PRACTICE: Chinese New Year – 10min

It’s the Year of the Pig, I hear. Starting tomorrow. I think of pig, piggy, how I used to worry when I first started doing writing practice with this group, way back before we were bloggin’, that I was being too piggy. Taking up too much of the airwave.

Then I realized, Aw, they can always delete if they don’t want to read. Of course, I never delete. I used to delete when I wrote with a huge group; you have to. But with a small writing community, and all being writers whose writing draws me in, I never delete. Ever. And it never feels burdensome. It’s strange how on this eve of a new year, I know that writing has become an integral part of my life.

I’ve written for many years. Many, many years. I started my first journal when I was 12, I think. It was the year I got a tumor removed from my right knee. My sister, who was ten years older than me and doing student teaching in a small town, came home that summer with a book order for me that she’d gotten from Scholastic. I always remember the smell of a new book order, that paper binding odor, how there’s something fresh about it. And the shiny unbent, unbroken paperback book bindings. And the cool titles. My kids get book orders now in elementary school and it’s the same thing. Back then I got a Summer Diary, not a hard-backed one but a paperback, a mustard yellow cover with a drawing of a lock on it. Inside in the first few pages were stickers: A Joke, What I Read Today, My Secret, My Favorite Color, What I Learned Today, News, and so on. I would peel off a sticker and put it in the day’s entry. I had to always manufacture whatever thought or bit of information I wanted to go with the sticker. That part was my least favorite; my most favorite was just being able to write.

The Year of the Pig, and I feel abundant like a pig. Or does a pig feel abundant? I feel full and big and round of belly and heart. Pigs in the Chinese zodiac are said to be generous. I feel generous and grateful for others’ generosity. For writing that has taken hold in me. And me in it. I still have the little diary my sister gave me. After filling out about half of it, I got tired and stopped filling in the rest of the days of that summer. I guess after spending two weeks or so in bed post the surgery, during which I had little else to do but write, I lost interest. I don’t recall if I ever had another diary, at least not until I was 23. I did get one at the age of 23. I still have it. And since then, for more than two decades, I’ve written and written and written. Filled many diaries and journals and notebooks. And now computer screens.

I wonder what I would find if I went to a Chinese restaurant tonight. Would they all be full? I’m craving a potsticker.

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PRACTICE: Essay – 20min

I was making a second cup of Earl Gray tea, waiting for the water to boil. Thinking about my essay. How I feel stuck. How yesterday I thought it might help to go back to the compilation of Best American Essays from 2005. How that only served to make me feel like there’s no way in hell I can ever write an essay.

Something about those essays’ voice. The people who wrote those essays. I notice the voice is calm. I notice that right away. I flip to the essays I especially liked. Ted Kooser’s Small Rooms in Time. Melancholy, I wonder if one always gets melancholy for first wives and homes and places we had our children. I can’t imagine starting life over with a new spouse and thinking back to these homes. Anyway.

Then I flip over to the baseball guy, Roger Angell. How he starts out with a memory of peeing in the garden of a wealthy famous person, a baron or something. I flipped to the essays I didn’t read, just to see how they start. The ones about cooking. The one about a dog. The about David Sedaris’ boil.

They’re all so concrete. That’s the other thing about them. Their voice and their, what’s the word I’m looking for? The first paragraph immediately grounds you in reality. Is there a word for that?

Then I’m thrown into a tizzy. I’m thinking now of my essay. Do I have a voice?

Ese, pronounced just like Essay. Ese, dude. Ese is what the vatos say to each other, or used to when I was in high school. Oye, ese. It means you, hey you. Ese vato. You, vato. Hey you, vato. Orale. I like those words. I like that I know what they mean, how to use them. Orale ese, you sapo’d out.

I remember this guy Charlie who worked behind the desk of Fort Marcy rec center in Santa Fe. He wore thick, thick glasses, had reddish hair, one of those light-skinned vatos. He poured all his energy into his body.

