The Rushing River

Nysa County Sheriff's Department reported the discovery of a dead body floating down the S. Lette River, a popular camping and fishing destination during the summer months. Even though it was summertime the body was blue and bloated, the ice pack had been particularly good that year prior to the thaw. Forest Rangers were advised to notify in person any and all campers of the incident and remind them of being safe and responsible. The cause of death and identity of the body were unsolved.

The white haired child points and dips her little big toe into the flowing river water. She taps the surface with a tiny slap before jerking her naked leg back onto the bank. A half smile sneaks up to her face as she cranes her neck around to see if any adult eyes may be monitoring her moves. Aside from the quiet gurgles music notes dance among the trunks carried from some distance, the only company nearby the little body in an orange bathing suit with a brown belt in the late afternoon sun was a black dog sniffing and digging up rocks with his nose behind her.

"Hercules!" she whispered.

The dog was at her side before the exclamation point attentively wagging his tail. The little girl patted the top of his head, grabbing his soft ear in her palm always reassured her. The little white girl with her pale freckled skin and the shiny black dog, purple and wild stood like the illustration in a fairy tales book at the side of the Rushing River, something magical was about to happen, the music echoing from the nearby campsite predicted so.

The little girl put her arm around the dogs shoulders and was saying something into his ear, his head was cocked to the left and they seemed to be in involved in a conversation...it's a shame how many of us neglect this skill or simply lose this ability with atrophy.

Her right arm dropped to the ground as she fished around through the rocks, the dog closely watching each rock she dismissed. Finally, one stone in particular the little girl rubbed in between her hand before dipping it in the water. It looked as though she were going to keep it before she suddenly with a spasmodic jerk thrust the rock into the water, immediately inciting the dog to retrieve it,
"Go get it Herk!"

Again, the dog was in the water nearing its target before the girl could finish her command.
The dog made it just outside the rapids, raising his haunches before diving down and disappearing for a long moment then reappearing, repositioning his body toward the shore and paddling with all his might, he reached the shore and before shaking dropped a stone at the girls small feet. She squealed in delight confirming it was the rock she tossed and praised the proud pup.

The dog and the girl sat next to each other watching the water dance and sing entranced with the show of the massive melting ice flow churning white and sapphire.
The next second a flash of white-blond hair, a streak of orange, a thunderous splash, water fell in on itself and it was as though she were never there- were it not for the nervous black dog racing down the bank, circling, barking and prancing.
A tiny hand or twig, broke the surface enough for the dog to know where to go and he dove off a small ledge after the nearly drown frozen girl turning slowly from white to blue and whose contracted muscles gave up helping her fight for the direction up.
The swirls of water ate around the rocks hungrily, only the sharp water was happily slicing through life.
Minutes passed, the girl and dog were gone.
An hour later searching voices or disharmonious song came echoing from the treetops.
Pahhh-if----uuhhnnnneeyy!
Peh--suh--neeeeee!
Paah--tiff----eyyy!

The girl shivered next to the dog's limp body downstream in a patch of sun. Scrapes on both legs that did not hurt, her chest ached and waist sore from being pulled by her brown belt, a small canine tooth puncture on her side poured diluted blood down her side as she lay quietly humming to the dog who was not dead, just dog tired.

Image by By Phil Mieszkowski (talk · contribs), Merced River in Yosemite, California, 2007 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

His Rescue Human

He squints at me, he trusts I will be there squinting back when he peaks. There is no warmer hug, this is a soul kiss.
I feel the adoring heat of his glare anywhere he happens to touch my body with his searching eyes, content to be resting only on his favorite sight.
When life has me tangled in all its sticky strings, he helps unravel the yarn enough to let me take one deep breath and notice I am never alone in this web.
Battered and beaten, he pours all healing into me, it roars through my marrow and melts my stiff icy pain. I try to do the same yet I am inept.
Bloody, broken and brave, he protects and guards against anything he may deem suspiciously dangerous-to either of us-expecting nothing but safety and (my lap) some security in return.
Electric touch exchange, plugged in to each other, we alternate our currents as needed, the recharging makes me live longer, I can feel it with every smile.
The first and last thing I see every day, never ending is never long enough-for this one of nine nows that we share between animal worlds.
We recognize each others (like) ness, knowing we will always find each other again.
Each and every now and again-so often-i am-immortally in love with this divine feline who chose me to be his companion. I didn't know how lost I was until he found and rescued me (from me).

