First I will tell you a true story

First I will tell you a true story. Then I will throw a big bag of words at you, because I can.

True story: About a year ago I was working with a kid who did not talk, almost three years old, no language at all. I spent a few months getting past his fear and hysteria, helping to lead his mother to the A word. Autism. One day, teaming with my therapy partner, she was talking with mom about his learning style. While they talked , I had Lou leaning against me, looking at cards as I turned them over and named them.  It was rare for him to touch me, or to sit quietly, or to interact in any social way. I showed him another card and said the name: Violin. And the next one: Rainbow. He took them from me and said: Violin. And showed me the card. Then the other: Rainbow. And showed me the card. Then he danced around the room with the two cards, saying Violin (holding it out). Rainbow (holding it out).  First words. Violin. Rainbow. Three years old. For the next few weeks, he kept those cards close, repeating the names. And new words came, all of a sudden, a suddenly opening door.

 

Suddenly words

You might consider your libido as a kind of ornament, hanging on a tree like a ripe tomato, or secret and deep as a trench, ripe and sweet as fresh-squeezed juice. But that’s not how we do it round here. We keep our spirits up, we’re green and crisp as spring salad. We like to showcase our young; reservations are required. At the Odium Theatre every year there is an extravaganza that features filigreed kimonos (most of them in mauve) challenging the deep water acrobats, diving into moats, down gorges, smiling and waving all the way down. The journalists draw pictures of them, smirking like Cheshire cats, jumping down that gorge, making aerial hairpin turns, alive alive alive until there’s a bad moment, could have been just a bruise but instead the truth is a bastard, a dastardly freak who gloats at the bloated corpse that floats downstream until it is washed up in a swamp, a quagmire, a murky, queer and unlikely terrain. The distinguished gentleman stands and with characteristic discernment and an unseemly relish demonstrates his encyclopedic knowledge, his Hail Britannica superiority. After hours he goes home, shoots up, and plays the violin, watches as the sun goes down, where the rainbow smudges the lengthening sky. But never mind all that, indeed, certainly not, it’s not surely, but you jest, and you find this questionable, this questionable judgment that zooms past us while we stand and pontificate. Zip it up, friend, make it work, it’s not me, it’s the esoteric tickle of uncertainty, the chronic temperamental temptations of someone who loves Pandora, the Explora who is no esoteric Cassandra, no hunch maker, inkling spreader, odds wagerer. She is more like coals carried aloft on balloons, leaving their baggage suspended on earth day, the flying Brenda on the wall, bounteous, dubious, glorious, smack down gorgeous, suspended indefinitely by curious safeguards draped in a koolaid smile.

Rainbow Ocean by Thelma 1 at deviantart.com

Sky caves

Clouds, Albuquerque - from Albuquerque Daily Photo

Sky caves collect where ice and air interact with heat and wind. I collect sky caves. I collect sky caves and gather them high where the clouds are piled. The clouds are piled and at the top the ice crystals form. I wait.

The winds blow, the grasses lay flat, storm crashes against the sky bottom all at once, and then there is fire. I gather the fire and pour it into the river and it boils up again into the sky, where it hits the sky caves with a great crash and then there is rain.

There is rain, sent down by the air gods, not me; they gather the ice and shake it hard with fire. When it comes down to earth the trees hold their hands up and shake their wild heads and laugh and cry all at once. The tree people cry for water, joy and sex soaking into the roots, and for pain as their arms are broken and thrown down in the wind, and the branches lay on the ground, which is clay mud and runs red like blood to the river. The ground is a river running red with mud, my collection has shattered, glass in shards have scattered and broken against the bosque floor. The sun warms, the water runs fast, the morning birds wake. They sing the air gods to sleep, high in the sky caves that rest, now, silent and still in the thin air.

 

20 minutes, writing group. Topic: Ice. Thank you, Mike!

To see a storm in central New Mexico, see the link below from You Tube. My neighborhood has more cottonwoods, wild giant trees, being in the bosque itself, but this is beautiful viewing also.

** The embedding feature for this video is disabled, but you can still watch it by clicking on the You Tube logo. My understanding of protocol in You Tube is limited, for now.

Sudden spring wind

 

The pragmatic asthmatic relaxed into the dance, the shimmy shammy prance, the collective breath. The pragmatic asthmatic learned to meditate, to breathe into his third eye, his fourth eye, his belly button and his nebulizer. The pragmatic asthmatic is nebulous in his desires, his tendencies tender, blenderized, repressed and released from their straight jacket cover. He lives in a puddle of hope, the asthmatic pragmatic, the empresario, the unlikely lothario, the man whose breath is short but whose shadow is long. There are times when the difference between calm and comatose is muddy; he looks into the murky waters and they are shallow, shallow and guarded, a familiar habit whose resolution could jeopardize the expectations of the masses, and this is how graves are dug.

Get out a shovel, get out a pick, get out a set of orders, a tuxedo stored in lavendar sachet. Splash, I am an aqua velva man, says Sugar, sweet and barbed and brown. Sugar lives in a disco universe, percolator blurping, mirror ball twisting in dance halls, rectories, refracting, reacting, acting, profilacting. We have doubts, hesitations, regrets, returns, we have return addresses that are no longer there. Did you know that? You will send the cavalry out to rescue the distressed players of your past, and they will no longer be at that venue.

Stand on the avenue and hand out flyers; rewritten play holding auditions in fingers splayed open, dance running like sand and covering your fingers, your belly, the soles of your feet. Nancy Drew auditions for a role; so does James Bond, the Nancy Boys, the Clancy Brothers, and the Oliver Twister Sisters. There is room for all of them; you know this to be true and so you make a pot of beans and collard greens and invite them in to write, rehearse and sing. They have fencing battles with potstickers and potliquor, and announcements are posted on telephone poles and coffee shops and oxygen bars where asthmatics wheeze and elephants sneeze and this is a turbulent time.

