She grinned, thinking back to that morning’s
odd occurrence,
then giggled to herself,
placing the strawberries over melting
chocolate chips.
“That pancake done yet?”
her husband called from the living room.
“Yeah, just a minute. What’s happening?”
“Sandoval hit a single. Now Posey’s up.”
“What the count?” she asked,
squinting at the television,
her glasses sitting on a stack of Post-it notes
near her computer.
“Two balls, one strike,” her husband said
as she sat down beside him,
that bonus pancake on a plate in her hand.
“Man, after this morning, the Giants better win,”
she said, taking a bite of chocolaty goodness.
Her husband agreed,
getting himself a forkful.
Then they laughed as she crooned
“Layla”
while Buster Posey hit a home run, his first of the year.
Living Inside the Work
I’m not a surgeon –
I’m actually rather squeamish.
But yesterday I
went trekking under skin
past capillaries
into tendons
and muscles
(and all that sort of icky, goopy stuff)
and reveled in the most inner sanctum
of a living
although not breathing organism.
Yesterday I began revising a novel.
Now, don’t scoff
or turn your head
laughing uncontrollably.
I wouldn’t kid about something
so intimate
slightly gory
(definitely gruesome)
but not altogether ugly.
It’s just the first round
the initial cutting away
(hacking off)
piling in a bloody heap near my feet
(I need to watch where I step).
It’s like wood shavings
or marble dust
(or any such artistic metaphor).
But it’s more
because the guts of a novel
aren’t just fragments
run-on sentences
poorly worded phrases;
there’s a heart beating
even for all my prodding about –
the heart has been pumping
since I put the first sentence on the virtual page:
He noted the way she walked
with a small slide in her step,
the small duffel weighting down her shoulder.
And that rather incredible muscle
will continue to function
until I reach the very last line:
“…Answer the goddamn phone!”
no matter how much
mucking about I do.
The difference between me and a surgeon
is the theoretical mess I leave behind.
Well, and a host of years in school.
Yet, the process is the exact same
as a doctor attempting to revive a patient –
I’m trying to resurrect a story
diving in, as if in a combat zone,
doing the best I can.
At this early stage,
it’s about preliminaries,
chucking the diseased
irretrievable bits
seeing what remains –
but at what cost
to the manuscript?
Will it be rendered
comatose
or might a spark of creative nuance still flicker?
I don’t know
nor will I for a while,
prod poke oh excuse me
didn’t mean to excise that character
(but you knew you were expendable
from your first line of dialogue).
I’m not gentle,
trying to save this patient –
but I am keenly aware of that beating
throbbing heart
for it is deeply imbedded in my chest –
not a single word
gets written
unless somehow
I’ve already bled it.
So there’s a fair amount of
self-medicating going on,
(or something like that)
wading through a fictional cast
trying to maintain
my own footing.
But it’s tough
as the floor is slippery
(Blood, guts, oh jeez, what a mess!)
and I don’t want to
kill the patient
while enacting the cure.
Because I’m not a surgeon –
I’m a writer.
Words are my lifeblood,
revisions the scalpel.
God help me,
I want to get it right.
Novels die everyday
when someone can’t muster the strength to finish the story.
Please let this manuscript
recover.
The Way She Curled Her Toes
She looked at least fifteen years younger,
or maybe ten
but like a girl –
she used to be a little girl
but time and events altered her
the way they do everybody
yet differently with her
because it happened
out in the open.
But in one photograph
she’s back to being a child
innocent
unharmed
even if only her feet remember life that way.
Maybe all the rest of her had forgotten
but her toes
recalled remnants of youth’s vigor
and carefree nature.
Toes still possessed
a semblance of
bliss and frivolity
twisting and wrenched
but not painfully
more like an unconscious habit
that she had when
eight or nine
but not past ten.
After she was ten, childhood disappeared.
Yet, somehow
some way
her feet remembered.
Out of all she suffered,
all she endured,
her lovely little toes
clung to those earliest memories
like a precious treasure.
The rest of her had lost those years,
but her feet remembered.
