Lilac

Blossomed full lilac long years ago,

Beauty’s lush petals have slipped

through open fingers

man by man,

day by day, year by year.

Desired flame dwindles to

cooling ember soon to ash.

Is this all I am?

Oh, Love!  Beauty was never

mine, but yours to behold.

The Plant and The Gardener

I am the Plant

waiting for nourishment from

the Rain and the Soil.

I am the Gardener

bringing water and care

for my Plant in its container.

My Plant is unable to move; I must watch

when the Plant needs to be trimmed, shaded, and fed.

The Plant that I am depends on

Me, the Gardener, to remove

dead paths that nutrients

may seek, robbing

live paths in mid blossom.

If I am to flower, then I am to prune,

bringing growth in new green limbs.

Cat on a Fence

She sits there

waiting for the tom

or a robin.  She preens her long

Siamese coat.  She waits for the

Someone to let her back in to her

comfort, her food bowl, her safe bed.

She tucks against the

elements and unseen enemies

and imagined dangers and her fears.

She and I wait on our fences,

not willing to venture out, sitting on

 both sides of a decision.

 

Blue

I am blue frigid ice, still and deep and transparent,

dripping away day by day to my death.

With smooth curving waves on top and gurgling washing machine

underneath – the chemical blue swimming pool work mode is

unnatural in appearance and masks my clear nature.

I am blue eyes and dark grey edges searching intently into your

Soul until you cannot meet my gaze going back into myself and

both of us at once.  I am blue ink flowing from God onto paper

in ideas I did not create and cannot explain nor take credit for.

There is blue mood sadness and melancholy matching that ice blue cold

so closely that no one wants to linger long at my side.

I am blue in every piece of clothing that was my high school wardrobe until,

I changed;

told it was too much and that I needed to be different than the blue

that I was, the blue that I loved.   Okay, I said, and walked away

from blue me only to return a lifetime of years later to find me,

again,

rich blue velvet in ageless style.

Rumi's Poem (not mine - so worth hearing I'm posting it on my blog)

Those who don't feel this Love

pulling them like a river,

those who don't drink dawn

like a cup of spring water

or take in sunset like supper,

those who don't want to change,

let them sleep.

This Love is beyond the study of theology,

that old trickery and hypocrisy.

If you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on.

I've given up on my brain.

I've torn the cloth to shreds

and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,

wrap your beautiful robe of words

around you,

and sleep.

-Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

Outside and (G)In

Hostels and beer on the sidewalk café

                Gates Foundation and biotech

                Approachable folks, accepting

                                Willing to add a sketch to the book of European experiences

Talk flows without effort as if old friends have met again

Four-star hotel and wine with ho’rs dourves

                Pressed shirts and gowns and heels and dangling diamonds

                Congregate in safe groups

                Excluding in tight huddles

A challenge to seek

                The gift of a sketch as I

Escape the corner box!

This is Outside and Gin

Blue Veil

  Silk blue veil covering the silver-shimmer
sequins of fish, she
dances her windy watery soft
shimmy.  Unhappy with her outfit,
she changes into something
brown, then foamy green, then a
bottomlessly deep black with
white lace and caps accented in wide stripes
of a metal riveted belt in two layers.
She wakes in the morning
yawning clouds in her sea gull
pajamas of Berkeley cloud
patches; dreamy and Tolkien,
magical as if she'd just left a night
in Middle Earth.  Matching
her lover's blissfull look with
clarity and calm;  two mirrors of
eternal blue.  At night she brings
out a velvet gown of midnight,
studded with rhinestone stars and
she flirts with the crescent watching
from above.

Tweed

Irregular tweed blue bay

Wrapped tonight in your evening peach shawl,

Dusk accents your lovely

Stony necklace with a shiny city bridge

clasp

Saturday Morning Sister Poem

Meet me at the intersection

                Of Me and You

How could we find each other

                Anywhere else?

