In the bookstore at the Orthodox church

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
there will be school work to do because today I couldn't do that because today I interviewed for my jobs because they are my jobs and I want them back.

and then I went to see the bookstore in the Orthodox church and met the lady minding the shop, and she had slung her fur coat over the chair behind the counter and I bet she's owned it for decades and maybe her large rings were newer than that but maybe not, and she was wonderful, and tiny and she was ninety-four years old.

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
except today was not a creeping pace. No petty pace, this day. The lady in the bookstore is, she told me, a cancer survivor. She got it in her eighties, she said. And chemo was rough. Your hair falls out, you know. But this morning she got an appointment right away with the doctor - for something wrong with her leg, I think, and she was so glad. She told the person on the phone she was so glad she got to see him then. Because it gave her a reason to drive at that hour. And it was snowing. And it was so beautiful.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
or not. Out, out, or maybe we can live to be ninety-four and dress fit for immediate seating in a better place than dusty, and be so kind and practical and sweet. And little. She was so little. I didn't notice until she took my card and ran it through the machine and waited. What a tiny little person! What a good cut, her skirt was fashioned from.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
unless it doesn't. Sometimes life is brisk and quick and pays attention for a very long time and remembers our neighbor from the old house. Oh, yes. She remembered him. Vanikiotis is an old family name, and she remembers him very well.

And then is heard no more.
Or is.
Because she still remembers him.
And he was kind and she is kind and when her friends stop in to see how her appointment went this morning, she speaks in Greek. Or English. Or Greek. It doesn't matter.

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
or love. It might be full of love and it might be told by a woman born when the last century was young, and now she takes her daughter's phone calls on her cell phone, because she's fine, the doctor said. She's fine.

Signifying nothing.
Or maybe something.
Today, I see that it is really something and Macbeth was wrong. He never met the lady volunteering in the bookstore.
But I did.

Stay This Time

And if today I stay
not turn or shy
not try to get away from it

If today I stay
and look

If today I wonder not
why I should be afraid
or sad
Why should this happen to me?
God only wants me to be happy
believe the Secret
chant the affirmation
gather some good way
to crawl from this
escape

What if I observe
instead
and wonder what
not why

What is your name
Sadness?
No, I mean your proper name.
Are you called avoid
or guilt
or caught betwixt between
an expectation and a slap

Are tears good?

Bow down for weeping

There is a time for it.

Out

At the top of the stairs I reach
out.

My hand, flat on the painted wall.
He is not there, I say to myself
about the boy who used to live on the other side.
He is grown now. Moved.
Out.

I feel the years under my palm,
sliding along the wall as I start
down.
And she is not there, glancing across the hall.
And now he is not.
The door at the other end is shut
because he is not in.
He has gone
out.

Here is the hallway where I sat on the floor
the book on my knees
my back against the wall
and every room holding a listening child
in pajamas
at night.
Huck Finn, one time. Odd silence no reaction
until she burst out at last
"He's such a liar!"
Yes, he is. That boy's a liar. She figured the liar
out.

Games they got for birthdays and Christmases
are in the closet behind me
and Klutz books in that cabinet there.
I think we've lost a state from the USA puzzle.
Kentucky, I think. Kentucky fell
out.

I know - because I looked - those drawers
contain a lot of things, but mostly photos
and crayons, pencils, markers, erasers, paints and brushes
ways to make the pictures
and the words and keep the light
from going
out.

Each one all grown.
My house that once held Uncle Art and where
Aunt Nita died. In my room, I think. But only once
her work was done. Her brother Mel had already gone
out.

I know, H.D. I know. The wall do not fall
the body lives
the Palimpsest is written again and again
and in my wall
in this hall
the writers have gone
out.

I feel them
in the palm
of my hand.

Third Day Thoughts: That Thing I Do

I need to get this stuff written down.

Yarn fibers and hanks of thread.

Twisting maybe strands of belts or straps and
I cannot figure out what it is and
I know it is important
because it was given
to me
this past weekend.

I keep teasing the strands apart
running my fingers through it
like hair I'm trying to braid
behind my head.

Embroidery thread. First,
pull apart the strands.
Lay the threads against each other
so that their spun nature aligns

It is impossible to attend (be attentive, be in attendance) for a weekend of Testimony, Night, Woman at Point Zero, The Little School, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Death and the Maiden ... the palpable answering pain of my fellow students ... without being permanently changed. I was right. I'm back from The Village, and everything here is the same, but I am not the same. So everything's different now for me.

