Tag Archives: survival

by

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?

by

Confessions of a Transplant: Rape, My Story.

I am a feminist. I am not a victim of anyone’s politics. I am a mother, daughter, sister, grandmother and friend. I will stand up and not be shut up. I am a human being, a citizen of the United States, and a damn fine cook. I take great pleasure in voting. I believe in a higher power and the Constitution. I think these entities are separate: one governs my spiritual life, the other my corporeal rights.

Rape is an act of violence and against all laws proscribed by human beings. I was ‘date-raped’ at 23 and for years I thought I did something wrong. I ran in my head a litany of shoulds and coulds. I blamed myself and internally I thought I was ugly and ‘used’.

It happened at a huge house party in a small city in Massachusetts. I did not report it because I took me years to call it rape. When I left the party I told a girlfriend, she said to me: “Isn’t that what you wanted?” For years I had no women friends. I let no one in. I told no one. I spent the next five years in a relationship with a man where everything looked fine on the outside.

When he slapped me around. I ended it. My mother didn’t understand why I could leave someone with a good job and nice care. I got therapy and started going to 12 step meetings. This redeemed my life. Gave me a guide back to myself. Taught me what it is to be loved and how to love. It taught me how to trust.

Every time I hear the word RAPE used on television like it’s nothing I get sick to my stomach. Every time I see the word on FB or social networking as a meme. I get angry. I fear the ignorance spewed on progressive and conservative news outlets. I applaud the doctors willing to take of all of women’s medical needs.

Carrying a fetus to term from an act of violence is not a choice. . . it is morally reprehensible. I know what choice is. I chose to be a mother, single, at 20. And I thank God everyday that I am a Mom.

I am your sister. I am your mother. I am your cousin. I am your wife. I am your friend. I am any one. I am everyone. And I scare people with my resilience.

 

Note to those who know me. . .you probably don’t know this about me.  I am sorry that you hear this story from this post. But I have grown more weary and more angry these past few weeks. I hope you understand. . .  enough is enough. I can no longer be so silent.

by

In Memorium: For David Duncan

This year started with mescal and worm-salt. It started with poetry and song. I recovered my singing voice in a warm, welcoming group. My first friend was Molly, an petite alto with a great smile and deep faith. She shared her husband’s recent cancer diagnosis and I told her my story because being a care-giver is harder than having the disease for I’ve walked both sides of the cancer treatment street.

I love Molly. I love her David. And for the past few weeks, I’ve been saying this poem in my mind because there is nothing can do. There is a helplessness we all feel in the presence of horrible disease, the times I want to DO something, the only thing I can do is pray, meditate, hold in my mind that no matter the sequence of events: this too shall pass.

That all who’s lives are touched by the disease that will take whatever it can, it cannot take memories, cannot take love, cannot take true friends, cannot take our spirits. Some of us survive the horrible treatments, even watch our bodies slip and fail only to return. Some of us pass to the next path. We all overcome cancer. WE all overcome and find comfort in unexpected ways.

LET EVENING COME
By Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

by

Confessions of a Transplant: Heat

Heat is molecules moving very, very fast. That’s how I remember from some science class. Heat turns water into steam and the lack of heat causes snow and ice.

The universe moves, we move and we move to new towns, cities for love and/or make a living. We move our eyes across this screen to see the words. An object in motion stays in motion. Yet another thing learned in high school science and currently on some advertisement for weight loss.

Nine years ago, this week, I moved to Austin, Texas after 43 years in New England. And while I looked back, I did not turn into a pillar of salt. Little by little the best of what I had moved with me and have come to our yellow house.

Never, ever thought I would feel this way: the heat of Texas feels like home. I felt it on my skin as I walked up the jet way from a flight from Denver. It was not a pleasure trip. It was yet another adventure in parenting, love and ‘damn why didn’t I think to ask that question‘. I felt the heat and the music and the culture of Austin fill me as I returned. A friend hugged and hugged me at the baggage claim (hubby working).

