what would it be to take thanks

Slowly it dawns on me that writing is not easy, that all of the voices that say this is not real work deserve to be put to rest.

I’m not the first to say this, but it is my dawning. A mechanism turning inside of me, a key, letting me know what this is, my writing.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a new poem.

I jotted down a dream a couple of weeks ago, a vivid dream of a thin emerald-green book of unusual size, leather-bound, the cover rich in color and texture.

But no poems per se and not much desire to share my thoughts here of late.

Sometimes the time quickens, sometimes it drags.

What is this calling? I appreciate silliness and I love to write nonsense. But I only want to write down the most important of my thoughts just now.

Yesterday, we drove from Massachusetts to Northeast Ohio. It had been a very long time since I’ve made this trip in the car—the last time was the summer of 2009. It is close to 600 miles.

I have never read Watership Down, but we have been listening to it in the car for long stretches on this trip. The narration is excellent and I am reminded of how much I love to be read to, how much of a pleasure to all humans this gift of stories being told aloud is. I feel thirsty for it now and I have decided that I will read at open mics even when I don’t have my own work to read.

Such is the thanks I would like to give. I love reading out loud as much as I like singing out loud. It is a great pleasure to me, like the emerald-green book from my dream. The richness of the color I can summon in my mind’s eye. How I would like you to know it, too, to take it from me. I will hand you the book so you can feel its richness, the animal skin, the creamy parchment of the pages, crisp and soft at the same time.

I want to leave politics behind, the truth of war and rape, the way humans have of tearing down what cannot be shared.

I want to take and drink and give back.

Thanks Giving and Thanks Taking

Peace

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sweetgum

This morning, I dozed back to a restless sleep after my kids left for school. Semi-insomniac that I am, I had a couple of bad nights this week; paired with my lingering health problems, I have been needing more sleep than usual. Some day, I hope to return to productivity and my old “morning person” persona. When did I get this way?

As I slumbered (ha ha, don’t you just love that?), I had a dream with spiders. Huge spiders whose bodies mimicked the fruit of the sweetgum tree, aka, monkey balls (I don’t think that as children we thought they referred to a monkey’s testicles even though every kid knew what balls were).

There was a musician playing a guitar. Another man, too, but I don’t remember who. And Paul was there, I think to save me from the spiders. The spiders were key. There were many, sort of hanging around off the wall and they were huge and some of the spiders had babies. I thought the spiders should not be squashed and that if they were, they would make a bloody mess; bloody both in the British sense of the word as well as the bodily fluid.

I know why the spiders looked like they did in my dream. Yesterday, I had an appointment with my acupuncturist. There are 4 treatment rooms in her clinic and I was in the Herb Room. One wall is made of built-in shelves and on the shelves are glass jars comprising a Chinese pharmacopoeia. One of the jars has something that looks like the monkey balls of which I speak. I am guessing they are the very same, but since I don’t know the Linnaean name nor can I make sense of the Chinese words, I have no way of knowing. I suppose I can check next time I’m in the Herb Room, but I will have forgotten by then.

I think this photo is so lovely. It makes me think warm and happy feelings, like spring. Can you think a feeling or are thoughts and feelings distinct? Certainly, humans have the unique ability to summon feelings. Feelings, as well as thoughts, are simply neuro-chemical impulses after all.

Some time late in my college years, I made a beautiful mobile out of natural objects. A crab claw, a feather, perhaps some sweetgum fruits strung on thread. I can’t really remember. These things perish because they are not rocks or bones or sand. Maybe feathers, like hair, last a long time. Crab claws, they break. We see so many of them on the beach, their shells, too; they are thin and brittle. Maybe they become sand.

The long and short of it is that when I did get out of bed, there was a small, jet-black spider on the wall. It’s not the usual spider we get in the house, but I’ve seen them before. I meant to go back and grab it up into a tissue and put it outside. But I forgot. It dipped down pretty cold today, a freezing wind and no sun so it would have died. I try not to kill them in the house. This creates a dilemma in the winter. Sometimes I do suck them up when I am vacuuming.

Is it better to be squashed to death if you are a spider or to be put outside to freeze? Sometimes, I need my space to be free from spiders, but more often in the winter, I just leave them alone. In warmer weather there is no dilemma.

Are your dreams ever prescient or do you not cotton to that kind of phenomenon? No matter; I believe in the inexplicable and it’s often good enough for me. Science has its charms but I don’t think it can measure everything.

How many spiders live in winter? how many billions of neurons are in your brain? how many stars are in the universe?

Estimated guesses, my doves. You can leave the rest to the poets and dreamers.

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a nightmare

I remembered a tiny piece of a dream from last night. But I warn you—it was very scary!

I walk into the kitchen in the morning and the bag of frozen poppy seed bagels is ON THE COUNTER, left out overnight, thawing in the room temperature air!!!

Are you all right? I know it was scary. Don’t worry—when I really woke up and went into the kitchen to make breakfast, the bagels were safe and sound in the freezer. Whew!

It sort of reminds me of this.

Now I will tell you something else scary that happened today and it was NOT in a dream.

I was at the DOT (Department of Transportation, but I’ve also seen the monikers RMV and DMV and BMV. I wish the Commonwealth would make up its mind!), and I saw a man with head fat. Yes. It’s true. He had a roll of fat on the back of his head.

Why do I share this? I don’t know. I know it’s not right to speak poorly of a person because of his/her appearance but I’m in a state of shock. Maybe the American diet really is as bad as they say.

