Tag: poem

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The Start of Summer

Of course it begins with a boiling cauldron of dark, mysterious liquid. Two cauldrons, actually. It begins with an hour of stirring, and a daughter beside me, saying, “I can feel your tension radiating off you like the steam from this pot,” as we stir and stir fabric in its vat.

What, me tense?

My brilliant idea: to dye twenty long cheesecloths needed for a special event this weekend the perfect shade of green, a green unavailable commercially, at least for the price I was willing to pay. But O foibles, O disasters, O ticking clock and last minute drives back across town to try and salvage the failures, O worldly mess we try to rise above and find ourselves mired in, deeper than ever!

What choice had I but to succumb, surrender, and let the daughter stir both pots on her own, quietly, meditatively, quite happily?

Yes, Dear Old Recipe Readers, it has been a minute since we saw this cauldron bubbling away in these pages, and I must hearken back to those old days to offer a public service to the internet, for in this time of Everything Known Under the Sun and No Stones Unturned by the machine mind of the internet, a great void existed, one that I must remedy now (no doubt driving up my page views exponentially by other seeking souls) by answering this important question:

What color will Rit’s Dyemore Dye make when dying polyester cheesecloth and various miscellaneous poly blend garments using this esoteric formula: Two Bottles Peacock Green, One bottle Sapphire Blue, and One bottle Graphite? That’s right, I wanted them to be Dark Green. Would I succeed?

Barely!

The color is, in fact, sufficiently gorgeous. It is SO not the disaster it could have been! And also, very close to the commercially available cheesecloths that I eschewed the hue of and thought I might best through my own cunning and (untested) skill. And I did best them, for here I am, content and grateful for what I have, which is not, in the end, a disaster. Which makes it a triumph!

And the girl who did all that stirring, she sincerely thought this was a great way to spend her first day of summer vacation. Not to mention the driving practice she got as we crossed the city in search of one more bottle of Peacock Green…

But I’m also wondering–did I need to try so hard? What can I do to arrive here–content and grateful–a little more easily next time? This is the question I hold in my hand as we tip into the life raft of summer.

Meanwhile, there is the forest, the garden, the sweet river whose ephemeral season is likely over, there are notebooks to fill, novels to relax into, paintbrushes to dip into paint, rose gardens, poems to expand the universe, and many other small resurrections to live within.

Speaking of which, I had a few poems published recently in Cold Mountain Review. Take a peek, and have a listen.

In other good news, I had a blissful epiphany!

In a hand-slapping-forehead aha moment, I realized I don’t need to work so hard on writing the impossible novel or finishing the un-finishable essays that have been haunting me for years. What!? That’s right. I must be officially middle aged. Wisdom slowly seeps in.

As somebody once said to Kate Bowler, this is a hard journey. What can you set down to make your burden lighter?

In that spirit, I have set down the longtime “goals” and expectations I had for myself as a writer in favor of carrying on with my long time practice of being in a monogamous and devoted relationship with the Poetic Imagination.

It is a gift to cultivate art out of established soil. Why not sink the roots deeper and deeper? Why not say no-thanks to being distracted and spread thin and not quite enough?

And of course I’ll leave the door ajar by saying, who knows what unexpected fruits might grow out of that liberation?

Meanwhile, I’m going to stop trying so hard to do, fix, plan, write, and be everything.

Meanwhile, I will carry on painting self portraits as roses, and trying to become more rose-like. Thorns and all.

::

PS, one last gift to the internet for all those seeking # darkgreendyemoredyeimages and who read far enough to be thus rewarded. All these items came out of the same dye pot. Why is it that we are walking around thinking we have control over anything?

Good luck, friends.

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Playing the Song

I can feel in my bones this moment 15 years ago, freshly delivered of my second tiny babe. That tender mama sits halfway between the age my daughter has become, and the age I am now. Oh time, beautiful and terrifying friend!

I’m aware of the world’s unraveling, and also: standing amongst five hundred robins flocking and singing along the Rio Grande; the way my breath merges with my patients’ breath when I check vital signs at the hospital and we merge for a moment; walking through the shifting light over the course of a day, light that is like a great ark I climb aboard, or a book whose only line reads, We will survive this season, we will be changed by it, we will change the world during it.

I am making a little book of collages as a visual arts practice, writing as wildly as I can as I compose my own version of Four Quartets which has me drawing from the deep well of female mystics, and also being inspired by the Divine Imagination by keeping my tiny toe stuck into that river.

A handful of the more photogenic books that fight for my attention these days–all so good. Annie’s book Singing Under Snow wins my favorite book of the winter award, as well as best collection of love poems to mothers, lovers, fungi, and the wild. I am not sure I have ever cried so much over a collection of poetry. It is one of those books that makes a poet want to renew their vows to poetry forever, just to continue the practice in order to see what unexpected wonder might come next, like a handful of chanterelles popping up when the conditions are just right.

Keep your basket ready, friends, and your knife sharp.

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Bones Break Us Open

Just back from visiting a friend on Bone Mesa on the far side of Colorado, where snowy peaks towered over the mesa. Deer grazed on grass shoots at twilight. Blossoms from wild apricots blew along the dirt road like fallen stars. 

A poem practically wrote itself, in that moment. Except I didn’t write it down, but rather wandered around inside it, as happens when we realize we are actually walking through a poem, we are the poem, that the mesa is really bones, and the bones are poems.

My friend served lentil stew and fresh bread. A fire roared in the woodstove. The night grew transparent as a veil that the wind can lift, revealing that we aren’t in this world at all, but in the place where imagination lives, where we are fed on earth and stones. Where bones speak.

Bones more or less open Far Country, and in an invocation that may or may not have to do with every word that follows, we are reminded in the first poem that it is “Better to ask / what these bones will hatch, what lies, / curled, inside the shells of the dead.”

In “Blood City,” the ground we walk upon cobbled in fossilized snakes curled into balls, which turn to eggs. I can’t say that I always understand what the images that enter my poems say, but I trust and obey them. My friend and fellow writer Jennifer Ferraro read those lines as a call to perceive more deeply, to open our field of awareness to the memory of the land.

When I check my copy of The Book of Symbols, it says that bones suggest that something “hard” within psychic life endures beyond bodily death, and that a structure of ancestral experience supports us. In the Orthodox Church, the sweet smelling bones of saints are venerated as holy relics that bless us. Bones as bearers of life. Benediction and medicine.

Bones accompany the poet/speaker/me throughout the book–as talisman and key. There is an underworld called The Boneyard to be navigated. And in every poem, there is an invisible skeleton holding it up that is not, entirely, of this world.

The earth is a realm of bone on bone, in all the ways that can be understood. It can hurt to be here, magnificent as the scenery might be. Throughout the struggles, bones remind us that something unseen supports us, lies hidden within the known world, bears new life within what is buried.