Ice forming…

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Each step I take brings me into deeper healing, brings me back to poetry, opens my heart to sky!

It was just a short walk today…from camp to water’s edge. I jogged back up the hill, though. This weekend I refused to rush myself. I did little of what I had planned and I slept a lot.

On the ride to camp, I read poetry by Russel Thorburn from his book, “The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard”

I love these lines:

At my typewriter close to the window/the cold earned its right to be a metaphor,/but none could be found as we heard/the tree crouching in its dreams.

We took things from the yard and garage (at Craig Street) to camp for winter storage. We brought home wood for the garage woodstove. I picked up buckets and pots. Found three small pumpkins in the garden.

We dropped lumber at Michael and Beth’s home, too.

Dinner was re-warmed roast chicken and I smoothed yesterday’s leftover mashed potatoes into a casserole dish and baked them until slightly crusty.

Now, I have little energy for anything else.

I feel ice forming. It’s below 30-degrees. I am ready for an afghan and more poetry.

21.5.800–Jonathon Johnson Finds Me Again

Jonathon Johnson (and a poetic voice) Finds Me Again

(rough draft)

Today is the kind of day that I walk around with two pairs of glasses on my head and a stack of poetry books. I sit on the swing next to the pond you built camera balanced on my lap waiting for oriole or wax-wing, reading aloud Jonathon Johnson.

I get the call you are late, dealing with a mess. It’s a good thing for I almost forgot the pot of brown rice cooking, now dry, almost burring on the stove.

An ant bites my foot and it still stings, but the phone is on the hook, and I brought in the stack of library books I’ll likely have little time to read.

I am trying to grasp on to the summers of my youth. Where sand in my hair meant I laid on the tall dunes baking in the sun. Reading. Napping.  A nature child with words in her head and on the tip of her tongue.

The rice is off, placed on the back burner. Dark clouds threaten dreams of watching sunset on Solstice.

Dreams of curry chicken on hold as I sit again pond-side reciting for the gold finch, reading to the air, feet tucked under me in a camp chair.

I might even be happy that you are late as lines form to poems in my head.

Word Count: 226

Journal Fragments, 2004

Before I picked my first blueberry of the season, I knew I could grow old with you.

There is a song inside me it raises with your palm.

Somewhere between the Yellow Dog (river), Little Garlic Falls and the blueberry patches on the Mulligan Plains, I lost my cell phone and it was like loosing my innocence all over again but different.

“…coming home to all these hippies cooking in my kitchen,” He said.

I garden for coffee.

I needed to drive 90mph with Zydeco, loud. See I am no different from your son crashing down the trail like a bear.

There were days of swords and ice, swords and ice…

As my chakras spin faster, butterflies let loose, lavender in the yard, in my hair, over my skin as your hands reach up…

I fly over the Altamont Bridge to lay by your side. Writing this brings me to you and again to our dance in the yard. That’s the challenge of writing isn’t it? Everything comes out sounding cliché and you can never freeze a moment. I have learned to like fruit salad at your table, kiwi and grapes, peach and plum. My tastes changed. If I told you, would you understand this? Fiddle Music plays in my heart. (It sounds like Daisy May smiling)

The Bear

The Bear  
 
1.

In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

–Galway Kinnell

My journey to the Upper Peninsula was the path of the bear. A journey to find myself and my path. At Mike’s Camp we have a bear that lets us know he is there, but we have never seen him, just what he leaves behind.

When I moved my family to the Upper Peninsula, each home we toured with a real estate agent had sign of bear. Even the hotel that we stayed at while traveling had a barrel-bear-trap set up near the dumpsters. One home had a window in a garage that a bear had reached through. The home we bought in 1993 near Gwinn had a neighborhood bear that would climb in my neighbors jeep to drink from “empties” not yet returned for deposit at the grocery store. That was many years ago and now at camp the bear comes to me.

I lumber trails with him in my dreams. It is that time of year.

Free Write Fling, October 29, 2007

Funky Socks II 

“It was a day of unexpected events and funky socks. I bought two pair, Knee socks in black, purple, burgundy, and golden yellow, with three dimensional squiggle lines that are raised up and travel vertical on the socks. The alternating colors are horizontal socks. There is a lot going on in that pair of knee-highs. The second pair of socks is black with mod-looking daisies in shades of pink. There was a woman standing at the end cap of winter clearance socks and I commented to her all is well in the world if you are wearing happy socks. She asked if I too had received a chain-letter. I replied, no? And she explained that she had to send odd socks to a person and she was hoping to receive in return 36 pairs of socks :-) I told her my mother’s way of making good after an argument was to go to K-Mart and buy you happy socks, so since my childhood the best way to lighten a mood is what I happen to choose to pull onto my feet.”

–from an old blog post

I am starting the week with funky socks and that is how I plan to end it as well. This week started with stripes, knee high, black socks with thin lines of lime green, orange and purple. It is a spooky Halloween week and I can take some chances on socks. Be bold. Lime green socks with black cats. New black tights and a wild skirt. Who knows what I will wear come Thursday or Friday.

I am recalling the woman in Target (no K-mart in Marquette, Michigan), the one with the chain letter. I am curious how many pairs of socks came to her. Were they biz-casual or wild and fuzzy? How did they brighten her life.

I have been missing my mother. Recognizing signs of depression in me that I saw in her. Already, the grayer days of October have an impact. I want to clip pictures of white sand beaches and pin them on the walls of my Creative Cave. I want to keep panic far from my sock drawer, keyboard or paints.

Maybe it is time to give socks. Start my own chain letter. Show up on people’s doorsteps with bags from Target filled with fun socks. My Grandson is almost the age of finding his feet. His socks should be bright primary colors. I could leave gifts of socks on teacher’s desks at the schools where I sub-teach. I could take socks to nursing hoems and sing songs to ladies who stare at walls all day.

Maybe socks have come to mind because of a poem I edited. An old poem about my mother. She lay in a coma and I rolled socks on her feet. In the poem, yes. But also on an ordinary day at Munson General Hospital. Warm socks. Soft socks. Socks that could not hurt her, anymore. She was covered in splotchy bruises. Liver failing. Life was hard for my mother so she drank herself to death. I wanted to be gentle. No sense in judging matters. No sense in having grudges. Just the bleeps of a heart monitor and the hush of an end.

For more information on this Free Write Fling.

3 words on how I feel about this post: Let’s head to the store to buy socks! Lonely. Sorting.

Free Write Fling, October 26 2007

Stop and Start on a Dime 

The radio disc jockey at Folk Alley talks of
damselfly and dragonfly ability to stop
mid-flight and hover.

He plays the lyric of Alex Bevan.

“Hello dragonfly
A hovering surprise
Right between the morning star
And this one fair sunrise
Caught in stopping time
Like you, my love, I find
A lovely thought that waits a moment
Then continues flying.”

A person comments on my flitting
from job to job.

I affirm to be taken seriously.
If I am not seen as an artist
how can I go on?

You, my love remind me insects flit
Flower to flower,
pollinate the garden.

Creation, blossom.
Stamen, pistil
and for a moment I am distracted
by my need to hover over you
sexual, driven.

All this encouragement
and commitment and still
I search want-ads as
my savings falls short of supporting my art.

For more information on this Free Write Fling.

3 words on how I feel about this post: worried, glad that it is coming out wanting to be a poem, afraid.