Xmas Xercise

There was a time when I challenged myself to write a poem every Christmas, to take a new perspective on the Christmas story as my prompt.  I thought it might be the season to post a few of those old poems. Here's one about Joseph.

Joseph's Betrayal

Who said it wasn't dirty?

Even rock will break down

faced with the insistent growing thing.

It wasn't the amazing light

but something in the darkness that changed.

People talked. I'm no fool.

Can I forgive her — God —

for doing this to me?

Without messengers, would I fold the betrayal

and set it aside?

Not only me — but all of us —

expecting so much more.

Do we settle now for this dirty salvation.

After all this history, our beautiful myths

turned inside out to reveal a pulpy core,

the ugly seed.

Do we run to the arms of another god

or start over in a stable,

nursing this difficult aching

with careless hope.

I do not understand the rushing presence in the night

that asks me to believe.

Believe this, now — after everything?

She was perfection

simple true,

like the precious promise.

Now the circle closes and I stand outside.

Who has been duped?

What place is there for me here?

If I can't forgive, I can rescue appearances.

They need me to clean things up.

It is not done.

So far, we have only uncovered

the ugly seed and dirtied our hands.

If angels sing perhaps it is an accident.

Who knows what we do in our sleep?

Getting Back To It

There were other dramas we paid attention to, besides Amanda and Jerry, and the busboy. We were a band, with all that entailed, and we paid attention to the migration of the birds, the barn swallows in summer, the eagles in January, the trumpeter swans, the snow geese, the robins. We loved Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac, could listen to Landslide and Silver Spring and Stop Draggin' My Heart Around on repeat forever in the car, and Nathan and I had not figured out whether we were in love or not. Jenn B and Jen A were the ones with formal music training, met at some famous school back east. Jenn B knew how to play both violin and fiddle, same body, different sound. Jen A opened her mouth and the heavens poured out, sometimes wrathful and wild, all New Testament love at others, Jesus and John Lennon in the voice of a girl. The three of us wore bikinis and ran around barefoot, were told by Amanda that she had never met three girls who combed their hair less. Not that we had dreads or were dirty. We were a cliche anyway, I guess.

When We Were No Longer Afraid of the Beautiful

I found myself in New York on 9/11 this year and was caught by how much that moved me. I was in SoHo, and so pretty close to the tribute lights and I came upon many people just stopped in their tracks, remembering. It was some contrast to the political craziness. I am sad a lot lately over the awful, uncivilized way we are treating each other and how impossible it seems to have an honest respectful discourse about just about anything. This 9/11 made me remember how for a brief, brief moment that year we found a more common place to be. I wrote this short bit that October in 2011 when I missed it already as something we couldn't hold onto.

When We Were No Longer Afraid of the Beautiful / October 2001

After the day the unimagined played out like a movie we had forgotten to write, we said to each other that everything had changed. We held our breaths. We held the door open for each other and thanked the CTA worker for the free ride.

We felt ashamed, our irony exposed for fraud. All that pretending we were above it all when really we had no idea what we were talking about. Blindfolded dancers along the volcano.

What a relief. To stop and smell the flowers, even. To be cliché. To salute a hero, say the pledge, sing the hymn, unburdened of that ironic distance. Weary with the effort of holding everything at arm’s length, our arms suddenly so very tired. We let them drop. Let it hit us. Damn. Who knew?

I want to hold on to this awareness. Already, I sense it slipping, our impatience again returning. Yellow ribbons suspended at the ready, but we aren’t good at waiting. Quick and big. Wholehearted and no holds barred—our charm, our beauty, our flaw.

Tired of waiting for the drama to pick up again, we turn surly. But still we see. The way fall turns on us, first stunning and benign, then nasty and undressed. Exposing what was there all along underneath the haughty green.

The Next Things

The busboy was a tall kid, lanky and glossy, brown-eyed, long-lashed and graceful. He worked the early shift at the cafe, clearing the old timers breakfasts away, keeping up with their coffee consumption. Secretly, they liked him. In the evenings, we'd see him out on impossibly long runs all the way up the Farm to Market hill and over highway 20 to the other side of the valley. He came back looking damp, relaxed, shaking out his long limbs and brushing dark curls off his forehead.

