In passing

I pray for your soul every night.
Liar.

From a Women’s History Month Poetry Reading

The error is to think we have a soul,
as we can have a car or an umbrella.
The soul has us. We mustn’t take
our life personally.

– By Oriana, from her poem C.G. Jung to Eurydice

Poolside, 65ºF water

Kate: OK, I’m going in, now.
Splash!
Mama: You know, that’s a form of shock therapy.
Kate: I’m feeling better already.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A pompous author once proclaimed to his indulgent fans, “Writing isn’t for sissies.” His pronouncement drew a distinct line between those with the chutzpah to put pen to paper and those without, lending to the writing class the superiority of the courageous. And I bought it. Back then.

But over the years, I’ve come to learn he was, well, full of shit. Writing is not a matter of champ versus wuss any more than it’s a matter of artiste versus plebeian. Writing is something humans do, whether in the sand, on a cave wall, under the covers by flashlight, on a laptop amid the clatter of coffee and scones and dreams of bestselling wizardry.

We write to crystallize our thoughts, to pen what we can’t say, to pay the mortgage, to share a lyrical moment, to vent murderous rage sans consummation, to pass on a lesson, a feeling, a vision, a hope, to create a story, to immortalize some part of oneself. And I’ve come to believe we all do it, at one time or another, to one end or another, some of us more often than others — a bit of verse here, a love note there, a novel manuscript, a journal entry that made the pain take one step back, a wistful family history, a wishful page filled with a married name.

And suddenly, as if evidence were required, in the last day or two I’ve been the happy recipient of several proofs that indeed writing isn’t for sissies — because it’s for everyone.

First, a long lost friend found me online and asked if he could send me a poem. Now, this is a guy who looks as though he could snap you in half with one hand, not the one, I now presume, he reserves for writing.

“Hot damn and hell yes, send me a poem!” was my writerly response, and this is what he sent:

One day I was downtown, and I noticed a homeless guy with his shopping cart. I was taken aback by the way people were reacting to him with total disdain — almost hatred. He was standing outside a store, unsure whether his possessions would be safe if he went inside and also a little unsure if he would be allowed in the store at all.

I didn’t stay to see whether he finally went in. Instead, I went home and wrote this:

No Place Called Home

Yes, at one time I called this place home
I’m a stranger now on the streets I roam

The stores I pass daily, they don’t want me near
their signs say welcome, their eyes say fear

Of the shadow I am, of what I used to be
a future so bright, now a faint memory

Who I once was, what could have been me
they’re not here now, they never will be

Three days later, we found the man by himself, under a bridge, dead, still clutching his shopping cart … now empty … like his dreams.

– By Kevin Langley

Don’t you love that he wrote that, that he was willing to share? I think of his tattooed brawn, the remnants of his tough kid street smarts, his tender view of a wretched soul. And I wonder why I was surprised — for this is a man who celebrates the successes of the youthful offenders he teaches to learn.

Then my writing workshop partner and I received a thank you note from a student — not that writing can actually be taught, mind you. Oh, you can teach how to match subject to verb (although not always — check your local paper for plenty of examples of failed instruction on this topic), how to punctuate dialogue (the comma goes inside the closing quotation mark — yes, inside!), how to diagram a story’s arc (yeah, like a rainbow, but it’s usually a bumpier ride than that), how to shift the tone with one little word from chatty to lascivious (picture Theda Bara mouthing that line). Yes, the craft can be taught, but heart and gut cannot; writing is a bit too innate for teaching, per se, and our grateful student gets that.

“I want you to know that I have been profoundly changed by participating in your writing class,” he wrote. “The use of words to create has become a wonderful new pathway for me in this life’s journey. Spending time with you and the other writers has nurtured both my mind and my heart. … The more I write, the more I want to write, to learn about the process, and to express things with words that cause people to experience the ineffable wonder and joy in the world. These first small steps that I took in your class were leaps and bounds for my soul.”