Little Miss Pants on Fire

Midway through, I thought I'd have it figured out. Not the ending, but what the beginning meant. This is why we are all obsessed with memory and invoke meaning where we think it should go. Although we also all know history has a voice of its own. Capital T, Truth is irrelevant. The moral is in the outcome, not the story itself. Most of my real memories I have put under lock and key deep in the dark corridors of my experiential mind. Safe keeping. My own and others safety.

So some do inevitably morph into secrets and some are tempted to sneak out. Needless to say, I don't like digging around for the right one. It's messy in there.

When asked to conjure up my first memory ever, I responded as anyone would to the request as though being asked to clean someone else's latrine. 

But I found it. For now, it's the first ever.

My first visceral memory is of being called a liar. Not just labeled a ‘liar’, but awarded for being the best one. A ribbon fashioned from construction paper made with two notched out blue bookmarks that formed a vee, a circle glued over their intersection point notating the number one was bestowed upon me in front of my elementary peers one day in Mrs. A’s class.

When I brought it home from school my grandparents giggled at my grand achievement, a little too much. Telling and showing whomever they could, including the mailman, who, like me, didn't seem to think it was as funny as they did.

I was 5 and in first grade at Loyola Elementary, a richy-rich school, although I had an inter-district transfer. I knew there was much about adult humor I had to learn. I did not ever end up learning it in school, however. I was not proud of my ribbon, but they were and proudly put it on the left side of the Frigidaire affixed with an old AAA fridge magnet. 

I thought I should be punished, I half expected it. As far as I had learned in my handful of years so far, lying was a sign of weakness, either used to protect me or make someone seem stronger than they were.

Even now I do not disagree with that definition, especially after having been divorced for some time from a compulsive liar, I have the accumulated a physical BS ton by volume amount of experience with lies, white and tall. 

I remember that handmade ribbon vividly with its bold royal blue bands and happy orange circle. It defined me, made me, made me look more alertly for lies, question what is good and what is bad, and helped me to discover ribbons of my own truth somewhere in the middle. Now I understand why I needed to remember this misremembered memory, hindsight provides clearer vision. I am learning to embrace my little Liar after receiving an award for #1 Storyteller in the first grade. I’ve figured out that the ending will write itself. 

Image of painting by Ludwig Koch (painter) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, c. 1918.

Night-lights Navigating the Web

It felt like the biggest thing since the Enlightenment, a reliable sturdy creation with infinite possibilities much larger than the house Emily Dickinson imagined.   

It was critical or lethal and a bit of both.

Look what we made!

Oh well, it’s out of the makers hands now. 

The hints were there all along, it was just picking up the remote signals.

We are all weavers of webs, despite the gossamer display of arachnids who have been at their art much longer and have endless spools.

Along the world wide lines, signals are sent and retrieved, divisible in byte sized bits, digestible only be permeability, though we work at it every day.

Self-absorption. Absorbing all around. Come on-we’re not that porous, we usually bob on the surface letting the timely tide take us integrated, aggregated, curated, cultivated, pseudo-created avatar ambling along, shrimps on a Joeless shoe-string.

Hang on the line, was once a real line to hang yourself with.

Tailored threads hand me down, TV has nothing on receiving, channeling, funneling people or bots to works we make for man’s sake, it all started out as useful.

Like blinking, we trust everything is there in between-

Searches and updates are endless, archives immense, impressive towers that loom, spin castles into clouds, no wonder its knot raining this winter.

The clutter we defragment into micro-chips, the bottom of the bag, petabytes of particles add up.

Fine as silk, the web that covers the world wide connected by sub oceanic cabling balloons from no birthdays, beacons blinking vibrations, its working, we are entangled.

