PRACTICE — Ghosts — 15min

Dark when I get up, dark when I drive home. Ghosts like this time of year. They can wander freely throughout the Universe, come and go, visit whoever they please. I haven’t seen any real ghosts in a long, long time. Yet I lay awake this morning from 4am to 6am, the time I got up to write this practice. I can’t help but think of Ada my grandmother when I think of ghosts. The way she came to see me in Minnesota after she died, made the trip all the way from Tennessee. I was a young woman the last time I saw her alive. She came to me in a ghost-like dream, told me she was alright, that she loved me, and said good-bye. It was the day after that I called Mom to see if she had died. I regretted not seeing her in person for so long; she let me know it was okay. I could feel at peace.

Leslea was more playful, the way she pulled at my toe and knocked the writing book off the shelf. It was around the time I was deeply immersed in my study with Natalie, debating whether to quit my day job for writing, haunted by the ghosts of what-if’s. Looking back, maybe I should have kept my day job. At least if I had wanted a secure financial future. But, then again, looking at the recession of the last few years, maybe it didn’t matter. I was happier leaving. And have made great strides in feeling secure as a writer, in setting up practices that sustain me, a community that holds me. That’s half the reason we started red Ravine.

I watch shows about the paranormal because they fascinate me. I’m fascinated because I’m curious about what happens after we die. I do believe that some souls are trapped between worlds. They wander and attach themselves to places where they lived in their physical lives. I also believe that most of us move on. To do different things in the next spiritual life. Maybe not all lives are spiritual. I happen to believe the work I do here now takes me to the next phase of whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. This is all vague. Because it’s a Writing Practice and it’s the stream of my mind. It’s also vague because the afterlife is vague. No one really knows what happens after you die.

What if the afterlife is only what you believe it to be? That would make it different for each person. Some don’t believe in life after death at all. The physical death is the end. If I believed that, I would lose hope. That people can improve themselves and go on to something better. But back to Ghosts. I don’t summon them up, play the Ouija Board anymore. I don’t look for ghosts or ask them to appear. I don’t provoke or ask for signs. I might fall over if I saw a ghost of a person I didn’t know. Somehow, it doesn’t scare me to get visits from those I know who have passed to the other side. I count it as one of the many blessings of being in a body.

I want to be comfortable with my own death. But sometimes I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot this year because my brother has been very sick. His liver has been failing for some time. I was prepared for the worst. Then, miraculously, the week after I got back from my last writing retreat on Lake Michigan, I got a text from him that they had a liver. He was on his way to Philadelphia. Last night we IM’d over Facebook as if nothing had happened. Except the miracle that is his life. He is energetic and full of energy. The 45 staples come out on Tuesday, the day I arrive. The story could have ended differently. In this case, the ghosts are Wonder, Joy, fragments of Disbelief in how a life could move so quickly from Death’s door.

Oh, and Death. I’m not so sure about the sickle and scythe thing. It’s too daunting. Maybe you should lighten up your wardrobe. It’s scary to the living. Or maybe you already have and we all don’t know how to change your ghost of an image. Whatever you are, I don’t want to be afraid. Shadow and Light, they all play in the same forest of autumn leaves.

-Related to Topic post: Ghost Hunting — Tips & Tools Of The Trade

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PRACTICE: Ghosts – 15min

I love the idea of being able to see ghosts. I wish I could, I mean, really see ghosts. Like the main character from that TV series “The Ghost Whisperer.” I like how she’s always calm, even after the most jolting vision. Blood, vomiting ghosts, ghosts who have half their brains falling out of their heads. None of it rankles her.

Me, I’d have my eyes shut most of the time. And yet, I still want to see ghosts. The closest I get is seeing a flash of something out of the corner of my eye. Or I feel something, a prickle of fear, a chill running past me.

Ever since high school I’ve been fascinated by ghosts and people who can see them. Patrick, for instance. He told us stories about a recurring dream he had about his grandmother dying. She did die, in the house, and most of what he dreamed was exactly how she died. His parents had set up a room for her in the house, and they had a nurse and maybe another attendant taking care of her. When she died, he happened to walk by her room and notice that his parents and the attendants were all fussing about her. He was a boy, maybe 8 or 9, maybe 10, but young enough that when someone noticed that he had stopped in the doorway and was looking in on the scene, one of them, maybe his mother, rushed to him and scooped him away.