Like It Was 1988 All Over Again
Few things can beat
reliving the most glorious moments of one’s past
(my past)
via 3 different kinds of frozen yogurt
(tart blackberry, chocolate, and birthday cake)
topped with plops of cookie dough.
The dessert frames the moment
late yesterday afternoon
sitting in my car, in the driver’s seat
with my husband
in the passenger’s seat, eating a cherry Hawaiian snow.
He can’t stand frozen yogurt
but has loved me for almost 26 years,
as I’m just 47
and we met when I was just 21.
He is pushing 50 now
but yesterday afternoon
it was like 1988 all over again.
It wasn’t just the yogurt;
but the sweetness of the chocolate
and birthday cake, which tasted like vanilla cake batter,
contrasted perfectly with the sharp, tart blackberry
like a relationship
a marriage
a love affair.
Dollops of processed cookie dough represented
nuggets of wonder
and dismay
but I wasn’t thinking about tha
t
as I ate them
looking at him
so completely in love
as if yesterday
was the day we married.
(Or maybe even nine months earlier when I met him.)
I gazed at him
feeling far past frozen yogurt
and Hawaiian snow –
yet those sweets kept me
in the car, not far away,
or maybe they bridged the small distance afforded by the gear box.
Or maybe the tears falling down my cheeks acted like
a gateway, so many moments that he said he couldn’t
think of our life together all at once.
(Maybe Hawaiian snow had loosened his tongue.)
He couldn’t compose more than this part or
that section
making me cry harder
but not too hard.
Just enough to say
(somehow)
I love you
while still grasping the yogurt container.
The colours were creamy white, bright deep pink, silky brown.
The flavours were sugary, tarty, chocolaty,
with grainy lumps of a cookie-dough-like substance.
Marriage is a mix of elements, hues, moments
feelings and memories and things better forgotten.
Love is like heaven
frozen yogurt
Hawaiian snow, cherry-flavoured.
Love after 26 years is like love after
6 months or
14 days or
2,685 days (which is roughly 7 years).
Or it’s like yesterday,
25 married years,
but how many lifetimes
or how many tears?
What did it matter as we ate our treats in the car
(because the yogurt shop was full)
staring at one another,
smiles and thrilled tears and too many things to think of at once
just like my husband said.
There are too many ways in which we love each other
to explain them all
in just one moment
(or in one poem).
But if he died tomorrow,
I’d know all we had
was perfect.
I’m Not Feeling Poetic Today
But it’s the third to last day of
NaPoWriMo
(National Poetry Writing Month).
I’ve written a poem a day
(sometimes two poems a day)
for the last twenty-seven days.
That’s a lot of poems
in many days.
But today I’m not feeling
it.
Not overly inspired
certainly not poetic.
I could note several factors
(San Francisco’s looking at their fifth straight loss
the second day of my period
my recent birthday is sufficiently passed and the excitement has waned)
yet those are merely excuses
(and not very good ones).
But it’s April
still NaPoWriMo
and I need to come up with something.
This month I’ve already covered
war
love
death
flowers and
ninja hats.
Fairly impressive,
and not all in the same poem.
I’ve tackled pancakes
Silicon Valley
aliens and
Eric Clapton
(and that was within the same poem).
I’ve considered my eldest at two
Linda Ronstadt in 1970
the novel I wrote this month
(and finished, or at least the first installment is done).
I even wrote a poem about
Marilyn Monroe
for crying out loud;
how kitschy is that?
(Not very; it was actually about childhood being so far away
and how she might have tried to recapture it.)
I’ve written more poems this month
than I’ve written in the last thirteen or fourteen years.
And that’s a good thing.
NaPoWriMo has been very, very good to me
so I want to be true to it –
I want to finish this
month-long challenge with
vibrant
meaningful
verses.
Yet today
I’m all out of
vibrant
meaningful
verses.
I’m full of blah blah blah
and
yada yada yada
which isn’t how I wanted to see off the end of April.
Instead of guns blazing
pens scribbling
it’s more like –
am I done yet?
How about now?
Now?
Well fine
okay
to heck with it.
