A Lark

I remember when flying was this much fun!  That was then...this is now.

Anxious & Distracted?

I am traveling this weekend with trepidation. Can’t quite put my finger directly on this particular anxiety’s pulse. Or maybe I can.  Yesterday, a US Airways flight from Paris to Charlotte, North Carolina made an emergency landing in Bangor, Maine. Why? A woman handed a flight attendant a note, in French, which said she had a device surgically implanted, a boom-boom device.

A call for physicians was made and several doctors examined the woman. (Where, I wonder, in the galley?)  They proclaimed her scar free so no device.  She was taken into custody in Bangor.

We can all recall the would be underwear bomber who attempted to detonate a device on Christmas day as his Amsterdam flight neared Detroit; which would put that plane in the vicinity of my husband’s extended family, all gathered together to celebrate the holiday in a big home on the airport’s flight path. I chill ran down my spine as I wrote those words.  One Michigan cousin-in-law who lives not all that far from the airport recently emailed that he writes as better to “puzzle things out.”  Perhaps that is what I am doing this morning.  But what a strange and dark puzzle traveling is these days.

I would be foolhardy if I didn’t have a sense of anxiety, right?  I am an alert traveler as is the actor, James Wood.  He happened to be traveling in first class with the 9/11 mad bombers. It was their practice run. Wood said later in an interview that the solemnity of these Middle Eastern men struck him as very odd. They were traveling in first class without enjoying any of the benefits offered.  No beverages of any sort, no food, no convivial conversation, no reading material, nothing but silent observation.  Wood said his father was retired CIA and that he had wished he had at least called to discuss his impressions of these men.

I have a sense that even in my little seaside town, there is an increased sense of general anxiety manifesting in part as distraction.  Running errands yesterday, I saw both distracted drivers and pedestrians.  A woman was so preoccupied with her i Phone that she completely forget about her toddler trailing behind her. The little girl was wandering in Safeway’s parking lot. The mother was oblivious.  Perhaps she was reading about the woman claiming to have a device implanted?   

My Mortal Muse

She closed the book, placed it on the table and finally decided to walk through the door.  Lana turned decisively toward the front door with its prism-like glass portal, her multicolored world reflected, refracted, recently dissected and reassembled. Her award-winning collection of short stories, “In the Arms of the Muse” settled in the table’s dust.

"Deep breaths,” Lana muttered.  She extended her left hand (yeah she was a leftie) and twisted the old brass knob.

 The muse seated at the round oak table sighed and put her curling blond head on the book.  “Lana, wait.  By Zeus, don’t go!”

Lana shrugged, knowing Thalia couldn’t follow her.  She opened the door to the worn porch of the tiny Victorian flat. Her dreads lifted in the breeze.  Spontaneously she raised her arms to San Francisco’s heavenly blue light.  Greco rode by on his battered delivery bike; the oversized basket emblazoned with Ferrario’s Italian Food and saluted her, “Ciao, Bella Lana!

Hey, Ciao, Greco!”

 Greco was Lana’s confident. He knew about the ancient albatross sobbing in her flat.  Greco had asked why Lana the vegetarian was ordering fois gras Panini’s with Gorgonzola.  It was for Thalia, who oddly preferred Italian to Greek take-out.   

But wasn’t Lana’s success exhilarating, Greco asked. Luminaries celebrated her collection of short stories worldwide as evocative, offering fresh, keen insight into an ancient Greece throbbing with life. (Thalia was throbbing with life, Lana’s.)

Since leaving Old Miss, Lana kept to her vow to write every day.  She told herself Faulkner said it plain: “You want to write, write!”   

Yet waiting tables at three different joints, dragging home at all hours with aching feet; it was an existence becoming stale, futile.  Then the birthday, the nice round thirtieth birthday; the seal on the tomb of her twenties had arrived. 

Around eleven she left the birthday eve party Greco had cobbled together at Ferrario’s for her.  He’d strung the deli’s patio with lights, poured the prosecco.  She mingled with their hyphenated friends:  the waiters-actors, bar tending-writers. It was more commiseration than celebration.  Midge, raw-vegan-dancer, presented the birthday cake with a “Rest In Peace” headstone in mocha and vanilla nut icing.  Lana graciously declined the 25-year-old’s gooey insult.  It was a rare warm summer evening in San Francisco and Lana slipped away to walk the City.

 She found herself on Nob Hill at Grace Cathedral as if by appointment.  The clockworks in the formidable tower sounded twelve deep tones, midnight as Lana stood silent, in the center of the labyrinth alone with her wishing heart.  A wisp of rising fog engulfed her.  She was suddenly chilled in her party dress. 

And then Thalia embraced her, warming her, whispering, “The Muse has arrived, thy wish granted!”

Lana’s writing flowed.  Editors lapped her up, as did Thalia.  An agent appeared.  In The Arms of the Muse was published.  Lana thought Geraldine Brooks had a crush on her. She wanted to include two of Lana’s stories in the Best American Short Stories volume she was editing.