A fiber optic photograph on a 11-D graph, an amazing maze we made, the complex vortex wrapping fellow weavers and believers in their own image and calling it a cocoon.  

Resurrecting Dark Ages. 

Image By Christian A Diez (Christian A Diez), The Web (2008) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Acting out

“I get it,” she informed me. “I understand it now Mom,” she says nonchalantly while rifling through the pantry for afterschool snacks, past the crackers, straight to the chocolate covered cashews.  She seemed further away today, or maybe got taller.

“Oh yeah?” I think I challenged back, likely defiantly.

“You just have to be crazy,” decidedly closing the cabinet.

“Hmm…” I cast a lure for another line.

“In theatre…if I stop trying to be normal and not stress about being all in control, it’s better that way-the performance.”

“I think you’re right. Actors-the good ones anyway-lose themselves, you forget they are acting.”

“Mom,” correcting my conclusion she explained, “I can’t lose myself when I haven’t even found myself.”

Little did she know, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

Cutting the rug of sanity, dance like nobody is watching, unraveling is revealing.  



Image by Everett Shinn [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, Girl on Stage, 1906.  

Never trust a cook with a clean apron

The days we try to do what we do but it is hard, chunky, clunky even when balancing on muscle memory movements jerk and it still doesn't work-right-when writing is what you do but all those right words ellude, what to do with all that art that wont quit and just comes out like shit-
The forcible pushing through comes out labored and premature needing ICU(s), but tagged as terminal, I've flatlined-you knew it. You saw the trap and said nothing.
I got caught in all those corners where I am cowering from looking around for the little door, the way in, regretting all of the digging and the hole I burrowed myself in, eating dirt, thinking of Alice, and knowing a white apron and patience is all I will need in Wonderland.


Image by Conrad Poirier [Public domain or Public domain], Cooking Class at YWCA c. 1939, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Around the Bend: Trains (1)

There’s something about train stations and Mars-the canals (perhaps Percival planted that seed), No-the subversion, Martian-ness of this group travel, the train itself evocative of not just red and coal, gases and defiance, power, toxicity, it’s the Industry of it. And there is where one will certainly find the great hidden labyrinths below ground like in Paris. The romantic always interjects, yes, that is the fascination, the obsession, the fear, the fix of revolt and intrigue, our responsive, elemental self, raw and open to receiving. I see the train and I think I’ve seen it before. Not this one, not the ones in my town, in my lifetime.  The station itself, a hub I never frequented but feel at home. It is because it is so familiar, the sounds of multiple people bubbles jumping around one central location barely aware of one another, the sounds of such business on high and then a momentary hush, a warm wind and everyone suddenly remembers they are in the same place as others, going somewhere that is not here-together-today-anyway.

My grandfather was in the song “Morning Train” by Sheena Easton-not really, but it is certainly about him taking the morning train into the city-my grandmother would pick him up at the station in the evening with “the car” and notoriously kick up her left foot when they kissed before making the 40 minute drive home into the suburbs. That is true. I think he’s waiting for me at the train station, anytime he may be on one of the trains I impatiently anticipate that infallibly has nobody on it that I know, but I smile at them anyway since everyone likes to be welcomed home-even by a stranger at the train station thinking about the tunnels on Mars. 

Image By War Office official photographer, Horton (Cpt) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. W. Churchill waiting @ train station. 

Oboe We Are

We should treat ourselves as our finest instrument. An instrument we have gotten to know how to use over the years and the end goal of mastery is to become experts on our instruments, with our instruments, and yet all of us fumble a bit forgetting how it works, or neglecting the care and maintenance, turning our blind eye to the wear and tear and ultimately living our lives as though our instruments are a responsibility, our onus, our gift or curse, whatever, but existing outside of us. Our instrument is something we use to show how we do it.

