I've been reading e.e. cummings; does it show?

How to read poetry



Aloud while walking

/p/
/t/
/k/
Trip
on the tip
of the tongue
to snap underfoot

let them think me pretentious or mad
to read
aloud while walking

Family Portrait

Branches

I want to live to be 111, since on 01/01/01 I’ll be eleventy-one. I want to die full of grace, old and full of years. I want my husband to be there with me to the end; being part of me as much as my bones. I want people to sing hymns of praise to God at my funeral and to have held my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and have helped to raise them up to love God and sing to Him and serve Him and abide in Him. I want to be a thick, strong branch in a tree rooted in God and watered with life, blessed with a boring testimony. I want to surrender my legacy to my creator. I can’t think of anything more I have to give. I feel the potential in my belly for influence spanning on through history, my progeny infiltrating the Earth, each claiming some small corner for Christ.

Likewise, I look down and see the branches that support me – in places clean, smooth bark forking into innumerable branches, elsewhere sadly withered, ripe for the axe. and elsewhere still, a glorious patchwork of grafted branches bearing fruit and branching out still further until our canopy forms a banner proclaiming Christ and His truth and His love, His mercy and grace, inviting, beckoning, and soothing the scorched and battle-scarred Earth with His healing shade.

I was writing about sin and then suddenly I was writing about laundry.

I feel the potential deep my atrophied heart for terrifying violence and cruelty; for apathy and rebellion, for broken windows and hurled insults, lashing out of my self-built cage of bitterness and secret grudges, for a wretched gnawing on bones, crouched in a dark corner. I have no trouble believing that I have a sin nature, that I got this stain when I was being woven and not from another red sock in the laundry. I have a harder time believing that I have been bleached in blood, because I keep acting like a stained and soiled sock and not a renewed, white one. I can't see myself in the mirror through this pigment of deceit that gets in my eyes. I am made new. I am soaked, scrubbed, wrung out and given a place on the clothesline of saints, a great cloud of witnesses, blood-bleached and billowing in the breeze.

not special.

Slip a thought into my mind and it will circle the drain, tighter and faster, until it falls into the void of familiar territory. I try to write something new, but always I find I am just rewriting and expounding the same thought, adding to its gravitational pull. And so I continue to whine about how hard it is to be me.

I know that I am not special. Everyone has troubles, usually more troublesome than mine. Everyone feels alone and unloved at times. Everyone needs to be rescued from the inevitable and inescapable maelstrom of self. Everyone is at God's mercy. I am not the only one who lives on the periphery of others' lives, in some obscure corner of the unfathomably complex Venn diagram of social spheres. My inadequacies do not make me special.

Fortunately my days are beginning to fill up again, keeping me from wallowing and ultimately drowning in the unstructured hours, sucked down into the briny darkness of self-discovery. I can take shape only when I am not looking.

Musical Stylings

So I guess I'm kind of in a band now. In December I met my pal Nathan, himself a friend of Kerry, while recording some cello on a song she'd written. A couple weeks ago he found himself in need of a cellist when a friend of his, Ria, brilliant singer and songwriter, asked him to join her playing some sort of festival gig in Yakima. So I became the second tier of friends-of-friends on this little trek. When we arrived, we met up with Roger (I don't know whose friend he was. Guess he's my friend now) and, being something of a musically-inclined fellow, agreed to join up with the rest of us and learn the djembe and mandolin for a few of the songs. I heard the songs for the first time Wednesday, and Friday saw me loading up the old cello into Nathan's little Geo for a journey, both topographical and musical, having recorded what amounted to a demo for most of the songs we would be playing, which in turn featured a whole mess of other friends-of-friends with various instruments in tow mixed expertly, albeit quickly, by Nathan. The poor kid can't have slept much.

In any event, this is all a thinly veiled plug for our free album, remixed in the week or two following the trip. You can get it here.

Morning

Most of these summer mornings, for me, pass in an overblanketed blur, in those unfailingly strange dreams, interrupted by the moments of clarity brought on by the snooze button's lease expiring again or the sun's encroachment, advancing, bright legions marching over the kicked-off covers. And so I retreat, back underground. Eight, nine, ten, the hours pass in five-minute increments. Eventually I slither forth, shedding my skin and emerging, bleary-eyed, pink, and often late for the day's docket.

But.

Twice now I have set the alarm for the previously unthinkable hour of half-past six. And to my surprise, I found my eyes opening clear, free of the haze of sleep. I descended from my tall mattress, feet first, sitting becoming standing through a simple, effortless transfer of weight. And just like that, the day began.

