The Melting World

My Husband

He sneaks out the back door
“to check on the rabbits”
and returns to us stinking
of tobacco. He drinks coffee
after coffee until he stutters.
Before washing dishes, he pulls
on headphones – with a chewed
wire and right ear-cushion
taped on with package tape.
Like a pogo stick gone awry,
he dances to Devo: “She’s just
a girl, just a girl, a girl you want.”
He puffs out his face like a fugu,
sans needles, and asks for a kiss.
At 2 a.m. he re-configures
our son’s train tracks across
the living room floor into elaborate
loopty-loops, with empty waffle
boxes curved into tunnels, and
laughs as I trip over them.
When I catch him reading posts
for the online fan club for Prince,
he blushes. He stays up late
every night to create the songs
which pulse through his brain.
He tosses our son into the air,
up, up, and up, over and over,
with the grace and power of a lion.
He lets me be when I see
the world through a dark window.
He knows that to say nothing
is often the ultimate sign of love.

Call your senators and representatives and call this man some think a president for a virtual march to protest troop escalation. Stop Bush from causing more death and destruction.

More information at http://www.moveon.org/

A recent search on Google for images of the people harmed and killed by this illegal war makes me feel even more compelled to try and stop this madness.

Violence begets violence. Peace begets peace. Love begets love. Simple. Now help us to give real hope to the people in Iraq, whether for the sake of the American or Iraqi people there or for both, it’s time to stop a war that all started with sick lies and deception. Case in point: 15,000 Minnesotans have already been sent to fight this war in Iraq. 35%-41% returning MN reservists self-report significant mental health troubles. 1500 MN severely wounded. 165 were killed. Each day 150-200 more Minnesotans are being sent to fight in Iraq.

Read the BBC’s recent article.

25,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, and 37% were killed by US-led coalition forces! Many who have died and who are now in permanent suffering from severe injuries and loss of limbs are children and women. An estimated 42,500 have been severely wounded. Think of how many more are injured emotionally and spiritually by the loss of their family members. We can help to stop this madness now.

Racking the bane of the same idea, scribbling a compulsive list
of materialistic desires. His brain jogs with the noontime zest
of a jackal munching on the flesh of ten ripe melons. The rushing
yacht of naught transports him to a tropical island, where a life
lived naïve deserves the most acerbic cocktail.

Made of kudzu, dog hair, and Styrofoam, his mind muffles
the noise of the clamorous world. Take a nap: the fuzzy tail
of a roving jet wags over Nepal, flashback to the high
society escape, vacillating between bourbon
or sugar rolled in hundred dollar bills.

If steadfast, he believes, these privileges remain and spouted
uncertainty would shrivel his size, like a deformed leg. If he
escapes the horror of losing petrol, pretty is each day –
better than watching the local flies buzz around Jesus.

Onto the final animal music, as it sound-bites the on-stage poultry
who must march to the orders of this enfant terrible. To command
tanks blindly across the desert might stir up enough chlorine
to cleanse all foreign prayers from foreign lips.

If only a bull would moo or snort, and scratch the dirt, our man
might realize right before the end that his servants had pulled
over his head and pulled up to his waist the liquid, flowing silk
of pajamas dyed in the human fruits of his decidings.

Up in that land where bears snore under branches, bellies full of blueberries,
where a ferret in a white fur snowsuit bounces across the fields of fresh snow,
and the heat of its small engine emits bursts of mist from its throat, Uncle
holds in two hands, like a prayer, a white coffee cup full of mirrored
blackness and watches the memories of the day reveal themselves there.

Today the image of Linda Krachek’s smile, her two front teeth, slightly crossed
like Snow White’s folded hands, gleam as she sets down his breakfast special:
two eggs overeasy, two strips of bacon, and one buttered toast, cut into
triangles, with a packet of blueberry jam. He is Man of the Northstar Grill,
her eyes flash emeralds. Whenever she looked into his own,
they held him tight.

A ferret jumps in and out of sight.

His niece, his Mouse with rat-nest hair, the one unafraid of delivering earthworms
and leeches to the old fools who fished all day in sun or rain. She who hugged him
as if he were a Hero of the Great North, as if he were Paul Bunyan himself. She left
years ago, in awkward puberty, when Uncle became a person to smile at briefly
on her way to the bedroom before closing the door. Last he’d heard she lived in China.
He imagines her elf face darkening into a sunset, like a cinnamon stick in black tea,
and on each finger, a leech is twisting like the fingernails of an ancient Chinese empress.

A ferret jumps, switches directions midair, leaps and tumbles.