For comparison sake I will compare thee to a woodwind. While neither you nor I need be musically tuned in any way I shall show is absolutely not necessary for full comprehension of this apt comparison. First and foremost, we are full of hot air. Likewise we need fine or general tuning before use. We can hear ourselves louder than anyone else. It doesn’t match what others hear. We can feel when we are off. We drool at the chance to be heard, to toot our own horns. And we, humans, all of us, bellow constantly whether in unison or solo, we think we sound better than we do. So if the oboe is our onus we should get to know its best notes, as the ugly duckling of Peter and the Wolf, we should know our part, play up our assets, and practice our skills, lightly.

Sadly, practice is hard, Practice is work, redundant work, it’s like work practicing.

No two oboes play the same, even with similar construction. I am an oboe, though, I have negative 12% musical talent, I hear myself, my oboeness and just recently I have been cleaning, properly storing and regularly my instrument. I’d even like to learn some new tunes once I become proficient at anything. Somedays I can’t even blow a note, so I admire what it can do while not having to waste my breath.  My oboe knows my moods, my pitch, my flaws, my touch, my lips, my song, and especially when my notes are all wrong.  

Practice does not make pitch perfect, but it does make it easy listening.  

Like the great Yogism goes, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” 

Image by Thomas Eakins [Public domain], The Oboe Player (1903), via Wikimedia Commons.

Plan Z

When? Then?
Now? Now then. Back when-
between now and then. In the past, not alive as "in" the past or as buried under, down in the back where, back when we want-
Now.
It's alive again and then it never was, is, has been-
Been stalling for some time, stall, a place to park, in the shade-time wasted, delayed, squandered, gone...it's going even now even though we don't feel it unless we move too fast or not at all, I never knew it had been now or never, nothing, measurable, nothing pleasurable comes, becomes a fleetin moment, a palpitation unmentionable and broken. A sinking feeling of tummy twists leaden, plummeting in silence, stillness eludes, discontent stacks past seconds, more, thirds, everything and their firsts waiting for someone, not you-anymore.
See? Where has the time gone now?
Exactly where you left it,
behind you, projecting your history on to others coming up back there as you race forward,
late for the future-again.


Image By Abbie Rowe, 1905-1967, Photographer (NARA record: 8451352) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons of reporters rushing through the White House, 8/14/1945. 

Your desire

I object. I object to getting along. I object to making peace. I object to having hope. I object to giving volume and shape to such soundless and weightless objects. I object to mapping Babel, decoding dark matter, and documentation as fact. I object material wealth, gains of ills, drowning in debt, planning on procrastination, delaying destiny, fabricated faith, and all other coat racks collecting dust.  I object to forgetting yourself like a name since it’s only a temporary assignment.  I object the image. I project your image. An object you cannot touch. I object possession. I am not an object of possession. 

Image of painting by Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten 1664 [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Weighing the plumage

The queen owns all the swans in England. This must include the black ones. She uses sheep to keep the lawns trim, or was it goats- even so there must be a black one in the herd. I think Taleb is onto something. Maybe I am a black swan? Maybe I’m just a duck that think’s it’s a swan. My cats’ middle name is Waddles.  Countless humans have accused me of quackery, but I don’t understand the language, so I must speak chicken (and a little peacock). Well, if it struts like a rooster and sings like a mockingbird, it may just be a Phoenix.   

“Ever heard the old trick question, "which weighs more a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?"

The answer is supposed to be neither, because both would be a pound, yet that answer is technically incorrect.

Gold is universally weighed using a different measurement system than most other materials. It is weighed using the troy system, and troy ounces.

This system is measured so that 12 troy ounces makes up 5760 grains to the pound, while the common measurement for feathers would make them equal to 7000 grains to the pound.

Thus, a standard pound of feathers technically weighs more than a pound of gold!

(Source)” -OMG Facts

And just now I have come to discover, I am mature enough, informed a bit, I am shown clearly and unavoidably, that predictions, planning, forecasting, and intentions are all just busy-body-bee-hive activities. I’ve subconsciously known this, like you, rationally, anything goes, right?  That’s why we have “Murphy’s Law”, “margins of error” and certitudes like “more or less” and countless (literally uncountable) ways to say the same thing-‘I guess’…

Yet I have not been a great planner. I have been a better gardener, planting seeds and then amazed when they grow into more than I initially ‘anticipated’. I have what I need and want. I recognize continuously wanting more is an American affliction and I quarantine myself if any symptoms arise.  

