eating the last o'keefe

There's a limb on the family tree that spent money on spendy M&Ms as a gift to my father- one of the last of his generation. What to give a non-material man? The leaves on that limb thought: M & M's with his last name on every M.

My mother served them in a crystal dish, but none of the leaves on my own limb wanted to dip in. Not that we didn't want to eat them, we just didn't want to be the leaf to eat the last one. It became a race, then, to get your M's eaten before the tension of eating the last one heightened to a finger-pointing conclusion.

I'm not pointing any fingers, but I'm saying it wasn't my mother. It might have been the main trunk himself. I'm noticing he's not complained they are gone.

throwing rocks in dallas

I miss being here, but it is April - the month for poets and poetry. Some poets participate in Write A Draft Every Day No Matter What. The theory is if we keep forcing ourselves to be tuned (available) to some sort of channel, we start tuning in easier, quicker, and our ability to fine tune increases.

Does it work when it happens? Yes, when I am able to tune in, I start to notice more colors, finer tunes, the grace of nature. Does it result in better poetry? I say it results in more consciousness. Um, if that can be measured in quantity.

Before we learn to crit ourselves and before we learn to see us as others see us, we start out knowing we are creative. At one point in our lives we all believed we could draw. We all knew how to hear the sun. The photo here is a series of self-portraits of my daughter's kindergarten students. This is how they see themselves. If we were asked to draw ourselves, under what constraints would we draw? April is the month to rid ourselves of constraints. You know, it's time to remember what the sun sounds like. Time to remember which one of us was throwing rocks and time to quit keeping track of what time it is in Dallas.

Nothing herein should be construed as being the writer's opinion. The April muse has her writing a poem about throwing rocks in Dallas.

mesh

I've been working on a window project, so to speak, for a couple months. For those of you who click over to my photo blog, you might have noticed this. What I learn everytime I head out in pursuit of a photo, there are no good photo moments to be found. Last weekend I had arrived too early for the Bag O'Books Sale at the library so I decided to drive through the downtown alleys. My phone rang, I bemoaned to my caller that there were no good windows to be shot. Look up, my caller said.

At the library, good novels were a quarter a piece. No kidding! I thought to pick through the titles and fill two bags. And instead of keeping them at my house for those no-good-book nights, I planned to give them to my sister. Why? Because I've been reading Mary Karr's book, Lit, and even though what I've learned in the book mostly reinforces what I want to say I already know . . . there is one line from the book that stays with me.

For many years, she had traded joy for excitement and then went around feeling hungry and messed up.  The excitement of two bags of books weighs against  the joy my sister will experience in receiving them.

Karr talks about two other things she traded lightly, but I'll be back to write about those another time. It's still April inside my head- the poem-a-day challenge continues.

drawing the line at pineapple

One of my favorite notes from my daughter. She's one of two of my favorite sources for poetry. I tell my kids they are Walking Poems. They roll their eyes and grin at each other. They are used to the way we talk to each other. For example, when she debriefs after a day of teaching six-year-olds with an assortment of special needs, she tells us she draws the line at pineapple in the pocket.

And her brother and I nod our heads. We know exactly what she means.

**

Here's a quote that I've been wanting to share with everyone touched by the poetry gene.

Do you know the book, Lit, by Mary Karr? Mary's memoir is like reading page after page of poetry. Her prose is easy to skate across, and yet you slowly realize the pond of water is filled with poetry.

She shares this quote from The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms:

"The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language."

**

April is the National Poetry Month. Many of us poets are trying to draft a poem each day. While I think that some of my blog posts are poetry in disguise, I am taking the time this month to extract more of the poetry from some of my blog posts and turning them into drafts.

When I find a way to draw the line at pineapple in my pocket, I'll know that I've arrived.

since

I don't know Andy. But once I knew a man who urged me to climb to the top of Pompey's Pillar with my sleeping bag. He'd come from where he was, I was to come from where I was and we'd meet at the top and you know. Cover ourselves with stars. Or some suchness.

I never did meet him there. But I've since slept at the base of that pillar. Somewhere in this blog is a photo of the prairie grass with the morning sunlight slicing through it.

My timing is often off.

Remember me? I was your wrong number the other day.

And once I knew someone else not called Andy. All over the Malibu we ate from a can-man's grocery cart. But never at McD's in Tijuana. He knew how to carve a crutch. He knew how to laugh when our Tijuana taxi driver got lost and asked us for directions. He always knew when to cross the border, how to get back home. But then some suchness happened. And guess what. Somehow now he's lost.

slope

I am not the mountain

          I need plank - this from the one who cannot take a hammer

                 to nails when depression closes in.

yet people come, people talk to me.

          This one gives back her hand and whispers:

                  I listen to no music when I sing.

I am high country, yes -- but without vistas --

          She nods her head. Today she wants to understand 

                  he doesn't believe in bridges anymore.

slopes of white bark, pine beetles setting in.

           I'd rather there be real bees the aspen tells

                   the river and the river tells

the mountain. And the mountain turns to me.

                 

the shutting of eyes

"Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."

- Roland Barthes - (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)


** ** ** ** ** **

Before I knew of the above quote, I wrote 101, which accompanies the header photo of this blog.



