After

My recovery is steady, though I don't expect to get back to "normal" for some time. I can describe the "atmosphere" of recovery as "blank." I'm fastidious about being clean and almost never go without a shower. I may have showered three times since getting back home on the 21st. I've sponge-bathed but didn't wash my hair, which devolved into an oily mess. I wanted to just curl up, unwashed, under blankets. Today I showered (and plan to every day from now on). One would think it would be refreshing (especially with peppermint shampoo). No--I feel the same, dirty or clean. No difference except I don't smell musty. Food has a curious, metallic overlay. Mr. Strega gets me brown rice with turkey gravy because I can taste the gravy and the salt. I ate half a turkey burrito today--again, the salt overrode the metallic flavor. I'm making a grilled cheese sandwich and steamed carrots for dinner, a kid's meal (the carrots are heart-healthy, the grilled cheese is not.) So it goes.

My dreams are strange: it's where I seem alive again. Last night I dreamed of a specific street in Santa Cruz, with an elementary school in the corner. The building is large, light gray; it used to be full of children. But the population of kids has diminished, and small, alternative schools house the building. 

In my dream, I am to cross the street, to get to the school. Massive vehicles roar around me: a giant red dump truck, a blockish school bus, like something made out of Lego. The traffic is terrifying, reminds me of Los Angeles: but somehow I get to my destination. That is another pale gray building, with columns and a tiled roof: it's supposed to be the Santa Cruz Main Library. The dream ends inside the library; I'm standing in front of open French doors, talking to a man I don't know.

Strange and very much off my center: so unexpected 

Mortality, Again

I'm going to give the CliffNotes version of what happened to me recently.

On April 18th, I nearly died of sepsis after contracting the H3N2 influenza virus. I was progressing into septic shock but pulled through and am lucky to be alive.

 I was able to avoid the ICU but spent four days as a "guest" in the cardiac unit of the local hospital. I hate being in the hospital and left a day or two early so I could actually get some sleep. For one thing, the guy in the next room kept talking (loudly) about how his wife was having an affair with his best friend. There was also a woman who screamed and fought the staff half the night (like, literally fought, so security had to come in). 

I left full of admiration for what nurses do, and what they have to contend with.

 I'd had this year's flu shot, but the virus has mutated and the flu shot is less effective. 

I would like to end with a chart about sepsis symptoms:

On Living in the Hour of Cities Under Siege (by Carolyn Forche)

It is a time of being sorted by skin and hair, by mother tongue,
as being from here or there, as pepper spray fills in the air
until the whole city stinks of it, and the men who arrived in rented cars
with out-of-state plates, with faces covered, begin their hunt
for carpenters, house maids, dish washers, kindergarten kids,
for anyone who, to them, looks like they aren’t from here.
They’ll pull you through the window of your car.
They will not tell you who they are, who is in command.
They wear a little of the alphabet and do not know
that ice out also means the date in spring when
it is forbidden any longer to fish on the lakes.
They tackle and beat and cuff. It is never enough.
This is where the people make their stand.
These are the city’s barricades and fires,
leaf blowers blowing the tear gas back.
Here are the bouquets left in the snow for the dead,
candles in glass jars guttering out, hymns once sung in church.
Anyone may be taken, and those who stand
in the way are shot in the head.
This is what should be said to the coming cities:
you’ll need gas masks, goggles, armbands, milk for your eyes,
the name of someone who will search if you disappear.
When the time comes, take in anyone who needs to hide,
bring pots of food to front lines everywhere,
hot soup and cocoa, a roast potato to warm the hands.
When the time comes, listen to the whistles, the car horns, the cries in the air

The Dignity of Ushers by Al Maginnes

Their authority did not unfold

from ironed white shirts and thin ties

or from the funereal seriousness that struck

their acne-splashed faces but because

they stood heir to our native faith in light.

So we followed the thin white waver

of beams they pointed down aisles

to seats we never thought of refusing.

It was the first job I wanted,

especially after birthday outings

far from home showed me the glowing

outfits worn by big-city ushers, their get-ups

a blend of doorman and military dictator,

as gaudy and fine as the plots

of movies my Saturdays were swallowed by.