I think Karma is a great concept, instant karma even more so. Just like you I don’t know for certain, but I sense that there’s some higher form of justice-or maybe purpose. That is why planning is useless really. I have taken many dumb risks and survived. I took the largest calculated risk of my life and am still in a free-fall, but learning to slow it down and look around.  I believe that we should all believe in ourselves first before we try to go around believing in other things that cannot be proven.

It could be the butterfly effect. I can feel invisible strings. I think science and philosophy are inextricably intertwined but have been made thin as individual strands by the constant resistance to each others symbiotic connection, over the last 150 years.  Even as a layperson I feel obliged to try to understand as much as I possibly am able to of both fields, of their shared territories and studying poetry, the middle ground in which they both dance.  I do not expect to discover anything new, perhaps it's all just déjà vu.  

I think if I think things will work out, they already have, maybe the way they were supposed to, or maybe just the way I hoped or planned. Being optimistic is only half the glass, but it’s the replenishing part.  Is there such thing as luck if anyone can be born a black swan? Why do we bother being pre-occupied by our own conventions, nose in the microparticles instead of eyes wide open, terrified and exhilarated at the taking the biggest risk possible, to try, to go for it, to give yourself permission while you’re here to do what you want with your life. That is its own reward.

Risk is an irrational calculation. We are all accidents about to happen. Will is not free. Exposure is embarrassing. Jeopardy is a game show. A gamble is an investment.  Possibility is the address of Emily Dickinson. One’s fortuity is directly proportionally to how fortunate they feel, minus the scruples paid in interest.  Uncertainty is certain.  

“Hope is the thing with feathers…”-Emily Dickinson

1st Image photograph By PookieFugglestein (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons. 

2nd Image, drawing via Wikimedia Commons, c. 1885, sourced uncertain.

Otherness (Def.)

“The highest form of prose is discourse, in the literal sense of the word.”

“The word is man himself.”

“We are made of words.”

“Words are born and die like men.”

(All above quotes from Octavio Paz in “The Bow and the Lyre” University of Texas Press, 1973)

The following conversation is a real conversation based on the prose piece by Harryette Mullen entitled, Sleeping with the Dictionary.

"What a funny title! What does that suggest to you-even if you hadn't read anything? If someone said to you-Oh, I have a book, it's called Sleeping with the Dictionary-what do you think?"

“Um, I think of someone cuddled up in their bed with a dictionary…um, that’s usually-that’s the first thought…do you want to hear my second thought?”

giggling

“Cuddled with the-cuddled sounds a little innocent-”

“Well. Well, I literally-that’s what I first thought of. I literally thought of someone just like, falling asleep with a book…”

“……….falling asleep with the dictionary.”

“Yeah-”

“Yeah-we do that a lot…”

“Do you want to say your second thought?”

                                 “My second thought-

having sex with the dictionary.”

“So what does that-”

all together             “Making Love.”

“F***ing the dictionary…what does it mean to “F” the dictionary?”

“Well, I mean. I think it means that…you-if you-so if you just translate the things that we mean when we say that about like, sleeping with another person. So it means, like, you know the dictionary really intimately. You feel almost, sort of, like you have the same access to the dictionary as you do to your own body. Um, so, like you just…and, and there’s an erotic dimension to all of that so…”

“Let me get back to the erotics of language and words. But let’s-What kind of person has a special relationship with the dictionary?”

unanimously             “A writer.”

“A writer-why? I mean, what is the real-the writer is to the dictionary as a dictionary is…what?”

“A construction worker to bricks. A plumber to pipes-”

“Let’s stick to bricks. Let’s say a mason and bricks. So, the writer is to the dictionary as the mason is to bricks. So what does that mean for the dictionary-

pause

It’s the things…that you put…to build with…poiesis, poiesis, you make with bricks. 

Words of bricks.”

“A writer as a sculptor to clay...”

