Moonlight and nightingale

 

The moon is hanging in indecision. A nightingale sat on a low-hanging branch. He sang a love song to a rose in the moonlight. The rose turned her face away from him, up toward the eavesdropping moon.

I do not shine brightly enough, said the nightingale and hid his head in shame. A beam of moon reached down through the night sky and touched the nightingale lightly on his shoulders, stroking the strong wings, soothing the dark feathers. The nightingale lifted his head and looked at the moon. She was smiling at him, a simple half smile that suggested something not quite specific. He flew, with a light heart, from the lower branch to one at the top of the tree and sat there swaying on the highest, thinnest branch. A light breeze came to dance with him, and the moon wrapped her white light around him. This was the happiest nightingale had ever been and he opened his mouth to tell the moon about adoration and love and soul and so on. He opened his mouth and out came a song so brilliant, so trippingly and thrillingly embellished that he almost fell off the branch. Sitting there in the moon circle he was fully visible to every bird for miles around, his voice carrying from tree to tree, from tree to meadow to forest to river. Every bird began to sing back, to the glory of the moon, to the calling of the nightingale and he sang with a thousand song birds, a few hundred crows, and one or two sparrows who couldn’t sleep well for one reason or another. Their song shook the leaves, who began to dance, and the water, which began to jiggle and percolate in the wide shallow river. Someone turned the volume up high and they all danced together until the early hours of tomorrow, until the dance and the day was done.

Hive

I am leaving the hive, you see. It is my head, my head which is filled with the buzzing of bees, which is filled with longing, with honey, the comb, the drive to predict and to reproduce. I am leaving the hive, you see. It is my head, which is filled with honey, which is filled with a strange desire that is sweet and unreproducible. The honeybee has a particular song, you see. It is not the song of the wasp or the hornet. It is not the thin stinging whing of the mosquito, it is not the high whining cry of the child whose wishes have not been granted.

I am leaving the hive, you see, with a longing in my head that makes a buzz, a droning sound that says wings can beat so fast, too fast, so much faster than heartbeats, and the beating of wings can stir the winds, can carry them over oceans, over tides, over deserts and into high mountains, the clouds, the skies.

I am leaving the hive, you see, away from the honey, away from the drone, away from the sagebrush, the leaves and the waves at the wide ocean’s edge and up into the high, the thin mountain air, where breathing is hard but sweet, where breathing captures, raptures, wraps the straining lungs in wishes, in hailing, exhaling. The hive does buzz, does fly, does drive. The hive does predict, does produce, reproduce. Produce, reproduce, encase, contain. I am leaving the hive, you see, and that is enough.

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

Summer Triptych

Summertime

Little baby with flyaway hair is dancing. White sheets on a clothesline and a tree with green leaves waving high to the big blue sky. Baby laughs and waves at tree and sheets and runs through grass to cool mud. A reel-to-reel memory and the baby has blue-green eyes, half on land, half at sea. We laugh and toss her between us. Then nothing and the film strip thwock thwocks at the end of the reel. Thwock thwock, thwock thwock, then the living room is dark except for the hard white light staring out the end of the projector.

In summertime, there are many smells. Smells of hot, melting tarmac, of laundromats billowing out sweet dirty laundry sheets and bleach. Hair burnt crunchy and dry, slightly green from chlorine and swim lessons. Chemistry smells lingering wherever blue pools light up at night. Steaming bright midnight, an abandoned inflatable chair rocking gently in the wee hours as the pool filter blurbs and billows, benign and protective.

 

Making do

Wish I had a shoestring. What do I have? Rummaging in this paper bag, I find a bag of Fritos, a dollar twenty five in change, and a book of matches. Making do. I buy a single cigarette from the Circle K on the corner of Solano and Hadley, sit on the corner in the hot July evening. I eat the Fritos and go back inside for a cherry lime slurpee. Then back out on the curb, I smoke the cigarette and drink the slurpee and my tongue turns bright red. A white Chevy Nova pulls up at the corner and I kiss the boy in the driver’s seat with my bright red tongue, which is still cold. Then I run away into the dark alley behind the Circle K and lose him almost immediately. Ten minutes pass, then twenty, and I walk back to the Circle K for another cigarette. They are three cents apiece. I now have a paper bag, 45 cents, and no place to sleep tonight. It is 1 a.m. and the streets are still hot. I can see moths and fireflies banging against the streetlight in the parking lot. I put the cigarette out and save the butt in an empty pack, then walk down Hadley three blocks, four, til I come to a small square park with a bandstand in a summer pagoda. It is the only building lit this time of night. The boy is there, waiting for me, and we dance a polka on the raised stage. There are still flowers in early summer, not worn and dry like everything else here will be by August.  We sit on the steps at the edge of the stage; we can both see the fourth of July from here, still three weeks away. We lean back and look up at the sky and the stars are fireworks, shooting up into the deep forever and bursting. Thousands of shooting stars bursting and showering the night, comet tails leaving a bright, trailing signature. We sleep in the Nova that night, him in the front seat sitting up, me in the back with a trunk blanket on the floorboards in case of a chilly dawn. In the morning, we drive to the Denny’s to wash our hands and faces, and order coffee, and fill my purse with crackers and jelly packets and a bottle of catsup for later. Then we go back to the Circle K for a cigarette, which we share. Later, we will either go back home, or find another place to stay, or do the same thing again tonight.

 

Be happy, precious five

Be happy, precious five.
Five fingers, five toes.
Five days in a work week.
Five acres, five dreams
Dreamt in a night of coupling

Uncoupling, dreamt in a night
Of sweat and a morning of worry.
The snow coming late, left early
And everything is dry:
Grass, air, trees, eyes, and dry is a crisp
Threat calling sparks from the sky.

I am counting on my five
Fingers, five toes, counting on
Rain, counting on clouds piling up over
There, over there, purple and heavy,
Pregnant like cattle in this late spring.
We are overdue, it is past time.
I am counting the days til the rains begin.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Until then, I cannot afford to breathe. Hail Mary,
Hail Mary, send us hail, send us rain,
send us rain. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

 

(Three prompts: “Summer” 10 minutes; “Making do on a shoestring” 20 minutes; “Precious Five” – W.H. Auden – 10 minutes.)

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.)

Ten minute verse

 

 

The limerick packs laughs a bit anatomical
The hyena forestells disasters astronomical
The hermit sees shows that are not so comical,
The blowtorch makes glass that is curved or conical.

What happened to the moment of limit, not limited
by greed or shape or sudden inhalations, some primitive
wishing for Jesus or Joseph or Mary
or Bill ‘O or Monroe or rich guys who nary
a word said against them are nonetheless wrong or words
said against them are strong in the long
run where there is no fortress no mercy no song
where whatever there is, is where rope may be hung
on a cassock, a limb, on a boat, where he clings,
where the deep gapes its maw, like a song that he sings
a song like a cris, like a prayer, like a dirge, like a bell
that is ringing, clanging, as day runs to a well
of night, of night, of light that fades and well it fades

Smooth, grey, velvet rays darkening in times astronomical
the hermit lights the lamp in a night long and comical
the blowtorch makes glass that is curved or conical,
a limerick packs laughs a bit anatomical.

 

 (ten minute freewrite at the end of a busy night of writing)

 

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.)

New Job Haiku

time bandit

 

 

Swipe in, sign here please.
Tomorrow do it again.
Goodbye says hello.