empathy

Every moment prepares you for every other moment. That moment when the universe stormed and shut off the sun and the dark went click and you felt torched by hot rain in a black well, when you said I was never prepared for this and you were right. It was living not for that moment but to prepare you for this one here, this one now. The one where your eyes see - she has lost something, something she has lost in the same moment when you had muddled your mind with thoughts about the mess and the long drive and the temperature of the weather and you feel pangs of guilt and confusion of how fate works such pain like rain clouds over the wrong people. Searching, you search for your faith, it leads you not to answers but to look up. You look up and recognize the nebulous shapes to realize the fire has struck your neighbor's house and not your own, not this time. Such distance yet so close your fingers can touch, city limits touch, continents touch. You wonder how it feels to have lost something immense - a child, a dream, purpose, hope. What all vanishes when the sun clicks off. Except immeasurable despair, and almost you turn away to prepare your hands to make dinner. But can you rise long enough to stand, to reach out, to feel the feeling that she is a real person and not a camera shot of suffering. Nor story board. Nor anything except the heat and hair and skin and fabric of a real human being. You wonder if she can feel her own hands holding each other, or if all is lost. You wish you could exchange breaths, to give her a moment's relief. So there it rises. Reach deep. The swath of empty you recognize. You barely believe you can. But you know the well and that day and the darkness I was never prepared for this and somehow it calls you forward from way back there to do what you were never prepared to do except you are.

If only empathy, let it be empathy. If prayer, let it be prayer. But if it is more, let it be more.     

Songs to my kids

Why? Write to be not forgotten.
----
It's a Beautiful Day
It's a beautiful day it's a beautiful day it's a beautiful day
God gave us: sun (clouds, grey skies, rain, snow, etc...) today -

The farmers and the bees and the plants and the trees say: thanks!
I'll join the heavens and the earth to sing His praises

It's a beautiful day it's a beautiful day it's a beautiful day! (2X).


Little Cloud
there's a little cloud in the blue, blue sky
and it's calling out your name

singing: Addy, Joey - come to me
and catch the breeze and I will be
the little pillow in your dreams

(there's a little cloud in the orange, orange sky...)
(there's a little could in the snowy white sky...)
(there's a little cloud in the starry night sky...)


I Love You
I love you I love you I love you I do (4X)
I love you Joey bigger than the sky
I love you I love you 'cause you are my guy
I love you I love you and I always will
And when I'm not with you my love's with you still
I love you I love you I love you I do
I love you Joey I love you - I do.

I love you I love you I love you I do (4X)
I love you Addy bigger than this world
I love you I love you 'cause you are my girl
I love you I love you and I always will
And when I'm not with you my love's with you still
I love you I love you I love you I do
I love you Addy I love you - I do.


Hey Baby
Hey baby, I think maybe it's time it's time
It's time to go to sleep and catch 100 winks
as the sun sinks
into tomorrow's brink and I will sing
this little song to you.

To you to you to you
I don't know what I'd do I'd do I'd do
If you were feeling blue so blue so blue
I don't know what I'd do.

So goodnight goodnight goodnight
Everything will be alright alright alright
Don't let those bedbugs bite those bedbugs bite
Okay I'll sing it one more time.

Goodnight goodnight goodnight
Everything will be alright alright alright
Don't pee your pants tonight tonight tonight
Darling - goodnight.

writing by feeling

Writing by feeling is ostensibly a junk exercise, a serial malpractice; of, recklessly explaining the rivers of oneself out loud with feverish expectation of complete loss and futility. An ample test of tepid rejection; one I try for and pass. I cannot help it. That first nameless street leaves me predisposed to loss and no simple words to explain it. It being: imminent loss. unreachable loss. I was small and spun a plastic globe and could understand that distance meant so much more. So I dig, write, not to tell of oceans but of rivers, the narrowest ones. Invite rejection, make accidents. Both are easier to accept that way.

Sleeping on the train

The motion made my eyes close
my lungs sigh.

I was thinking of closets and separating
what all doesn't fit right.
What to keep or give away.
The end of work day conundrum --
to accept life or
sleep through it.

I was jolted --
his deep voice behind me a few seats over
as I heard him sing like gospel on a swing:

Life is a-waltzin'! 

He broke out in a raspy old tune and cleared
his throat to the metal wheels clacking faster
faster as we pulled away from South station.

(I could tell from how South station makes my bones feel.)

I held in my smile, let out one more sigh.
Ours was a traincar clicking west.
west. west.

Muscle memory and counting clicks.

From behind I hear the young new couple giggling her
thin leg draped over his their
four arms tangled like doves in knitted stupor.