“The spoken language is closer to poetry than to prose; 

it is less reflective and more natural, 

and that is why it is easier to be a poet without knowing it than a prose writer.”

-Octavio Paz

Image By Tomasz Krzykała (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

1st image By Andrews, William [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

passiflora

“...the bloom is clasped by 3 leafy green bracts, 5 pearlesque petals, a fringe like corona of white tipped rays, flagged with 5 antlers or stamens,”  I read...

It started with a large bowl containing forty-six shriveled maroon brown (ugly) palm-sized fruit in a wicker bowl on my kitchen table. That day I wrote my first published piece purely inspired by not knowing what to do with those wrinkled empty fruit, with myself, with my story. Lazy Susan didn't even know what to do with them, I asked and she just spoke in circles. The pursuance of purpose with passion(fruit) began with those little spent and shriveled fruit. The time was ripe. Since then, I have hidden and sprinkled little seeds in each poetic line, a memento sometimes I only know. Passion is preserved in my pages, not as obvious as photos in a scrapbook, but stashed between If & A Very Minor Poet Speaks. In the art of Oshibana time still becomes brittle. 

It could have been Dickinson that made me do it, or inspired me-alas her sadness never infused my muse. Besides we had not even been formally introduced academically. She seemed to see the same things in the garden, as the way one reads the sky, we both speak poetry.

 Instead of grapes, I planted a single passion fruit vine, on a pilgrimage of its own, running east to west along the fence line, signifying the borderlands, sharing its own passion with the sun.

No sour grapes, I am not whining, but the passiflora is out of control, overzealous and runneth over.

The passion fruit is a vigorous, climbing vine that clings by tendrils to almost any support. It can grow 15 to 20 ft. per year once established and must have strong support.

–Passionfruit

That is how a passionflower ended up pressed in between the pages of my grandmother's 1936 edition of the Best Loved Poems of the American People (no further comment on the content selection). I do not know why I robbed this fruit of its seed, cryogenically frozen in a wax paper sheath, a plan aborted, its architecture in perfect symmetry...the Holy Lance of leaves accented by tendrils or tamed tails, 10 virginal milk quartz petals as pillars, 10 faithful apostles guard the crown of thorns. Heaven and Purity, blue and white, fire and ice, behind lilac hued velvet drapes, yellow fireworks accent flashes of light.

The flower has been given names related to this symbolism throughout Europe since that time. In Spain, it is known as espina de Cristo (“Christ’s thorn”). German names include Christus-Krone (“Christ’s crown”), Christus-Strauss (“Christ’s bouquet”), Dorn-Krone (“crown of thorns”), Jesus-Leiden (“Jesus’ passion”), Marter(“passion”) or Muttergottes-Stern (“Mother of God’s star”).

–Passionflower: Etymology and Names (source: http://signum-crucis.tumblr.com/post/23014727480/passion-flower-passiflora-symbol-of-christs)

I see now why one would like to preserve life, preserve energy mid-life, like passion interrupted, full and pregnant with expectation, abundantly awaiting night to shape shift in peace,

Letting go, forgetting all you know about the natural course of things, it's all the same and doesn't change the outcome, unless you've been interrupted by the existence of infinite possibility, unpredictably. Passion possesses. 

And that gentle hand of fate, the nudge in a direction, can be a push, a shove, a pull, a punch. A gentle hand can be made into a fist. We stand up to change, not letting the wild beast order us around, even knowing the beast is trying to scare you into a more beautiful you, we cringe at this reflection, we could fail. Change takes us to a new place we think we've never seen, but it knows us, has our placard and makes us feel dumb, Hello my name is Stationary.

I built this intricate and dynamic machine called daily life, I am its humble servant, I obey.

I only hope to be preserved one day myself, not by Botox, like the passion flower of poetry, the passiflora of faith, the seed of inspiration and the serum of my stimulation. Oozing with potential, already hidden in history, I write as though nobody's reading, I press flowers for all they are worth, for those that give a Dickinson. 

1st image of Julia Margaret Cameron [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Pasion flower at garden gate.