She lets him inside her life the first time
he hikes Two Moon with her. Ice-jammed

Yellowstone, gnarled beaver dams, blonde stalks
of endless prairie waving as they walked.

He sets the pace along the river bank,
anxious, he teases, to get to where it turns pretty.

Oh Jiminy, she prays to her Montana god,
forgive him-he knows not what he says.

He’s from Oregon and only knows
green colors. He laughs out loud with her.

She tells him about moccasins, the fleeing
Nez Pierce slipping through these trees.

He talks about Bear Creek Hikers, the odds
of John Wayne wearing them, if only he still lived.

When the trail runs higher and the water cuts
the bank, they single file quietly -- the sun leaning

on their backs as they round the river’s bend, a vista
point for them. Show him is the echo she sends out.

Her words strike against sandstone cliffs, skip across blue
water, settle into nested brush sleeping against washed rock.

A Chinook breath stirs when she explains to him
how beauty sneaks in when we close our eyes.

thin ice

May we skate on the thick ice as long as we stay away from the thin? And how do you stay away from the thin, a brother asked as we slid across the ice.

The world divides in two: Those who think the sign warns that all the ice is thin, and those who think the sign reminds us to stay off the thin ice, but allows for skating on the thick.

**

I was watching a video on David Foster Wallace last night. He spoke about what we lose when we allow ourselves to gratify any and all of our desires, often times instantaneously Where do the chunks of quiet go we once had in our days?

"We don't want things to be quiet anymore," he said. "The part of you that can think for thirty minutes of silence never gets fed." When did living start feeling so thin?

**

I asked Hewhoflies about silence and living thick or thin. He told me about a month spent in Ireland a few years ago. The only time he and his wife spoke on their drive along the Irish coastline was when they reached a small village overlooking the sea. To their right, a police station. In the window, a sign: For Rent.

They shared a hearty laugh.

They drove on. Now they are back in the States and he entertains the notion of renting that active police station. For what, for why? To see if he can.

quiet

We get quiet when others cry, Mary Little Cross whispered decades ago. It's like lighting candles on an altar; it's the way we send our prayers. The Bear Don't Walk  kids were boarding our school bus a few days after their mother had died while painting the ceiling in their kitchen.  

I feel quiet. In the wake of Japan's disasters, everything I have to say is small.

**

I wondered if Hewhofliesplanes would be flying rescue in Japan the way he did in Indonesia a few years ago. In the middle of wondering, my cell phone rang. He was calling to say he was involved in a different mission and so he'd not be in Japan.

Where would they, how would they find the courage they will need to recover? How would any of us? Whenever Plane-flyer and I visit the subject of courage comes up. Mostly we were quiet, but then he shared this quote with me:

"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; Knows not the livid loneliness of fear."  -Amelia Earhart

Photo courtesy of Nadine Hergenrider.

icicle

Of the two photos my father emailed to my Blackberry in the middle of the night, I open the one he's named Chop. The other one, Self Portrait with New Necktie, is one I can't bring myself to open. Not yet. Instead, I start my day earlier than usual. I take a photo of an icycle icicle hanging from the eaves of my house. The colors of a winter sunrise are distorted when looking through the ice. I'll send that photo to him before I go to sleep tonight now that I've looked up how to spell it.

icicle: noun: a pendent spear of ice formed by the freezing of dripping water.

On my early drive to work, Hewhowatchesmoviesfromthebackporch calls with today's weather forecast. He's surprised I am already out of bed and on my way to work. He just got off night shift so he knows how snowy our roads are and (surprise) he's watching I Love You, Man. Did I know, he asks, it was filmed at Venice Beach? Remember where we found that great parking place in the shade of a rundown garage's awning one alley from the beach? Everyone else was parking a mile away, but not us. We had found a secret parking spot.

Oy, I remember. So does he. He tells me that for years afterwards he would sometimes drive to Venice Beach to see if anyone else had discovered our spot.  

icicle: M.E. isykle, from is "ice" + ikel "icicle," from O.E. gicel (rel. to cylegicel "cold ice"), from P.Gmc. *jekilaz (cf. O.N. jaki "piece of ice," dim. jökull "icicle, ice, glacier"). Dialectal ickle "icicle" survived into 20c.

In how many ways can something keep hurting?  I am driving up the slick hill to my office, thinking about this but I don't say it out loud. Instead I tell him about my dad's latest emails and how I don't want to open the Necktie shot just yet. Moviewatcher-Parkingspotrememberer clears his throat.

I flip my left-turn signal on and ask if his movie has reached the sad section, but he says no-- he was just remembering my dad back when we were together. Remember how your dad took photos of his radiation mask when he had throat cancer? He measured it and emailed everyone a photo of the mask, the diagram, the radiation table, and the prognosis of oxygen tubes someday hanging around his chest.  

Traffic clears. I turn left and bounce across my office's icy parking lot. I turn the engine off and sit in the silent pickup cab, phone held against my ear and listen to him tell me: Taking photos and documenting pain are forms of detachment which help your dad find the courage to deal with what he must.

icicle: A pendent mass of ice tapering downward to a point, formed by the freezing of drops of water or other liquid flowing down from the place of attachment.