time for the 8th Grade play!

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, scene ii

Your Tatania sleeps, Oberon; why not wake her with your love-shaft*?

*okay, so it’s Cupid’s love-shaft and I’ve taken liberties with it; wouldn’t you?

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bike ‘n’ bitch, Mother’s Day edition

Happy Mother’s Day to all women, even those of you who aren’t mothers. It is the way it is. For all of us.

How did my Mother’s Day begin?

At 3 am, I was waked to the sound of retching, cat retching. The cat had puked on the down quilt under which I slumbered. The dear.

This was a perfect reminder of what mothers do most of the other 364 days (and nights) of our lives.

So I did what mothers have always done, cleaned up puke. Did laundry. Felt my hungry, grumbling stomach. Yes, this is the reason motherhood makes you fat. When you wake in the middle of the night to the delightful sounds and smells of poop or puke or pee or crying (all of these belonging to someone else), you find after your arduous tasks that you are hungry. So you eat breakfast. In four hours, when you wake again, you will be hungry for your real breakfast and you will eat again. You will be tired. You will drink coffee, you will crave energy in the form of sugar and fat because you are sleep-deprived; you will eat some more. Love the fat. As Susun Weed says pack your bags for the long journey.

Yesterday, I had the honor of going on a nice bike ride with 2 of my gal pals. What did I learn anew? That every ride is a good ride. Yes, it goes hand-in-hand with there are no perfect conditions (though yesterday’s weather and lack of traffic means it came pretty close).

I was finally able to prevent my mid-traps from becoming excessively painful; they were only tight. I also had more of what I needed all around, cheer, stamina, upright torso, free neck, widening chest, freeing away to the knees, knees forward, tight in on my climbs, lots of good breath. But I was slightly dehydrated and still lacking protein because I got a headache and my legs shook once. Must eat eggs more often. Eggs=mothers. See how this all fits together?

I also had my first exposure to obtaining a biker’s tan. I have mixed feelings about it. Still, I am sure we all got a buttload of Vitamin D under the perfectly clear skies.

I realized yesterday that I am becoming much less of a biking bitch; I am slowly evolving into a BIKING CITIZEN. It’s hard to give up these well-earned parts of myself (it’s been about a month). I’m not convinced that I won’t need my bitchy in the near future, so I’m not swearing off of it yet.

Next tasks include harder faster longer and more hills. But I’m not attached. I’m easy, zen, cool, a unified whole, a non-end-gaining, non-doing-when-possible, bike chick; open to possibilities.

Here is what I posted last year for the Music Monday after Mother’s Day. It is the best lyric for women that I know.

Now I am going to paint my slutty toenails with a slutty color for Mother’s Day because I can. Fuck the debates and the cover of Time magazine. Own it, whatever it is, ladies. It’s our day, all 365 of them, year in and year out.

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“O dear children, look in what a dungeon we are lying…”

“O dear children, look in what a dungeon we are lying, in what lodging we are, for we have been captured by the spirit of the outward world; it is our life, for it nourishes and brings us up, it rules in our marrow and bones, in our flesh and blood, it has made our flesh earthly, and now death has us.”

Jacob Boehme

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Reader’s Choice

On the heels of our smash sketch comedy show last night at the World War II Club in Northampton, Mass, here’s a sketch, from way back in 2007, in which yours truly plays a supporting role. Written by Hubby and starring some of the usual suspects from the sketch comedy troupe “Side of Toast:”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Or, one of my favorite poems (please be aware that wordpress doesn’t maintain line breaks, so the line “washed out all tracks” is actually indented 4 spaces in the original text):

Women We Never See Again

Three are women we love whom we never see again.
They are chestnuts shining in the rain.
Moths hatched in winter disappear behind books.
Sometimes when you put your hand into a hollow tree
you touch the dark places between the stars.
Human war has parted messengers from another place—
they cross back to each other at night,
going through slippery valleys, farmyards where rain has
washed out all tracks,
and when we walk there, with no guide, saddened, in the dark,
we see above us glowing the fortress made of ecstatic blue stone.

Robert Bly

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Yesterday was Marie Curie’s birthday, so here’s a poem by Adrienne Rich

Yes, it’s true that without the Google doodle of yesterday, I wouldn’t have known it was Marie Curie’s birthday. This poem still gives me chills. One of my favorites. I don’t really know much about Marie Curie, but I do think of all the women who research alongside men and don’t get credit, though perhaps this has nothing to do with Marie Curie.

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Adrienne Rich

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Tweedy does it again and memories of my father

Dear Readers,

I don’t have an iPod (RIP Steve Jobs) and even if I did, I couldn’t play it through my 2000 Toyota mini-van’s stereo system (see, I used the phrase stereo system, so you know the dinosaur part about me is true).

I bought the new Wilco CD yesterday and I played it in the car on the way to the high school open house I attended last night. I listened to this track twice, once on the way to the school, once on the way home. Wilco played this live when we saw them in Boston last month and it stuck with me…I kept wondering which song was that?

During our 15-minute Geometry “class” at the open house, I tried sneaking reading the lyrics, but no worries, my daughter will probably get an A, unlike me who flunked high school Geometry (or was that Alg II?). Sneaking lyrics wasn’t the only thing I did in high school to get into trouble and I can only hope my amazing, intense, creative, energetic, artistic daughter goes a better way than I did back then.