Amanda had been a lacrosse player in high school, and once we found out about them, we all sort of pictured her tackling him more than we pictured anything sexual. It seemed like that between them, more a collision, an accident than anything. Amanda had her own unavoidable charms, poreless skin, the sweet freckles of summer across the bridge of her nose, always, a face that broadcast every emotion and   an easy way of touching everyone. She and her sister Iris used to walk to the cafe together in the mornings for takeaway coffee sometimes, Amanda's arm draped over Iris' strong swimmer's shoulders, their gait a kind of drawling, lazy thing.

She had told Jerry she couldn't do another summer of him in Alaska, that she wanted time together in the daylight for a change. She wanted him there when the garden was going, wanted help with weeding and putting in some new brassica beds. She didn't want to taste the first strawberries of the season without him, or stand out in the twilight alone watching the bats' quiet swerving flight over the back acre. There were meteor showers to be there for, and if he wouldn't let her hire Tucker Bennett to fix the corroding water line out to the greenhouse, then he would need to be there to do it. He had missed all her summer naps and the three times a year she swam outside and he hadn't helped wash the antique quilts, delicate heavy things she carried in the sling of an old sheet, arranged carefully on the back lawn to dry on the longest day of the year.

That was why he couldn't do much more then punch the kid, and why at the end of it he was apologizing to Amanda instead of the other way around, and that was how we finally got the Edison Free Library she had dreamed up ages ago, a cedar-shingled shack on the corner at the bend of the road, tended by Amanda twice a week like a vase of flowers that needed emptying, a good rinse, a generous refilling.

What I Have So Far

We were the ones who put all the labels on the postcards that were sent to the whole town, and we were the ones who stamped them. No one would say that makes us the ones to blame, though. Once Jerry found out she had slept with the busboy, the school parking lot fistfight was inevitable. It was just that our stamping and labeling made us involved, the same way sitting around the table with her and the busboy while they also stamped and labeled made us involved. The busboy probably shouldn't have been at a Ladies' Club thing in the first place.

The fistfight was on bingo night, the same night Jerry hit a skunk with his truck, so the parking lot smelled like skunk too. Amanda had won the pass to the Skagit Speedway and Jerry had spent most of the night chasing Aubrey up and down the aisles between tables, which was how the busboy got a chance to take a seat on the same bench as Amanda, who was not going to get up and move when all she had left before Bingo was B7.

History

You said the world is ending and I put my head in my hands.  Too many meetings that went nowhere today, I told you, and I've had no time to write.  We spoke to each other about history, the history of the entire world.  As usual, it made both our points.

Tuna, tomato sauce, black beans, white beans, pinto beans, olives. Lined up like soldiers in the back of our cupboards. Cases of water wait beneath old blankets in the garage. I've been in two hurricanes, three car wrecks and a ski crash.  I have fallen down the stairs. My house was burned to the ground by an arsonist with a fetish for churches, children and stolen underwear. I get that shit can happen.  Not really, you shake your head.  Not nearly enough.

On my birthday we watched images of the tsunami pummeling Fukushima and heard our island named as its next stop, waves on their way at more than five hundred miles an hour, tall as buildings.  Taller.  What made us turn on the TV that night, dark in its corner all week?

I told your daughter we'd call her back.  She reminded me of the hurricane on our honeymoon. We laughed nervously remembering the three sunken fishing boats, the dozens of frogs dead at the bottom of the swimming pool, the blasted out windows and toppled over street lamps, iron posts bent as if by a pair of giant hands - how you and I had somehow slept through it all.

You took the rental car while I stood in the center of the room and listened, listened with my toenails and the ends of my hair.  Outside it was pitch black, the air a languid caress.

Long lines, snarled traffic and spontaneous fistfights met you at the store. Empty-handed you returned and found other things to take.  I watched you grab bedspreads and silverware, dishwashing liquid and lighter fluid. You filled every empty bottle we had pilled up for recycling from the kitchen tap.  Move! you yelled and I did.  I must have.  The car was crammed full and we were driving, away from the endless line of headlights crawling toward the airport, up toward the canyons, to the place we had gone hiking on the first day.

The radio knew nothing but we kept it on anyway. More than once the announcers invited us to like them on Facebook. I watched your profile, your eyes scanning the sides of the road. Higher, you decided aloud and we kept climbing.