Little brother, Mouse’s father. His laugh would crack across ice like lightening bolts.
People crowded around him, their messiah of mirth. Uncle Bud nearby in the shadow,
older, the other brother, the fumbler, whose jokes fell like geese full of buckshot. Best friend, comrade in frost and fish, a right-hand man, to the one who fell in a lake and fell silent.

Brother underground for forty years, Linda married, then divorced, sitting under a thinning quilt, TV on, for twenty-eight, Mouse a wisp of a memory, lost in an adult shell. Here Uncle is, King
of Memories. We were wordless when we posed before his Polaroid, but he knew. He gave unencumbered love, and for that, we stay near on winter mornings. We hang like crystal from the window ledge, immortal beauties he cannot reach or save.

photo by grandma brown

(painting by me)

My Ears

A dog is barking terrier terror
and the sleepy young man jumps
into a jumpsuit of fear
before crumpling and slumping away.

My ears heard it happen and told me so.
They are my little boys eager to help.
They sweep floors, humming, chittering
about who said what on that table
or this sidewalk, nosing dust like pups,
and they’ll never grow old or bored
of smalltalk.

To some, ears prove an embarrassment,
an extra pair of primeval hands
they muffle their ears with long hairy gloves.

But I like to fold the cartilage
into those tiny pop-up books
filled with tales of Van Gogh on trombone
and listen to their ocean waves roll
and bask in the applause.

These immature wings love me wildly
and I love them back the same.
If only they’d develop a little more finesse,
I am sure they’d flap from their silken nest,
flutter about like pale butterflies
and return to me chockfull of good news.

Mirrors

At breakfast I told my husband about a study showing vegetarians
have high IQ’s and in the matter of a few sentences I had begun to talk
about cannibalism practiced among starving WWII Japanese soldiers
on a remote Pacific island. I am my mother’s daughter, I concluded when
he waved his hand as a roadblock to all things morbid, sad, unbelievable, yet true.

At the bus stop I see how the elm tree across the way spreads its branches
across the road, dancing its slow dance of balance and growth, reaching
for the intangible. Roots do the same underneath the grass, another world
of darkness where growth, as slow and as delicate, occurs in moments
whether we stand above, staring, or walk past, whistling.

If we are trees’ siblings, where are the roots? Did we lose them when born inside
porcelain, steel, and recycled air? The girl born outside today wears handprints
of her aunties on her skull forever. Her mind soars above the world
far from its dry cough and fever.

Maybe roots are invisible, like the red thread of destiny tying together those
meant to love, and maybe we drag them behind like entrails in each step.
We don’t care for them, we don’t see them, we never stand still. Our roots
capture bits of hair, lifeless ants, and candy wrappers, until we become burdened,
and we fall down before we understand a simpler way to grow.

Yet, then again, maybe my roots were never mine at all, but are my mother’s
and my grandmothers’ and my great-grandmothers’ and their mothers
and on and on. A seed sprouted from the heart of southern Africa where
First Mother sang. Words are then not mine to choose. Words began in the sigh
of hydrogen combining with oxygen, times two.

Whatever we utter connects us to dark and to light, burrowing
inside the roots we have a song kept safe, even as each word leaves.

I am back in a nation who believes in daylight savings, so for a few weeks I didn’t need electric light bulbs while shuffling about the apartment from sink to cereal bowl to coat to shoes, and I didn’t need to peer across the park on heightened awareness to see if I walked alone or if someone shared the sidewalk – other than the omnipresent rabbits and squirrels.

But daylight savings cannot lengthen the time the sun wishes to shine on us, and as days shorten, we have slipped back into the eerie darkness of mornings, where each step is careful and each street light is abuzz with nervous activity. The trees wave their thin arms and bony fingers about in the wind with longing.

Insomnia visited me last night and I can’t shake the feeling that there are more bureaucratic nightmares to accomplish than I have the mind and hands to tackle. Times like this, I wish I could leap ahead into my sixties, tug on a pale green elbow-worn sweater and settle into the upholstered chair of my grandmother Lucille. To be her as I remember her, the one who had time to cook from scratch and make things with her hands, from malted milk shakes poured into blue, red and green aluminum cups to knitting neon-colored ponchos for her mousy-haired granddaughter. How lovely it would to be to have the time to create from what we discard rather than to create what we discard. It is a gift to be able to fold torn magazine pages into the skirts of angels.