None of us knew, as they took us

into the artificial light of the cinema,

that they walked the path of the pin setter,

the blacksmith or elevator operator,

professions reduced to curiosity

by wandering time. Only in the quick steps

of floor salesmen, the slim backs of hostesses

bringing us to our tables, do they remain,

the artful flutters of their flashlights lost

in dark we are left to find our own way through

Making Peace (by Denise Levertov)

A voice from the dark called out,

             ‘The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.’

                                   But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

                                       A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

                                              A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal

Re-reading

I read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut every few years. This paragraph haunts me, then and present. Present-time, the items would not be of German origin. 

"Now he was indoors, next to an iron cookstove that was glowing cherry red. Dozens of teapots were boiling there. Some of them had whistles. And there was a witches’ cauldron full of golden soup. The soup was thick. Primeval bubbles surfaced it with lethargical majesty as Billy Pilgrim stared. There were long tables set for a banquet. At each place was a bowl made from a can that had once contained powdered milk. A smaller can was a cup. A taller, more slender can was a tumbler. Each tumbler was filled with warm milk. At each place was a safety razor, a washcloth, a package of razor blades, a chocolate bar, two cigars, a bar of soap, ten cigarettes, a book of matches, a pencil, and a candle. Only the candles and the soap were of German origin. They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State. So it goes."

Update on Jeanne Burke

 There is an update on Jeanne Burke, who went missing in November. Her body was recently found in deep woods near the junction of Smith Grade and Moore Ranch Road, where she was last seen. I am sad to think she died in fear, and alone. What was she looking for? Was she just on a walk and did not know how to find her way home? Was she looking for something, someone? Why did she walk into the woods and not stay on the road? 

We will never know. 

Reading the Map

 A Map to the Next World

 

By Joy Harjo

for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the

map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

A Mark of Resistance (by Adrienne Rich)

 

A Mark of Resistance

Stone by stone I pile
this cairn of my intention
with the noon's weight on my back,
exposed and vulnerable
across the slanting fields
which I love but cannot save
from floods that are to come;
can only fasten down
with this work of my hands,
these painfully assembled
stones, in the shape of nothing
that has ever existed before.
A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.
A mark of resistance, a sign.

Death Fugue (By Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris)

 

                    Death Fugue 

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease

He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play
he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue
jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon we drink you evenings
we drink you and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes

He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit

Never Found

 An update regarding Jeanne Burke: she was never found. That's the simple, sad fact. I cannot imagine what her family is going through. Despite that the outcome was likely inevitable after several days due to the cold weather and rain, we still held out hope that she would be rescued. I'm not even sure someone will find her remains in that rugged area. People still post things like, "Look in the blackberry bushes!" or posit that someone picked her up and she's now in a hospital or homeless camp. The latter might have some small grain of truth in it. Still, it seems like one of those stories where someone has amnesia for years and suddenly wakes up knowing their identity. 

It's horrifically sad. I was recently invited to go up to Empire Grade with friends to view a meteor shower, but declined. It's one of the roads that Jeanne was known to have walked.

I can't go up there anymore, and may never.

 

Lost: Jeanne Burke, Santa Cruz County, California

 Something very sad has unfolded over the last week. A caveat: I'm only reporting what I've heard and read in the media. I apologize if I haven't gotten some of the details accurately.

Jeanne Burke, a 73-year-old resident of my hometown (Felton, California) has been lost in the mountains for over a week. Jeanne used to work at the post office and also owned an archery store.

Jeanne lived near one of two quarries in Felton. It is easy to get lost up there even if you know the terrain. Jeanne wandered off from her home around 3:00 in the afternoon. She was first spotted near the quarry, headed towards Empire Grade.

Let me tell you about that section of Empire Grade. The last time I was up at the Empire Grade quarry gate, I was with a couple of friends across the street, hoping to see a comet. We'd already seen the comet at the beach before the full moon rose, but we decided to make a trek up into the mountains to get a better look. We didn't see the comet, but the "mistake" turned out to be a happy one: we found ourselves in a meadow so fabulously moonlit that it seemed drenched in silver. 

