The Pancake That Saved Silicon Valley and other NaPoWriMo Poems 2013

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