This man does not need our instruction, but he’s a delight to have in the class.

And then my husband sent me a scholarly paper from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California: “Poetry: Why it Matters to Afghans?” by Professor Thomas H. Johnson. In a country whose abysmal literacy rate reflects its continuing oral tradition, Afghanistan’s poetry is as much a form of communal art and shared wisdom as it is a form of propaganda, a theme the paper promotes, suggesting poetry as a weapon for U.S. forces to wield against Taliban verse:

Liberty

I have seen the color of your blood in the flowers.
I have seen the rock become colorful with your blood.
When the young men began to murmur the melody of freedom.
I have seen the bells ringing in the hearts of the slaves.
Those heads that were sacrificed for freedom.
I have seen beds made with them in the palaces.
Nations are alive with the spirit of liberty.
I have seen every nation in destitution without this spirit.
If there are no wounds, hardships, and funerals in it.
Have you seen a movement of only a few talks?
O! Peroz, liberty is an adornment for the nations.
I have seen this beauty in the clank of the swords.

– By Mawlawi Mohammad Ghafoor Peroz

It has a horrible beauty, this poem, one I get halfway around the world from the poet. That universality of the written word might be lost on us, as we make the daily shuffle from bed to bath to fridge to desk and back again. But upon the first key stroke, the first drop of ink or chalk dust on the board, it is regained, often with passion and a resonance that crosses the boundaries between the courageous and fearful, the landed and the homeless, teachers and students, fanatic and invader.

Words, at least, our stories, we have that in common. And, as another student wrote, “I love this shit!”

Love,
K-B

About Kevin Langley: I was lucky enough to have two teachers for parents, and my early years were spent in the library where my mother worked. The value of the written word always intrigued me. I’ve never been a proponent of my right to remain silent, mainly because I don’t have the ability. I awake every day knowing I am not strong enough to change the world, but also believing I am not weak enough to let it change me.

(Note: Graffiti photograph by Made Underground courtesy of a Creative Commons license.)

Women of Granite … 2000

Like ancient stones
We have directed
Destiny’s course.

Silently stoically
Standing firmly
We have founded and formed

Every executive
Each executioner
Every Senator
Each cellmate

All owe their identity
To our wombs…

As we enter
This rapid movement
With scars of silence
We carry grace and wisdom
Into the echoing corridors
And hurl the earth’s core
At the glass ceilings

Our ungrateful fetuses foolishly formed.

– Lisa Albright Ratnavira

Daughters of Clay … 2008

Like unpolished pebbles
We are tumbled
Along the fates of men

We play with dolls
we bake and cut cookie dough
we are praised for our dresses

Every father’s knee
Every Pastor’s benediction
Every teacher’s gold star
Every playmate’s secret

Our identity is formed before
our ripened wombs release us

we repeat
we regurgitate
with silent assent
we carry our young
into the empty rivers
biting our tongues
we offer them
Promises of change

Our forebears foolishly fought for

– Lisa Albright Ratnavira

About the author:

Lisa Albright Ratnavira’s work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including Poet, Bereavement, Lucidity and Limestone Circle. She has published two chapbooks: Maiden, Mother and Crone, with Rachel Harding and Kate Harding, and Traveling with Pen and Brush. Lisa directs the Hidden Forest Art Gallery in Fallbrook, California, with her husband, Gamini, a renowned wildlife artist, and their children. Their work appears on www.gaminiratnavira.com. Lisa can be reached at lratnavira@yahoo.com.

(Photo by Gamini Ratnavira, Sri Lanka 2009)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

For John Amen and Alfred Joyce Kilmer

“When did poetry stop rhyming?” the man asked the visiting poet.

It was a sad, an angry question, a plea for succor in a world where the man’s perfectly trimmed coif and manicured nails, his gem-laden pinky ring and custom-tailored finery could not stave off age or the crashing waves of a new era, splattering his tidy life with the spindrift.