This song, I don’t know what it’s about, but I think this is the true gem of the album, the one for the ages. There are a couple of lines that kill the hell outta me:

Outside I look lived in/like the bones in a shrine–it’s immediate, sharp and soft at the same time, and reminds me of churches in Prague and I am cold for my father/frozen underground

I’ve lived without my father for so long, lived without knowing him for so much of my life, but I was missing him and picturing him yesterday. I pulled out a bin of old photos.

I forget the damage, you know, the damage of losing a parent when you’re still pretty young. I don’t grieve for him any more, but I am today. How death defines us, underneath all of the geometry and the words and anything else we layer on top.

One Sunday Morning

This is how I tell it
Oh, but it’s long
One Sunday morning
Oh, one son is gone

I can see where they’re dawning
Over the sea
My father said what I had become
No-one should be

Outside I look lived in
Like the bones in a shrine
How am I forgiven?
Oh, I’ll give it time

This, I learned without warning
Holding my brow
In time he thought I would kill him
Oh, but I didn’t know how

I said it’s your god I don’t believe in
No, your Bible can’t be true
Knocked down by the long life
He cried, ‘I fear what waits for you’

I can hear those bells
Spoken and gone
I feel relief, I feel well
Now he knows he was wrong

I am cold for my father
Frozen underground
Jesus, I wouldn’t bother
He belongs to me now

Something sad keeps moving
So I wandered around
I fell in love with the burden
Holding me down

Bless my mind, I miss
Being told how to live
What I learned without knowing
How much more that I owe that I can give

This is how I tell it
Oh, but it’s long
One Sunday morning
One son is gone

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Music Monday–I ❤ Jeff Tweedy

Buckle up, people, it’s a long one. It’s also a bit of a linkfest. Never been to a linkfest before? Here’s your chance.

YES YES YES YES I can’t stop it I am compelled to keep listening to these songs and isn’t that what Music Monday should be about?

After seeing Wilco at the end of June at the Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCA, 2 members of my family went a little nuts and listened exclusively to Wilco for several weeks. It got so crazy that there had been talk of renaming our cat Willow, Wilco.

Only recently has the spell been broken, but it’s been cast on yours truly, the twinklinator.

This is the song, this is the one, these are the words, this is the Tweedy. Look, I am not too far a fan of self-indulgent guitar solos and for the most part this goes too far. But it’s fucking great in spite of and because of it. Paulie says this is pure Tom Verlaine-style and yes, I hear it, and it’s fucking beautiful.

Inside out of love, what a laugh, I was looking for you

The whole song encapsulates what addiction is about, or at least a particular aspect of it. Nails it.

and then there’s this

and this

and my latest favorite, the amazing “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”

I am sure I don’t know what those all of the words mean except that they get to me.

Bible-black predawn and

I want to glide through those brown eyes dreaming,/ Take you from the inside, baby hold on tight

That gets to a girl, you know? Take you from the inside, baby hold on tight. Who writes like that? Tweedy, that’s who.

Yours to discover: Steven Colbert interviewing Jeff Tweedy around the time of the presidential run in ’08. Wilco performing on The Colbert Report on the same episode. Also this and this.

You know what I think I like most about Jeff Tweedy? You can’t sex him up. He’s old-school humble. It’s good to know that this still exists in this troubled world. Salt of the earth, a real mensch. Like you or me.

(Can you all believe how brilliant I am? That heart up there? Damn I’m good).

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Music Monday–Visions of Johanna

No footage and it’s a long one. Maybe my favorite Dylan song. Then again….

Marianne Faithful does a great version, though I find her voice falters in odd places; also Robyn Hitchcock, who, unbeknownst to me until recently, recorded an entire album of Dylan covers. How the hell do I miss these things?

Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “D” train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it’s him or them that’s really insane
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze
I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel

The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him
Sayin’, “Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him”
But like Louise always says
“Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?”
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

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Thankful Thursday–Woody and Wilco and my Mac Daddy

I am grateful for this day and that I have decided to push myself to give thanks each Thursday (more or less each Thursday and more or less thanks)

Glad that Hubby helped me fix yesterday’s poem’s formatting, which I had screwed up when left to my own devices, Mac and me. I needs my Mac Daddy.

How about lack of pretension and a sense of humility? It sounds pretentious to say it, but I love a lack of pretension. Innocence, the naif. Humility, humus, the dirt, the ground, the earth, what is lowly and below, what lacks ego. I am loving Jeff Tweedy’s old school lack of pretension, but also love knowing what a complicated person he seems to be.

Grateful for Woody Guthrie’s words channeled through Jeff Tweedy’s music and voice. I chose this version because it’s so like Woody. The studio version and the many live versions are often great (how can you fail with those lyrics and Tweedy’s voice?), but this is the most simple, humble, and lovely to me.

Woody had me already, for many years, and Wilco had me a bit, but this? It’s beautiful, so beautiful.

Here’s another. I always forget how plainly sexual Woody Guthrie’s words often are, but how in their simplicity, they are often much more –broad and encompassing, clear and honest; never missing. It’s the Garden of Eden, maybe without the shame, isn’t it?

“Remember The Mountain Bed”

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life’s reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head…

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again

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Easter Post: Beautiful Words by Norman Maclean

These aren’t particularly Easter-ly words and the passage takes place in summer, not spring. It is however, timeless, and I can’t find much meaning in the holiday that we call Easter, so this is what I have come to today.

I come back to this passage again and again. It is beautiful and contains so much about life and death and work and rhythm and love and being human. I still haven’t gotten to the point of understanding it fully, but I am trying to remain teachable in my heart and soul and being.

Excerpt from “A River Runs Through It.” Norman Maclean; The University of Chicago Press; Chicago; 1976, p. 104

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

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