Fitness. You could tell he wasn’t used to female attention. I realize now I gave my attentions to anyone, I didn’t discriminate on the basis of looks. What was I looking for? Friendship, I guess. I never slept with him or even made overtures to sleep with him. But I did glom on to him. I insisted on him riding with me on 20-mile or 40-mile bike rides.

I insisted that we both register for a running/walking race in La Tierra. He was the runner, I’d be the biker. Two-man race. He was so much fitter than me, he must have felt like he was training a novice.

We did eventually do the race together. It rained that day. We did poorly. I blew it on the bike. I still can see rain dripping from his bangs down his face. His glasses completely blurred as he stood there waiting for me. Like he was peering into fog, Where is she?

What made me think of him was how he was an artist and I was an artist. He once told me he wanted to do a show called Sapo Art. Do you know what sapo means, he asked me. Sure, I said, it’s like when you throw a basketball and it swooshes into the hoop without making even a sound. That’s sapo. You’re right, he said.

The Sapo Art show was going to be art that came easily. Graffiti art, art that you just sit down and spout out. Nothing you labor over, just easy art.

I went to Spain before we could do our Sapo Art show. It took me almost the whole year to finish the one drawing I really loved. It’s four small panels, each features an ogre that in hindsight looks like a prototype for Shrek. I wrote a poem to go with it: My Monster Eats Small Children.

I was the monster. I was so lost in Spain. I didn’t know what I was doing, just that I was there. Was I a writer? Was I an artist? Was I a drunk? I didn’t want to be who I was, that’s for sure.

I still think of that ogre drawing as Sapo Art, even if it took me a long time. It came easily, I just couldn’t bring myself to produce. I remember one time Almudena came up to my piso and asked what I was working on. I showed her. Dibujas de puta madre, mujer. “De puta madre” was one of those words that means exactly the opposite of its literal meaning, like “bad” when you want to say “good.” You draw like the mother whore, was the literal meaning.

Ese, dude, I really need to just let this essay come out of me without worrying what David Sedaris says about boils. I guess it’s becoming a little a bit clearer what I want to say. What experience it is I’m trying to recall without coming out and being literal about it. I wonder if I’m just scared that whoever it is I am is not the person I want to be.

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Do or Die – Stop Worrying What Others Think of Me, Part 2

I’ve been putting off this leg of the assignment. For one thing, which of my 27 items to write about? Some of those wishes are so deep, fostered and fermented for so many years, just saying them out loud brings tears to my eyes.

The bulto. I’ve dreamed about carving those wooden statues. I have a fantasy about my life if my father had been an artist, not an accountant. Who I’d be in my core. I’m sad that for this life I’ve been born into my vocation, my father’s vocation, my mother’s blind trust in doctors, my father’s lack of savvy and surplus of responsibility. Sad. Sad the way you can be when you miss the ideal mark. Not regretful, not depressed. Not ungrateful. Just sad. I could have had longer legs and a longer waist, more pronounced eyebrows, darker skin, thicker hair. Then I would have marveled at myself in the mirror, walked taller, literally, been happier. In my dreams.

Something concrete. Mom doesn’t care any longer what people think of her. She’s not at the end of the journey. I imagine she cares plenty, yet her plenty is a thimbleful compared to another person’s. And you know, I don’t even want to write about this. Not the hum of the loud refrigerator or the sound of water moving from the water heater in the entryway closet to the far bathroom. Not the clothes tumbling in the stacked dryer, not the tile under my left foot too hot. Not my gratefulness for socks to keep my skin from burning. Not my chagrin for having worn the same pair four days out of four days this week. I’m sock poor, wine glass poor, coffee mug poor, house poor.

When will I realize my dreams? I give myself to my 50th birthday to have my house done, walls painted. And what? Another ten years for the compound? Isn’t this antithesis to the direction most people move as they get older? Don’t they divest? Buy condos. A condo. Travel. Get light?