The graying woman beside him, sipping wine, the gazpacho, whatever he ordered for her, made everyone chuckle with her innocent retorts to well-worn social graces, to the poet’s verse of dark mannequins posing and Jewish Ophelias, to things only she remembered, mortifying her husband to his chill bone.

He scolded her for fiddling with her napkin. Poor thing. Poor thing.

“When I was young,” he mourned, “we learned wonderful poems, poems that rhymed. Like ‘Trees.’ Now that’s a beautiful poem. But today, I don’t know. This poetry, this poetry is weird.”

The responding silence — of looks askance, awkward sips of flavored coffees, the oblivious few waiting patiently for an answer — was barely broken by a whispered suggestion of excess Chardonnay gone awry.

And then the poet rescued them, “Oh, around the late nineteenth century through the 1920s — with Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, E.E. Cummings — poetry began to turn inward. Rhyme was replaced with intimacy.”

Lovely trees and schoolroom recitations, replaced with roiling innards shared in quaint cafés; with masturbatory imagery, rending sorrow, arching hope; with things that make well-trimmed folks blanch in horror and wonder what in God’s name is happening to the country, how the economic hurricane could prevail, how men could couple with men, how an African peacemonger could be elected to preside over landed gentry.

“The rhythm, though,” the poet soothed, “the rhythm remains. Like a song! Listen to the rhythm, the rhythm.”

Indeed, the poet did not hide behind pretty things, romantic notions, heroic meter and pattern like an eclipsed sun. No, he burst forth naked, compelling his listeners to contemplate tortured children, broken bonds, recovery, resolve — things other people simply called life.

Still, the man’s dismay seeped from the corners of his eyes. It would not be quenched with revelations of newly-beloved poets roaring through town astride freewheeling verse, rattling teacups and sensibilities. No, he wanted something else.

He yearned for her, for her to re-inhabit the body next to him. He longed for her loveliness, for her hungry mouth prest against his breast, for the intimacy of his rain dripping among her limbs.

For her, though, there was no longer rhyme or reason. Addled by tangled neurons, sticky plaque, fading familiarity, she was not always sure he was her husband.

But she could still recite “Trees.”

He wiped her mouth, applauded the next poem, then guided her out the door, a sad, an angry parting.

And the poetry continues.

Love,
K-B

Hiding

By John Amen

for Richard

I spend the morning
looking at photographs of my dead sister,
dark mannequin posing
beside husbands, parents, siblings,
her son—people who look like extras on a movie set—
the years’ battering superimposed on her face,
reminding me of Holocaust images, olive-skinned
girls who died in showers at Auschwitz.
Even in the photo where she
wades in a nurturing Atlantic, she
reminds me of some Jewish Ophelia, her
moribund drama hemorrhaging into the spindrift,
thick shadow snuffing a nirvanic beach.

Last night a friend told me she felt
my ex-wife had not been good for me,
that I had hidden behind her like an eclipsed sun,
and I thought about how my own mother was a piranha
who each morning at the breakfast table
stripped her sons and daughter to the bones.
Years later, my father would tell me
he sacrificed his children to appease his wife,
offered us to her as if she were some pagan goddess
who needed to drink daily her own family’s blood.

We all learned to hide; it is our legacy—
my sister and I, even my brother,
skulking in the custody of his own rage.
We grew out of childhood
like houseplants in a hurricane,
domestic pets abandoned in a jungle;
floating out of body in public places;
passing like ghosts through marriages and jobs;
watching ourselves fuck spouses and greedy strangers,
naked bodies move; not recognizing ourselves, honestly
not knowing how we were going to survive the relentless invasions,
the ambushes and slow, secret military movements,

this thing other people simply called life.

Click here to read more of John Amen’s poetry.

Trees

By Alfred Joyce Kilmer

for Mrs. Henry Mills Alden

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Click here to read more of Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s poetry.