But in the dream, when they notice that he’s standing at the door to the room watching all the chaos, instead of sweeping him out the room they all walk calmly to one side of his grandmother’s bed. His grandmother is dead but she slowly sits up, opens her eyes then turns toward Patrick. At that point in his dream he wakes up.

I remember him saying that whenever he woke up from this dream he smelled his grandmother’s powder, that kind of old-lady stuff that comes in a round container. Or he woke to the sound of her cane tap-tapping on the brick floors down the hallway.

We always wanted to hear more, and I remember he told us once that one day he went crazy trying to find the source of the powder smell. He dug through his grandmother’s old closet and under boxes and boxes of clothing and shoes and hats, until there he found it, one pink container with her powder. He told us about sitting in the bathtub once and having the water go completely cold, then the smell of old-lady powder.

He told us these stories after we’d graduated and would hang out together at night, already at the university yet not ready to let go of the friendships we’d had that defined who we were. I had just moved into a studio apartment that was haunted. All sorts of freaky things happened to me the short time I was there. A phone call in the middle of the night, a child’s voice on the other end asking for his mother. It sounded like a party in the background. The child wouldn’t answer me when I asked, Where are you? What’s your name?

And black dogs out the front door, this was right after the movie “The Omen” had come out. Black dogs were bad signs, and one afternoon, a rare cloudy New Mexico day I opened the door and there were two, the same exact kind from the movie. But the kicker was one night when my pillow rolled off the bed and onto the floor heater. I woke up choking, the room full of thick smoke.

When Patrick came the next morning to see if he felt ghosts at my place, he walked in and gasped as if he’d been punched in the chest. He looked at me and said, You’re getting out of here. He waited by the doorway while I packed a bag with enough stuff to last me a few nights. That next week we moved me out, but we only went to the house during the day. I never went back alone.

I still remember sitting up with Patrick, and my best friend Denise. I think I might have moved into an apartment with my friend Ellen. It was one of those nights when we all sat on my bed, all of us friends, and made Patrick tell us one scary story after another. We made ourselves so scared that no one left my place that night. We all slept on the bed like a litter of pups.



-Related to post Ghost Hunting — Tips & Tools Of The Trade

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Fuchsia High Tops

By dzvayehi

I didn’t have to even think about this. My favorite shoes are my fuchsia high tops, which I bought at Ross’s a few months ago. In fact, it already makes me sad to know that some day these shoes will be a thing of the past, the red suede is already getting worn out and faded in places, especially around the toes. That’s because I wear them all the time, even in the rain and snow and mud. And then there was the time I picked up a bottle of lotion in Big Lots and the top fell off and the stuff spilled all over the left shoe. I was so upset I ran to the bathroom to try and blot the stuff off with scratchy paper towels. I’d only had them two weeks, and it felt kind of like that first accident in your brand new car. I even stopped to talk to the cashier, threatening to sue the store if the stain didn’t go away when they were dry. I remember how she leaned over the counter with a puzzled look on her face, looking at my fuchsia high tops.

But I want to tell you more about why I love them. First of all, they’re that bright playful color, and the day I saw them, they screamed at me, “here! We’re over here!” and I put them in the little top part of the shopping cart and wheeled all over the store with them. I kept looking over my shoulder too, certain that someone else would probably covet them and that I had snatched the last pair. But then I saw another pair, and had a moment of doubt. Maybe they weren’t so special after all I began to think. But then I looked at them again fondly and just knew I had to have them, especially since they were just 10 bucks. Then there’s the arches too, soft and cushy and lots of support. And the way they fasten – laces on the bottom, and two velcro straps running across the tops. The really good part about this is that I can slip them on and off without unlacing them and I don’t have to smash down the heels.