Empire Grade itself, however, scared the crap out of me; despite the bright moonlight, the trees seemed strange, almost sinister, and giant quarry and construction trucks kept zooming by. I finally had to go sit in my friend's car, and felt grateful when we finally headed home.

You'd think seeing an elder walking along that remote road might prompt someone to stop and offer help. A couple of years ago, an elder wandered off from an assisted living home near downtown Santa Cruz and walked ten miles up Highway One, a busy road where NOBODY walks. This woman was found deceased on a service road in the woods. Why NO ONE stopped to ask an elder why she was walking along Highway One is beyond me. 

The latter is true about Jeanne as well. She walked a short way to Smith Grade Road, which a lot of people won't even drive, much less walk (including me). It's a steep, winding road flanked by heavy woods and and ravines. I am confounded that nobody stopped to ask a 73-year-old woman why she was walking by herself on that road.

Jeanne was sighted for the last time at 4:30 pm on Moore Ranch Road, which branches off Smith Grade. The alert had already gone out that Jeanne was missing, but the person who saw her didn't know that, just thought she was one of many walkers who frequented the area. I can't imagine how this person must feel now.

Moore Ranch Road looks like a very pleasant, flat road flanked by wide meadows (I've never been there myself, but saw a video of that area made by a mountain biker). Still, by 4:30 this time of year, sunset is less than 30 minutes away. Darkness falls early in the woods, and by 5:30 or so, it begins to get pitch black. Jeanne had no flashlight, no food, no proper clothing except a light jacket. She wore a black sandal on one foot, a pink one on the other. 

There was a huge search-and-rescue operation over the week, with search dogs, helicopters, and search-and-rescue teams from all over Northern California. A search dog lost her scent at the intersection of Moore Ranch Road and Lupine Lane. Where did she go after that? Nobody knows.

Planes with infrared capability searched at night. Planes to communicate with ground crews circled the area during the day, as well as search planes and helicopters. The weather grew cold, then rainy, then clear and cold again. There was no trace of Jeanne at all.

 On the 24th, the formal search was "paused" to analyze GPS data and "determine the next steps." I am sure people will still look for her, but after a week lost in dark, cold woods, with a couple of rainy days, no shelter, no proper clothing, no food or water, the chance of finding her alive is slim. 

My hope is that perhaps Jeanne found an outbuilding to shelter in. It may not have prevented a worst-case scenario, but maybe she would have found some comfort at not being out in the cold and rain. 

My thoughts are jumbled and sad right now, and there is no more I can really say. 

 

A poem by A. J. M. Smith. Written during the Vietnam war. "Apposite then/And now, goddammit, again." Only now, not even crocodile tears from that quarter.

Pity the Nation

For the MAGA nation:

PITY THE NATION”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (After Khalil Gibran) 

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

The Colonel by Carolyn Forche

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Poem by Denise Levertov: November 15, 1969

Brown gas-fog, white

beneath the street lamps.

Cut off on three sides, all space filled

with our bodies.

      Bodies that stumble

in brown airlessness, whitened

in light, a mildew glare,

      that stumble

hand in hand, blinded, retching.

Wanting it, wanting

to be here, the body believing it’s

dying in its nausea, my head

clear in its despair, a kind of joy,

knowing this is by no means death,

is trivial, an incident, a

fragile instant.    Wanting it, wanting

         with all my hunger this anguish,

         this knowing in the body

the grim odds we’re

up against, wanting it real.

Up that bank where gas

curled in the ivy, dragging each other

up, strangers, brothers

and sisters.    Nothing

will do but

to taste the bitter

taste. No life

other, apart from

I remember this commercial!

 

A Poem by Helen Goldbaum, Written in 1939. This poem calls across time to us.