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tweaking things, things like this poem

The Underside of Sleep

1. verba volant

the words play tricks on us at night
fireflies flashing in a summer field

connect the letters
to spell summer
before the lake forms from the ice melt

before the hickory nuts fall open in the road

when the earth plumed sulfur

2. autumnal

sounds like tumble

the morning turns pitch
and smooth like onyx

hematite, marcasite
black-mirrored minerals
hard iron oxides

The last blood
trickles out at the wrong time of year

late summer crickets
a static
to the traffic

3. winter

Sleep sifts
like snow drifts
inside my head

When I wake
and open the doors
a mound of snow pours onto my feet

the way the beginning of darkness
pours out of me

4. carving infinity with a scalpel

I trace the sideways symbol
on the underside of my arm

the skin soft, spotless

the rain sounds like an animal

spring rushing in

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something fishy

(This Is Not My Fridge)

(this fridge costs 2700 smackaroos)

Something smells funny in my new fridge.

All of these not-made-to-last appliances are overpriced. Every one of them. Already, the handle to the freezer door won’t stay on and the freezer-light mechanism does not always properly activate.

But that smell. I have not yet put a box of baking soda in the fridge. Maybe that will help.

My friend back in Kent, Ohio said they had a bad smell in the house.

She was playing the Ouija (©) and it said something about kitchen sink or sponge and kitchen cabinet or sponge under sink (I’ve never played, so I don’t know how much it can spell out). Or maybe she asked a psychic what the smell was and the psychic told her remove the sponge that is under the kitchen sink.

Anyway, she removed a sponge (which she says was new and odorless) and the smell left the house.

Maybe my refrigerator is cursed or haunted. I had a weird haunted goat-walking-man dream last night. Maybe that is why my fridge smells.

This goat-man is scary, but also a bit debonair. My goat man was very evil and was trying to walk upright and not doing a very good job of it. He was wearing blue jeans. He really couldn’t pull off the human walk. He didn’t fool me, but the little goat he was abusing who followed obsequiously behind was under his evil power.

Why does fridge have a d but refrigerator doesn’t? Learning to spell in English is so trying!

I think I better get my facts straight on that smelly house story. It was told to me only once and at least 20 years ago. I’ve undoubtedly embellished.

If I had a pink 1950s fridge, I don’t think I’d have this problem. Then again, remember those ice cube trays that were such a pain-in-the-ass (these lasted up into the ’60s, maybe early ’70s even)? What a mess, all the ice shattered all over the counter and it tasted like metal. No wonder women wanted to stick their heads into their pink ovens with the gas on.

Still, one has nostalgia for these kinds of things.

It never occurred to me that Ouija is OUI and JA: YES YES. Not only that, but it seems to imply that the French and the Germans are very agreeable.

I thought the Ouija is always answering yes and no. A OUINON board would probably be too close to the French for onion (l’oignon). Or NEINJA would be too much like Ninja.

If anyone out there has any suggestions about my fridge smell, please leave a comment. I need all the help I can get. I don’t even have a job.

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glory be! I think I’m writing again

A new piece, very very rough

A Mother’s Gifts

I’d say it was stark

the way the student drove
on the wrong side of the road
side-swiping my mother’s Toyota

She pats its dashboard
like a schoolboy’s head
there, there; good car, good car

We listen daily to the story
of her first driver’s test

new to America,
fresh from her Nazi father

bribing the proctor
with a twenty
while her hands shook

She’s slipping
and
I’m slow to wake to it

When I finally see,
I want 50 bucks
to bribe my way out

I want my one call
from my cell
not to a lawyer
but to God

to shake his shoulders
and ask why
he left her alone with me

The car still needs to be fixed
the college student stays ignorant and votes for Romney

I live the hell unimagined
the one dream in which
my mother
does not know
who holds her in the death bed

I have to wake in an hour
and send my daughters to school,
my Flower Girls,
and me in the middle

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Thankful Thursday–Pink Spring

I know I’ve stated on numerous occasions that I refuse to use emoticons.

I got an email from a friend yesterday and it was prefaced with a little yellow smiley-guy blowing a kiss. I laughed. I keep looking at the thing. Is this how emoticons are supposed to work? I guess I finally get it. It is hard being an emoticonazi. I’m not saying I’ll start using them, but who knows? I can change.

Thankful for

the dental practice I frequent. I had a cleaning on Monday. I do love them all so much there. The new dentist, Dr. Wilson, who replaced the fabulous Dr. Brookes, gets a high thumbs-up from me. She’s got the same gentle touch that Klepacki has and that Brookes had. I am, however, trying to avoid x-rays to the head but I know one of these times they will insist and I will say yes. I have a friend who’s gone her whole life without even one cavity, who has never needed braces, whose children don’t need braces or glasses, and who, between her and her husband, still have 4 living parents. How does that work? And does this kind of information really belong in this post?

I love this bowl with its funny blue flowers

I love pink

I love spring today, even if it’s a bit cold out. It’s rainy and cool and the plants LOVE it.

I love the dream I had about a month ago in which Heath Ledger (alive) was standing just behind me, breathing and leaning in very close to my left ear. He lingered there, warm and dusky, saying something in his low Australian voice. He was slightly unshaven, scruffy; he had a hat on. I know he was gonna kiss me. But he didn’t.

I love when famous men visit my dreams. I am a lucky woman to have such a generous imagination.

Here it is people

Kiss my ass

Not as easy as it looks: this is what happens when you are the family photographer. You have to keep taking photos of yourself. In the mirror. the same mirror. You look pretty much the same. Except for the pink lipstick and pink shirt. Am I right? wait, I know how to do this, I’ve seen it before, alongside some emoticons: amirite?

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