The air shines crisp, clear and golden, striped with sunbeams. It tastes of cool water now, tinged with the promise of warmth later in the day. The light is almost liquid, and in it the world is softly bathed.

Bacon sizzles. Toast, coffee, clothes, shower. Amazing how necessity drapes itself in elegance when there is no rush, when the day stretches out ahead of me like miles of open road, potential adventures round every sloping curve.

And so I give in. I will be a morning person.

This Desolate Summer

These stretched-out hours hang long and loose around the middle. Summer is a particularly desolate time to be alone, hands empty rather than holding his. I dream of lying in the grass next to him, together forming a layer in this cake of earth and grass and warm air, deciduous canopy and blue sky. Summer alone without anyone to casually brush with your fingers as move past him in a small room, flush with invading sunlight. A light touch, as if to say, oh, I'm just here behind you, don't step back or you'll trip and we'll find ourself falling to the floor, laughing and then I'll kiss your cheek, rough with the day's new growth, there sitting on the floor. Instead my fingers pop; cracking and shriveling I try to rehydrate them as I bite the white from my nails. The air is perfumed with blackberry and hot pitch sweating from the overdressed firs. The sun laps at my protruding bare arms. Inevitably, though, I find myself inside, hiding from summer and its inherent romance. I crave someone on whose shoulder I can lean as we sit in the living outdoor silence, books propped up on knees and steadied by the hands that are not occupied in embracing one another. I need someone who will kiss me in the long dusk as the air slowly cools. I want to roll down the windows and fuss with the radio as he drives us off on grand adventures. I earnestly hope I am not one of those Pauline people whom God has set aside for a lifetime of singleness, but I am afraid. I am afraid that this man will never find me, cloistered away here hiding from confronting my friendlessness.

I once began a story in the fairy-tale tradition, wherein a princess, having decided that there was none in the land worthy of her affections, locked herself in a tower away from the world. Eventually, however, she grew lonely and earnestly desired to be rescued from her self-imprisonment, and so staged her own kidnapping by oni (my childhood was rather culturally confused, European and Japanese stories shelved side-by-side in my mind). And of course she dressed as her own peasant handmaiden and guided the necessarily handsome knight to the oni's lair. Naturally over the course of their adventures, the two fight many obake, have some Taming of the Shrew moments wherin the Princess learns to generally get over herself, and ultimately fall in love. I don't know how I planned to finish the tale, but it never entered my mind to have it end other than happily, with a grand wedding celebrated throughout the land.

And so this summer, I once again find myself locked in a tower of my solitude so remote that even my exaggerated cries for help go largely unheard by any that would be qualified for the role of handsome knight. I have heard the advice countless times; get out there, hang out in places he's likely to haunt, make friends and don't worry about it so much. Apparently, though, I would rather sit alone in my room, wallowing in my solitude than go out and enjoy the sun this desolate summer.

Healing

I had, until recently, a mole. Small, somewhat innocuous, and centered directly over my larynx. It is in nearly every picture of me and is, to me, as much a part of my face as my nose. Alas, one day, it stopped seeming so innocuous and grew dark and raised, doubtless preparing for a devastating conquest that would end in glorious victory for all things moley. The doctor pumped it full of liquid and snipped it off. As they whisked it off to the lab, I wished it a fond farewell, despite the fact that it could have bourne within it the seeds of my undoing. The scar is just now healed and my neck now cleanly spans the distance between head and shoulders. Still, the mole persists in my rare attempts at self-portraiture and in the picture of myself I carry in the wallet of my mind.


I was born with a cancer on my soul, a black fungus with tentacles and teeth that gnawed on my ego. Its grip was poisonous, but I grew used to the company. I welcomed the deadly and inescapable embrace and tried to believe it wasn't killing me. It is gone now, blasted away and burnt out of me. But who am I now that I have been freed? I sprout tentacles and cannibalize myself sooner than surrender to the Surgeon. I keep drawing the thing back in with thick lines of charcoal. I am no longer beholden to the beast, so why do I live as though I am?


I am a healed paralytic who will not walk, a restored leper who still covers her face. I want to welcome the remedy, forgetting that, beneath the bandages, I bear glorious, healed scars.

Moon

I am caught in a deathly spiral, my face always turned to the world. Pockmarked and dusty, bearing no trace of life. Alone I turn, through darkness into darkness.But sometimes, I catch the light. I borrow beams too bright to be bourne, and light is cast into dark. In spite of myself I shine. But I feel all the more keenly that I have no light of my own and lack even the tenacity to reflect sunlight consistently. I yearn to hide my ugliness, the gouges in my skin. I bury my face in the world and fade into the black. And so I am again but a scarred stone swinging through space. I tug fruitlessly at the distant seas, trying to pull them over my head as I wait for the everlasting dawn when I will be overwhelmed with ubiquitous light, transcended and rendered obsolete as a means of luminescence. Surrendering my post, I will bask in endless Day.