In the Shadow of Great Times

^.
by Helen Goldbaum
^.
We are like people at a wayside station, waiting
      between trains, or between planes.
We attend the cinema, consult our watches.
We sit down and stretch our legs, stare at the skylight.
We buy a paper and read it without comprehending.
^.
Noticing the whistles blowing, the crowds coming and going,
We listen for the porter to call sonorously the panel
      of destinations.
^.
Decorously the clock ticks: we await the roar of the transport. 

The Crazy Women of Plaza de Mayo

 

The poet's voice carries the fire in these troubled times.

The Crazy Women of Plaza de Mayo

By Salima Rivera

Me llaman La Loca de la Plaza de Mayo.

Every day I go to look for my son,

a prisoner of a treacherous tyranny

or maybe he lays rotting in an unknown grave.

I don’t know.

Every day I go down to the Plaza

to raise my voice in chorus with the others,

“¡Malditos asesinos! Give us our sons.

Tell us what are their crimes—

what have they done?”

They laugh at us, call us crazy.

I’m crazy because I want to know

the fate of my son whose only crime

was to say we are hungry.

I’m crazy because he raged against

the injustice of it, watching us slowly die

having no dreams of our own to nourish us.

I’m crazy because I love this boy—

flesh of my womb—

who did the only thing a man

with nothing left but his dignity could do.

And they laugh at me;

these bloated jackals glutted

with the blood of our offspring.

So drunk with their power,

so blissfully unaware

that this crazy woman,

the mother they ridicule and scorn,

carries deep within her the sprouted seed

of their destruction,

the bloody beginning to the end of their rule.

Y me llaman La Loca

Their Beauty Has More Meaning

I want to push the seasons away, but this Robinson Jeffers poem reminds me that "this too shall pass." 

Their Beauty Has More Meaning

Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the ocean,
Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn;
The night herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings. Today
Black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky,
And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which day is more beautiful.
I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years
I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it does not hurt.
They will be here. And when the whole human race
Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and ocean,
Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning
Than the whole human race and the race of birds. 

The Purse-Seine

I turn to Robinson Jeffers again to find words for these ungracious times. If a time comes when we cannot speak, poetry will speak for us. 

                The Purse-Seine

                         by Robinson Jeffers

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphorescence of the
    shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off
    Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the sea's night-purple; he
    points, and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
    They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.
                                                                         I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny
    the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame, like a live
    rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch; sighing in the dark; the
    vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.

                               Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the
    seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little
    terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we
    have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival,
    insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is
    closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. The
    inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers–or revolution, and the
    new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls–or anarchy, the mass-disasters.

                         These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps its reason? Or it lets go,
    lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled
    laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's
    end is death

Shine

I have great love and admiration for Robinson Jeffers and his poetry. He lived in Carmel before it became "Carmel."  

Jeffers wrote the following poem in 1952:

 

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass
      hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and
      home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or
     suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center;
     corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the
     mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable
     master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught–they say–God, when he walked on earth. 

The Poems

 (In which I describe the process of putting a chapbook manuscript together for a contest).

  

The Poems, Day One

I'm working on a chapbook manuscript for a competition, the prize of which is $1000, 20 copies of the chapbook (which, despite the origin of the name--"cheap book"--is to be more than just a stapled-together printout), and the best prize of all, an "amethyst Depression glass trophy, circa 1930."

Yes! The perfect prize for any poet: a trophy for depression! I could have won several of them in my lifetime.

I haven't written a poem in over ten years. A door shut somehow, and I'm not sure why. I began as a poet here in Santa Cruz. What stops me, even now?

I think of that question a lot. Toxic hesitation is one thing. Self-doubt, pain over the past--when a poet dips into the well, everything comes up, whether you want it to or not. That is just how it is--a palimpsest of toxic hesitation, doubt, fear, memories good and bad: you have to peel away those layers to get to the jewel at the center, if you're lucky.

Going through my poems, I realize it would be good for me to get back to it--I've been feeling the pull for a long time. But oh, these old poems are just...wow. I wrote some things about my mother that are, in the light of my elder years, very unfair. 

