Tag Archives: rain

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regarding rain, ocean and asphalt

the road is wet in the morning
northwest normal and I stop
loading the car because the rainbow
of gasoline is spread slick on the asphalt

I think this is gasoline not oil
from the size and color of the slick
I take a picture with my phone
the rainbow against the grey blue in the low light is beautiful

Is this from one car at the stop sign
or is it leaking from the street itself
as it appears and if so, what does that mean?
I comfort myself that it is not from my cars

What is happening to our environment?
where is this from? This is no doubt human
activity creating this slick. If I dropped a match
on my street would it burn in the rain?

I still want to lie on the street in the rain
sometimes tear my clothes and weep oceans howl
for love for loss for grief. If I did it here
I might be more flammable: ignition achieved

 

I already posted this photograph a week ago…. but then, a poem was published on everything2.com with this title. The title and the photograph kept rattling around in my head until I wrote a poem as well. There are four poems now with that title here: regarding rain, ocean and asphalt.

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Heart call

I am lying in bed and missing my heart.

I prayed to the Beloved to fall in love and I do. I happen to be terribly sick because the Beloved is teaching me to take time off and not just work harder and longer to avoid grieving. This is the second lesson. Or the fifth, depending on how I count it. The previous one was two months, this will be ten.

But early on, before I realize that death is standing in my doorway, I am at a picnic. A sports picnic with parents and teens and some younger children. I see a man who has been flirting with me be nice to a tween girl. My heart falls out of my chest and attaches itself to him. It follows him home.

He is quite spectacularly wrong for me. I know it but my heart doesn’t care. And he is a liar, manipulator and a slut. Familiar ground, just like my family. I go to his place and try to catch my heart, but it is stubborn and skitters away from me. It is covered with sawdust, cat hair and motor oil. Also rabbit fur. He raises bunnies for meat and kills them. I cuddle the babies and then he does too.

My heart is brutally stubborn. I tell it it is stupid, it will get hurt, he doesn’t want it, all the usual stuff. I think the Beloved is laughing at me. By January I revise my prayers. Ok, Beloved, you win AGAIN, I am STUPID, now I want NOT ONLY to fall in love but to fall in love with someone who loves me back. I am so stupid I can’t believe it.

The Beloved ignores me, since my heart is already gone. Damn it.

The man tells me a dream. He dreams that his son is stuffed inside a giant teddy bear to keep him safe. He is fighting a war alone, being shot at and shooting a multitude of enemies. He tells me that his son is trained. If he needs to come out of the bear, he will be angry and he is trained to kill. Another dream is of zombies coming up from the shop and attacking the door. He and a teen or two are trying to hold them off.

There are no women in his dreams. At least the ones he tells me.

Uh, Beloved? Shit. I dream of angels, as many angels as there are stars. I meet with my minister to challenge his ideas. “The people in dreams are aspects of ourselves, ok, but not angels right? I can’t have that many angels. I was raised atheist, damn it.”

“The angels are aspects of yourself.”

And zombies…well, we’re well matched on a psychic level, right? I have enough angels to handle any number of zombies and more.

I connect with his small child self, because our small child selves are so alike. Abandoned at the same age and afraid and with desperate courage.

His pattern is obvious from the start. Mapped out like a constellation. I tell my heart, but it scurries up ladders, into boats, down the metal stands, under cars. It plays among the tools. I tell it to be careful of the saws and tools and it ignores me.

He lies and ignores emails and lies again and avoids me when he’s done something that will hurt me and like, obvious, duh. I get angry, but my angels map a new path to his small child each time. Boundary after boundary after boundary.

And now I am in contact only by text. Only by distant virtual message. He is showing up again, of course, because that’s the pattern. He has tried so hard to make me angry and make me abandon him in rage. I don’t really care. He fixes the leak on my boat that I asked him about over a year ago. He texts about installing the bilge pump. He offers to bag up the cushions and put them in his loft.