(And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk.
Rev 21:23-24)

The Story So Far

Behind the first door we have Bachelor Number One. Alone among the candidates, we started out as friends. In fact I didn't even know he was playing until it was too late. Unfortunately, he was patently inelegable because he didn't love Jesus. I told him so that night after he confessed his crush and never saw him again.

Bachelor Number Two was a mistake. So eager was I to be loved that I admitted him to the game without checking that I actually liked him. He broke his promises and by the time I sorted through the wreckage, he'd taken nine months of my life. He broke up with me over the phone, but we both know I pushed him to it. I haven't seen him since either.

Bachelor Number Three, a crowd favorite, appeared to have everything I could want, enough so to warrant trecking back and forth; enough so as to pledge my life to him. In my eyes it was all but official, just a matter of time. Apparently he disagreed. He murdered the bride-to-be he created and left me alone to bury her. After a week of seasick vascilation, he broke it up over the phone. He didn't even have the common decency to skype me.

Insecurity

This may come as something of a surprise to those of you who know me more than some and less than most, but I am cripplingly beset with a certain madness, a gnawing voice curled up in my ear. From the comfort of its waxy warm home, the little terror loves to whisper half-truths of my folly. In my own voice I hear it; "I can't" and "I'm not". "I won't". "I don't". It pervades me and persuades me and grows fat on my failure. And so I have come to believe all manner of baseless claims: My skin is bad, my hair a mess, and my body disproportionate. My attempts at conversation are stinted and shallow, and anyone who I might claim as Friend would scarcely reciprocate. I can't cook or wear button-down shirts, and my life is crumbling to disorganized dust in my hands. Anything good I might achieve or obtain, I will doubtless ruin before long. My intelligence is less than it ought to be, besides some small skill with words, and what is that when nothing I have to say would be of any lasting worth? I fear the embraces of more caring souls than myself, for I feel I wear only a thin carapace of confidence and competence. It could crack at any second and my true nature would come spilling out like so much sand.

Insecurity, it's called. And it thrives on the likes of me because it hardly has to lie to be believed. I fully acknowledge that I am not what I should be, I don't work as I was designed to. Something in me is broken and no amount of polish can hide the fracture. Now I know the right way to answer to this voice: I am not as much as I could be, but I am chosen. I am crafted. I am loved. I have been made worthy of more than my component pieces would merit. And yet the voice remains, singing its sweet song of deprecation and setting a splinter in my soul to chafe. Even now, as I confront it, it whispers, "Wow, you must be some kind of sucker to fall pray to such an obvious ploy. What is wrong with you?" Heaven help me, for I cannot escape on my own.

Sun, shade and soil

My future is stretched across the sky, changing color with every incremental movement of the sun. Beneath the canopy, blotches of light deface the solemn austerity of a field of tombstones and their long-decayed subterranean inhabitants. Reading from top to bottom, this is my life--sun, shade and soil. Already I feel too ripe to stay so high in the treetop. I grow heavy with juice and the branch bends beneath me. But, my love, if we put down roots side by side and live with branches entangled, I can face becoming something new.

Writers' Workshop

Some of you may know that I am attending a writers' workshop here on the coast, so here I humbly offer a smattering of my handiwork this weekend to you, my loyal readers who have stuck with me through this rather extensive hiatus. The prompts have been edited to make it look as though I stuck to them more closely than may actually be the case, or else that I was more creative than I actually deserve credit for.



Assignment 1: What do you hope to accomplish this weekend?

In all honesty, I don't know why I'm here. I'm not sure that I want to be here. They told us we wouldn't have to share these responses with the group, so I'm not holdng back. I suppose the best reason I can give is that people who know me and love me anyway think I have a way of molding words into vessles, giving an attractive, sometimes alliterative shape to contain my meaning. To extend the metaphor, as is my tendancy, in catching a thought in a jar, the thought conforms to the shape of its container, sometimes flattening into a muddy puddle at the bottom, or, more rarely, taking on a new and more eloquent form.

I am good at words. I feel myself as a Creature with a directive to sub-create. I do this with my body in dance. I do this in a studio full of squirrelly eight-year-olds and putting them in rows and teaching them, in turn, to create lines and paint strokes in the canvas of the stage. I do this by taking a tangled ball of yarn and knitting it into a sweater (if I ever finish that beknighted thing). But I have an untapped medium beneath my fingertips. I feel its breath on my fingers, a living thing beneath the keyboard begging to be given a shape and a name. Language is a curious beast with its own peculiar diet. It eats ideas and spits out words, having ruminated them into something more conducive to its picky palate. I love the softly steaming pile of syntax it produces, but I lack sustenance on which to feed my beloved wordbeast.