The leaves on the maple tree across the street from my office window have transformed into the same color as the burnt red brick of Eddy Hall. I want to take a picture to show you this chameleon miracle, but I have yet to locate my camera’s recharger. On a positive note, it is Friday and tonight I will take my son with me to see the open studios of the art students. The dusty green of the Jack pines and the tenacious reds of the maples fill my eyes with a symphony of how life should be: both calm and vibrant, in balanced ease.

A hiatus from blogging occurred, due to unstoppable flows of forms, databases, and meetings and greetings and fare-thee-wells. My son has finally been seen and checked and officially diagnosed, and now, maybe now, people will start to help him to grow into his full bloom. I still have a gazillion other forms to fill out and places to visit because I won’t ever give up finding him the best help out there in the wild, wild blue.

I took yesterday off to spend time with my husband’s mother, who stopped in for a few from Detroit, and it was a comfortable relief to lounge about, drinking coffee, tussling with my son, reading sustainable home building magazines, and chit-chatting while the western capitalist world click-clacked along without me….

Now back into the frenetic spiral, with a tinge of a headache, but I remain hopeful curious enough about life to search for more to explore and to learn. As the owner of the local coffee shop down the street says (and she is a great poet): “My father always said a kick in the ass is still a step forward.” I feel I have received a series of kicks in the last few months in this move from Japan to Minnesota, and I realize this morning that I have progressed toward my goal of helping my son. I have, at least, stepped almost 7,000 miles ahead.

(painting from www.atlasoftheuniverse.com_milkyway2.jpg)

Guarantees

Four a.m. my son awakens, stricken with a grief
he cannot explain. His hands search
like starfish for my mouth and eyes,
his head burrows into my chest as if
he wishes to be unborn again. What can I do
for him except tell him I am here?
All Will Be Well. ShhhShhhShhh.
The any-mother threadbare guarantee patched
together with borrowed blankets, unpaid bills,
a gelid radiator, and tarnished pennies in a bowl.
I sing what I know: Swing low, sweet chariot,
coming for to carry me home, I once was lost,
but now I’m found, was blind, but now
I see, kum by yah, my Lord, kum by yah,
O, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall
overcome someday, we are not afraid,
O, deep in my heart, I do believe.
My son pats my back to the same
rhythm I pat his, and we head hand-in-hand
to the mountain top where a band of angels
fly. Our mother is there in the center
of the spiraling galaxy, weaving with her bony
fingers blue and yellow stars into the twigs of a nest.
She hums what she knows until morning comes.

(photo by me)

(photo by me)

I AM LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET

I am lost in the supermarket somewhere
between the brussel sprouts and the tangerines, lost
in the age-old parent-child debate over
brand-name vs. generic, wavering between
100% organic and 100% genetically-modified,
I am lost in a maze of an imagined life without you.
You’ve already settled in the earth and sprouted back as a bee.

I am lost and you stay at home inside the cocoon
of Luther crooning and dressed in sweaters stitched
with reverberations and keys, raspberry jelly on your lips,
sparrow down and unconditional love in your being.

I am floating near the orange paint on the ceiling
and brushing against the sign for the missing cat.

Help bring my precious baby home.

I am lost in the flickering haze above the cabbage, breathing in the mist,
back to the source of life, where we end to begin.

(painting by me)

Miroku (Buddha of the Future)

Unformed air and cut ginger root voice
of the in-between inhale and exhale, Miroku, a curious god
to walk with toward distance drawn nearer step by step
and every and any direction is Divine. The simple way to live tucked inside
the pocket of her brown shabby coat.

Most run past her screaming inside, as we strive toward the next meal, pill,
best-laid plan, junk mail, jackpot, war, deal, steal, fix, fight, election, erection,
and everything we seek coated with sugar, sprayed with vitamins, soaked
in preservatives, plastic severed flesh and fruit wrapped for instant gratification.

Miroku, the true future, she moves the silent bodies of animals, human,
and insect, toward the unknown blindly, like fish swimming downstream, following
her we never lose the way to hesitation or complicate life with the muddied multiplication
of prediction. Miroku, never looking over her shoulder in fear,
never lighting up night with artificial light, never listening to the orchestra
of incessant buzzing above our office chairs, not entertaining cold dissections
of regret, no destruction, interruption of the natural rhythmic dance
of breath and dream.

Miroku waits. She exists in the woman who struggles with bloodying hands
to secure the rope to the tree in a raging wind because she wants to live.
She lives in that child who like an unshelled seed opens its eyes
to the nocturnal churning earth. She is always unprepared and traveling light.
If we wake up and open our eyes to see ourselves in the mirror, she stares back
a bit harder and longer each day, with undying and unconditional love.