Alas, poor agoraphobic, Thalia, appeared unable to leave Lana. She spoke of giving up Olympus.  Lana suggested she try to get out, perhaps a gig at Bimbo’s?  After all, she is Thalia, antiquity’s Muse of the Comic Mask; who better to try a little stand up act?

 Privately Lana wondered if she could write Thalia’s story without Thalia’s charms?  “Perhaps, My Mortal Muse, perhaps try,” whispered Thalia, fading to a shimmer, a glimmer at the portal’s prism, then gone, but not to Bimbo’s, indeed not Bimbo’s.

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Lucy’s Stellar Summer

Another chapter in the life of Lucy Declan, Girl Astronomer: Memorial Day Weekend

Star Date:  Vega climbs higher in the sky, a foretaste of another summer’s truths be told.

“This is how it was, Lucy, you’re old enough to know the truth of things…we are creatures of fate, did you know that?

Here it is, I thought I loved your mother until I met her sister, your wild Auntie Lisa. 

Your mother brought me home here to the coast to meet her family over the long Memorial Day weekend.  Seems suitable that we are having this conversation on that same holiday…so many years later…but here we are. 

I was crazy about your mother; she was so full of life, passionate about her field of work, saving the ocean.  Did I tell you about the time I took her to a book talk…it was two field workers with National Geographic…they’d done a book on the raft of plastic adrift in the Southern ocean and

Dad, pops,” Lucy broke in…”I know the story and it makes me cry too, how the sea birds couldn’t fledge, couldn’t fly because they’d been fed regurgitated plastic which is what the mother birds were eating…feeding off that raft of our plastic trash…”

“That’s quite a tone, Lucy, quite a tone in your voice…yes, she did get emotional but then she acted.  She declared that with our lovely opposable thumbs we should be perfectly capable of opening milk cartons by folding back the corners.  Why did we have to have those little round openings with a plastic cap?  She created public awareness through her campaign.  And at least one major dairy dropped the plastic caps and went back to the original carton.  Which saved them money anyway and the whole carton was recyclable and…

“Dad, please, back to the holiday weekend….

Alright, Lu-Lu, bear with me, this isn’t easy…as soon as I saw your mother’s sister, Lisa was just 20 at the time, I knew, it was as if she were the most vibrant human being I’d ever seen…others appeared as paper dolls, two-dimensional, while Lisa inhabited the world as if it were created for her and her alone.

Wow, Pops...

Exactly, Lu-Lu, wow to the ninth degree.

So the long weekend passed and I was so pleased to meet your granddad and grandmamma and at the same time I was so confused, it was like I was living on on one of  your far-away nebula…

Dad, you can’t live on nebulae, you know but there are other planets, which could support…

Hey, Lucy, we have a heck of time communicating these days, do you want the truth or do you want me to write all down, shove it into a bottle and throw into the sea and if you find it, you find it!

Hey, Pops, mother wouldn’t want you throwing anything in the ocean…

For God’s sake Lucy, I’m pouring it all out for you!

Rising Lucy brushed the sand from her jeans and went to her big dad, sitting on their driftwood log staring out to sea.  She stood behind him, putting her hands on his broad fleecy shoulders; she kissed him on the top of the head, and sighed.

 I know you are, Dad, Daddy, I want to know it all; I really do and I don’t, but I think I must.  Go on.”

 

                                    (To be continued…)

 

 

Her Doubtful Fate

 I am working to create and stick to a consistent writing schedule. However, my attention goes to the dishes in the sink, the dirty laundry sagging against the washing machine. If all that were tidied, surely the writing would be sparkling.

I know other writers who get up and dress, pick up their laptop and go to a café or a bookstore and write.

Or, our previous poet laureate’s schedule: She sees her life partner off to work in the morning and then returns to bed with a pot of coffee and legal pads and writes until noon.

I’ve tried both and I am still plagued by my inability to honor the aim to write.

Permission was given by ‘me’ to ‘me’ to sit down on Saturday morning with blank paper and colored pencils and sketch some of the interesting creatures recently populating my dreamscape.

These visitors rising from my subconscious are neither one thing or another. Interesting? Neither writer or not writer am I?

In one dream, I was walking a familiar beach on a warm afternoon when I felt the attention of someone or something. Turning I saw a creature with the body of a snake, with a cobra head and flared hood.  The snake’s body ended in a display of peacock tail feathers, a full and vibrant fan. This creature-radiated intelligence, staring at me ready to strike.

The following night’s dream was equally lucid.  It was late twilight. I was staying in an older hotel.  The windows were open, with old-fashioned sashes and screens.  I was working at a drawing table, sketching another variety of animal. This fellow was winged with cat's paws in front and hooves behind. As I finished the sketch, it came to life; leaped off the page and onto the windowsill.

Grinning at me, the winged cat nodded his horned head and pushed through the screen and out into the night. 

What to make of theses strange combinations?  These things that are neither this nor that?  Are they a manifestation, an illustration of my state, which is between two stools, no doubt.

The earliest reference to the expression ‘between two stools’ in modern English is in Matthew Prior's comic poem Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind, 1717:

    Now which were wise, and which were fools?

    Poor Alma sits between two stools;

    The more she reads the more perplexed,

    The comment ruining the text:

    Now fears, now hopes her doubtful fate.

