Category Archives: poetry

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Falling

I was asked to write a poem from the perspective of the angels in my dream.

Falling

We are stars
We are born
We are made to burn
We flame
We explode or burn out
We are made to die

We are angels
We are made to fall
We all fall
We are white falling in black space
Or black falling in white space
If you prefer
It doesn’t matter
It is the contrast that is important
There is no light without dark

We are angels
We are made to fall
We all fall

Do you fear
your fear?
your anger?
your grief?
falling?
death?

We fall for you

If you reject
your fear
your anger
your grief
falling
death

We will fall for you
We accept falling

All must fall

If you accept
your fear
your anger
your grief
falling
death

We will fall with you

You will fall with us

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The future of medicine

we recognize the true embodied mind
we stop the stigma of the many beaten down
the damage done in childhood caught in time
hearts open and lift the broken off the ground

we learn that diagnoses are a crutch
drugs plaster over deep and seeping wounds
mental labels hurt the patients oh so much
we learn to listen: broken hearts sing grieving tunes

cruel medicines and thoughts are shelved for good
gentle boundaries surround hearts to keep them safe
we rise as friends and families and doctors really should
the angry monster revealed as longing waif

damage done in childhood to the brain
lays survival pathways that we no longer call insane

The photo is me and my sister Chris. I do not know who took it, but I think it was at my maternal grandparents. They are deceased, my parents are deceased, my sister is deceased. I don’t know who to credit.

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unbearable

each time
I think
I can’t bear it

it hurts too much

you are hitting me when I am down

but then I know
that I have come too close

icarus to the sun

you melt the wax from my wings
impassive
as I fall
from the sky

you forget
I forget
that the sea is my true element

not the air

I fall into the sea

I am safe
no wings
no air
no burning sun
just the depths
my tail is back
and the painful split is healed

I swim
down to the depths

I remember
that you torch me
because it is unbearable
to be loved

you stand on shore
apollo
bright and beautiful

I wonder if you will call me forth
from the froth

I wonder if I will come
forth

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Trust in the dark

Writing201’s prompt today is trust. This article in the NY Times about how there is no right way to grieve moves me: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/getting-grief-right/?_r=0

Trust in the dark

Oh Beloved
   Help me to trust in the dark
      Help me to take each step
         Down into grief
            As needed
Oh Beloved
   Help me walk in the caverns of despair
      Each step slow
         As if I walk through molasses
            The air is thickened
               My chest hurts
Oh Beloved
   Help me to trust you
      That just as I descend into grief
         That just as I move through despair
            That the steps will someday lead up again
               That I will rise and spring will come
Oh Beloved
   Help me to thank you
      For tears and joy
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The Mother Daughter Show II

Over the last two days, I hung the Mother Daughter Show II, at the Boiler Room in Port Townsend, Washington. It will be up for the month of December.

This time it is the joint work my mother and I did in the 1980s. She did etchings to go with nine of my poems. The tenth poem was written for an etching she had already done. I asked my mother if she would do this project with me and she replied, “Only if the poems rhyme. None of that free verse stuff.”

I worked on the poems, I think with my mother’s etching style in mind. She used a zinc plate, with a tar solution on it. She would do a drawing in the tar, usually with a dental tool. The plate was placed in acid, which would etch where the tar had been scraped away. She would etch the plate multiple times, which gave different depths to the etched lines.

When the plate was finished, she would remove the tar and run an artist’s proof. She would heat the plate on a metal hot plate. She would ink it and then gently wipe the ink off until there was a very thin layer on the unetched parts of the plate. This had to be done delicately, so that the ink was not wiped out of the etching lines. She would place the plate on the press, place a piece of wet paper gently over the plate, lower the thick pile of wool pads over the paper and run the press. After the plate had gone through, the paper was peeled up and there was an etching, with the edges of the plate pressed into the paper.

Sometimes she was not satisfied and would return to the tar and change the etching. Sometimes she ran multiple proofs until she had the color right. Then she would run an edition. The print and poems are editions of fifty. Each etching is signed and numbered: 1/50, 2/50, 3/50, and so forth. We had the poems printed first, on a lead type press, and then my mother ran the etchings. We had a show in the late 1980s in Alexandria, Virginia.

My mother died in 2000. My father died in 2013. My mother was a prolific artist, so trying to deal with the estate felt insane. I put the art in a storage unit. When I had The Mother Daughter Show in July, it felt like a remembrance of my mother. And anyhow, I have to do something with the art in that storage unit, don’t I?

I find the etchings easier to show and sell then the watercolors. I want to clutch each watercolor, but eventually I will start to let go of them. I have the etching plates, too, because my mother said she was terrible at finishing editions. I have the box of poems printed on the lead press and the guides for running the edition. I do not have the press. My sister took it to California and it disappeared. That is ok, because there are presses in Port Townsend. There is a big art community, which is part of why my parents moved to this area in 1996. Art, music, gardens and boats.

My mother did many small fantasy etchings, flying elephants, fairies, a mermaid, a merman. The poems I sent her were almost all about animals. I wrote Eating Water Hyacinths and my mother did a charming etching of two manatees. She looked in various books to see what manatees looked like and then drew them. I wrote a blue crab poem and we bought a live crab. I photographed her drawing the crab, which was skittering around unhappily on the dining room floor. I enjoyed the constraint of rhymes. It made it easier to write the poems, though I am not sure why.

I have six of the series hanging in the show. I don’t currently have the other four framed. The Gallery Walk is this Saturday. I hope that people will come and perhaps we will sell one. We are also going to show the Panda Minimum, outside. The Panda Minimum is a mountain bike camping trailer, a bit like a teardrop trailer, designed and built by a local friend. We will have it outside the Boiler Room. I’ve already told the friend that I think the Panda will steal all the thunder and the art on the wall will be ignored, but ah, well. I have a third show scheduled, for June and July, at another venue. It is easier to do shows of my mother’s artwork than my own, because I think she was so good.