On the Anniversary

October 12

By Kate Harding

A Wyoming twilight. Nine years ago.
A cyclist saw a scarecrow tied to a wooden
split rail fence. Not a scarecrow. Matthew Shepard.
Bruised. Beaten. His skull crushed. Left to die.
His blood-caked face washed by tears.

On this anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death,
I try to read, sip tea, count my valley’s few stars.
No sleep. My son Danny’s would be killers
could be prowling San Francisco streets tonight.

Broad shouldered football players. Thick jackets.
Tourists from the Midwest. Careful to walk
a few feet from each other. They have been drinking.
Later tonight they will have to share a hotel room
in this expensive city. A bump of an elbow,
a brush of a hand, could be misunderstood.
Mist blows in from the bay.
They tell each other it is girls they like. Girls.

They are nothing like my son,
with his pretty face and long hair.
Humming to himself, Danny is coming home
late from teaching, He wears the pink shirt
and tie we bought him. His light footsteps quicken.
Their footsteps echo his. Their beery breaths burn
the back of his neck.

©2007 Kate Harding poetmother@gmail.com

MAMMA (Middle-Aged Women for Marriage Equality) suggests sharing this poem with the people who oppose same-sex marriage, as a way to start a conversation; share it and ask them what they think about it.

And here’s another same-sex marriage conversation starter we just found:

The California Council of Churches’ Congregational Study Guide, Living Lovingly: Talking About Marriage Equality From a Faith Perspective, by Rev. Dr. Linda Pickens-Jones, has very helpful talking points, including discussion of civil rights compared to sacramental rights. MAMMA highly recommends this downloadable guide for those who want to take a loving and rational approach to a faith-based discussion. The introduction is a little dated, but the primary content makes the whole thing well worth downloading.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Yesterday morning, I sat at my desk, committed to adding 2,000 words to my mediocre American novel manuscript, but I just wanted to clear out my emails before getting started.

The first one asked me to save newborn buffalo, but I didn’t want to think about their wobbly little legs, shattered in a stampeding frenzy.

Then Amazon suggested, based on my previous purchases, that I might like to order John Stossel’s “Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics,” except what Amazon doesn’t know is that Stossel kind of gives me the creeps.

I could have read a joke about $7 sex, and my husband has been traveling a lot lately, so I did, and then I thought maybe I shouldn’t have, but it was too late.

I could also have read an analysis of the poll to which 66 percent of women responded that being a mother is women’s most important role, but it smacked of some sort of confused misogyny.

Facebook sent me a birthday notice for someone I don’t know but whom I mistakenly approved as a friend before I figured out Facebook, but Facebook annoys me, so I deleted it.

I could have looked at what Verizon is charging to my credit card, but the purpose of automatic payments is to avoid acknowledging how much all this great technology costs.

The definition and etymology of “dissimulate” was enticing, and because I love words, I opened it, and now I fully intend to use “dissimulate” in my 2,000 words. I am not dissimulating.

There was another Facebook request, from another stranger who wanted to be my friend, but I’ve learned that lesson well.

Salon.com sent an article about the state politics of stem cell research, but I figure with Barack Obama in the presidency, and my cells in California, I don’t have to worry about it.

Someone forwarded a poem called “Crowning,” published in The New Yorker, and, because it was a poem and in The New Yorker, I read it and it was lovely, and then I was surprised that I was surprised it was by a male poet. I’m a pig.

The Publishers Marketplace wanted to report all the new book deals this week, but I didn’t get a deal, so I didn’t open it, although I’ll try to be pleased for the writers who did. Bastards.

Composer and violinist Mark O’Connor wanted me to buy his Americana Symphony CD but, although I love his work, the economy is “not getting worse as quickly,” so I didn’t.

Message!Products was pitching a sale — 25 percent off — but I just replenished my pro-choice checks, so I didn’t bite, but I did wonder why they always announce a sale just after I’ve received my order.

