I cannot stop a train wreck.
I cannot stop a drunk from drinking.
I cannot stop the earth and I do not want to get off.
I cannot stop worrying about my son, no matter his age.
I cannot stop loving my husband — I don’t know where it began.
I cannot stop seeing beauty everywhere I look.
I cannot become the person you think I’m supposed to be.
I cannot become a person who believes in goodness.
I cannot become a person whose fear becomes hate.
I cannot become a person untouched by disease.
I cannot become a person who says: this faith is the faith.
I cannot stop the girl with the pink guitar from living on the streets.
I cannot give her enough money to feed her addictions.
I did give her the pint of ice cream I bought for whatever reason one buys ice-cream at ten o’clock on a Monday night.
I did give it without hesitation — knowing and not knowing
there but for the grace of god, go I.
It has taken three years of work, of letting go, of holding on, of work with two therapists, of dropped friendships, of fear, of argument, of medications, of writing, of walking through fears, of compassion, of passions, of discovery of this self. . . and I can now meditate again. 15 minutes of not thinking.
And no I cannot sit on a cushion on the floor. I do not pray for anyone one or anything. I swat the doings of life away with my eyes closed. And breathe the scent of our old furniture, the music of cars and bird song, focus on this one small blue glass berry in my ceiling light, and forgive myself, and breathe because I can.
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:
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.
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.