No, I reply. I have room in my house.

The only things left at his shop are a broken outboard, pipe clamps that I inherited from my father and my heart. I will go to get them.

I lie in bed, thinking of getting the motor and clamps. I think of asking for my heart too. But he has never noticed that he had it. I didn’t tell him. It was obvious. And he didn’t want it. So why would I tell him now?

And then I think, I can just call my heart. I don’t need to go in person.

I call my heart. Come home, I say. He never noticed you. You could stay, but we have done everything we can. He is still fighting the zombies, he doesn’t know he is fighting himself. He is fighting his own feelings. Come home.

My heart comes home.

It is in my chest. Filthy, sawdust, bruised, motor oil, banged up, with old tears that I mended with ribbon and dental floss and sewing thread and artificial cat gut.

Welcome home, my heart. Welcome home.

This is for the Music Prompt #63: Daniel Powter Bad Day. I took the photograph on the train from Chicago, in the evening in a storm. Prayers for those hit by the hurricane and other disasters.

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Rain on water

My sister wrote Rain on water and posted it on everything2.com in 2009. Here: http://everything2.com/title/Rain+on+water

She was writing about going to Lake Matinenda. Our family has had land with cabins since the 1930s and now the fifth generation has gone there.

My sister died in 2012. I wrote my own version while I was there last summer.

____________________________________

What are you doing?

nothing

outwardly nothing

Inwardly, I am on a journey. I am back at the lake. It’s been three years. I am at the lake when the family is not there. I take old friends who have never been there. One knew my sister as I did and has known me for thirty years.

He and his wife and his six year old love the lake. And the six year old wants freedom as we all want but there are rules and you must wear your lifejacket on the front rocks until you can swim and can swim a certain distance and we never get in the canoe when it is on the rocks, it must be in the water or the canoe will be hurt and my uncle’s shade is over my shoulder and I can hear him yelling about the canoes as his parents yelled at him. The birchbark canoe that he and my mother destroyed still awaits repairs. And I demonstrate how to tip a canoe over when we go swimming and how fast it goes. “You may try it, but first you must practice jumping in the water. Do you want to?” No, he shakes his head, no, the small canoe went over so fast.

They leave and I am alone. I am not alone. The dead are there, their ashes, their words in the log, their voices in my head, their heights marked on the wall of the Little Cabin, my sister’s clothes, a marker for my uncle, my grandmother’s bed has been taken apart and is now a bench and I grieve about change and loss but it goes on. My sister is a sea otter but there are no sea otters at the lake and she is at the lake with me because she said, “How will I find you?” and I told her how and she was satisfied. No sea otters, but there are river otters, they come, a family, three, playing and fishing. I sing to them, Pie Jesu and they watch me curiously and go back to fishing and I think of my father my mother my sister and that I think they would be happy to be river otters in the lake together and fishing. I am with them almost and crying. My grandmother is a white pine and in the mink, my grandfather is a dragonfly, my uncle is the snapping turtle, I wonder what my friend’s son is, dead at 22, and the next animal I see is a merganser, the hooded merganser with two babies and she is leading me away from them while I am in the canoe, they are hidden I know about where and she circles back to say that now they can come out and are safe and I think yes, that would be right, a child who grew to a young man and was lost, he might choose to be a mom next caring for these young and careful and nurturing them, protecting them, hiding them, leading danger away.

Loons call and I answer and my voice lessons have helped my loon calls, I can hit the high notes now. A long conversation with a loon with me in the blue canoe and the loon wondering, do I have a loon trapped in my boat or am I in fact a loon, yes, I think I am, I will be a loon not a human any more

I can’t swim for long, not yet strong enough, the taste of the water is ingrained, layers of memory back to five months old and beyond, in the womb, has the lake marked my dna in three generations, I don’t know but I am in the water I am of the water I am water tears and water

written 8/29/15