I didn’t want to plod through a Human Security News report because I didn’t want to know about the dozens killed in Mogadishu, the 700 militants killed in Pakistan, the 106 children who died in shelling in Sri Lanka, the 50 people hospitalized after a girls’ school poisoning in Afghanistan, the 49 killed in Sudanese tribal violence, or the political prisoners suffering ill health in Myanmar (it’s really Burma), presumably including Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. OK, I peeked, and it was exactly the agonizing news I expected.

I blew my nose and considered activating my life by buying active wear shoes from zappos.com, but I have a pair of sneakers that has lasted seven years because I am not an active person.

The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) asked me to contribute to its effort to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Souter with a pro-choice nominee, but President Obama’s head is screwed on straight and NARAL is just trying to keep up with the anti-choice opposition to a pro-choice nominee. Of course the complacency of majority is ill advised, so I reconsidered briefly, until I remembered the economy.

I could have read STRATFOR’s editorial on The Strategic Debate Over Afghanistan, but I’d had enough frustrating news for one day, so I didn’t, although I did feel a little guilty about that one, which resurrected the threat to the baby buffalo and their wobbly little legs, and then I was swamped by a swell of guilt.

So, I rescued the National Resources Defense Council email from death by deletion, clicked to save the newborn bison and read all about their terrible plight, and I wondered if I could work baby bison into my 2,000 pages.

But then I got another email, asking me to ask President Obama to put an end to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for gays in the military, a policy akin to sanctioned lying, so I had to respond to that one, and then — oops, another email.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Editor’s Note: This piece is cross-posted with www.ivorytowerz.com.)

(Photo by Jim Bowen via a Creative Commons License.)

A Santa Ana breeze sweeps across my hill, stirring up dust and a sense of changing seasons. Palm fronds rub songs like crickets’ legs and the dog lies at my feet, her licking noises distracting me from the pursuit of Percy Shelley’s essays. I need no excuse, but it is a satisfying one, for in her rhythmic canine actions there is a certain natural poetry that requires no defense from Shelley, eager though he was to offer one up for the unappreciated poets of his day.

Neither does the dog need defense for the artful pleasure of licking herself clean. For the twitch-inducing imagery of her dog dreams, for the pure joy of exposing her soul and rolling in the pungent flesh of carrion, for the haunting melodies of her late-night canine choir, she requires no argument that her art has a place in the world, no rationale to win her public funding. Of course, unlike those seeking stimulus funds for the arts, she is not asking for any.

But again of course, it is not really public funding that draws the horror of those who would decry money for the arts in the package, who would starve artists and the National Endowment for the Arts with poverty. Rather it is the virulent freedom, the profane questioning, the crushing honesty, the consummately naked beauty of art that frightens them so. And it is that fear, I suppose, against which Shelley presciently constructed so exquisite a brief for the benefit of art. If only they would read it.

But in lieu of poetic defense, it is perhaps more apropos in our era to seek out evidence that art is as natural, as intrinsic, as compellingly a part of our culture and our economy as is the dog’s inclination to pee in the dry grasses of my yard and dance with the barbecue’s smoke.

One could search for art among the cognoscenti of a community, in the garrets of those who dress with the studied air of the aesthete, who wax esoteric in offbeat salons of foreign lands, who contemplate how a certain hour’s light falls upon rotting fruit. But that would just be droll — and too damn easy.

Instead, let’s look to the folk who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a beret.

In my own little town of Fallbrook, the proprietor of the convenience store crafts the tales of a novelist, fine enough to make you question your own perceptions. The gasoline peddler, with the subtle style of a clever essayist, serves up both fuel and succinct commentary as an erotic hint of butt-crack emerges from his pants. The child interprets her landscape with seven years of salvaged bottle caps, intuiting the perfect placement of each to create her impressionistic vision. The postal worker arranges the mail with such a studied touch as to please an intransigent bureaucracy and a grateful customer, sculpting a stack defined by time and space. The mother hums a line of love like no other. And the lover presents a performance piece of rare and potent audience participation.

