Another Year (or Point A to Point B Makes a Line)

Birthdays are sort of like New Year’s Eve – a day to take stock of where you’ve been and where you’re going. This year’s ‘event’ has loomed a bit like a train speeding down a tunnel where there’s no pinprick of white at the end. And now, the day is here and all I can think is, ‘Wow, I breathe. I walk. I think. I talk.’ No big deal, really.

So Point A of the past year started with the sense I needed change, not immediate, not even mid-term, but long-term change. This time last year ennui filled my days, a restlessness, and a desire for something ‘new’. Mid-life, I suppose, and not easily fixable with a sports car (well, maybe a Maserati 420) and certainly I have no desire to trade in my husband or kiddos (I love them all dearly). That caged-in feeling dwelled deep in me, so it was up to me to figure out that hollow-sounding clanging below my diaphragm.

This is what I learned:
--The work I do for pay is satisfying, but it is just… work.
--I get my greatest joy and satisfaction with my family – even if they are individually or collectively driving me bonkers.
--Friends are not what always seem.
--Those who you do not consider friends will surprise you – in the best way – if you remain open to the possibility.
--Happiness comes from within, not without; it is all about attitude.
--I am too quick to anger (hormones).
--Writing is my passion and the single thing that anchors my life beyond my family.
--The best things in life take time.

Point B starts now.
Today. A new beginning, and one heading up to Point C, which is a Big Point. The next year holds a lot of promise. Once again, it all begins with me. My resolutions for this upcoming journey include:
--Let the crap roll off my back (where crap = office politics, other people’s bad manners, kids’ temper tantrums, rejections).
--Spend more time listening (and save money on the cream I use to reduce wrinkles around my lips).
--Strive for better balance between demands, and always do what is important first (my father always said – pay the piper first).
--Spend more time with girlfriends.

And to zap the ennui, I am applying to graduate schools for writing. I have four ‘top tier’ programs in mind -- three low-residency, one a local part-time. The application process evokes all these horrible memories of college and graduate school applications – official transcripts, essays (why I want to go into a writing program, blah-blah-blah), and what really terrifies – letters of reference! Ack! This is one time when I truly wish the ‘writing is everything’ adage held true.

I’m looking forward to a productive year and one less filled with inner turmoil. Thank you for sharing the journey with me. Peace…

P.S. If you are looking for my #fridayflash #52/250 #napowrimo weekly contribution, please wander: HERE

cold

when the doctor came,the room stilled, a sterile still life colder than the air used to keep the machinery bleating and pushing blood through my arteries, the frigidity
keeping engines cool from shorts that would gum wires and tubes and send electric shocks down lifelines to the system, my system, and when he shook his head, a brief motion, the air grew colder yet and heaved my heart into a pulsing mass of valves and vessels, one last gasp before it puttered into a puddle of tissue, of hope gone south



***

Inspired by the 52-250 Flash A Year theme: cold front. A prose poem as we ease into the home stretch of NaPoWriMo. Peace...

raleigh before the tornado hits

Cresting the inner loop
after seven hours of slick asphalt,
the city stretches before us
shrouded in haze the yellow
of nicotine stains. Trees droop
still as skyscrapers, the radio spits
static. In the rearview black clouds
churn, the children sleep, and I
press the gas until my foot goes numb.


***

The kids and I arrived about 15 minutes before the tornado touched down in Raleigh. At least three died in the city limits, and many homes and businesses suffered major damage. Tornados continued to wreak havoc throughout the state, with more lives, homes, and hopes lost. Peace to all...

Tainted Love

Tainted love is stained love, a dirty jeans love, mucky
under nails and knees from garden dirt and worms
slippery, slickery things compost-heaped, grubs chewing love.

Tainted love is tinted love, a greyer pink love, edges purple
from necrosis, halitosis, the lack of osmosis, a hypoxia
of the heart hardened boundaries kind of love.

Tainted love is skinny love, skinned and thinned weak
broth love, fight veneered, resentment adhered, salty-teared
nicotine-laden cloud love, breathed in and cancerous.


***

Inspired by National Poetry Writing Month and the 52-250 Flash a Year Challenge theme: tainted love.

April Showers

bring word powers.

'tis National Poetry Writing Month. I'm writing my daily -- are you?

Peace....

The High Before the Crash

Friday Two-fer. Poetry prompt: and suddenly. Interesting prompt. My birthday today made me consider how fast life flies past. The prose piece, excerpted from Brighter than Bright, reflects the heady feeling of youthful limerance.


and suddenly the bed shrank

along with your cleats,
your jeans,the Hard
Rock café tee
bought in Boston;
everything smaller
but the reach of your arm,
the length of your stride,
the burgeoning pile of
diaper bags, board books,
Pokemon cards, and other
childhood detritus, never
again retrievable.