Which brings to mind mules. I was over fifty before I discovered mules – those dorky looking sneakers that have no heels. But come to think of it, I guess they are not heels are they? What I mean is the back part of the shoe that rides up over the heel. High Heel Sneakers, I think that’s my favorite shoe song. But why hasn’t anyone written a song about platform sneakers? You know the kind I mean – the ones that have a two or three inch platform running the entire length of the shoe. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a pair of high heel sneakers – do such things exist? But what I really want to know, is what do you call that back part of the shoe, if it isn’t the heel. And now I’m thinking of all the opportunities I had to ask this question in fancy shoe stores I used to shop at and in dry cleaning places that do shoe repair. But I never asked, never even thought to ask, assuming as I did then that I knew all there was to know about shoes.

I guess I’ve always liked colorful shoes, bright things on my feet that make me feel like dancing though I haven’t danced in many years, and don’t really like to dance except with my dogs. Just last summer I bought a pair of cyan platform thongs. They made me about three inches taller (this is important) and were such an electric shade of turquoise that I felt neon when I wore them, not to mention, tall. I think I picked those up at TJ Maxx for $2. But just when they were starting to get comfortable, I left them in the living room one day and when I got home, found that one of the dogs had chewed the heel on the right one. He took off about a half inch or so, and when I wore them to the grocery store that night I found I was limping.

But my favorite shoes of all times were the deep purple/royal blue/wine red two-inch heels I spent $75 on in 1989. I’d never spent that much money on shoes before, but these had me hypnotized, and they were that soft creamy leather that you love to touch. I used to take them any time I traveled, in case I had to get dressed up for something, and for some reason I even took them home with me when my mother died. It was the middle of February, light slushy snow on the ground in the cemetary, and I left them in the closet that day. Following the service, our house would be filled with visitors, and my brother had locked all of his dogs, including his new puppy, in my bedroom to keep them from messing up the house.

When we got back from the graveyard I went down the hall and to my room to change into the black kaftan I wore each day of shiva that week. And as I went to the closet to find a pair of slippers to replace my wet boots, I saw the damage. Just one shoe, the heel mangled to where the white plastic showed through, like the shiny bone of a piece of raw chicken. The other shoe was perfectly intact, and I felt like everything, my mother, my shoes, my life, was slipping through my hands. And I felt stupid and guilty too, for grieving over a pair of shoes. The puppy wriggled at my feet and wagged her tail but I was still pissed. I took the chewed up shoe to three shoe repair places, but each man shook his head sadly, like he was giving a prognosis for terminal cancer, “nothing to be done,” they said. I think that might have been the last time I spent more than $40 on a pair of shoes.

Fuchsia High Tops, photo © 2008 by dzvayehi. All rights reserved.

About writing, Diane says:  They say we create our own realities. What scares me most about writing is I see myself creating my own past. I have been working on a memoir on and off for about six years now, more off than on. It began when I told my brother, as he was dying, that I would publish his paintings and poetry. It seemed so simple a thing to do at the time. But then, when I began to think seriously about it, I felt that I would also have to write something about who he was. And so I began my writing journey, taking workshops and joining writers’ groups, telling people I was working on a memoir about my brother.

Then people began asking if I was writing about my brother or myself, and soon, I began to ask myself the same question. I also began to realize that as much as we may love someone and think we know them, they are still an unfathomable mystery in the end. And with each step further down that path, I found there was a story in me that wanted telling too.

The more I write the less certain I am about what I remember, and sometimes I am left wondering who was living those lives I thought I had witnessed. I’ve taken workshops that talk about theme and character development and story arc and plot, and I have looked for these elements in my story and am still looking. As my own story unfolds, through writing and therapy, I am often surprised and humbled by what I learn. Most of all, I am grateful for the actual gift my brother gave me – the path of writing. Even if I never complete either story, or never publish, writing has brought so much into my life, especially the other writers I have met, in workshops, groups, and in books.