I am home in Texas.

by

Confessions of a Transplant: Seduction

It is my last morning in Boston, for the time being. And Mother Nature has washed the city during the night. The breeze is gentle and the humidity has dropped. The broad leaves on old tall trees are the kind of green that satisfies something deep within me.

This is the morning when I am a girl again exploring the woods around my childhood home in Connecticut. There was young tree that I could shake the rain off the leaves, pretending it was shower. I would take my Barbies under the mountain laurels, sit on thick moss and play house.

A part of seduction must be memory that is held in our skin. The touch of air that conjures a sweet ache. It’s too bad that the word in contemporary usage has a sexual connotation. Pragmatic and romantic, I sense seduction as a dance, a right of way, a process. Yes it can lead into temptation but I’m thinking of a two-step, face to face, a turn, a little girl spinning and spinning and falling into soft grass.

And Boston and I have been dancing for decade. Boston for the last nine years has been seducing me into returning. Mornings like this it is easy to forget snow. Makes it easy to forget the humidity just two days ago as I helped my son pack up his house, as I keep a busy toddler out of harms way from big trucks and moving men. Two days ago, waiting Park Street Station’s foul, stale air. Park Street where 19th century technology and 21st intersect underground. (Never liked Park Street, even when I lived here.)

I will not see this kind of weather for weeks and weeks when I return to my home in Austin. Geographical seduction will call to me as I long for deep shade that calls for a chair and reading.

This parting from this city this time is to let go and dance with tiger.

by

Considering the Notion of Displacement

Maybe we’re all just ice cubes.

And when we travel we have our shapes which get, by some invention of work or pleasure or obligation, dropped into various solutions. The destination is the solution, not that travel leads us to existential solutions but this is a strong possibility.

We are ice cubes, crunchy ice, tubes, hunks, wee slivers. I’m a great fan of road trips. Big fan, in fact, because when you travel at your own pace, stopping here and there, sleeping at cheap motel chains that have numbers in the name, you experience a variety of solutions yet maintain your shape for your car is your container. It’s almost like being an ice cube that gets to try on different cocktails, ice teas, sodas or waters.

This is different if you travel by air. You are an ice cube picked up by the great machines and ministrations of air travel, slip into your seat, just like those old fashion aluminum ice trays. And you are popped out unceremoniously into a solution where you now visit or stay.  In a cosmic plastic forty-eight ounce cup, the world is shaken not stirred. And yes you may be excited as a (insert favorite metaphor here) but still you are a cube.

This cube flew from Austin to Boston yesterday and for me, displacement is the feeling of melting back into the season, the air, the movement of a city I know well. Yes, it’s changed but the soft air coming off the harbor in a light breeze was a lovely greeting. The breeze did not scorch. The scene was Logan, waiting for the bus that would take me to the subway, the taxis, the buses the people, nothing pretty but so familiar.

And then I got on the bus with my nine years of Austin cubism. It’s packed, a man is blocking the entry and he doesn’t move, nor does he help schlep my bag on to the bus. No one moves, others are trying to get on.  I wrangle my bag past other cubes but they refuse displacement even to look up and just acknowledge a fellow cube. Back of the bus, this cube realized a number of my expectations for public behavior have shifted. There I am crammed in the back with suitcase and travel bag, heavier at the end of the day, purse over my shoulder, taking up three seats, not by choice, when an older man, sees even more people crunch their way into the bus, starts looking around for a solution.

“There’s not enough seats.” ” Where will they fit?” and he turns his head in my direction. His look bewildered and yet not.  So I say, “I’d be glad to open up these seats if you will help me move my suitcase.” I smiled my nine years of Texas.  He swiveled his head away so fast and didn’t move.

In my mind the Bostonian in me said, “There’s room. It’s a city bus. We just fit or wait for the next one.” Knowing I would gladly move if I had help. Knowing in Austin, in Texas, some person, male or female would have aided my entrance to the bus in the first place.

As this ice cube sat on the bus, got her Boston game face one and dragged herself to the bottom of the cup, cube and solution. Austin into Boston. . .love that dirty water.

by

Fractals: The Beauty of Knowing

I know what I can’t do.

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.

by

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

Home is where you know it is.

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

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

by

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.

by

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