***

The High Before the Crash

The pathos-ridden notes of Mahler flow through earphones, reverberating at the cellular level. Words zip from my brain to my fingertips and onto the computer screen. Already, two poems knocked off. I crank in my journal in the darkened living room, recounting the past few glorious days at the beach with Phoebe. All we did was eat, sleep, make love; my skin still titillates.

Seeking inspiration, I pull up my sex_p folder, my catalogued memories of all my romances. The last dozen poems recall when I lost my virginity to Gloria. So many years ago. I close my eyes, remember the tall Tuscan grass, the sky anointing us, and for the first time I don’t feel sad remembering. Gloria’s face morphs into Phoebe’s, black hair melting in the sun turning to gold, and new words rush out… Amidst silvered sheaves we lie, hidden from all but God’s eyes and bees… My groin starts to ache.

A ding. Email. Who else is up at this infernal hour? Ah… Kevin, former Andover buddy, an ass - but one with disposable income interested in buying my car.

Ran that little black Maserati of yours down Route 1 and popped 70 in six. Superb. Can’t believe you want to sell her. Thanks - check’s in the mail. K

BTW, man, your sister’s HOT – when did she grow up?

My fingers hammer back.

Excellent! Enjoy – take good care of my baby. B
And keep your diseased dick away from Izzy – you can’t afford for me to chop off the last two inches.

Yes! I swivel in the chair, pumping my arms in victory. Kev’s always coveted my 420S, ever since a bunch of us dragged her down 128 one crazy August night, hammered out of our gourds after winning lacrosse regionals. We’d crashed some RISD party, I still don’t remember how we ended up in Providence. Kev might as well enjoy the car, she’s languished lonely and neglected in that hole of a garage back home. Yes! Last Fall semester’s paid off, only Spring and Summer tuition left to figure out, then financial aid kicks in. Finally.

I return to the computer, too excited to process words. Der Abschied concludes. Enough lieder already, too heavy. I shuffle over to La Sonnambula, the elegiac notes waft through my ears. My head turns meditative, the page fills… Time slows, time stops, clouds drape the azure canvas. I’m deep into the poem when I sense someone watching me.

“Sweetie.” Phoebe stands in the bedroom door, the nightstand lamp illuminating her from behind. In her long, white cotton gown, right fist rubbing her eyes, she reminds me of a little girl at the foot of her parents’ bed after a bad dream. “It’s almost two. When are you coming to bed?”

I pull out my ear buds. “Soon, baby, soon.”

She patters over in bare feet. I swivel in my chair, blocking the screen.

“What are you writing?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Just poems. Journaling.”

“What about?” She balances on her toes, trying to peek over my shoulder.

“Uh, the past week. Our trip to the Cape. Sex. Love. God. Death.” I bounce in my chair, impatient, wishing she’d go back to bed. “My usual existential stuff.”

“Are you okay?” She peers down at me, her eyes sleepy and suspicious.

“Okay?” I jerk back against my seat. “Of course I’m okay. I’m great.”

“Why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Ideas in my head need to get out.” I fidget, pass the MP3 from my right hand to my left, then tuck it in my lap, between my thighs. “Phebes, baby, go back to bed.”

“Only if you do.” She rests her hands on her hips.

“Promise,” I say. “Just five more minutes.”

She sighs, then slowly shuffles to bed. The lamp clicks off. Back to the poem. The words look unfamiliar, aseptic, and for a second I panic – the flow’s abandoned me – but I reinsert the earphones, the music fills me again… Ah, yes… the wind sighs low…

The opera ends. Pleased, I gaze at my new masterpiece, then save the file and creep into bed. The red 3:00 of the clock glares at me, an evil eye. Phoebe sleeps with her back to me, swaddled in blankets, an almost indiscernible hump. Except for her soft purring, it is eerily quiet, the time of morning when all the world’s noises cease. I ease myself under the sheet, tug on the bunched-up blankets and cradle her from behind. When I cup her breasts with my left hand, she makes little sounds. I nuzzle the back of her neck. She turns to me, drowsy, spearmint on her breath.

“It’s late,” she murmurs.

My hand trails to her waist and under the gown, between her legs. Her thighs part, warm and soft, and I lose myself between them as she moves under me, half-asleep.

I come quickly. I roll onto my back, breathing hard. Phoebe curls onto her side and returns to nirvanic slumber. I stare at the ceiling, body throbbing, and watch the fringes of the walls begin to glow grey. Still wired. Still hard. I want to make love again. But Phoebe dreams, motionless. She’ll be pissed if I wake her again.

I shimmy off the blanket. Too hot. Strings of words dance before my open eyes, phrases of poems written or yet to be, strobing in stark black and white, the light fluttering with my pulse and melting from one image into the next, an infinite slide show.