And me and my dreams. Some are silly, and that’s OK. My affirmation. What does it ultimately matter whether I make all or one? I will get to the Lightning Field in Quemado next year, for my birthday. Jim’s present to me. I will eventually stop caring about how I look. I’m letting the gray go wild, like dandelions in grass. They’re too many to pick and I’m tired of poisoning the earth to get rid of them. I will let my teeth yellow a few more shades but then I will employ strips to bleach them. I’ll lose those five pounds, gain them back, lose them, gain them. Each time I gain it will be one pound more than I lost. The net effect will be gradual weight gain. I will let my face go, stop washing it every night. NOT! Won’t let my teeth go unbrushed any night, although I will give up flossing except once a week. (Is this what it means to stop caring about how you look? I don’t think so.)

By the time I’m dead I will be tired of friends who get torqued because I say what’s on my mind. Although I’m self-aware enough to know I shouldn’t judge friends. A spouse or partner is simply a friend with whom you eventually learn not to get too bent out of shape with when he tells you something you’d rather not hear. Friends expect to be above that kind of reproach. Why, I don’t know. I’d like to make a friend who doesn’t freak out on my actions. I’m human. So are you and you and you and you and you. What’s the point in seeking ideals in every facet of life?

And then again, if we don’t seek some ideals–how to be in the moment, how not to waste this precious life–then what?

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Shattered: Broken Dreams, Broken Hearts, Broken Bones

Dart of a scissor-tail kite, splash of cracked glass, cutting edge of wind-wisped Superior, tear of corduroy feathers, rusty brown
orange red

blue
sky accents.

Ripping the stems from their moorings. I packed boxes of old paints and watercolor pencils. I packed slippery porcelain paint mixers. I packed old wax 45’s and ancient letters from my grandmother.

I packed up all those old broken dreams.

Snaking through the facets of a cracked mirror, my reflection haunts me. There is a bright fear of having to choose – me in the mirror – pathology. The name escapes. A holding pattern, a wrinkle in time.

Basting a turkey,
the gravy in a molded Ball jar.

Bell Jar.

Sylvia, my hands smell like Clementines
and gently pull the skin out from under

California labels, “Supersweet” and “EZ Peel.”

I want to frost your lemons with icing sweet spatter. Fruitinize your phobia. Instead I keep slow walking toward home, along brambled beaches and tiered satisfaction – a hole in a tree that cracked off long ago fell into the lake.

Shatter-thawed ice patterns
swirl into river maps.

You stand on a booted heel,
I boost your curved heartshaped butt
up the rough ridged bark.

Woot!

Cables and wires and antennae. How is it people can’t seem to connect? Frozen splashes of $10 water bottles with ice crystal patterns. The painting, lifted mariposas in the upper left corner. You strummed your guitar, sans makeup.

All down to zero here. Hollow bone.

It was the spectacles that spun out,
that stood out, when I told you her name.

Then we were in Perkins and that song came on, “You Said”
“Hey, isn’t that….”  I blurted out, standing still in the green isle after
fried shrimp bacon cheeseburgers & mashed potatoes.

I’m not ashamed to say
I eat my favorite foods,
sometimes in combination.

Wretched memories. Why can’t I let go? The frozen gravy spread eagle on the plastic tarp. I nearly tripped and fell over myself. Fell off the tricycle in the carport and slit my hand. The Brown Creeper.

I had dreams wrapped up in that corduroy shirt. Cracked, broken, gone the way of the Firefly. A measly short life that I love to write about.

Fire of any kind lights the world.

The insects, I’d collect them in jars just like you. I’d exclaim gleefully in that Ya’ll Georgia accent and study the shape of their wings in bed (surprise – squeals of glee sound the same in Minnesota).

In Taos in December there was a fat-bodied spider that loved to climb out of the flowery wash basin when I was brushing my teeth or spiking my hair. I let her be. She wasn’t bothering me. Spiders eat flies. And spin yarny webs of sticky safety.

Webs. Connection.

The moon stood still over the shower stall. I stared up, water droplets navigating peacefully between each hair on my arm. Doing what water drops do. My legs, let’s not talk about them.