It's becoming a theme for the year.
2010: The Suffering of Others.
2010: The year my soldier came back from Afghanistan.
2010: The Year of Nazareth House. (Give if you can. Please. Click on the link and give if you love the people who love without condition of litmus tests. Color, creed, politics or past - none of it matters to these people. All they do is love.)
2010: The year I heard the pain of men whose women are destructive - several such men, concurrently and all in this year
2010: The Literature of Resistance




Pull apart the strands and feel
the places where it grabs
every tiny scratch or hangnail or rough
place on your fingers.

I hear you. I can feel you here
in the palm of my hand
and along the inner edges of my own touch
You are no longer

Softly faded into the neat and woven
threads of destiny and the history channel
is not pausing for a commercial
and I hear you now.



I find myself wondering if there is anything in the natural world that has its layers peeled back over and over, and yet neither dies nor hardens. Are cork trees like that, I wonder? Cinnamon, perhaps? I know why I was not peeled to this depth before now. I would have died in some way. I think the sounds of this sort of pain would have caused me to turn away in self-protective need ... and maybe that is what happened. Maybe we can stop our ears and block the sounds if we are not yet strong enough to hear them.

But now I've heard them. I cannot un-know, and I cannot un-hear. I got back off the island, left The Village again, I'm back at my flat in London, and I have no idea what to do about what I know and heard. How do I give this into the safe keeping of another?

I think this is becoming a "thing I do." A few weeks ago, my adult daughter called me from the army base, and asked, "What 're ya doin?" I was not yet fully back into the room in which I'd answered the phone -- I mean to say, I was still in the last clutches of my thoughts. And so, to give myself a few more seconds to become conscious again, I said, "Ruminating." She laughed and answered, "Yeah - because that is a thing - that you do." I suspect now that finding ways to help people hear is becoming a thing - that I do.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God
walking in the garden
in the cool of the day
and Adam and his wife hid themselves
from the Presence.

The knowledge of good and evil
the innocence of not hearing
and now it's gone
and there is nothing left to do but listen.

I heard Your voice
in the garden and I was afraid
because I was naked.
And I hid myself.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Word Search

Dear David Shields (1) has done the darn'dest thing
and made me look at words and how they are
arranged
at random but we know nothing
is random

About a word search.
And I never search a word.
I search words.
I search sentences.
I search phrases and authors and names and
ideas search
for meaning and a context.

Try "feeling" "feeling return" try
"waiting for the feeling to return."

I leaned into the wall, cradling my arm, waiting for the feeling to return, wondering if I could find my gun in the dark, wondering if I had time. ... (2)
And then it was all over and I was back home in Las Vegas, waiting for the feeling to return to my fingers. That's when I had an opportunity to reflect (3)
Exhausted, he rested a moment leaning against Prince waiting for the feeling to return to his legs. Everything was happening so fast. (4)

The feeling returns eventually.
I know the feeling returns because
I feel it.

I'm still waiting for the feeling to return and the rest of the toenail to fall off. I think she did it on purpose, too. (5) (but this one is about a goat, I think -- this is not a horror film)
our love had grown stronger into the distance of the wide sky sent up thankful for the day waiting for the feeling to return (6) (people love. They don't seem to be able to stop themselves.)
Squall said nothing, but exhaled, watching his breath dissolve into the air, and waiting for the feeling to return to his limbs. (7) (Squall a character. A final fantasy.)

Is there such a thing as the sense of words
I wonder
and I search.
I do a word search but I do not
search words.
I wonder when the feeling will return.

(Google searching made this poem. Credits are the following:
(1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7))

Afraid that this will happen

The author of this poem, Rachel Wetzsteon, died on Christmas Day of this past year. She has a new volume of poems being released soon, and I will buy it. (And I will notice that my collection of poetry is starting to grow, and I will wonder again at a young man who knew - decades ago - that I had a poet's soul, and I will be amazed that I am just now discovering this about myself.)

This is what I am beginning to worry about. This is what I am starting to do. If I don't start to pay attention - be more full of intention with my writing - I may one day ask the very pines to opine, hoping to command the Muse. And I know it doesn't work that way. Life does not work that way. (I wonder why she called it "MacDowell"?)

MacDowell
by Rachel Wetzsteon

For once I fought back,
answering Oh yes, someday
when a restless muse asserted
This golden age needs treatment on the page.
It was the strangest lesson—
all that ink to make me think
shadows were real, this silence
when one true heart so manifestly was.
Time passed. Themes amassed;
I scoffed at amber, basked in oxygen.
Now in this little cabin
where no sightings slake my cravings
and my pen gets back its need to conjure,
on the ingots I have stored, oh pine, opine.