My elder sister had many deeply unresolved issues with my mother and because my sister was dynamic and intimidating, and I was very young, and still a dutiful sister, it was easy to get lost in the eddies of her anger and follow her derision of my mother.  I was too young when I wrote those poems to realize how broken my mother was. I believed she should have realized she was broken and straightened the hell up. But I know now, as I approach my 66th birthday, that her motherhood didn't equate to an ability to gain magical skills to heal herself. She was sick and wouldn't allow herself to be helped. And truly, very few people tried to help her at all.

The poems about my father really bother me, as if I'm trying to convince myself that I forgave him easily and there was no more work to be done. I could feel the suppression of anger in them. I thought the director of my MFA program was being stupid when he told me I was holding back in my writing: now I know what he meant.

So I've chosen for the chapbook what I think are more meaningful: poems that consider my mother as a flawed person, but not a "bad" one. No poems at all about my father--I have to think more deeply about those. Poems about pregnancy, childbirth, an elegy for the children I lost.

And of course, a couple of love poems (which both involve naps). At 66, pretty much everything leads to a nap.

Then there's the miscellaneous pile: an elegy for a friend, a description of a quilt made by an anonymous hired man from scraps of his old shirts, and three poems about "nature."  Really, nature's where it's at. You can write about nature and your entire life can peer out from the trees behind the poem, unseen but there. 

Perhaps I'll try my hand again. I've been duly depressed about the world right now. There's so much painful change, within and without, events I can't control, and a real sense that I'm falling, with everyone I love, off the edge of the world.

But the writer writes through everything,

Here's a link to one of my best poems. I'm still proud of it after all these years. It was published in Poetry magazine, September 1998, so long ago:

                 

            Morning Glory

It is as if all sorrows vanish into the earth
and re-bloom into flowers like this,
an origami shape filled with sky.
For weeks, the small buds stayed shut,
spiraling ovals on a waxy vine
that laced the stems of the last sunflowers.
I thought the first frost would darken it,
tighten it to coils of thin black wire,
but then, this morning, the blossom’s open dress,
blue silk that will wrinkle in hours,
yet for now, like a watercolor painted in the air,
one luminous white star in its shining throat. 

 

The Poems, Day Two 

Putting together this chapbook manuscript makes me shake my darn head from time to time.

I just edited a poem I wrote long ago, titled "Garnets." It's a fair poem, about losing my virginity, of all things, in my twenties (that's how old the poem is, lol), and I described it as some sort of holy ritual. 

Holy ritual?! Talk about rose-colored glasses!

I edited the poem to put the kibosh on the "holiness" and tease out the frank cheapness of the experience, which brings it closer to the truth, and will include it in the manuscript. 

The  other "love poem" (such as they are) I chose is called Night Cove, and I think it is one of my best. I was in my forties when I wrote it, in a relatively happy time in my life (when I also had dark hair, still. It's almost completely white now, and I don't dye it anymore. There's a little weirdness in the poem (note the line about my hair--I don't know why it did that, because it did--maybe we were opening and closing our mouths like codfish). 

This was published in Catamaran:

                      

             Night Cove

Long after love has veiled us both with salt,
we lie beneath your raveled blanket,
soft breathers, our sleep a tide going out.
Your skin is freckled like sand and my dark hair slides,
slippery as kelp, into both our mouths.
Here the sea is so close fog muffles the sky in white wool
and the mile buoy sounds its dull gray note
all night until I float precariously on the surface of dreams
like the small boat we saw off Monterey
anchored after dark, its blazing lamp
shining into slick waves the color of ink.
You told me how squid rose to the net, silver souls
drawn to the beams of that artificial moon,
while, thin as a kayak, the real moon rode
through flowing sable clouds, its whiteness vanishing and reappearing
like the glimpse of a woman’s shoulder in the folds of a ragged shawl. 

 

 

 

 

Thread

So many changes in my life now: one of those times when everything feels like waves cresting and breaking. Beloved places are shuttering and with it, acquaintances I may never see again. Letting go seems to be the order of the day.

I prefer the company of my own strangeness nowadays. I am an elder who slips deeper and deeper into the forest, making a home there. If people want to see me, they must seek me out; everyone and no one knows how to find me.