I stopped shaving in September.
You wouldn’t believe

the length.
The softness.
Like Kiev’s raven fur.

There was that slice to the finger, a cat’s cradle claw. I yelped in pain like a kicked puppy. Was it the Scooby or Pooh bandaide that saved me? Or the Vitamin E you carefully rubbed along the torn punctured skin.

There is a flap where the slit comes together.
And I wear a healing band –
green yellow orange leopard cloth
over the wound.

A pet in the morning.

It’s glassy on the deck. I can’t stand without grasping the rail. Purple lunch pail in tow. And the Adidas black sling pack. The December dark morning hovering at 35 degrees – feels like late September.

Did you ever look closely at O’Keeffe’s painted blacks? They contain 700 colors of chocolate coffee bean brown. I stood close, next to ribbons of oil. Silent. Watching.

Watercolor nudes.
Muggy. And saturating my senses.

The car starts right up. Even though the doors crack with icy rain when I open them. Rubber stuck to metal. Rrrrriiiiippppp.

Splayed out is my anger. I lost it somewhere. I foster compassion. And hold my head high. You left me a million times. And this time for good. That tattoo, the Chinese character? I missed it in the juices. I find Home in a Valley of Gold.

It’s so quiet, my solitude quakes.

I misunderstood. I may not be cut out for making money. I hold myself back, learn to boost myself up. A scarecrow in a golden pond.

Mainstream I am not. Airstream. Chuckle.
Yes. Airstream.

You said you wanted a shiny RV. To travel the world, tootle along, you say, and diddle around. I think of
Milton, blind as a bat, shunned by his Universe, shattered, broken, writing his best work ever in the twilight of his life.

Humanity’s fall from grace.
Who knew it was in him?

Political hack they yelled.
He showed them.

I want to say I will never be broken again. But every time I sit, some pain comes up. Rising, I skim off the top. The insecurity of that old ripped shirt. I moved boxes and boxes, frayed edges unraveling, covering my treasures. And I remembered how thin and trim I used to be.

How naive.

One cold fall day we cut the wing off a Great Gray owl. Roadkill. It’s worth being buried. Then the talons – crunch. Stolen moments in the freezer, years go by. How could I forget her? Broken, headbanged raptor. I’ve felt your pain.

When I moved from Ulysses after 14 years there was only one thing left in the abandoned 5 rooms – a dim gray bag of frozen body parts. Lying in the dark. I wanted to photograph the sifting light through the tertiary bands.

I wanted to set it up
all the world’s a stage
you would have looked beautiful.

But you chose to disappear. Poof, just like that. And leave me fractured, disjointed that last day I closed the door, turned out the light, wept at the happy ending. Closet boxes of memories. And fierce wet talons vanquished into thin air. Vanquished?

The mask of a thousand ages fell upon my wrinkled face.
I wasn’t there to receive it.

I flew off to Taos.
And wondered what I was doing.

Climbing out from under Masonic clouds
or tripping over a raised crack in the sidewalk –
“I hope I’ve made it right,” you said, shaking my hand.
I smiled & shook back.

the floor boards don’t creak anymore
they are bleached blond and hard as a rock
shake a tail feather. break a leg.

Home.

What is it?
Where is it?
Why can’t I find it?

Because there’s no where to look
It’s all here. Inside.

here

inside

the spaces between

broken dreams
broken hearts
broken bones

the smell of Clementines oozing off of my skin
the soaking rain in December
the hard freeze in October

swimming in the Rio Grande in August
which face am I?

the manic joy of falling in love
the printed word on the muted white page

what did Dogen say?
when you walk in the mist
you get wet

not original
but genuine

pulpy & alive

shatter
wet pieces
together again

melt
white heart
puffy lips

money
it’s not worth
fighting over

under, around
or through

let go
drip with satisfaction
let the good stuff in

break structure
build strong bones
mend broken hearts

shatter your dreams
the sky’s big enough to hold
the juicy fractured pieces

and you.

if not,
then silence. 

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

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