Shapes started to emerge in front of our headlights.  A truck with a horse trailer.  A station wagon with two dogs in the back. An El Camino stacked high with surfboards.  Here.  You turned the car so the nose was pointing downhill and pulled parallel between two others, killed the engine, opened a beer.

You offered me things and I shook my head yes or no.  Accepted the blanket, waved away the beer.  You went outside and talked to a man with crates full of live chickens stacked in the back of his flatbed.  Perhaps you gave him the bottle I'd refused.  He leaned his head in my window reeking of pot and said, this goes like they think you'll be stuck up here for weeks.  We all will.  His eyes scanned the backseat, took in the towels and pillows and pots and pans.

Later you told me you were prepared to trade.  The chicken man was amenable.  You told me things about the people in the other cars, what part of the island they lived on, the ages of their dogs, who had kids.  You knew all their names.  You handed me a round pillow and the shape brought to mind a pair of stuffed mice with music boxes in their bellies that slowly plinked Three Blind Mice.  My mother had brought them home to my sister and me when we had the measles.  Always two of everything, two of the exact same thing, to show us the world was fair.

I would never say that you enjoyed it, but it was clear you did not hate it.  There was an essentialness to the situation that set your shoulders back in a way I had not seen.

After it was over we put everything away, poured out the tap water and left the bottles out for recycling, placed the lighter fluid next to the bar-be-que, tried to go back to being on vacation. We drank cocktails and hiked, planned dinners out, drove around the island in a slow semi-circle searching for the perfect place to kayak.  I dreamt of walls of water that trembled with a terrifying sound.  You slept deeply and woke starved. Neither of us was sad to board our flight.

Tonight you want to talk about it, the world ending, and I decidedly do not.  Every morning at our second-hand dining room table you read my grandmother's Bible while I study the yoga sutras on the couch.  They have more in common than not.   A thought that leaves me both frightened and relieved.

If you stack your cans neatly while I chant and breathe, perhaps we'll come out of this alright.

People Who Have Lost Me

If you are a band, and you have more than one keyboard, you have likely lost me. If there are more photographers than fans in the audience, also lost me. Men wearing utilikilts lose me. Real kilts are fine,  when legitimate. Bands with male members who wear white pants with white shoes are also in danger of losing me. I'll admit that pedal steel is like an anti-losing measure that succeeds with me nine times out of ten.

My Myers-Briggs type is ENFP, which means that guilt is like my kryptonite, which means that guilt trips are a very effective way to lose me. A corollary would be that you may ask once if you think my migraines are caused by stress, but if you have a not-so-secret pet theory that they are - Lost me. Capital L. I'm not going to say that requiring me to take my shoes off in your house will lose me, but you are tip-toeing up to it if you have not told me that in advance. Having a living room that no one goes into will complicate this entire issue. When I was a teenager, adults could lose me by commenting on my acne and suggesting remedies, and I think that was fair. If you made a comment about whether or not I picked my pimple, please know that your nose job, tacky affairs and white shag rug were talked about behind your back with no remorse on my part. Insisting that I never be petty will lose me, though it's true that as an older person, I try a little harder not to be.

My mother and her friends lost me and my pimple once. Same teenage years, somewhere on a road trip where the party of dogs and grown-ups and kids was split between two cars. I wore headphones and waited near the plant identification sign and as mad as I was, I still had to try not to cry. They only ever kind-of found me again.

This has been hungry for a home and can't seem to find one. One of the reasons for making this place here, right?

Buzzer Shot

            Open. The first thing, the very first, should have been her. But it was the damn bedpan on a side tray bouncing the light - goddamn light - across dingy white hospital blankets. Under the cheap blankets, two lumpy shapes I understood to be my own knees. Shut. I opened again and shut immediately. Tried again. Next thing was the overhead florescent. Shut. Open. Finally, a ring of faces. The hope there was the weight of the earth. Was gravity defined.

The exposed skin, freed from gauze and tape, prickled with itch, but I resisted lifting my fingers to scratch at my new eyes. They waited. I felt the collective held breath of my wife of nine years, all three of my children, the magic doctor and an entourage of nurses and assistants. I found my blotchy altered face reflected in a camera lens as a young dark-haired man stood to the side, recording this large moment for television. I held with them as I pressed into the light like it was a solid thing. I caught my own breath and swallowed.