Assignment 2: Smells

The air in the church in which I grew up was flavored with stale animal crackers and coffee-stained carafes with just a hint of the brittle glue holding down the horrid mauve carpet.

A hospital waiting room smells of anespetic and apprehension. The air hangs heavy with baited breath, soulless and bleached clean.

There are two kinds of public restroom; those that smell exactly like what goes on in their graffitied stalls and those that have tried to hide their scent by choking out the oxygen with pink deoderizer, discouraging visitors from breathing at all.

One reads of salt-smelling sea air, but what the literature often fails to mention is the seaweed and dead fish semi-preserved in the brine.



Assignment 3: Scene with at least 2 people, complex series of specific actions
Specific, concrete, but not just about action.

Back, side, together. Forward, side, together. For once, the dreadful choice between looking my partner in the eye or staring blankly over his shoulder was peacefully resolved as Kevin grinned at me from point-blank range. The hand on my shoulderblade twitched, gently signaling me to the right. One, two, three, and under the arch of our clasped hands I paraded, stately and elegant. One, two, three steps and my hand alighted on his shoulder and sighed contentedly to be back home as we finished the box step. "Very nice." he observed.
"Well, I just follow your lead, mister." It was true, but I said it to flatter and hopefully press him to laughter. And laugh he did. We lapsed once more into silence, watching the other pairings on the dance floor and repeating the simple one, two, three, one, two, three. The waltz began to croon itself out and he twirled me against the retardando. I curtseyed in mock-seriousness and he inclined his head like a prince obliged to dance with every girl at the ball. Some smokey-voiced singer took over and we listened intently for a moment, probing for a rhythm. "Ooh, a foxtrot."
"Well good. I know way more moves for the foxtrot." He extended his hand to take mine. "Shall we?" We folded back into closed position, his left hand engulfing my right in an embrace. Two steps back, side together. I could tell he was holding his longer stride in check to match mine. The firm twitching of his hand pulled me back toward him and we rocked in place, turning around the corner of the room. My shoes were too big and I had to curl my toes upward to hold them on, but I managed not to leave them behind as I moved with as much grace as I could muster. One, two, three and four. He winked at me as he signaled a promenade. "You're right," I said, " you do know more foxtrot. That's like two moves we've pulled off already." The plural 'we' buzzed on my tongue with both the spice and warm comfort of a homemade curry and I smiled what I hoped was cutely in a self-conscious attempt to inflect the mild jibe with some flirtation. We slipped back into the basic step, encircling the dance floor as we talked in the semi-darkness. The actual topics discussed flatten when retold, but I felt myself shine wittily in his arms, always armed with a clever response or something to make him laugh, when I wasn't laughing myself. Finally the song slowed and he twirled me in close. Too late I realized he was going for a dip and I was not ready for it. As the floor approached and Kevin's grasp on my waist slipped, I hung suspended for a moment, sinking into my own bubbling laughter.



Not an assignment: Undressing Words

I hereby define myself a poetess. No more contrived plotlines to write into the world. No more stilted attempts at composing dialogue between imaginary friends. Everything is like something else, and my job is only to tell you what a I see through my word-shaped lenses. Legions of glorious words already slink shining beneath my skin, just waiting to be prodded and poked into cooperation. The words themselves are characters in the stories they tell. I merely document their exploits. Love, for instance, is feminine in a baroque sort of way. She is squishy, or voluptuous if you prefer, always popular but rarely says anything of any substance. Beneath her powdered wig, however, lies a deep truth and a mirror-bright heart which absorbs nothing for itself, but turns all glory back outward. Lies, however, wears black. He is slender and pale, handsome but hollow, an ashen crust shaped out of shadows' skin. Then there are more exotic cousins; Fortuitous, Lollygaggery, Castigate, and Eczima. Magnanimous is a fat man with white spats and open palms, Inane has an trendy haircut and a constantly open mouth. Even nouns get in on the fun. Beartrap wears a coonskin cap, Tarot has a scarf in her hair and a neck weighed down with jewelry, Phrenology is grey-haired and large-headed. I'd better stop myself before I get carried away any further talking about my dear and varied friends who dwell in dictionaries occasionally venturing out into the wide world to play supporting roles in my great lexical drama.




More to come, in all likelihood. Signing off for now.