***

Wonderful birthday -- thank you for reading and dropping notes on fb, gmail, everywhere. I am so blessed. Peace, Linda
Peace, Linda

End of a Line

The grandfather clock’s
ponderous ticking trails me past
the photograph-lined hall,
memorial to mother and father,
their mothers and fathers
and theirs before them,
and so on.

And so on, sepia-stained and
scalloped-edged tangibilities.

Zoom to present tense:
mom up to her elbows
in flour, picking gardenias from
her verdant bed, clad
in wedding white, holding
an infant, squalling pink-cheeked.

Me, ten years past her passing,
crying unseen tears, draped
in baby-blue satin,
carnation corsage tickling
my virginal neck, mortarboards
and sheepskins portending
my future more
than the hand held,
my once-love.

Through the wood-stove’s
crackle and hiss, daddy snores
under his gold-spun afghan,
reliable as time, and so on,
the hallway wall, austere eyes frozen,
snapshots of a history, all
funnel down to a single entity,
an end product.
A deliverable.

Yet here am I,
no more or less
than myself.


***

Prompt: end of the line

The inspiration for this poem came from the introspections of Phoebe, one of my characters in my novels.

Two more days of poetry.

Peace, Linda

Asparagus

Blunt, heated purple
cleaving frigid earth; like you,
mounting my winter.


***

Prompt: hope

Walking my garden after the last hard frost, seeing the earth crack in the asparagus bed, knowing the spears will poke up soon, harbingers Spring. Harbingers hope.

Of course, that's the only veggie we're eating now -- up to our eyeballs in roasted lusciousness.

Three more days, three more poems. Peace, Linda

Five Times, With Feeling

Your sweaty-socked feet dangle over the lazy-Boy,
the tv a constant blare of video and comics,
notebooks and popcorn bowl scattered about,
so much tween-age detritus.

Please, take out the garbage.

Bart Simpson mocks Homer, then whizzes off
on a cartoon bicycle. A low grunt erupts from
behind the armchair, your foot swings back and forth.

The garbage. Now, please.

You reach for the phone, half ring; your voice
sounds an octave lower even as you crank back
the armchair, prostate to afternoon sun seeping
through the neglected jade and philodendron.

Son. Take out the garbage. Now.

A disgruntled sigh, the phone clatters on the endtable
beside the glass sweating cola rings on veneer.

FINAL WARNING – TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE!

The volume ratchets up, closing credits reel by,
arms and legs disappear behind the safety of corduroy.
A microsecond of silence.

Please, son, would you take out the garbage?




Sure, mom.


***

Prompt: 5 times

Peace, Linda

I dream in emails

I dream in emails,
sputters of forgotten
phone calls and worn out
phrases, letters wending
through miles and miles
of empty pages, and
from this morass of images,
ideas, histories, deadlines,
sometimes emerges a pearl,
fleeting, intangible,
hoping to be clutched
and readied for polish.


***

Prompt: music

I love the refrain in Perfect Symmetry (Keane); it makes me think of life as a series of short-cuts and sound bites. I think the rushed-ness of daily busy-ness cramps our creativity.

Here's hoping for some clean, clear, mental and emotional space, to make some room for beauty. Peace, Linda

Sandwiched

I’ve walked these hospital halls
and reaped enough frequent flier miles
to travel the world at least once over,
bagged groceries for two households
three hundred miles apart,
worked with the good nurses
and doctors, and still made every
little league game, every gym meet,
every Sunday sermon, deliver every lecture,
even bake brownies for staff meeting,
yet why is it now, as dark descends,
every cell in me surrenders
except for those lodged beneath my skull?


***

Two different prompts for two different days rolled into one -- 'exhaustion' and 'evening'. It usually is when night falls that I feel the weight of all most acutely.


Peace, Linda

according to the doctor

you should not be here
after all the good physician
a medical prodigy of sorts
what with his Hah-vuhd degrees
and sub subspecialty certificates
in fields I cannot spell
much less pronounce

is expert


no?

after all who am I
to doubt his veracity
his years of experience
cleaving ova studying the tea
leaves of temperature charts
concocting cocktails of chemicals
to inject into tender skin

who am i?

but a dried up old fruit
of a woman too young to die
or retire too old to eke out
an embryo viable past sixteen
cells a pinhead a lima bean an ounce.

but here you are my quarter
million dollar miracle
smiling at me & thumbing your nose
at god and all


***

Prompt: According ______


Peace, Linda

And Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

This past weekend two things crashed: my computer and my mother. Both now are on the mend, mom with a brand new hip and the computer sans Blue Screen of Death. I am enjoying both in the Wake Medical Center in Raleigh (yay for hospital wifi).

So. Yay!

I have been writing my daily poems, just in pen and paper form. I'll continue tomorrow posting my daily poetic responses to the prompts. For now, enjoy Hon, Have a Dime?, up at Every Day Poets.