It’s time for gravity and antimatter and Auntie Maggie and Auntie Macassar, and the two make chai for the masses, the clams and the teachers – the geoducks challenge the continental divide, and the continent does then divide and conquer. The croquet set reaches out, goosenecks grab a sweet meat, so tender, so tenderized, held and cradled and memorized. There’s a place in this world for deliberate nonsense, for accidental sense, for labels and for white out late at night.

White out, night out; a full moon only illuminates what it shines upon. I saw a cow and a spoon and dish, I saw a moon and a spoon of raspberry preserves. The crumpet dreams buttery hot dreams of jam and cream and wakes up blushing. The rushing wind calls upon us; the silenced wind sits suddenly still and we sitting in its wake are shaken, light blankets in March, hanging on a clothesline, April calling from across the field. Fool, no nebulizer needed here, no gasping shortness, no empty field. Fielded, flooded fields full, watered, impregnated, saturated, sated with spring.

(quick write – 20 minutes. needs an image. more later.)

Found pillow

In marble halls as white as milk,
lined with a skin as soft as silk,
An image of women, an image of men,
Dented and battered, scarred and thin.

Within, without, with hearts and rain,
With cabbages, kings, with kites without strings.
Their eyes were watching, were watching god,
in bare rooms, empty, were watching god,
With shadowed eyes, bare mattresses, odd,
shortened breath, shortened life, watching god,
watching god.

We suspect them of having mean hearts, she said.
She looked through the windows, she looked in their heads.
We suspect them of breathing, we suspect them of crime,
The crime of not sleeping, of eating dry bread
of drawing breath, of drawing
a bridge, of drawing a card to carry the dead.

This book is harmless, written and sad.
These people have gone where nothing is said.
This loss is a pillow, grieved and wet. 
This loss is a pillow, beaten, set,
Thrown on the floor, wrinkled and sad.

This loss is a pillow, grieved and wet, buried
In walls, breathing out, breathing in,
in a marble hall, as white as milk,
Lined with a skin, as soft as silk.

 

 

 

 

 

(found poem, writing group, 15 minutes, untouched)

Sleep

The acoustic bed is where I lie with headphones on. When I lie there, my eyes are closed. My eyes are closed and the bed shakes me. Atomic, powerful, electric. There is no such thing as too loud. I heard that somewhere, and I know it is true. I am on my knees to the glory of sound. Power chords. Death metal. Teeth crushing volume. This is a spiritual experience, make no mistake.

When I am saturated with sound, it is time for light. Nuclear, flaming, magical, reflective. I am in my vision bed and it is a mandala, a flaming tower blooming skyward and then circling. I am deaf, I am nothing but one large optical nerve looking out, looking west into the sun, burning rays and falling blind on my face. Blind and deaf.

On my knees again, I am blind and deaf. But my nose, oh my nose, oh my subtle quivering proboscis seeking out more honey, more. How could I have thought that light or sound could match, could compete, could even perform in the same arena? My olfactory bed is redolent – herbal, musky, rancid, floral. It is ozone and rain, it is the rotten sweetness of death and the iron bloody smell of birth. The olfactory bed consumes me, suffocated, breathless, gasping, lost.

When I wake it is tomorrow. The bed that wakes me seems perfectly ordinary, except for around the edges, where there are burnt crispy bits, with little whispers of smoke rising, disappearing out the morning window.

 

(* Writing prompt – used 5 syllable rhyming words “rhymes with shower” from Rhyme Zone. Wrote for 20 minutes. Thank you, Red Ravine, for the “Tools We Use” list.)

Monastery on Minor and Pine

When I ring the bell at the red iron gate, Li Po crosses the dining hall on soft cotton feet. Brown robes brush cracked linoleum; she smiles and allows me in. I enter, smell incense and silence, read the songs hanging in red and gold scrolls where someone has translated no selfishness no greed. We bow welcome, Amitaba, and around her Cheshire smile the peeling paint fades in the shadowed hallway. 

 Big Gwoli warms my meal in the microwave, prayer beads click as I eat. We light incense, eat oranges; my hands are sticky with juice, and I wash them in the kitchen where mice dance unworried on the kharmic wheel and the countertops. 

 Through the classroom floor we hear chanting, bells chime Amitaba for compassion, Amitaba for Guan Yin. My hands are covered with chalk dust, hair smells of smoke and sweet herbs. I set aside lessons, ask my students to read The Cat in the Hat instead. Little Gwoli laughs, startled at the sounds of sense and no sense. I see that Heng Sheung has the scars of repentance burnt into her arms, onto her bare scalp, and I wonder what is the desire she battles with white coals, how strong is the will that lives in this crumbled brown building. Across the street, the nodding junkies disfigure the bodhisattva spirits of the city no less than she with her bracelet and crown of guilt. 

 In the classroom, voices stagger drunk outside the windows, clatter against the chanting below, rattle the cage of detachment. The afternoon light catches dust and smoke; Heng Sheung is transformed into a lighted mind vivid with struggle, English rhythms and hard edges ache in her jaw, leaving dharma in a heap behind Dr. Seuss. Later, when pleasure has hardened to guilt, she will rock on her knees in prayer, calling Amitaba for compassion, Amitaba for Guan Yin. 

As I leave, I close the red iron gate behind me; undetached, unrepentant, I sing us Amitaba for compassion, Amitaba for Guan Yin, Amitaba for the sweet madness of the wheel dance that shakes the belly of every Buddha who has ever laughed in exile.

 

© 1993 Teresa Phillips. May not be used without permission.