ride and ride and ride

Today the sun is back. I’m a bit sad about it, in truth. Yesterday afternoon, when the dark clouds came, it was such a reprieve from all of this sun and heat. I looked at the weather report online and the picture above each day this week had a dark cloud blowing and a little stick of yellow lightning poking through the air. But yesterday was the only storm.

I read Anne Sexton’s letters recently and keep going back to them. There is something so special in her words. I flip through the pages, and, to borrow from her own sentiment, she comes at me from the page and grows like a bone inside of my heart. She has really been a quiet companion to me these days, and I wish I could offer more truth than that, but it’s more the feeling, like someone is drinking you maybe.

Karen Kovacik wrote a poem about my picture from above. It’s going to be in her new book, I think.

Woman at Streetcar Stop, St. Charles Line, New Orleans

Gone are the feathered masks of Mardi Gras,
gone, too, the Krewe of Zulu tossing coconuts
to revelers. It’s June, unending month of sweat
which glues her hair like chicken down
to her forgotten neck. Her shirtwaist –shirred
brown jersey knit –conceals a bladder pad
and crinkly arms. She’s maybe fifty-five,
her butt a flabby saddle no one wants
to grab, though fifteen years before, I’ll bet
her swell of ass commanded stares,
and earlier still, those heavy hips shook babies free.
So what if assholes call her “hag” or “crone?”
I’m forty-four. To me, she’s harbinger,
wherever she is headed: grocery store or HMO
or church named for the saint
who sang Last Rites to victims of the plague.
I’m off to tour the Cities of the Dead,
but first I watch her haul herself aboard
the trolley car, calves sculpted still, purse smashed
against her chest. I’d guess she’s fifty-five.
And when some stranger offers her his seat,
she settles in to ride and ride.

green

The sky is green tonight and the color shimmies between our French windows and strikes up a nice background for the spider plant that my mother gave me a month ago, the one she grew from a bud my great grandmother gave her before she died. I like to think she brought it from Scotland. Green is everywhere. Though it feels expansive tonight - melancholy. I’m drinking a Chilean wine and perhaps it, instead is the catalyst to melancholy on a night like tonight.

a shark while running

The arm of the sea sweeps onto land
like a broom. Rain comes with morning

and as the tide passes eastward, many dead things
are left for gulls: sticky bodies of clams,
black grasses my mother thinks are Nigerian thistle seeds.

Later, midday, I run north along the shore.
Ahead of me a man heaves a long pole –

a wave tenders a sand shark at his feet.

He circles the ancient thing like a lampshade - smiles
as she begins her thrashing –

a crooked question mark beating the sand,
the flat sound like slapping laundry on a line,
reminds me, it is Summer after all.

Something violent stirs my lungs
but I do not stop running, I must pass the sound.

I must not imagine the man returning home,
wet and clucking with pride. I cannot stand to think
of his bravado.

The day is hot, and I am tired of being bold.
I run past her body in its earnest disappointment.

I claw north and she looks at me, one eye
and then the next. Does she wonder why I will not save her? –
why there is not one safe place left in this world?

weekend

I'�ve lost so many brain cells finishing my novel that I�'m starting to categorize moments in my life with one word, two-syllable, palpable descriptions. But this week I finally handed it over to Nin and promised not to meddle with it whilst she does her thang.

Dearest Susan Sontag, I apologize for writing �"barf"� after your name on my previous post. Truly, my mood had nothing to do with you or your essays, only my uncharitable and careless brain gagging on the fumes of academia. Today I finished your critique, �Regarding the Pain of Others� and I must say that I find your brilliance astounding. Please accept my apology. I am an asshole.

Right now I am reading �God'�s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn�t Get It� by Jim Wallis a well know and highly respected evangelical. Though I turn each page with a critical eye, I think this book is perhaps the most important book (dealing with faith and politics) on the shelf today for its accessibility, objectivity, and, dare I say it, hopeful outlook for social justice.

To conclude my opening thought, I hope that the next time I venture to write something here, I am inspired to try harder than �"weekend"�. I hate concluding paragraphs.