Tag Archives: Mexico

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Last Year, This Year and What Else Can I Say?

I am so good at pushing the wrong button and the wrong time!  And I am so good at procrastination.

2011 ended and 2012, started with a trip to my favorite poetry workshop in San Miguel de Allende. Took a car, then a plane, then a bus, then another bus and then a taxi much of which I had to do in my get-along Spanish. Nine hours of travel and I’m finally in the old-school style hotel, signing things. My friend Jennifer Clement, who created this wonderful week of poetry, walks in the lobby, “I have wormsalt!”

“Wormsalt, Jennifer?” I have not been in the lobby more than five minutes. She is in black velvet with candlelight hair, pulled softly to the back, with curls. I have not seen her in a years time.

“Yes! Wormsalt for the mescal!”  I took one of the plastic Dixie cups from her hand, touched my finger in what looked like damp sand, licked my finger and knocked back the liquor. My whole body smiled.

“Wow! You tossed that back!”

Nodding: “Well I’ve been traveling about ten hours at this point.” I tried the wormsalt again. . .it reminded me of swimming in the Atlantic and licking my lips when I came out of the water. “How’d you know I was here?” I asked Jennifer.

“Oh, I told them I wanted to know the second you arrived. We’re up on the patio, come get another drink! Then we’ll go to dinner and then fireworks at the Jardin!” Off she went to rejoin the small party and I went to my room. Changed into something more festive with salt and smokey mescal still on my tongue.  One year started and the new one began as I made my way back to the hotel, smiling at strangers, fireworks over head.

Nice, sweet, delicious memory. Woven into this week are moments of absolute confusion, chronic pain and old buttons. Woven into this week are threads like silk that shine and lay soft in my heart. New friends, skulking about the former home to the nuns. . . a midnight cloister walk. . . poems and readings and good food. I went home exhausted. A cluttered brain and somewhat defeated.

I had spent 2o11 ‘working’ on myself. I worked hard at work. I wanted so much to have 2012 be new. But I was stuck. . . and felt entirely alone with my confusion of who I am. Who am I now?

And the year brought me to Boston and my husband got to know our grandson. And then I helped the ‘kids’ pack up and move to a place near Boulder.  I drove with my son from Austin to Boulder and it was sweet. . . he was loving every inch of the thousand mile drive.  A drive, and week or so there, I was done. All done. Done in. It was sad and huge awareness that I don’t have the physical reserves that I had BC.  This came at 52, when I had always thought I’d have that awareness at 62.

The summer I had my sister here, my home, for six weeks. She was lost and needed quiet to figure out what’s best for her. As sisters we squabbled a little but mostly we drank red wine and laughed and poked around thrift stores.  Then after my adventure in moving, my other sister (by marriage) came for five days. She and I rearrange furniture and danced at night with my husband’s band.

This year, I found a choir. I found singing, my first and forever love, and oh god it was hard. Like Mexico hard, confusion and in articulation.  Wanting to belong and scared to death of belonging then to be rejected. . . but I went. I went and showed up. Every Wednesday night, choir then dancing at my favorite bar in Austin, Donn’s Depot.  I would leave choir mentally exhausted. . .just as I had been in my workshops in Mexico.

And then it got better.  This feeling of belonging filled me without the fear.  I could belong somewhere on Wednesday nights and that was great. And the pastor of this church wore clogs and quoted poetry in sermons. I can listen. I could follow.

Before 2012 ended, somewhere around Thanksgiving I realized I was happy in my own skin for the first time in what seems years. I am not the person I was before . . .I could not return to the past but in letting go, fully, I found a me.

In this finding are friends, steadfast and true. Some new, some old dear friends. In the kitchen my husband holding me saying: “I miss your laugh” early in the year and then “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had” later in the year.   A year when I felt like a family again with my son and daughter-in-law and grandson.

And, here I am, mid-way through the first month of 2013, focused on what I am and what fills my life with work and work with life. Cliche, perhaps. I still have a high-maintenance body I deal with every day. I get muddled and stuck. . . but I no longer judge myself for this and won’t hang with those who do.  But the best part is , I have a sense of potential in my life, sense of wonder. And how I have missed this. How I have longed to feel like this.

What else can I say?