And it’s important that we both

                Show up

For how could it otherwise be

                Than at the edge of You and Me

Full Moon Grasses

Full moon grasses

lit silver by sister orb’s

metal breath of night

only waves from

dark sky breezes

let luster peacock

off each thin blade

and so the wind

and the grass

and the sun and the moon,

and so they play

all night

as we sleep

Cottonwood Trees

By the cottonwood trees next to the railroad tracks

                Down a dirt road sits a tiny white house

Davenport on the porch with the built in smell of Grandpa’s

                Copenhagen

Blue and white striped overalls

Scruff beard and a white shock of thick hair

Harmonica

Jokes and laughter and fishing poles with worms

                Waiting

For a trek through the snake grass and cows to

                The river

Whatever fish came back to the white house

                Were a tribute to Grandpa’s patience with

                Tangled lines, snags, and baiting hook after hook

Stop at the red iron hand pump for water to clean our catches

                For Grandma to bread and fry

Served with sliced cucumbers from the garden

                Behind the outhouse with a crescent moon cutout

                                For light

Those cucumbers with vinegar, sugar, salt, and thin slices of

                Onion

Served on china, meals sometimes cooked on the

                Woodstove

Slices of vanilla ice cream in a cantaloupe bowl

Pinochle and pinions at the kitchen table at night

Sleeping in the double bed with two sisters

Trains rattling us to slumber

Waking to coffee scents with clinking teaspoons and

low voices in the kitchen

Pictures of dogs smoking cigars and playing

                Poker

The clock on the wall with the witch or

                The kids, indicating stormy or sunny playtime outside

Cousins

                Left-handed Ruth on my right handed side

                At Thanksgiving dinners

Stealing Dutch’s cigarettes

Hearing of Rip chasing the stick and it getting stuck in his throat

Wood pile smelling of railroad, that hot-sun creosote

Poncho the Chihuahua, Grandma’s dog

The cellar door outside

                Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz

Peppermint lozenges, pink, for us in a candy dish

                On the corner of the buffet that now rests

                In my living room, carrying the essence of

                Sweet memories

Harmonica playing

You Are My Sunshine

                Still makes me smile; causes a lump in my throat

Happy memories

Sixteen Year-Old summer days vacuuming and doing their laundry and

                Soaking in having them all to myself

Beautiful sepia Oval pictures of youth

                Young

Ed and Anna

In love 60 years

Worry

Even fresh from napping,

my mind picks up a thread

of worry and begins to

                stab and twirl

and knit and purl

                with its crafty needles.

Threading and fretting,

                Jabbing and wrapping,

Then we tat and mend

                Into a too-tight mess.

Turning it back and forth,

over and over again,

pulling and bunching

things much worse than they were.

The sewing machine comes out

with a bang and roars zig zag over

it forward and back

until its unrecognizably contorted

in a knot of my own creation.

I add my embellishments of ric-rak and beads

without any concern for structure,

pattern, and plan.

Cross-stitch on top of it all

Until I

Stop

Take a breath

Shake my head

And exhale

Undoing my worrisome

Handiwork

Loose threads; let me rest!

Somebody

Somebody out there is smiling as the wind whips her plain brown

hair around her oversized sunglasses.

The red Volkswagen, convertible top down, driven joyously by her beau

passes me, heading East

While my Westward pining heartbreak grieves my mother.

It’s my turn for this,

and soon I hope I can be headed back red convertible style

As is life’s way

Run Away

 

I ran away to the beach today.

Well, I drove fast on the winding Lucas Valley Road to Limantour, playing sad Alison Krauss songs in an

Unsuccessful attempt to trick my steely heart into an overdue mourn.

The shaker is empty

Let the sea air salt my freshly peeled cucumber, teeth ripping into it whole, unsliced devoured in chunks unladylike-

I’m here at the source asking to feel,

To have crystalized mineral anger dump – I don’t want it anymore.

Here, you take it back.

I need no knife to cut the heel of the French bread loaf to pieces –

I can chew what my strong set jaw gnaws free.

The brie, or what’s left of it, smooshed in the bread pocket, unfancy.

I don’t have to be good.  I can practice bad poetry and gnash with my teeth

What I can’t seem to wail.

patchwork

So many ungrounded ten thousand feet in the air

Corduroy patchwork

Rumbling below the black winged silver white bird

With 100 sets of eyes

Those eyes see sage green autumn alfalfa

Rusty brown stitched

With scriggles of river

Across taupy smooth irregular

Squares

The bigger the white bird grows

The smaller the patches on

The ground become under cumulous

Pillows of white cotton clouds

We divide and fence and divide

Again

What was once undividable,

Shared and whole, intact,

So many ungrounded ten thousand feet in the air

Mt. Crumpet Tipping Point

The way the clerk

Snapped at me, do

I really wanna haul

That around in my

Max-pulled, already overloaded

Grinch sled of shit?

Let it go

And save Max!

Let my heart grow 2000% !