So what about that! they exchange a long
long sheepish
look, the type --
you hang love on.

Uniformly their limbs untwist,
their bodies rise
nervously in splendor --

Love is anyhow
a spectacular occasion no matter the era

(It is their first trip into the big city.
She has dressed for this and he in his father's suit).

In slight mock and the rest excitement
they share their very
first dance
on this train
to his bluesy wisdom:

Life is a-waltzin'! Baa-ba! 
Daa-badee-da!  

Through rusty metal humming and cement tunnels
I hear her old time smoky heels and his wingtips
her bouncing curls and warm red lips as he reaches
low to tip his hat and
steady her hips.

I'm not going to turn to watch because
I am afraid
of the fiction but
I open my eyes,

and did because imagination
gets every last one of us.

The traincar was colder and dimmer
than when we left.

Today's newspaper was rolled
loosely
inside his worn black fingers his
gaze caught elsewhere.

We slowed to still.
Picked up west,
west again and
I don't recall him leaving.

Somehow I found myself alone and
mourning a man singing, crying
life is a-waltzin' 
to no one,
not even me.

Life Observation #8

On holding hands:

two hands holding feels like two hearts sharing one prayer. 

What Bert taught me

1. Nothing, and no one, is invisible to God.

2. Spit is an art tool. So is sand, and hands, and sticks. And his story reminds me: there is no creative poverty in God’s economy. 

3. Some art forms are nameless. But every artist has a name.

4. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21. God’s holy map leads to every single heart. Bert, and so many like him, knows this better than me. Before I see disability and strangeness, I need to start with their beating red heart. God, help me to remember Bert, and how he, without agenda, taught a famous artist the art of quiet awe and passing.

5. The canvas of earth is 4.5 billion years old. The Bible tells us our lives are but evaporating mist upon it. We are here and in long generations from now no one will know we lived except by the traces of how we loved.

And my faith tells me: we are evaporating elsewhere.

I stayed

I stayed
watching the little leaves dance
upon cooling September asphalt
like they knew this will end.

she thinks poetry

Poetry is the only wind my wings know how to fly in. Though, I am in love with the mystery of creation of all kinds; the microscopic planets on our eyelashes are as much art as the universes inside our hearts; everything spins and wants to express something; the caterpillar wants to become the butterfly, but what is the butterfly trying to express? Questions are the genesis of artful thinking. So I am in love with the stranger who tends his lawn meticulously because it says something that he cannot as much as I am in love with the stranger who is in love with something else far beyond tending to his grass and shade. We all have something more to say, this I know like the caterpillar knows; though what is that something more? That is the mystery of the butterfly.

The space, the timefullness Makoto Fujimura describes in his book Refractions is the linen-thin act of whispering more upon paper or crying more upon canvas or molding something more from inside our inner world out. The pain is in the grip and never the release though we protect the inverse of that reality because, well, it is easier. Like praying between snooze alarms. But the courage of unfolding ourselves is lightening from God. Sometimes thunderous and catapulting. But sometimes as simple as a switch. And sometimes not on to light, but on to listening. Listen, listen, listen. His word is everywhere. Upon the mystery of the planets on our eyelashes and in the crevices of our cleaning corners and in short essays of books that bring people together like chapters of a story. Like verses of The Good Book. We are each refractions of each others’ light. The small art space of the blank white page tells me this tonight.

Poets love the symbols of words; maybe it is the poets, by nature of their craft, who can most nearly articulate the highest capability of artists, which is not to create lovely things–which is lovely too–but to have awareness of the symbolism of all things; like metamorphosis, like blades of grass, like love. Like, of course, love. Love is a symbol for God, for God is love; an Entity so incomprehensible and unsearchable that He infused love as the symbol for who He is. Love is uncapturable; try holding love without metaphor or measuring it without scale. But as artists, we try to come as close as we can. Truer art comes when the artist is truer; closer to what they believe they feel than how they imagine others think they ought. Art demands faith; but with the demeanor of Christ. “Come child and create. Represent who you think you are and who you think I Am. Think deeply, have faith, and try.”

I have not written poetry by head or by hand for many months because I have been creating other things like to-do lists and excuse lists and many other lists that I cannot list here. But after reading Fujimura's essay Second Wind today, I listened, God. I tried.

she thinks poetry

She thinks poetry as she sits in cool white sunshine. On a pinewood bench

her four-year-old son splinters thin branches

by the grip of his small hands.