“What do you see?” asked the miracle doctor.

I blinked obediently, the light pushing back. I saw the voice now a face that was my surgeon. The scratchy tenor realized as surprisingly young, freckled and balding. Dr. Tabor was tall and thin enough, but shapeless in the way of those who rarely get exercise. It occurred to me that I was in better shape. I licked a circle around my lips. I needed time. I fell back into the arms of the darkness and floated for a long minute away from the faces of expectation. The faces now battling with themselves as creeping disappointment worked it out with resolve, the good fight rising optimistically over disbelief, a habit of hope. I couldn’t give it to them now. As badly as they wanted it.

In that small second, I saw plenty. My memory of light and shape from 20 years ago confronted with the real thing. The visible world - all that I took for granted before the reaction to penicillin. Before a 12-year old boy’s world slipped dark.

In that moment before closing my eyes, I had seen her, Donna, her face beautiful enough - just as everyone told me - and still no match for the one constructed of voice and touch and my nose against her neck. A small kindness in high school that became a marriage. That became the one sure thing I reached for and found. Over and over. Now, I saw myself without the need, without cane or hand or guide, and saw her moving away, walking wider circles, out of range.

I saw my children. Our boy, Kevin, looked like her. I knew that. The girls, Hannah and April, twins and nothing the same. All three, their confusion and wish to be like everyone else. To have a father who isn’t blind. Their child-focused disgust at the particulars of miracles, the bandages and stitches. Antiseptic covering evil smells. I wanted to give them the dream come true.

The good doctor, so skilled, rested his hand on April’s back. This, his chance to be a hero. A fortunate alignment of opportunity, intelligence, precision, practice and plain good luck. I saw his doubt, the sense of possible failure. His head spinning with questions as he ran back over the procedure and wondered just where things might have gone wrong. My eyes, his work.

“Honey?”

I avoided the eyes and scratched my nose instead. I straightened my legs, sat a little higher and reached for Donna, thinking of her belly now after the twins. Smooth, but rounded in a way it hadn’t been before. A little hill. My favorite pillow. I wanted her in the bed with me now. She took my fingers and pressed her thumb into the center of my palm. Always our signal for “it’s okay.”

“Daddy, can you see?”

Hannah asked all the questions. Gathered information for her sister. Had the most scrapes and scabs. I touched the air near her voice, eyes still closed. She came closer and I felt the weight of her hands press the corner of the bed.

Perhaps the television crew wanted it most, although not deepest. Donna wanted it for my sake first, I think, even though my sight would make her life easier. For the reality TV show, it would be the perfect ending. Miracles granted like lottery winnings to the randomly lucky. Bolster for the idea that anything can be fixed. My blindness, their opportunity.

I pictured a man and a woman somewhere, St. Louis maybe, leaning against their oak headboard, prime time after a late dinner. Winding down from a busy day. They watched and needed me to be healed. They wanted an arm around Donna, April on my shoulders, Kevin and Hannah running ahead, excited to show me everything I had been missing.

I opened my eyes again. The faces had barely moved. They were trying to be patient.

“Any light at all getting through?” The doctor’s face came in close as he held each eye wider with spread fingers and shined a small flashlight at each pupil.

“Any sight? Shapes maybe or dim movement?”

I thought of my father, the last person, the last thing I remembered from 20 long years ago. His hopes for me. The medication meant to help, that turned on me. The basketball playoffs we watched in the waiting room. His tanned hand on my knee. A shot at the buzzer. Round, orange, circling the rim.

I hesitated. Opened my mouth. Stopped. Then, “nothing.”

The collective breath sighed out in one huge rush, pooling on the sterile tile.

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

I turned to the window and pretended not to notice a wave of green moving in the gusting summer winds, strong breezes gathering a rain, maple leaves exposing their lighter undersides.

The ball dropping through net. Game over.

Well, maybe. But not here. Not with the cameras. Not for the couple in St. Louis. Not with the nurses. Tonight in bed with Donna. Her hair. Then, tomorrow a browning banana for Kevin’s cereal. One thing at a time.