Pink Roses

Mom, there are pink roses in my new December yard

Just like the ones I plucked from the wreath on your casket

last May

The roses from the yard follow me inside to

vases in nearly every room

as if their following could fill the empty ache of

missing you

Heathrow

There is no cheese for this rat at terminal 4

There was no cheese at terminal 5

And despite the best direction following

Skills available thru the maze that is Heathrow,

Neither was there cheese at terminal 3

Escalators, trains, buses, and lines

Baa-sheeping along with the others

Sometimes their tapping at the dispenser opened

A gate and they passed through

Rewarded

Sometimes they were sent back; “wrong line”

And forced to wriggle upstream of all the  crowding others

To find another line

No gate assignments, even when finding terminal 1,

Instead wait for the gate announcements on those

Infuriating signs made

Fuzzy by leap frogging into another day

Nine time zones from home

Where's My Anti-Disgusting Cleanser

The Friday before our landlord, Ben Bakhshi, announces he is coming by on Saturday to discuss our deposit return process and take pictures of the apartment in preparation for finding his new tenant, I’m cleaning.  Well, that is, after I secluded myself in my bunker of blankets and pillows, fortified by two cups of coffee, one in a thermos to stay warm so I wouldn’t have to get up again, and my laptop for wirelessly communicating nonsense on Facebook for the entirety of the morning, and then partially into the afternoon.  Then I got hungry and had to get up.

Looking at the apartment in a new light since I have only four more nights to sleep here, I took a good scrutinous look around.  Ben might scowl at the dark colonies of dust bunnies that have overbred above each doorway.  He might also take a severe look at the dark coloring the spaces that were once white between the little yellow 1960-style tiles set in a diagonal pattern on the kitchen counter top.  They’re probably originals, maybe older than me.  But the grout should be white.

So out to the cleaning supplies shed I went seeking the bleach hiding in the back corner.  “okay, buddy, out you come.  Follow me; we have some work to do.  And bring your little friend, Mr. Ajax.” 

I’ve never been known for my cleaning prowess.  I’ve never had marriage proposals of “I love you, Bobbie, and you’re such a good house keeper…will you marry me?”  Perhaps that gene was snapped up by my older sister, Patty, cleaning goddess supreme.  Or it could have been her coming behind me and my dust rag on late Saturday mornings, my head still full of Bullwinkle and Rocky (how would they get out of that pickle they were in now?) wiping up after me and showing me the right way which I never seemed to catch onto. 

So for years I got away with sloppy. 

Now mind you, I’m not unclean.  I vacuum and clean the floors.  I scrub the toilet.  I do my dishes regularly.  I clean the fridge.  Not necessarily in that order.  But windows and blinds and grout and scrubbing down walls?  Nah.  I just don’t think about it or would rather pay someone else to do it for me.

I can imagine a shiver going down Patty’s spine if she ever reads this.  How can we have shared the same gene pool?  How?

But this afternoon the grout now sparkles as best it can at 50-something.  And the door casings are void of their bunnies.  The tub is gleaming white, and there shall be nary a sign of a cobweb by tomorrow morn when Ben arrives.

So, the question begs, why do I not clean like this for myself?  I like how it feels.  It really doesn’t take that much effort or time.  Where do I spend my extra time?  Is it a matter of discipline or is there a bad taste in my mouth about cleaning; a sense of incompetence?  And if so, it’s not fair or right to lean on that old worn out crutch some 40 years later. 

Maybe it’s due to the lack of kids’ whirlwind of constant clutter and mess.  Whatever momentum of cleaning I kept up during my 20’s and 30’s to keep some order in our home has fizzled out.  The bunnies are allowed to multiply unfettered since I don’t have to wipe soda pop spray off the ceiling and door casings or vacuum baking flour out of the window sills and kitchen drawers.  Don’t ask – true stories.  Not to mention the seek-and-destroy missions of old to basset-hound out “that smell” which turned out to be baloney and cheese sandwiches with mayo a la mold which had been tossed over tiny shoulders behind the toy box in the basement.  Another true story.  And what mother can’t relate to being on hands and knees, scrub brush in hand scouring floor tiles, when the troops arrive after school with neighborhood reinforcements galloping muddy tracks to the fridge?

Maybe I need the fear of never being able to neuter all of those bunnies to spur me back into that long-lost momentum.  Or….

If I could have Patty follow behind me and my dust rag one more time, I’m sure Ben would hand over the cleaning deposit no questions asked.

The Day Before Thanksgiving

I hear the whispers of my ancestors

They are with me today

Gathered ‘round in comfort

Bringing tears and memories

And longing for the days we shared

They let me know their presence

With random memories

Their signature noises in some recall button

I did not press

Their photos tucked away for special keeping

Ask me to bring them out

To help me feel them stronger; closer

To help me remember them

To love them today

They’re here

Called by their watches and photos and furniture

                And trinkets

Called by my memories and I miss yous,

                My heart

Here they are