Monthly Archives: April 2012

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Confessions of a Transplant: If there is water, I am home.

Home is where you know it is.

 

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I will listen until the trills fade and the light is old.

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Transplant: Fractal as Snow (?)

Return

Airmail and Mexican postage
I placed the letter beneath
your pillow and lost

you as dreams wandered
into suenos and caminos
meandered in the subjunctive

how I wanted to climb
into your voice, have you hear
the sky throwing snow

drifts up to the back door
and I shoveled, dug out
the car, a way to the mailbox

a labyrinth in the front yard
each shovel full and tossed
until my arms no longer felt

your absence and my ache
moved from my chest
to shoulders and hip bones

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Confessions of a Transplant: A True Digression, Hobo Code

From my friends and fellow fans of Flash Pulp (http://flashpulp.com) comes this fascinating list of ethics for a time that seems long ago.  And tho I am supposed to be working on my children’s book, this just seemed like a great time to post a digression because this is what writers do. . . or is it poets

Hobo (ethical) code

An ethical code was created by Tourist Union #63 during its 1889 National Hobo Convention in St. Louis Missouri.[11] This code was voted upon as a concrete set of laws to govern the Nation-wide Hobo Body; it reads this way:

1.    Decide your own life, don’t let another person run or rule you.
2.    When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3.    Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4.    Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5.    When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6.  Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
7.   When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as bad, if not worse than you.
8.   Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9.    If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10.   Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11.   When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
12.   Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13.   Do not allow other hobos to molest children, expose all molesters to authorities, they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14.   Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15.   Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
16    If present at a hobo court and you have testimony, give it. Whether for or against the accused, your voice counts!

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Transplant: Fractal as Surrender

Surrender

A two lane highway somewhere
between Yellowstone and Cody
beside the Shoshone River
I lay down my dream of family

From a boat out of Providence
my sister and brother release
our father’s remains
into the Narragansett, ash to salt

Amid terrain as steep as my heart aches,
I rise in the Big Horn Mountains
higher than I’ve ever been before
and remember, holding his last words to me:

Well kid, I’m gonna love ya and leave ya.

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Confessions of a Transplant: Fractals Found on a Date

 

Truth be told, as a couple for almost 19 years now, we have to relearn what it is to date. The fractal project of mine is one of the first times my husband has been part of my creative process. We were told about a wonderful park here in Austin where there are peacocks and peahens wandering around and wide paths for running children and side, rocky, least taken. . .there we found together fractals, or ferns. Hubby appreciated the truth and the metaphor of us, always the same, always moving and a love that just clings to rocks.

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Confessions of a Transplant: Sex and Death

A few years back, well more than a few, but who’s counting, I had  a week long workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown with perfect summery weather on the Cape. And there were beautiful men, and beautiful trinkets in shops and each morning started with three hours or Yusef Komunyakaa guiding and teaching in his soft spoken, exquisite and exacting way.

In our one on one meeting he asked what I was writing about and I replied, “sex and death” (without knowing that Yeats had said that a hundred years earlier). The outcome of my conversation with Yusef is a tale for another time but that week fostered deep, creative friendships.

Last week a friend emailed me about my recent posts, these “fractal poems” and the subjectivity had him worried about my state of mind. A very kind email. . . I do battle depression/anxiety crap, but I assured him that I am ok

The newly posted poems are recent only to the public. They are revisions of older works, as I try to reclaim the messy office so I can find creative space again, I picked up a pile of papers, (well really a healthy stack) and found poetry fodder. Words to work with to create fractals.

In that healthy pile is a sequence poem, chapbook length called: “Descending Plateaus”.  The book opens with this definition:

“The dying process can be described in terms of duration and shape. Duration referres to the time involved between the onset of dying and the arrival of death. Shape designates the course of the dying process. . . . “The descending plateaus trajectory, indicated by long, slow periods of decline followed by re-stabilization. Patients in this trajectory must repeatedly adjust to different levels of functioning.      National Cancer Institute

Where a fractal is a geometrical concept there is something about duration and shape that to my mind connects these two universal entities: fractals and dying. . .or fractal and memory.  Fractals are exponential and not linear.  As if life is exponential in growth, the example. I’ll use is sound or audio frequency, the measurement being Hz. . . a low A on a musical scale has 55 hz, the octave about is doubled to 110 hz, and then hz doubled again as you go up the scale . These measurements do not change in our minds, our listening but they do change in scale.

Memories at the core do not change for the individual. (My opinion.) Like a Mandelbrot image, a fractal, the scale does not change and in memory, duration does not change. And the mystery of that movement between living and  not is where art begs to be made.  It is the sound of the universe found between station on AM radios.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/sound-frequency-wavelength-d_56.html

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Transplant: Fractal with Moon

Somewhere There’s Heaven

The moon creeps out
of its orbit
four centimeters a year

Alone in a California
bed I watch
the full moon set over the ocean

There will be no tides
when the moon
withdraws – nothing to slow the earth

Honey, at five in the morning
you’re drinking
coffee in New Hampshire

and that swollen orange
rock dangles
just above the water.

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Fractal as Memory for the Transplant

The Quickening

I stepped off the side-walk
and puked in the gutter

Clogged with gaberdine
Madison Ave did not notice

At the Dirty Deli, coffee regular
took years to arrive.

It was the city of man
and bagels went cheap

Jersey boys crooned
down narrow aisles

I wanted Time and the news
and a muffin – an old man reached

across faded Formica revealing
his number –  tattooed without choice

For the first time
I felt my unborn child move.