as Kristen Stewart--an ideal costume since they both have a patent on the snarl-as-smile), and after falling asleep during Paranormal Activity with my daughter (an indication of my exhaustion level), I dreamed last night of Harvey. He and I were sitting in the kitchen drinking out of incredible Art Deco teacups, and smiling at each other. He said to me, You know I always will, so go ahead. I don't know what he was talking about, maybe nothing, maybe everything; I feel that I have his permission to keep living.

Oh to see those green eyes glowing at me, oh to see those strong fingers wrapped around that cup, oh to know that smile is for me. I could stay alive with dreams like this--even snippets of Harvey are better than no Harvey. I have been praying for a dream of him. This is the first one I have had since July 13, when I dreamed we were wandering through a beautiful garden of flowers, a botanical garden, and he said I'll make us one like this. Maybe he's doing that right now.

In the meantime...