Stephanie at the Library Plays Her Harp and Mimics Gertrude Stein

This is what my harp looks like. My husband made it for me from a kit - for my birthday. He signed the inside of it, and the date says 2004. By my next birthday this coming July, I should have been playing the harp for six years, then. But I learned a bit, slacked off a bit, put it down mostly, and now I can only remember a little bit of what I knew ... and I love this instrument, but I don't actually play it.

I mean, it's a hand made harp, right? It's gorgeous. It sounds lovely. The Great Husband has made me a bookcase, a platform for raising the washer and dryer off the floor for convenience, and a harp - other things too, of course, but those are the biggies. And the only things I use are the bookcase and the washer and dryer? What is wrong with me? Laziness. That's what. I just haven't been disciplined enough to keep up with it. But now it's caught up to me.

After dinner last night, the phone rang. A woman in our community has organized an after school program, and sometimes they get local musicians to bring in their instruments and talk about the instrument and how it works, and play a little. Somehow, this woman who once bought hay from us for her goats knew I have this harp. (How did she know?) And so she called. And we nailed down a date, despite the fact that I told her that any claim I might make that I can "play" the harp would be such an exaggeration that it would be a lie. "Can you play a scale?" she asked. "Well, yes. I can do that." "Well, that's good enough," she said. "We just want you to talk about the instrument and show us how it works."

Well, what can I say? The pull of a multi-age group of kids was too strong. I'd don another clown suit for the chance to work with those kids, and you know how I feel about clown suits. So I said yes. And we nailed down a date. (So now I have a few weeks to practice!) And I told her that I had to do that - nail down the date - because otherwise I'll get a call from the library, and since I'm a sub, I never know when that might happen. "Oh!" she said. "You're Stephanie at the library?"

I've been a lot of things in my life, but no one's ever called me Stephanie at the Library before. I think I can wear this one with pinache. Kinda like it, actually ... "Stephanie at the Library." It makes me want to write poetry - which I tried yesterday - for an assignment for Modern Lit - in the style of Gertrude Stein. Wanna see?

Torn Page From a Calendar
Is resting side to diagonal while for interest. Of passing to pass and not of waiting is liturgical of purple. If the whiting minder lilac knees breath breathing lilac breathing smoke. For passing comes. Square of under past cement.
To pass. Red of circles. Oh the square to pass red circles to cement. And breathing cut. Corner. Came and passing come. Windshield grit of passing comes to passing of the window. Of the curtains. Close the passing. And the torn. Settle passing.

Here's Stein reading Stein - with the bizarre visuals in this video, so you know where I was headed. This sort of thing is ... um ... an acquired taste, shall we say?

After Christmas

Two untouched bottles of cola and
the rum was barely breached and
the wrappers from the bits and pieces of
sweets
now pulled crackers and
their prizes
and paper crowns
refolded neatly - set at right angles to the books -
little pointed careful neatness in the mess.

And there was laughing.

I think I may have laughed myself.
But for all of these
and all the other sins I cannot now remember
I beg forgiveness.

The offspring of the Virgin's womb
the boy she bore to live, to love us all
and prove it by a death so brutal and inglorious
the fine exacted punishment for Love.

Last week we called it Christmas.
And I think I laughed.
I know the others did.
I know I cooked. We feasted and we even loved
the brussels sprouts.

The scattered bits and pieces and the dishes
sitting waiting to be cleared
restored to order
quietly
put away privily because I will not
make it public.
I ponder in my heart.

I think I laughed on Christmas.
I know I loved.
I wanted quiet, but the shepherds came.
Of course they did.
The whole of arching, reaching, dark and vaulted
sky was full of angels, and the startled shepherds
had to come.

I have read the story.
I know
what happens next. Here is a little space of time and
quiet so that
the baby grows until another angel brings
a message.
Run!

Gold and frankincense and myrrh and
terror as the blood of babies
drips from soldiers' swords and
Rachael weeps.

This is the One enormous Glory
as it labors and delivers.
This is the stuff of saints and angels.
The innocent and martyred babies, dying,
make their mothers
weep.

The Holy Family flies to refuge
in a place that is not home and do not know
that it will all be right
in the end
after the blood is shed and tears dried up.
They do not know.
They have not seen.
Not yet.