Here’s a poem
for Sunday
28 April
2013.
(Two more days left;
I hope I’m more inspired on Monday and Tuesday
than I am this afternoon.)
Very Low Tide
Another world exists
when the ocean pulls back her comforter
revealing green grass
a sea-meadow.
Nearly the lowest of
low tide
(-1.1 feet)
made me feel like a voyeur
trespassing on sacred ground
as I navigated the
seaweed and seashells
rocks with holes and
small dead crabs
strewn across the sand
like a debris field.
But there was no Titanic
(unless you count the entire planet)
just rubbish left behind as the
water retreated.
Not man-made
(thank God);
shells and driftwood and
brown sea-weedy stuff
that I carefully stepped around
and then through
trying not to break seashells
(breaking seashells is like
stepping on sidewalk cracks
breaking one’s mother’s back).
A few crunches emerged in my wake
making me cringe with
guilt for theoretically being where I shouldn’t
even if I was dying to walk
where usually the water rules.
I went the length of the permissible shore
snapping photos
listening to the natural soundtrack
(which included people yelling at their dogs).
Every few months this opportunity arises
as the ocean peels itself from the shore
which then lies naked
and beautiful.
I don’t trod past the sand –
that would be worse than stepping on shells.
That would be akin to walking along
someone’s ribcage
staring into their chest cavity
peering at a beating heart and
pulsating lungs.
From the beach I stared and snapped
and gaped at the miraculous scene
of low tide –
fantastic and hypnotic and
fleeting, as slowly,
stealthily
the waves began their reclamation
of the land.
It’s their land,
their shells
seaweed
driftwood and
dead crabs.
I was an interloper
hoping not to be hauled away by mermaid police officers.
I shot the vista with my smartphone
while the ocean laughed from a distance,
e
dging closer to the cliff.
It said –
watch out little lady.
I’m beautiful, oh yes,
and more powerful than all the gadgets in your world.
The Cost of the Written Word
I just finished
the first round of revisions
for a novel I wrote two years ago.
I had been reading
Letters Home
by Sylvia Plath
while eating chocolate-chocolate chip banana muffins
on a semi-daily basis
in spring 2011
thinking about Buddy Holly.
Novels emerge from the most
unlikely sources
and today
on the last day of NaPoWriMo
I’m thinking about
how and why
I initially wrote that book
and the price I paid
years ago
to make those words
fall into place.
I never think about this –
that is,
how my past
blends into the work.
What I mean is
specifically
how in this novel
Julia calls out Phil for being an asshole
then later Phil reprimands her in the same way.
The novel is full of assumptions
and truths
just like life.
But what in my life
brokered these characters
besides Sylvia Plath and Buddy Holly
and chocolate-chocolate chip banana muffins?
Now, it’s not like I don’t know –
I haven’t blocked out the last
forty-one or forty-two years of my history.
But noveling, like writing poetry,
is a funny thing
how one’s life gets
twisted into the fiction,
the facts,
the fabric of the prose
which is sometimes loosely knitted together.
Other times it’s like
polyester –
it will never die (unless you set fire to it).
In ten minutes
or so
I’ll type out this poem,
post it,
voila!
These words will exist as long as the internet does
even if the actual sheets are lost.
Some part of me
has been, or will eventually be,
uploaded onto the
World Wide Web
but the essence remains
free
traveling about in the confines of my corporeal mind.
One day I’ll die
and all that will be lost,
except for was translated through prose and verse.
Which brings me back to
how did I write that novel
(or this poem)
in the first place –
what in my DNA
demands this sacrifice
having withstood events
that were absorbed
into my consciousness
(resistance is futile
you will be assimilated);
I can’t for the wordy life of me
begin to fathom why I write
why I’m not a nurse
or engineer
or fighter pilot.
But that’s not truly what I’m on about
(just dithering, which I’m sort of good at).
Julia tells Phil he can’t hate,
or that he’ll turn into an asshole.
(She hates assholes.)
Later Phil tells Julia that while she doesn’t have to forgive
the one who totally screwed her over