She holds the word but the mid-morning breeze feels too beautiful

against her neck and it lifts her upward gently and with kindness

to the top of two towering oak trees. They cross and turn into shapes of

questions and she asks: Which of you grew these spindly toys for my son?

However did they break away from you? Was it

in a violent storm or self-sacrifice

or did they crack from the weight

of two black squirrels quarreling over acorns for

December?  Her lips are forming answers when –

he dashes in laughter beyond the oaks to search for his balance.

Uneven rocks and airplane arms and

imagination defying gravity. But while she was

ascending the trees

he must have laid the tiny timber next to her feet

in quiet trust

that she would save them for next summer. She watches as he forgets

and her toes tuck the nature pieces

back beneath earth and away

from sight of his memory because it is

in the making,

the trying. in the

breaking

apart and noticing.

She calls his name.

He moves closer inside light and shadows and she wonders

what else may come.

ebb and flow

ebb and flow

wish and woe

sand dollars wishing

to be starfish and

never writing of it.

but yellow is never purple so

she should write about that.


she writes words

she writes

then goes dim.


retreats.


returns shy

but returns

when art and gravity

God and depravity

seek light enough to meet.

if I had to measure

The length of true love: one lifetime.

Last night at 362 Lowell Street, Somerville, MA 02145

I haven't let myself come to this place for a long time. I didn't remember that I had returned it to privacy. Something like sharing a secret with yourself. Writing out disappointment hurts worse when it's only your eyes judging; other eyes make me uncomfortable. Puts coats on words. Words are like skin. They need to breathe instead of: suffocate beneath covers. I'd rather face my disappointment in myself than feel uncomfortable in my own words.

My bones feel hard on this wood floor. The night shows angles and light but only when space is emptied of stuff: light has a place to go. Long rectangles move, seep slowly from the windows. Streetlight plunges, mimics sunlight. Screenlight mimics flashlight. I can forget time and measurement when I write. Sounds stir low pitches I can retrieve. Recall like childhood, deep under the covers and thinking about the curious sounds of footsteps, of engines, of appliances. Each meant something that I was not doing. I was laying still and quiet and inexperienced about the world and I listened to understand. Sounds meant life. They still do. Sounds are stories and I listen. Almost only when I write.

Night, quiet, light, movement, empty, house. I feel most at home inside this sandstorm.

love is never almost

He was born in a rust shed small and cold yet
at night he was warmed beneath his mother's coat
damp with sweat and hope.

He formed love for her before he could form the word love
and she too loved him so. She told him.

They two together within the world and not against it
that is what she believed not because she was raised that way but because the grass grew every spring like morning rises from night and she could not explain it.

She explained little, not even why she loved him and he preferred it that way,
and inside those shed walls he wondered to himself one autumn afternoon when he was six -
Mama, is this home?
and she held him and rocked him and said Almost
and she caught him quiet and surprised because
Had he spoken his question out loud?
he would never know and it wouldn't matter.

He would learn as he grew into a man: answers come this way.

And when his feet touched down upon wooden floorboards inside bigger walls and bigger rooms he invited his mother in and took her coat and hung it in the foyer closet and welcomed her home and she smiled and cupped her small hands around a secret.
She sat upright because the chair contour asked it of her, her legs too short for her toes to touch the ground. But she sat proud and listening to the stories of his life and her eyes twinkled because she remembered the stories he couldn't and his eyes twinkled because, actually, he could.
His little eyes had watched her move inside many a shadows of that shed, her warm prayers pluming, rising, vanishing. Into the frigid air. She always thought he was sleeping but love works its way into the heart. In the quiet night. Almost means hope.

She had covered him warm each night in
I Love You. And as his tiny body exhaled beside hers,
he covered her over, too.

They both knew this love exactly.

Meaning

Every word or phrase strains to mean its own meaning. And the punctuation of the question mark: smudges clarity. Smirks like a fox. Shades of blue at night.

We, poor messengers, are strapped and riddled with the clothing of language. Nakedness gets us put in the 7th floor fanny wing so we tight-lipped speak...appropriately at the expense of: accuracy.

Yes typefont helps but ill enough. Bold and ALL CAPS distract. Apologies redact. But never all the residue of suspicion. So the uncircumscribable is the truth that: words are symbols and phrases - codes. To listen means merely: decode. And if you fail, no one knows. Circumscribe. Mix up some words to appear like you: get it.

The exception being

Love.
Love is itself.
I Love You is itself exactly.
Power unto itself complete.
Just as God says when He says:
I Am

Love -

A holy mystery mirroring
A common mystery.

Half

I sat up half awake and remembered suddenly - I was losing the stories of my life. I began again. To pen the other half.