Even dance is growing ever more silent for me--not finished: sometimes I think I might very well dance my way out of this life. When I dance by myself these days, the moves are not the bold, powerful motions I usually like. These days, I move, by deliberate design, around a central axis, everything proceeding from the center, as if I am attached to the cosmos with a thread thin as spider-silk. My gestures are slow, quiet. In these troubled times within and without, it is important to find the center.

I've been fortunate enough to find music that really works well with this type of dance. Ozgur Baba is a Turkish singer and musician. In the following video, he's playing the cura baglama, a traditional Turkish stringed instrument. I highly recommend his YouTube channel. Here is a sampling (I danced to this last night, alone in my living room):

 

 

Hair

I think someone should stage a stealth production of "Hair" at the Kennedy Center. Tell the MAGAs it's about Trump's "golden locks," then raise the curtain on opening night for a big surprise. 

Critical Theory Since Plato

I am trying to find tasks to occupy my time as the country grows ever-more alarming. Who the hell asked Elon Musk to do ANYTHING government-related? They sneaked him in the way people used to put blankets over their friends in the backseat of a car, to get them in free to a drive-in movie.

 So, I am downsizing books, packing some up for storage, weeding out what I want to keep on my shelves, for now. I found some very precious books from when I was in college: my textbook on John Milton, poems and essay collections by William Carlos Williams, a slender copy of The Wasteland, with a black-and grey cover. I also found my first-edition copy of Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and a book of Dylan Thomas's collected poems (probably bought at the same place). The latter two I bought and read on my own. 

 Nostalgically, I went onto Alibris a few minutes ago, wondering if there might possibly be a copy of a dreadful textbook I had for a class in my senior undergrad year: Critical Theory Since Plato. Yes, it is a real book, or at least I had remembered it as such. The Alibris search brought it up immediately.

I have thought for some time about creating a legend about CTSP in the book I'm currently writing, that students swear a book of such bone-crushing dullness cannot possibly exist. The urban legend leads to a Watergate-style break-in by soused English majors when they hear CTSP lurks somewhere in the always-locked faculty library. Maybe not soused--God knows how many times my friends and I went on the silliest,  almost Pythonesque adventures when I was an undergrad, without a drop of Demon Rum in sight. Plus, there's enough drunks in my book already that it's practically its own AA meeting.

A professor named Hazard Adams wrote Critical Theory Since Plato. Now there's a name: it sounds like someone who writes about living among grizzlies, or mushing a dog team through Alaska. Apparently Hazard Adams was, in real life, a well-liked professor at the University of Washington (he passed away in 1993). But what a name! There had to be a grizzly in there, somehow, somewhere.

 But I digress, as always (sometimes I fear I digress so much that I will make myself ageless). The real-world Critical Theory Since Plato has a plain, bull's-blood-red cover, with the title and author's name stamped in brassy gold. I remember from my first copy that this book looked old even when it was brand-new. The dull cover wraps an equally dull text: so tedious that I literally do not remember anything about it.

So why pay nine bucks on Alibris for a book I clearly hated, from a year that's in the top category of "the most traumatic years of my life?" I simply want to see if I might understand anything in the book after forty-odd years, with nearly fifteen years of that time spent in academia. I suppose my entertainments these days are as dull as that textbook.

For nine bucks, why not?  I can even promise you an update, Faithful Readers. 

Onward.

A Word

To the small audience who comes to this page: this is definitely a terrifying time, to say the least. The White House will soon be infested once again by Donald Trump, a felon and failed game show host, and JD Vance, a quisling turncoat. The ketamine-riddled man-child, Elon Musk, will have a little office near to Trump, so he can easily whisper in Trump's ear. Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Cook have all kissed the ring. The "Democracy Dies in Darkness" slogan of the Washington post has been undercut by “Riveting Storytelling for All of America," as if it's slowing morphing into the National Enquirer.

The center seems not to hold. So many people are afraid of what will happen, starting tomorrow, on Infestation Day. I really think these clowns will ultimately engage in a cage match and beat each other to a pulp, metaphorically. I pray it is not before immense suffering is visited upon innocent citizens.

