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

Storm

Then all hell breaks loose. My front tooth is chipped as I am thrown forward and against the ceiling. The windows break. Something is wrong with gravity, and with the street itself, buckling and kicking, a wild horse, an avalanche, a flood, an earthquake.

Every disaster movie ever made is dancing like sugar plums in my head. I’m waiting for ancient indian burial grounds to vomit their dead, I’m waiting for giant dancing spiders to descend, grinning, to snap me in half with monstrous jaws. I’m waiting for tsunamis, one after the other, to smack against this inland city like concrete, a wall of water harder than diamonds. This is about the right time to reconsider religion, or whiskey, or all the incredible sex I might have missed, or the books I might have written. Instead, I had been sitting up in my bed in my flannel nightgown, with a cup of chamomile tea and a Lilian Braun mystery. The disappointment I feel in myself at this apocalyptic moment is hard to describe. I wish I’d been doing something else. Something mysterious, deep, sensual, creative. I’m tossing around like a rag doll still, looking out the window as the city collapses and debris begins to fly. I am waiting for a white rabbit, waiting for a waistcoat, waiting for the fall to come to an end. When it does, I am returned to gravity with a thud and there is, suddenly, an absolute silence.

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.

The Menstrual Chronicles

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part I

Wherein we have a problem, a need for absolution, a problem that drops oh soft and miserable onto the sand. The sand where the pilgrims wandered, the sand where the hoi polloi met in tents and barbecue stands, where the ribs were sucked clean and the fingers were washed in the blood of the lamb and in little bowls of clear water. Absolution shooting out of deep skies in lost cities in continents local and far away, as far away as Obiwan as far away as Moses as far away as Jesus as far away as Osama as close as Jerry as close as Mike as close as election day as close as daybreak, as close as faith.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part II

We planted snapdragons, we did, one spring and they bloomed. We sang to them in the yard, all of us, with the karaoke machine hooked up to the orange extension cord that we jerryrigged with an adapter that made it foolish dangerous but we’d read in a catalog, a farmer’s almanac, a hippie guide to life on other planets that life on this planet is better when you sing to your flowers. So we did, karaoke Joan Jett and Hannah Montana and Alice Cooper and Louis Armstrong, I see skies of blue red roses too I watch them bloom for me and you and I think to myself what a wonderful world. Those were the best snapdragons and daffodils and bluebells and little wild roses that ever grew in our sucking mud clay. Then one day the plug overheated and the cord melted and there was a little spark in the early morning dew and that was the end of our snadragon concert.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part III

Wherein we have a problem, the problem of virtue and right living, wherein we have a problem of definition and decay, wherein the blessed is the man that walketh not in the council of the ungodly, but rather becomes the reconstitution of mashed potatoes and purified water and loaves and fishes, wherein amendments play American gladiator with commandments and we all sit down and direct our prayers to several kinds of mecca, where our knees are the worn knees of supplicants and carpet layers, where the marshmallow visions come thick, fast, and suffocating.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part IV

Cyclic, of course, like gardens and bleeding, like saviours and sinners, the devil is a dog with his tail between his legs. We set aside our discontents, said be grateful for where we live, said thank you sweet Jesus for not making me live in Lubbock or Manchester, thank you for soccer, thank you for my libido and yours, thank you for gratitude, thank you for honest mistakes,  thank you for chicken-fried steak, and once again thank you that I can have chicken-fried steak without having to live in Lubbock, A-men.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part D

Wherein we change all the regulations and re-write the rules and then hold a few meetings and air some dirty laundry and discover that we’ve all been angry and discontented all this time and that secretly we all knew it would never ever work anyway and then we reconvene to discuss the whole mess later, after the funding’s been approved and then we all go home to watch Indian movies, Bollywood taking us far away from all this. We all go home and dream of frog princes in Bombay, their handsome black-lined eyes, their promises, and when Pavlov calls us, we wake willingly.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part VI

I sit in the radio silence, there is static but in that moment I am meditative, calm, ecstatic, supraservient and then there is a moment, a moment unlike the others in which we watch the sea change from blue to green to black to gold. Fecundity, fidelity, fear, faith, the heirophant and the rod. It’s looking like a game of Texas hold ‘em from here. Play it close to the vest, watch their eyes and their hands and those little twitching places we’ve all got somewhere that gives away our secrets, for those who are looking.

**Take note: This is a completely improvisational, altogether unedited, 30 minutes timed writing in group. I offer no guarantees of quality or sense, it is just pen to paper, write it and let it go.

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.