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.