-related to Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKIN’

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Forget Vonnegut – Jane Kenyon Lives On

In the maelstrom of energy flooding paper, press, and print about the sudden death of Kurt Vonnegut, I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on about his life. At 3 a.m. last night, I was running around the Internet linking to articles, gobbling up details of Vonnegut’s death, birth, slow literary beginnings, and 70’s cult following.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

Ignoring the wailing Irish banshee, a screaming voice inside my head snapped, “Stop it! ! Go to bed! You haven’t read a Vonnegut book in years.”

“Okay, okay, I’m going,” I said.

Rising from my prone position on the couch, I grabbed the laptop precariously perched on my knees to keep it from crashing to the floor. And that’s when it hit me – I’d fallen prey to my own crazy Kantian schema about death, dying, and immortality.

In some odd twist of synchronicity, I wrote a post last Monday on The Uses of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries? Curious about the death of Molly Malone Cook, I found a long, engaging obituary in the Independent. It was overflowing with history and details of her life I didn’t know, and probably never would have cared about if she hadn’t died.

Isn’t it strange? We are drawn to write more about a person after they die, than we ever would have while they were alive. It’s part of the human condition. But amid all the writers, ex-hippies, beatniks, and bohemians bantering a slow death march around Vonnegut, I find myself wanting to say, “Enough already.”

Forget Vonnegut. Jane Kenyon lives on.

I don’t want to sound irreverent. I loved Vonnegut and read him voraciously (was it Stephen King that said adverbs are killers?) in my early college years. In 1972, Slaughterhouse-Five was the top film in Friday night screenings at McIntire Hall. We were still doing sit-ins for peace, streaking across campus, and protesting the Vietnam War (I wonder what’s changed?)

But back to living and dying.

Remember that back and forth on red Ravine last February about Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Valentine & Donald Hall? It inspired us to put one of Jane Kenyon’s books, Otherwise, on our list of Hungry to be Read.

Last night I went over to St. Paul with a writer friend to see Galway Kinnell and one of his protégés, Josephine Dickinson, read their poetry. (I’ll write more about these moving poets in another post.) It was one of the most inspirational nights I’ve had in months.

Galway Kinnell read a poem from his new book Strong Is Your Hold, which I immediately snapped up and brought home with me. The poem is a tribute to Jane Kenyon. You could have heard a pin drop.

If you don’t get out and listen to other living, breathing writers read their work, you’re missing out on one of the greatest pleasures of writing – listening. As evidenced by the explosion of blog world, there are 11 trillion writers out there, all wanting their voices to be heard. I hold to my strong belief that there is room for all of us. If we are generous of spirit and support other writers, we’ll be supported, too.

I teared up last night when I listened to Galway Kinnell read his poem for Jane Kenyon (1947-1995). He went to that dark place writers go, that place where angels fear to tread.

I imagined Kenyon, immortal through his words, smiling down on the silent, rapt faces that dotted the crimson velvet rows and stacked ornate balconies of the Fitzgerald Theatre. I bet she was pleased.

Losing a great writer who influenced our lives, perhaps even our livelihood, leaves a big hole. When Galway Kinnell read How Could She Not, I knew that writing about the death of Kurt Vonnegut is our way of grieving.

We know we’ll never forget Vonnegut. Because Jane Kenyon lives on.

Friday, April 13th, 2007

                           

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How Could She Not

In Memory of Jane Kenyon, 1947-1995

The air glitters. Overfull clouds
slide across the sky. A short shower,
its parallel diagonals visible
against the firs, douses and then
refreshes the crocuses. We knew
it might happen one day this week.
Out the open door, east of us, stand
the mountains of New Hampshire.
There, too, the sun is bright,
and heaped cumuli make their shadowy
ways along the horizon. When we learn
that she died this morning, we wish
we could think: how could it not
have been today? In another room,
Kiri Te Kanawa is singing
Mozart’s Laudate Dominum
from far in the past, her voice
barely there over the swishing of scythes,
and rattlings of horse-pulled
mowing machines dragging
their cutter bar’s little reciprocating
triangles through the timothy.

This morning did she wake
in the dark, almost used up
by her year of pain? By first light
did she glimpse the world
as she had loved it, and see
that if she died now, she would
be leaving him in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did her hold loosen a little?