Niceness needs to go out the window on the part of Democrats in office: just as the Republicans never gave an inch on Capitol Hill, so do Democrats need to be pit bulls now. We citizens can do what we can, but we are not in the very locus of the fight.

The ACLU website is a wealth of information about resistance, and I strongly recommend visiting the site often:

https://www.aclu.org/

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a father and son walk through a post-apocalyptic world. There is no government, no food, no safe homes: people have devolved into the "bad guys" (lawless, murderous cannibals) and "good guys" (a smaller group of people who maintain their humanity and sense of decency). The father and son discuss what it means to hold onto these things:

We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?

No. Of course not.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we’re the good guys.

Yes.

And we’re carrying the fire.

And we’re carrying the fire.

Yes.

Okay.

With insanity all around, with ignorance and fear trying to drag us down, holding on to one's humanity (and all that goes with it--the ability to resist, to stay strong, to believe in one's agency) is the final, last hope of a better world to come. 

The flame of goodness and decency, of everything that is true and right, is now in the hands of the good guys.

Be strong and carry the fire.

Forget Christmas Carols

 

Oops, published out of date blog posts

 Working on my mobile phone to update this blog, I accidentally posted old entries that I thought I had deleted or unpublished today, which then got sent to my mailing list.

I suppose my Faithful Readers will get to see what a traumatized, grieving person I was a few years ago. I am grateful that at least some of that trauma has been resolved.

At any rate, apologies!

What Else Can I Write?

 What else can I write for these times? 2016 has recycled and the dumpster has begun to unload again. 

Faithful Readers, I am 65 years old, having lived more or less on borrowed time since my thirties. I have had 3 near-death experiences. I lived through three years of chemotherapy for lupus that took everything to get through. I managed to avoid Covid, but the stress of those years aged me, as it did everyone I know. I now have two heart conditions and work every day to stay well so that I can stay on this earth. 

But I have never, ever lived through years like this.

I was born into the Eisenhower administration. I clearly remember JFK's assassination, though I was only four. My uncle served in the Vietnam war and came back with profound PTSD. I remember the first moon landing, the Watergate hearings, Nixon's resignation, Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon. I remember Jimmy Carter losing to Ronald Reagan, and the profound sense I had then that nothing was going to be the same. I lived through the Bush presidencies, the Clinton presidency, rejoiced when Barack Obama was elected, practically threw up when the buffoon, Trump, was elected, and felt deep gratitude for Biden's presidency.

Now Trump the Buffoon inches towards being sworn into office. Not a madman, really: a malignant buffoon, but someone clearly tailor-made, in his unfortunate cognitive decline, for manipulation by other malignant forces.

No one knows what will happen, or even what is happening now. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has promised to protect this state. I am grateful I do not live somewhere else. 

I think the continued challenge for these times is to not throw myself into fear and despair, even though that seems a luxury right now. I plan to never listen to the Orange Reptilian honk away--even as I know I must keep aware of the news and of budding menace. I pray my family is safe, and my loved ones (I really want to say I don't care about the MAGA ones, but I do, even as I'd rather not hear from them again).

Right now, my hope is that I live to see this clown taken down once and for all, via the Midterm Elections first. We erased the idiots once from the White House, and despite Trump's bluster, I still think he will never become a dictator. 

I am grateful I chose to try and find conscious gratitude for the Biden administration. I did not fear dying in a nuclear war then. I did not feel a constantly knotted-up stomach. I had to search out what the man was doing for the country, because it was All Trump, All The Time, in the media. That he had to end his campaign was a tragedy. There were forces around him, too. Harris had racism, misogyny, apathy, and the MAGA need for "bread and circuses" against her. We lost, and the world lost, too--though some don't know it yet.