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Fractal: Mooning

One of the things I really like about living in Central Texas, and sitting on my deck (sipping something) is I can see the earth move, how the moon is a constant in the arc — no matter the phase.

It can be eclipsed but it is there. Lunatic.

Some see a rabbit in the moon. I hiked to the alter of the Rabbit God, in Tepotzotlan with my husband, years ago now, my sea-level lungs sucking air all the way, as abulitas just walked by me, saying sweet encouraging things in Spanish. Oh but how a smile can be endless. And then climbing this iron ladder, there I was, feral black cats greeting us, and the valley below, we sat. Bought tortillas to feed the cats. . .endless valley, beauty close up and distant. Fractal.

Some see a man in the moon. Some feel the energy from a moonstone gem.

When I was in grad school, I was driving home and came face to face with a huge, pale orange moon rising. I had to stop. I’d never seen the moon with such enormity. I could have driven right into it, wanted to. . .lunatic.

And then I continued to drive, said to myself: “Well there’s one good reason to live here!”

“I’m in love with the man in the moon
We’re going to be married next June
Behind a dark cloud
Where no one’s allowed
I’m in love with the man in the moon”

I hear my mother’s voice.

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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: Awakening

As the day begins, as I ready for jury duty and the dentist. In the mirror I see my grandmother’s shoulders, her bosom, her posture. I see my first true memory of her. Beneath my top layer of brown hair is white.

A few weeks ago in Mexico a Slovenian poet, a lovely and learned man, said to me above the noise of dinner, “Do you know you are three people at the same time?” He beamed.

And I said, “Oh thank you for noticing.” I blushed.

Some have asked me: what did he mean?

One asked me: what are they’re names?

Now I will say that it does not matter, I’ve seen my grandmother in the mirror.

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Confessions of a Transplant: My Heart Goes Out

I spent the new year in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It’s a week-long poetry workshop run by two sisters, Jennifer Clement, poet, writer and current President Pen Mexico and Barbara Sibley, artist, poet and chef/restaurateur of La Palapa, NYC.  Over ten years ago they started this intimate, intelligent workshop in this mountain city in the middle of Mexico.  Many who attend come every year, and some have come consistently since its conception.

This was my second year. It was hard and it was good and it was magical because it in Mexico, a country and people I just love. The tone of this community of poets who work together, either as participants or faculty, is set by Jennifer and Barbara to be inclusive which is why one returns.  Like the perfect summer camp, we gather from all over the place and squeal with delight and hug and say “How are you?” And really mean it when we say it. We welcome the newbies. We welcome back the ones who’ve been away awhile.

This year Jennifer left our band of troubadours to work on her MFA in frozen tundra of Maine. . .we cheered her on. The night before her departure a bunch of us went to dance and sing karaoke.  I got up with a friend, Christina, she wanted a partner to sing “House of the Rising Sun”. What the heck. I know I can sing but never this way. We had fun. She was thrilled. When we came back to our seats, her husband Laszlo exclaimed, “You are SO sexy when you sing! That was wonderful” and he kissed his wife. I said thank you. We wandered back to the hotel, down the narrow, cobbled street singing still and lighthearted.

That was Wednesday. I saw Christina and Laszlo here and there, hello and good-byes, or over glasses of wine. They carried with them the air of a happy couple, settled in love, something dear and lasting. They were interesting to look at, she with her leggy, pale Englishness and he, emitting that salt of the earth glow. They fit together.

Today I heard that Laszlo died of heart failure. I was sent a note down the pipe of social networks. Oh and my heart hurts for her. I first went out to kiss my husband to make sure he was still there. Then I told him it was Laszlo’s voice that carried me through my audition yesterday for “America’s Got Talent”.  After a morning of being moved around like cattle (hence the term: cattle call) when it was finally time to step up and sing, alone, a capella, I heard him and sang with confidence.

My heart goes out to Christina and offer this song to her. I have been close to death and the dying. I cannot imagine return home without my husband. I cannot imagine, do not want to imagine a world I must negotiate with out him.  And in the one week I had to see and know him, seven days, how blessed I am for these memories. I pray she has a trunk full of them. . .and that they give her comfort as best a memory can.

“Requiem” written and performed by Eliza Gilkyson