Having these last days spoken
her whole heart to him, who spoke
his whole heart to her, might she not
have felt that in the silence to come
he would not feel any word
was missing? When her room filled
with daylight, how could she not
have slipped under a spell, with him
next to her, his arms around her, as they
had been, it may then have seemed,
all her life? How could she not
press her cheek to his cheek,
which presses itself to hers
from now on? How could she not
rise and go, with sunlight at the window,
and the drone, fading, deepening, hard to say,
of a single-engine plane in the distance,
coming for her, that no one else hears?

  -from Strong Is Your Hold, Poems, by Galway Kinnell, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006

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Reading The Obits

Reading The Obits, pen and ink on graph paper, doodle © 2007-2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

Inspired by this post:  The Uses Of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries?

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The Uses of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries?

I’m thinking about poetry.  Our topic this week is to write a poem for Slam-o-rama.

Poetry came easy to me last year. It poured out of me. I’m not saying it was good. Just that it poured. Like Morton salt. It seems tougher to write now. I have to slow down to write poetry.

I am going to hear Mary Oliver read her poetry in May. Her partner of over 40 years, Molly Malone Cook, died in 2005. Thirst is dedicated to Cook. The pages are full of sorrow, quiet longing, and a search for faith.

I wanted to know more about Molly Malone Cook, so I looked up her obituary. What is it about obituaries?

There is a certain fascination with death. It’s the 2nd thing we all have in common, regardless of race, religion, or creed. (Why did those words come out of my mouth? And what in the world is creed?)

The first is that we are born. And we shall die. When our time will come, we do not know.

The Independent’s obituary was illuminating. I found Malone Cook’s life to be even more fascinating than Mary Oliver’s. She’s the Oliver fire to Stein’s Toklas. I’m ashamed to admit, I had no idea Molly Malone Cook was a photographer with Southern roots who once photographed Eleanor Roosevelt:

Cook continued to work as a professional photographer, making portraits of such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, Walker Evans, Robert Motherwell and Adlai Stevenson, but her career was cut short by the breathing problems which were later to curtail her life: her lungs were unable to cope with the chemicals of the darkroom.

Meanwhile, her relationship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry – author of To Be Young, Gifted and Black and A Raisin in the Sun, the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway (in 1959) – ended with Hansberry’s early death from cancer, aged 34, in 1965.

Cook had met Mary Oliver in 1958, at the former home of the poet Edna St Vincent Millay in upstate New York – the two women having come to visit Millay’s sister Norma. Six years later Cook and Oliver moved into a Provincetown boathouse owned by one of the port’s Portuguese families, the Seguras.

They travelled together on Oliver’s trips to give readings or classes, and spent several years visiting Virginia in search of Cook’s Southern roots – she was delighted to discover that her ancestry stretched back to Judith Jefferson, aunt of President Thomas Jefferson.

– from the Independent Obituary, Molly Malone Cook, by Philip Hoare, September 7th, 2005

That’s why we read obituaries. I wonder what mine will say? And who the writer will be.

                               

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep, I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

 –Mary Oliver from Thirst, Poems by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press, 2006, copyright Mary Oliver

-posted on red Ravine, Monday, April 9th, 2007

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RE: Valentine & Donald Hall

Gassho. I am so appreciative of deep listening. Thanks for your comments on Valentine.

By the way, I love the Poets.org website. I didn’t know they broke writers and workshops down by state. Good to know.

I did stumble on an interview on the same website with Donald Hall, Flying Revision’s Flag . Insightful – about the art of revision. Can be applied to all forms of writing.

Hall seems to be a serious revisionist. He said when he was twenty-five a poem took six months or a year to revise. Now, it takes two years to five. I find revising a lot about letting go. What to keep. What to drop. I’m starting to be able to feel in my body when something isn’t right. What I do from there, well, that’s the challenge.

Here’s another interview, Donald Hall, in conversation with Judith Moore, I found with Hall from 1998, four years after his wife, Jane Kenyon, died of leukemia. As writers we have to hold everything – eventually, we write it down.

Life at Eagle Pond: the Poetry of Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall

Friday, February 16th, 2007

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