Squeaker

The wind smooths back the leaves of a tree, like a mother taming her child's unruly hair.  Parisian music mixes with the grind of an old dishwasher, the kind I grew up with, before we figured out how to encase the rough work of removing stubborn food particles inside the hush of fingerprint-resistant stainless steel.  The dog carefully excises the plastic squeaker from the "indestructible" ballistic NASA-approved fabric of the new toy - a stingray disguised as a leopard. Dogs must think we're crazy with the shit we buy them, even as they wag their tails in thanks.

Shiba Inu

In the beginning, there were five.  All given Japanese names that started with D, like Dosha and Daishiki with English translations that meant things like First and Lovable.  Except one who was just called Dakota.  Her translation was not a translation at all, just a physical description: cream girl.  The other four were brown with black and white markings - a perfectly matched set in a rainbow of colored collars to help identify them to the viewers.  She was solid cream, nude.  Maybe they thought her obvious difference was enough.  No meaningful name required.

I watched them all on the live stream puppy cam whenever I felt overwhelmed, or was waiting for a conference call to start or just wanted the visceral comfort of observing five tiny furry bodies piled on top of each other, breathing as one organism, paws jerking, ears twitching, pink mouths stretched open wide in massive closed-eye yawns.

Awake, they would crash into each other, rolling on and off their shared bed, five sets of jaws clamped onto one empty paper towel roll running round and round the room, like draft horses.  They used each other as step stools, as pillows, as chew toys.  I marveled at their easy engagement, their lack of concern over personal space.

Sometimes the live cam was dark, or the puppies were outside, or gathered in a part of the room the camera couldn't see.  Along the right side of the screen were highlight clips from previous days with titles like "Outside Adventure," and "Crazy Antics" so you could opt to go straight to the cutest moments.  I looked at a couple once but I preferred viewing them live, even if they were doing nothing.  Once when they were sleeping I moved my cursor over Cream Girl's back and at that exact moment she stretched and leaned her body closer to the camera as if in response.  

Twice when I was watching the mother visited.  The first time, she ran right into the center of them, licking their heads and backs and wagging wildly before settling down in their bed so she could nurse.  The puppies clawed and kneaded and nipped at her, disappearing beneath each other to reemerge in a more advantageous spot.  She touched her nose to their bent heads.  She lay back and surrendered herself to their mauling until they drained her entirely, falling asleep mid-suckle, their bellies round and sated.  The second time took place a couple of weeks later.  And though her nipples still sagged heavily beneath her it was as if she had never known them.  She ran in circles around the room as they chased after her, looking down at them in fear and then annoyance as they leapt up at her, her eyes narrowed as if to say "you have no right."  They were undeterred. They jumped and scrabbled and whined, throwing themselves into her path again and again.  They were relentless.  She ran around behind the black-clad legs of the breeder  who stepped out of the way to expose her again and again. It was exhausting. The dam wanting the breeder, the puppies wanting the dam, the breeder perhaps wanting a moment of drama on the screen.  I closed out of the cam entirely.  Later, I noticed the footage was not among that selected for the highlights.

Cream Girl was the first to leave.  I thought maybe she was outside or behind the bed but at the top of the archived footage I spied a still of her in the breeder's lap, a hand raising one of her paws in a wave.  "Dakota bids farewell," it said.  And I knew it was starting.

There is one left now, I think, or perhaps they are all gone and the camera is dark until a new set of puppies arrives.  When they got down to two, I stopped going back.  Watching a puppy alone feels like going to a school playground in the middle of summer.  Is there any sound more wistful than the squeak of empty swings?

Sit Down To It

A thousand and one moments will step in front of your ability to do that. Some of those moments are dog walks, good dinners, fresh air, happiness. There are also the moments of dishwashing, standing in front of the microwave, pumping gas, waiting in line. That's all fine, just a plea - take me with you. Snatch a moment of words from between some other moment, and another, and let my eyes rest where yours once did, tell me some small thing that proves that we have the ability to be two places at once, any time. In front of the computer at work, and on the California coast, or some mountain peak somewhere, or trapped in traffic in sympathy with our very best friends. Anywhere but here.