Also published on everything2 today.

The Boiler Room: http://www.ptbr.org/

Donate to the Boiler Room! Or come to the auction, also tomorrow!

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Twisting words

My sister got mad at me many times, but sometime in the last year of her life she said that I’d “twisted her words”. I don’t know if it was on email or on the phone, but I felt hurt. I do take people’s words seriously, I do look them over carefully, I do ask questions about what they say. The memory training as a small child, to memorize all the verses of songs, means that I have an excellent word memory. Combine that with the medical training, where you have to present an entire patient history from memory: chief complaint, history of present illness, past medical history, social history, medications, family history, physical exam, labs, xrays, specialist opinions, assessment and plan. One boyfriend complained that I would remember what he said and ask questions a week later. He’d say, “I don’t remember what I said.” But I remembered and had thought about it. It’s hard to discuss if only one of us remembers….

After my sister died, her husband got mad at me and was yelling at me on the phone about my niece. I said I would talk to my niece’s father. My brother in law continued to yell and said that I “twisted his words.” Oh.

Later an old family friend, who has known me since birth and was a huge and kind support to my sister, practically a second parent, got mad at me. He said that I “twisted his words.” I felt grim.

Then my cousin disagreed with me. We were disagreeing by email. She cut me off, saying that I “twisted her words”.

No one not intimately connected with my sister has ever said that I twist words.

So this has been hurting and now my sufi reading led me to go close to the place that hurts. Say yes.

Yes, I twist words. Words and books and songs and music were my safe place in a scary childhood. That is where I went to hide myself. I would play in mansions and palaces and forests and space stations of words. I feel safest in the real woods and sleeping in a tent…. people are what I fear most, that they will hurt me. But I say yes to twisting words: I twist them, I knit them, I paint with them, I play with them, I find joy in them, I misspell them on purpose, I adored Walt Kelley, Edward Lear, Robert Burns, Don Marquis, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, nonsense poems. Both of my grandfathers loved nonsense poetry and scurrilous poetry and they both memorized it. My father would read the Book of Practical Cats to us, and when I was little he would read Chaucer in Old English. I just threw away his note cards on Old English from college, though I wish I’d mailed them to Princeton. Never mind, I still have 20-30 boxes of my parents’ paper. I am sure that there is something that I can mail to Princeton. They, after all, are still sending him mail at my house. I memorized poetry that my father would quote and then in school, anything that I liked. “What a queer bird the frog are….”

What a queer bird, the frog are
When he sit he stand (almost)
When he walk he fly (almost)
When he talk he cry (almost)
He ain’t got no sense, hardly
He ain’t got no tail, neither, hardly
He sit on what he ain’t got hardly

I loved that poem and copied it laboriously and took it home. That is the first poem that I remember finding on my own out in the wide world, not from my parents.

I twist words. Not with malice, but with play. And that was why it hurt, my sister’s saying that I twisted words with meanness. I can let that go now. If another person who knew her says that I twist words, I can say, “Yes. I love words. I love to play with them,” and if they are angry, I can let them go…..

Let them go…..

Round of “What a queer bird” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHwwJkKp7Oo&index=1&list=RDUHwwJkKp7Oo

Passenger Let her go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBumgq5yVrA

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The Path to Wonderland

I thought I’d learned that lesson
But no
The Beloved
Knew I had not
Hadn’t really faced it
Some small piece
Still wanted to depend
On someone else

Still fused.
Still thinking that you
Who know me so well
Would hear when I say please
I really need you to call
You say I will
I wait by the phone
You don’t call

I feel hurt
Anyone would
But my heart doesn’t stay broken
I survive
It happens again
And again
Until it occurs to me
That I’ve been reading Rumi
That we are each entirely part
Of the Beloved
Connected
And yet I’ve been fused to needing you
I don’t need you

I love you
I’m not used to not needing you
But I will be soon
10/22/06

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Painting Angels

You were an artist
You are an artist
You said that you’d have to live to 120 to finish all your projects
And died at 61
I keep wondering
what the art supplies are like
and if you work on sunsets
or mountains
or lakes

Trey, 9
made a clay fish last summer that I admire.
He said grumpily “It’s too bad Grandma Helen died before I could do clay with her.”
He tells me he’s ready to make raku pots for fire in your ashes as you wished
I ask what he’d make
He considers and says, “What was Grandma Helen’s favorite food?”
I can’t think and say that she liked lots of foods
At the same time wondering squeamishly if maybe
he should make a vase and then being surprised
that I am squeamish and thinking of blood and wine,
too, I wonder if my dad would know. “Maybe guacamole.”
I need to find a potter to apprentice him to.

Camille, 4.
asks how old Grandma Helen was when she died.
I explain that she died at 61 but her mother died at 92.
Camille asks how old I am.
40.
When are you going to die?
I say I don’t know, none of us do, but I hope it’s more towards 90.

Camille studies me and is satisfied for now.
She goes off.
I think of you.

I perpetuate
the Christmas cards you did with us
upon my children
They each draw a card.
We photocopy them and hand paint with watercolors.
Camille wants to draw an angel
and says she can’t.
I draw a simple angel
and have her trace it.
She has your fierce concentration
bent over tracing through the thick paper
She wants it right.
The angel is transformed.

My kids resist the painting after a few cards as I did too.
Each time I paint the angel
to send to someone I love
I think of Camille
and you
and genes
and Heaven
I see you everywhere

published in Mama Stew: An Anthology: Reflections and Observations on Mothering, edited by Elisabeth Rotchford Haight and Sylvia Platt c. 2002

written January 19, 2002