Art by Stephanie Hardegen

 

Place Initiates

All leafed out, the Pin Oaks, Hickory, Black Walnut, still some American Elm then but not now, a stand of Sycamores, sisters sure, the Dogwoods and Catalpa’s delicate blooms done as it is late spring, Defiance, Missouri, a humid morning thick with past lingering in present’s heavy air.  Then and now, then and now and when?

Plump potato bugs buzzing, dragon flies hover, later, in the twilight, the fireflies blink, even the green bottle biting flies remind me of the taste of rain to come.  

The June bugs early persistence, moths the size of dinner plates at the porch light here in this long ago Defiance and my father mirroring his own revolutionary belligerence.

Early evening’s blue haze rising from the Femme Osage River…named for an Indian maiden who throws herself from the bluff and saves her tribe. The next morning we are out early, us chauser de savages.

“Look at that,” said my father as his old turquoise pick-up crested the white gravel road, hood pointed toward the cloudless call it azure sky.

The black racer etched a new horizon between white rock road and blue sky. 

“We’ll brake for that snake.  You see him?

Oh yes,” the initiate replies, “oh yes.”

My father grins, pipe in his hand. “We won’t tread on him.”

Good Morning, April Haiku! (3-5-3 Scheme)

Eyes closed yet

Sensing sun, resting

In bird song.

Molecular love pre dates gravity with its curling law of attraction. The Voice of the Word made Man, writ and strung in beads like the new born's blue beaded bracelet with his last name on lettered rounds, a 1951 Scrabble baby. Now a discarded charm, too much a liability to string blue bead by blue bead and affix on a chubby indistinguishable from arm, wrist.

But what twists? The double helix round the sacred chalice of Mary in the bowels of the Cathedral at Chartres? What carbon dating shows is love is never lost, it just moves on. Witness: fifteen hours after your death, I sat in meditation. I had said I would never leave you high and dry, without a tin of your Carter Hall to fill your pipe. And you filled the room with the scent of a freshly opened vacuum packed can of Virginia tobacco. Swirled, lingered, then evaporated.

A wise Native American Chief said we were even now...we had traded their sacred tobacco for our sacred wine, both profaned. This is an old, old story...going round and round. It's written in our DNA. Spelled out as clearly as the baby's name. And yet, this twisting love is our best game.

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 The Resurrection of Judas

1. Jerusalem, The Rented Rooms

“Here,” Christ said to Thomas. “Put your hand into my side, into the wound, so you will know that it is I.”

“I am here, Lord,” whispered Judas, a kneeling ghost.

“I am here, among the brethren.” The Lord rests his hand upon his curling hair.

Peter has gone all goose flesh. Chills run up his spine.  Is there another among them?

1. Paris, Charles De Gaul Airport

The Africans were beefy, colorful, noisy crowded together at the Gabon Air counter.

The one calling the shots stood 6’4’’ or 5”. His broad, black, bald plate shining in florescent lights, machete hacked and healed, topography of scars, a resurrection written in bloody Braille.

1. Mazatlan, Good Friday Morning

I awake to a sound of raw lumber hammered and fashioned into a rude cross by a pale youth. I watch him shoulder the cross and begin his path to crucifixion.

I rise and follow.  His procession is waiting at the beach. Diminutive nuns in black gabardine habits pray aloud. Fathers shoulder their children. Young women leave their beach chairs, fashioning sarongs over swimsuits.

The sun is rising higher, tropical. I wonder at the priests in full vestments; the Mexican women girdled in hose and heels. 

The young man with the cross is scourged and crowned with thorns. His garment torn. No Simon comes forward, no Veronica with a veil. He is alone in the crowd.

He climbs the rocky point above the shimmer of Pacific. We follow. We cannot do otherwise.

The cross is planted and he is hung upon it and it all framed by the wide expanse of sea and sky. He is artful in his death.

We sing. Judas whispers, “How do we pay for this Passover?  This room? This wine?  This Faith?”

 

 

 

Faith in Consciousness...what does that mean? This is your invitation to explore what it means objectively, from a new perspective, in a setting like the one pictured. Situated in the rolling hills of Morristown, New Jersey, the Jesuit retreat center is housed in a Federalist mansion dating from the late 19th century. A gracious setting in which you can explore your own undiscovered country. Amid daily life's ten thousand flames, find your own interior light.

Perhaps this is the year to make your Memorial Day Weekend truly memorable?

                        
 Katherine Mansfield:  "...To become a conscious, direct human being..."

    She was dying of tuberculosis and she knew it. How would one live with that?  Yet, she chose to explore as deeply as she could the verb to live. 

     She wrote: "By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living breathing life in close contact with what I love--the earth and wonders thereof--the sea--the sun.  All that we mean when we speak of the external world.  I want to enter into it, to be a part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and aquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being..."

    I intend to take the next few weeks and study her remarkable life. That would be honoring something I promised myself as I stood over her grave in Avon, forty miles southeast of Paris some years ago.

Ash-Wednesday by T S Eliot

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jagged, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.

IV

Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

VI

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.