I didn't get to the raspberry bushes until after that part of the yard had been watered. Last year the berries ripened one by one, most of those few ruby cells tasteless in spite of their color. This year they come in clumps, hidden deep in the overgrown canes, sweet and sun-warmed. Everything is going wrong tonight, in spite of the late evening warmth, the light clouds that will catch one of those vivid summer sunsets. Picking raspberries from the wet canes is like brushing tangled hair, water dripping from the leaves onto my forearms, little drops soaking through my jeans. I come away with a whole pint of them, thinking about how Tom was right about how we should have thinned the canes in the fall, but I wasn't so bold then with the garden, more inclined to leave things as they were for fear I'd only make them worse. I let the mint bully me and take over the greenhouse, the hollyhocks that blocked the walkway to the barn did the same. Now the mint in the lettuce beds is a weed, ripped out with everything else that needs to go.

I keep thinking about the kid sitting on the hood of the cop car just off Farm to Market road, the same road where last weekend someone hit one of the poles holding up the power lines, splintering it so that the top two thirds leaned out over the road, held there by lines staked out in someone's pasture until it was Monday again and time for someone to collect a paycheck fixing shit like that.

Once someone's up on the hood of the cop car, what is there to do? The opportunity to help out has passed. You can stop for a flat tire, but who's gonna say Officer what's the problem here? When that teenager ran into Farm to Market Bakery in the middle of the night this winter, busting through the guard rail and crushing the whole southwest corner of the building, someone told him they had called the cops and he, drunk as he was, said, It's okay, you don't have to call the cops, I just called my dad. Too late dude, the opportunity for dad to help has passed.

I think about the Occupy movement, how that whole thing is about saying Officer what's the problem here, in a sense. On Facebook someone posts a photo of a young white woman with dreadlocks, Missing. She's an Occupyer, it says, last seen at NATO protest. I see from her face that I don't know her, haven't seen her, don't know anyone with dreadlocks any more.

stormy

Between 13,383 and 14,229 feet above sea level what is there but 846 feet of disappointment?

I do not want to turn around. Even though it is the right thing. Probably. But when you are playing for luck you never know the other story. The clouds congregating early for a hallelujah holy-roller service surely coming, but we don’t know when. Or even if for sure. These things change. Uncertainty means we have to weigh the risk. We have to use our own judgment. We can’t know, only choose.

The high-country summer storm doesn’t care one way or the other. It will come, faster or slower, and hit here or there, that peak or this one, now or later. I look at the peak, so close really and we have come so far. I step up. My husband is reasonable when he asks me where I keep the life insurance information.

I know I am angry because I feel like crying. Because I want to go ahead anyway. I think I can scramble up and get back before anything bad happens. Before the rogue bolt finds earth. Because my friend is ahead and still moving and I can’t stand it thinking of her and her daughter there on the top without me. Their happy photos. Mad at myself because I can’t start earlier in the morning. Because now we will have to do this all over again. Because I like to finish what I start. Because I didn’t hike just a little faster. Because he is probably right and wants me to live. And like a guy I tell him that we don’t have to talk about everything for god’s sake. If we are going down, then let’s go on down to tree line and don’t look back. Let’s just f-ing go. Later, I convince myself I did the harder thing. I think.

How it's different

Trail Run:
Rabbit (small).
Rabbit (small).
Rabbit (small).
Stump (big).
Snake (small.)
Ocean (churning).
Surfers (jockeying).
Dogs (black, black, yellow, brown, black).
Umbrellas (red, green, purple, yellow, solid, stripe).
Kites (dragon, stingray, smiley face).
Bridge (misted).
Trees (dense).
Log (rotted).


Town Run:
"Italian?"
"Just took me off the project..."
"My dog's friendly."
"We don't need to park closer."
Honk
"Those boots!"
"If you get it at the gun show, you don't have to show ID."
"Just shut the fuck up Dan, OK?"

Starting Out

Try anything that will help you get out of your own way. The dog is wandering around the house aimlessly, maybe wondering where her person is, or maybe just wanting to go out for the third time today. The bedroom is cool and shaded and noiseless. Outside the sun is finally lifting the whole soggy spring from the soil. There are beds to be cleared out. Everyone needs coffee, except the dog. She lives on sunshine, and kibble and water, and most of all, touch.