In each of us, in everything around us, there is art — divine, inspired, intuitive, studied and raring to emerge in a roar of pigments, words, notes, forms. And by that art we are slowly, persistently moved toward a world of poetic beauty, of pleasure and pain and wisdom — in ways no politician could ever move us.

Shelley claimed poets — artists — as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And artists are we all. Although the hoary anti-NEA mob would burn us at the stake of economic censorship and selective morality, really they should join us — and fund us. For, as the cave paintings of Lascaux attest, it is not our laws but our art that survives us.

Note: Click here to sign a petition in support of designating 1 percent of the stimulus package for the arts.

Love
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(WPA Sing for Your Supper poster courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

CHAPTER 1. They meet at a mutual friend’s wedding.

“Oh yes, hi! Audry’s told me so much about you!”

“Oh yeah? Should I duck?”

“No, no. She’s your most ardent fan — and a great sales rep. My little heart’s going pitter patter in your manly presence.”

“She’s told me a whole lot about you too — every factoid of it favorable, of course, intentionally tailored to the male on the prowl. So, I suppose this is a set up?”

“We’d be fools not to admit it. But she does have lovely taste. Perhaps we should sample the glass before we reject the vintage?”

“Say what?”

“Oh, who cares if she’s playing Yenta? We’re the only two left at this shindig who’re young enough to remain upright without assistance. How about asking me to dance?”

“Dance? With you? Here, now? Well sure, yeah, I’d like that, a lot.”

CHAPTER 2. They close down the Moose Lodge Community Banquet Hall, drawing the last, weary notes from Joey Brown and His Band of Renown, a quintet that relies heavily on the Polka. But this isn’t the end of it. …

“Hi, I’m glad you called — a movie sounds good!”

“You sound good, exceptionally good. I, I’m attracted to you, and I’d like to explore this further.”

“You sound surprised?”

“Welp, dating’s no man’s forte. It’s always an adventure.”

“I understand, and I’m happy you’ve overcome your male enculturation. Forthright ranks high in my book; it’s a rare treat. Bravo! So, were you thinking sherpas and yaks, or something a bit more tame that would allow me to get all dolled up?”

“Ah ha, there’s a smart aleck lurking beneath that conservative exterior. I like that!”

CHAPTER 3. After many movies, moonlit beach strolls, sunsets — and sunrises — things are serious.

“Are you awake, Babe?”

“Not really.”

“Well, wake up, please? I had to take a leak, and standing there, I realized I have a status report I have to deliver.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. You, you are my joy, my anguish, my passion, my frustration, my effervescence, my hope. I thank God for nudging you across my errant path.”

“Oh, Sweetie, you know I love you, too. I love living with you, cooking for you, sewing your buttons back on. I’d be happy to grow old and crotchety with you — and wipe the drool from your chin.”

CHAPTER 4. Love is sweet, but not without its hurdles.

“Oh God, your mother detested me! She hated my outfit. She hated my hair. She hated my sense of humor. She hated my teeth. She hates me!”

“But, Babe, a good portion of the population hates you — oh come on, that was a joke. Where is that outrageous sense of humor when you need it most? Look, Babe, she just met you. And admit it: You’re not what she had envisioned for me all these years.”

“I know, I know. She was hoping for the four Bs: blond, beautiful, Bryn Mawr grad, baby-making material. Right?”

“Wrong. When it comes right down to it, she just wants me to be happy. And she did give you shortbread to bring home. She makes you shortbread; you’re in. So, relax. She’ll come to love you — but never as much as I absolutely adore every iota of you. I want you to be within reach always. Seriously, I want to be with you forever. Look, I’ll wash the dishes to my dying day, if you’ll cook. Will you marry me?”

“Yes, yes indeed I will!”

CHAPTER 5. And Tom and Harry live happily ever after in wedded bliss.

Don’t deny someone’s child — perhaps your own — the right to marriage.

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