Peace, Linda

Cuore

Transfixed, I watch
your hands - strong, quiet, efficient -
transform this humble offering

from the soil into something pure,
lyrical, a shape so perfect
it seems a miracle.

Later, when the yielding clay
ossifies to a leathered urn,
I cradle this treasure with care

between two palms and peer inside,
looking for… what? I do not know.
My eyes meet black eternity,

empty hollow smelling of earth
primordial, essence of you.
Your heart, a vessel.


***

Prompt: love

Cuore is Italian for heart. And what is a heart but a vessel? Back in my clay days, I once spent two years focusing my craft on the metaphorical aspects of the heart.

Peace, Linda

Last Trip

If I had known
the trip to the hospital
was the last time
you would ever be outside
I would not have rushed
you through the rain.



Prompt: Last _____

There are many firsts, and many lasts. The lasts are the most poignant of moments, because they creep upon you with the least expectation and, often, the lasts come after a long period of wishing they would end. I think of the times woken by my hungry infant and wishing this breast feeding to be over, the diapers changed, the long drive finished, the dissertation done, then, it is done. It is over. And once it is over, yu wish to be back with it.

The slow death of my father felt like a climb through a cairn-marked mountain trail. But on this journey, the stone markers were lasts: the last time to mow the lawn, drive to the store, eat solid food, sleep through the night, drink coffee, drink Scotch, sleep beside my mother, read a book, speak, stand in your garden, feel the rain.

I drove my father the hour to Chapel Hill for his cancer treatment many, many times. It seemed it would never end. And then, it did, and I would give anything to drive him there again.

Remember the lasts; treat every moment as if it were.

Peace, Linda

Memoir

The cartography
of me – glimmerings buried
between words conjured.






Prompt: autobiography

Peace, Linda

Spooning

Silver spoon
feed me
sweet
nadas


Silver moon
spoon me
sweet
somethings


Peace, Linda

Until I Had to Sing

Seems you hugged this corner
for years, bedraggled head dipped
over your guitar, a beat-up job you hugged,
a child. Your sweet soulful song filled

my ears, made my fingers thump
frets on my thigh, a beat contrary to
your tapping feet. Your eyes twitched to
the slung open case, nervous-like,
to slim bills tumbled in coffee-stained velvet.

Every few songs you scooped the coins
into jean pockets, a swift, measured stroke.

I perched on the stone wall nursing
my smoke, watching other passersby
toss a quarter, or not. Later, at home,

I pulled out my Fender, unplugged and
strummed, thinking of you, notes spinning,
where you slept after your gig.

Never threw a buck your way.
Not once all those years.

Didn’t know the sweet sound of coins
thudding in a can, not until
I had to sing for my bed.


***

Prompt: Until _____

Not sure where this idea came from.


Peace, Linda

One City Block

Bundles of plastic blue, paper brown,
huddle at their feet,
so many children;
three women share hats, sweaters, cigs.

Spittle flumes from a man
astride a moped, four inches from her toe;
nice Italian leather.

The flag inches over the square,
glass glints between concrete pavers
in front of the post-office.
A tuft of dandelions bursts
past used works.

Wallet waving, a man chortles
a lithium-deprived laugh,
begs coins from the suited
dude proselytizing pamphlets;
no takers.

A short block.
***
The prompt of two photos did not inspire, but the short walk from the metro to my office did: all along the west Lex Market folks hustle their drugs, their bodies, their boosted goods. Homeless congregate, hoping for spare change. Patients from the methadone clinic down the street stumble along the sidewalk with glazed eyes. Lots of sadness along this derelict stretch.

Treat yourself to this witty flash COMPUTER EDUCATION by fellow Harbinger, fictionaut, blogger, friend John Wiswell over at Every Day Fiction. Good stuff.

Boston cream pie. Wasy. Corned beef and hash. Glenfiddich, two fingers, neat. Coffee dark with sweet-n-low. Sunrise on Ocracoke Sound. Watching Survivor with mom. Mowing the lawn. Playing with grandkids.

Just a few of your very favorite things. Happy Birthday, Daddy... we miss you...


Peace, Linda

Rumi's Lament

Night thrums, cicada
song, your breath sweet luxury;
once, its ruby-throated
presence rattled my swaddled
life; now I slumber once more.


***

Today's prompt (TMI) did not inspire, but a reference to Rumi, the great Sufi prophet and seer, did. Rumi believed that we go through figurative cycles of sleep and awakening, and then return to sleep. That is, we become inurred to what once tantalized and intrigued, what drew us to another. The taking for granted. Here, I play with the tanka form, a 31-syllable five line poem. In the East, tanka is written as a single line; in the west, the form follows a 5-7-5-7-7 structure.

Peace, Linda