(Outsider art from Asahikawa Public library)

This Morning

I dreamt my man held my hand against his warm green sweater
The man in jean shorts I share a bus stop with finally mouthed good morning
The brick storefront I stand in front of just had a silver spiral door knob installed
Fog covered the fields, enough to cover the tops of the heads of humans
Our bus flew over the foothills of the Isle of Skye
And, finally, a man I voted for grinned from the frontpage, fist in the air,
And the loser who played dirty games was nowhere to be found
A grey squirrel raced past with a hawk feather in its mouth,
scuttered up an oak and twirled it in his paws.
A bumper sticker proclaimed ‘I Was Born to Bowhunt’
A young man whistled so well people stopped to take pictures
The Hare Krishna rang their bells and beat their drums,
Hare Bol Hare Hare Hare Bol Hare Hare.
Here is Minneapolis, then, with late summer days that make life sing.
From the east through the pines the morning sun blesses
with its occasional bands of light and mist
whoever glances up from the sidewalk.
I am at the edge, a witness to the beautiful bazaar.

Well, as the world around me begins to speed up and populate the minutes with complexity, I need to slow down and remind myself in a mantra that ‘stress around me doesn’t have to equal stress inside me,’ and if I can maintain a sense of humor about this chaotic and eclectic circus called life, I will not only find a path toward fulfillment but also toward lightness and wonder.

Since I don’t always do this well, as a human sieve who pours others’ energies swirling about me into my being until they turn into my own, I thank goodness for my husband and his sense of humor. If we are all superheroes for one thing or another, then he is the hero of the laugh and the now.

I love graveyards, though maybe many people find that odd. I like walking where I feel the bones and spirits are resting, reading the headstones and imagining the singular life of its occupant.

I once did a research project about an early turn-of-the-century graveyard in Alabama, how it grew into being an idealized community of the powerful people’s afterworld (basically replicating what they tried to achieve on earth) and how the poor and forgotten were relegated to the potter’s field (unmarked except for sunken squares of grass which were slightly a darker green), usually at the base of a hill.

The ‘prominent’ members (a.k.a the rich dudes) placed their plots on the hill, facing East, to be the first to see the sun smooch and glint the trumpets, and topped their bones with air-piercing grand obelisks, their wives given smaller (at times miniature versions of the men’s) headstones, and usually feminized with flowers, angels, and vines – to keep them put, I surmised. It surprised me to discover that some prominent families buried their ‘slaves’ in their family plots as well. Did these enslaved people, and later the economically-enslaved servants, get a say on that, did their families? I wondered how such a scenario played out in real life, among real people.

But it was the potter’s field and those rough simple headstones -often made illegible by time – and some made of poured cement inthe more recent years -that intrigued me the most. They were pushed to the outer, lower fringes, the western areas of the graveyard. To me their silencing meant they had the most to say and definitely the least written about them. Well, I have more stories to tell about graveyards, but for now will let it rest. But being at the edges, that is where I like to stand and think, in life as I walk toward the great long sleep.

(A dragonfly by an outsider artist from new library exhibition, Asahikawa Public Library)

For the first week and a half I have been taking two buses to and fro work, but gradually it dawned on me that the simpler way was to walk. So, I began walking as soon as I disembarked one bus and then caught the next one further down the road, getting exercise instead of just waiting and waiting for a bus to maybe arrive.

And this morning I just went ahead and started hoofing it toward work without any intention of catching the bus. Lo and behold, it took me the same amount of time (45 minutes) as if I had taken the two buses, and I didn’t have to sit on a lurching seat and smell the sticky vinyl floors of the buses, nor watch the people probably my same age who seem so unhealthy that they can barely walk up the bus steps. (Oh, I can’t let that happen to me, so incidentally, I need to start turning down all the opportunities to eat pastries at work….).

Thus, a Yeah for feet and Yeah for the beautiful, slightly crisp, but sunny morning. I then treated myself to a fancy coffee since I saved two dollars, too. It took me a while to catch on, but I’m feeling quite happy about the oldest form of transportation in the world: the ol’ fot, fuot, ped, pod!

Well, as many of you know, we uprooted ourselves three weeks earlier than anticipated due to my good luck in finding a job at my alma mater as an academic advisor.

More later when I get a chance to breathe, but for now I’ll say I am enjoying the overall experience of returning to Minnesota because it has that nice blend of rekindling longlost memories, sights and scents with encountering new faces, knowledge, places, and goals. Maybe I can more aptly describe these first few days here as the ‘strange familiar’ or the ‘familiar strange’.

Here my son sits perched on top of the sofa right before bedtime.