Tonight the moon is full; the annual flowers in my planters are dying. I planted three tomato plants; we ate tomatoes all summer until we got sick of them. I harvested seven pumpkins (with a last one still on the vine). I have three pounds of seeds from sunflower heads, five pounds of popcorn, and maybe a half-pound of scarlet runner beans. Broccoli is going into planters this week. Harvesting it all was a moment of quiet and centering for me. Learning to dry seeds and corn felt primal to me. Perhaps the skills will prove useful.

What will things be like as the old year ends and the new year begins? One last Christmas for the Bidens in the White House. The next Christmas, Melania might buy some tinsel at CVS and drape it on a coatrack in the Oval Office. 

I have had many, many times in my life where I felt no hope whatsoever: and yet hope was there. Even as the world slides into shadow, literally and figuratively, it is important to find something bright to grasp. It seems an essential search right now for any ray of light.

To MAGAs

 To MAGAs:

I see you. I see your asinine posts thanking your version of God that the convicted rapist/felon/con/grifter/reptile Donald J. Trump was elected. I see you thanking your plaster, hollow-eyed version of Baby Jesus. I see you in your delusion that he's going to Make America Great Again. I see you crowing about owning the libs.

Here's a message for you: Trump hates you. You think you've "owned the libs?" Trump owns YOU.

If you voted for Donald Trump, you share in every evil thing he stands for. You stand in the shadow of a convicted rapist, a felon, a con who laughs about what a bunch of idiots you are. You think Trump the God will protect you when your Medicare is slashed, when your Social Security dwindles to nothing, when the price of food skyrockets because there's no one to harvest it. You're not exempt. You'll suffer like the rest of us. And Trump and his toadies won't care, because they care nothing for you.

Btw: there are some branches of theology that theorize Jesus Christ was disabled. There are some texts that describe him as crippled, bald, short (under five feet tall), but with a compelling gaze. You would spit on a person like this: an unattractive man with disabilites, with brown skin, someone who was a refugee from violence. You would put him in a detention camp, guaranteed. 

As for the rest of us: I don't know the answers, yet. Maybe there are no answers. But we're good at gathering strength when the chips are down. 

For as long as I have the right to free speech, I will use it. I hope my fellow writers do, too. Yes, we're scared: so is every writer who lives under oppression. But we rise, as we have, and as we must.

Update, And All the Changes

First: I will be updating this blog more frequently, I hope, and I have also joined with the modern era and opened a substack. I will be adding a link to this on my blog's page as well. I hope to update it as well as this.

My substack may very well be more "public" than this blog, which has felt very internal and diary-like. Here is the substack link. You can subscribe if you wish, or not:

Joan McMillan's substack

Faithful Readers, I know it has been some time since I have posted. I have been in a long recuperation from the experience with my heart last August. Further tests have shown that I have an enlarged heart along with coronary artery spasms. I never thought I would be on multiple heart medications, but here I am. I am on both time-released nitroglycerin and "regular" nitroglycerin. Curiously, I hope that if I am to ever have a fatal heart attack, that I just drop like a stone and never come back. 

Oddly, the people who most stridently in denial about me having lupus, and how much it debilitated me, have offered me kindness and wishes for good health after learning about my cardiac event. And still, some think it is a kind of affront, as if I am to live forever. Get used to it, folks: that day will come for me, too, and I am not afraid.

I have PTSD from the experience, I tire easily, and hot weather affects me much more in my mid-sixties than ever. There are days I am sometimes in such pain, it feels like someone is shooting electric shocks through my body. These are days that happen every few weeks, thankfully, but they are horrific. There are medications but they dull my mind--a tradeoff. 

Can I get my health back? I'm trying. I will not leave the earth until I know for sure that my grandchildren will be okay. That is all I want now. And to finish a couple of quilts, and of course still write. Everything else is gravy, as Raymond Carter wrote. 

I'm turning from this short update to watch the third day of the Democratic National Convention. Someone said that these last few weeks have been the most stressful ten years of their lives! We are living history--hopefully one of the best histories. We have a chance to put the Orange Lizard and his ear-bandage-diaper-wearing-specimen-cup-holding-insurrection-making followers back in their holes. 

Life can be better. We can rise to the occasion. Vote as if your life depends on it, as if the life of the world depends on it, because it does.