Try This: 5 Step Cut Up

1.
Sometimes, many times, I don't know what I'm feeling until I write it out. 

2.
Sometimes I stand back from myself, while in myself, wondering who is this person, writing these words, and why? 

3. 
Sometimes my head is so full and fuzzed, I can't find my own words. And so I gather others. I go to books — art books, science books, manuals and guides — and jot down words and phrases.

Some feel poetic: dotted with mist.

Others are fact-full: Later measurements show that these surface currents flow with an average velocity of three knots.

Sometimes I pluck single words:  moss   tidal   index

4.
I cut these lines into strips, spread them out, and make sense again. I go outside myself to get back in, where the real poem is forming.

5.
Yes, it is both forced and fluid. It is an exercise and it is art, the kind that stirs hand and heart —  the best kind of workout. 

The myth of currents

Before these rolling hills and furrowed fields

there was moss and bark, soggy leaves and mist

dotted with riddle. 

How is it I dissolved in place? 

Struggling to understand the dark wet days

I etched patterns across the terrain of veins.

Tidal rhythms vary but nothing drowns like despair. 

I explored the pull of sun and moon, the myth of currents

how the flow swirls, restores, carries away, the hours circling.

Now, there is no drenching rain or rusting salt, no

saturated gloom, no cursing gray sky. 

In this index of renewal, every body has its own

movement. What I’m saying is when the moon

was full and the night wide, I left the ocean

to save myself. 

— Drew Myron

Love this line (passage, book . . )

Arturo hands him a conference packet and looks up at him wearily; violet streaks curve beneath his eyes, and lines are grooved into his still-young brow. Less notices now that what he had taken for gleaming bits of pomade in his hair are streaks of gray.

Arturo says, “There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road . . . to your final place of rest.” 

He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. 

Less understands: he has been assigned a poet. 

— from Less, a novel by Andrew Greer

This book, a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, is a delightful surprise of wit and warmth, with sharp teeth and well-placed sighs. A smart understated work, it hits all my marks: mid-life, writing, loving, losing, loathing, tenacity, humor and hope. 

What are you reading today?

Thankful Thursday: pocket, pickle, poem

It's Thankful Thursday! 

Because life is full and gratitude thin, please join me in a pause to express appreciation for people, places, things & more. 

1.
Poem in Your Pocket Day

All day, I've basked in the secret joy of Poem in Your Pocket Day, my favorite "holiday" and part of National Poetry Month. Until just now.

In my flurry, I realized that my favorite day of the year was actually yesterday. I had missed it! No need to fret; consider it a long holiday. I still carry this poem in my heart (and the friend who shared it with me): 

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night. 

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

 — Rainer Maria Rilke
Book of Hours, I 59

2. 
A Pickle

Grace is losing her words. Long ago she lost her hearing and now her ability to speak is slipping too. Though her eyes are bright, when she talks it's murmur and mew with a round of babble.

Today, though, while "chatting" her words are suddenly clear: "You are a pickle in the mud," she tells me, "and I love you." 

3. Lilacs

Spring's sudden sign. A burst of fragrance, fleeting.
In small petals, the day blooms.

What are you thankful for today? 

 * As always, names are changed to protect privacy. 

Sharing Our Stories

They never want to write.

Oh no, they'll say, with a groan, sigh and shooing away. I'm not a writer. 

I cajole and convince until they relent. And then, suddenly, gathered around the table, they dive in, energized and present, uncovering memories and fears, trials and joys, writing their stories, their selves. 

We're the Columbia Basin Writers, a clutch of senior citizens connected loosely by a single thread: the nursing home where they live. We meet once a month to write and recall, to chat and share. I'm the annoyingly cheerful leader who, with help from a writer-friend-volunteer, takes us through poems, prompts and writing games.

Sometimes they forget we've met, that they've penned poems and stories and had fun doing it. 

Sometimes we take dictation as the prompt unwinds the mind and loosens the past. And then what, we ask, tell me more. We write fast every falling word.

Sometimes they write, though hands shake and arms ache. The pen moves slowly, with great effort, guided and braced.

And this, I think, is the real success: to crave expression so much that you'll work against tremors and fear, against rust and ache, fighting the body to write the words, to write your mind. This is everything. 

And then we share, and the room swells with comfort and pride. And I think this is real writing, in this small room-turned-safe place, these reluctant writers pushing against the challenges of pain, age, memory and loss. With every word they say I am here.  

Please join us — in person or in spirit — to celebrate the act of expression and the power of writing. 

On Sunday, and a sense of her

You ask for happiness and the foghorn says No

And No again, stuck on it, 

The way the beach is stuck on gull 

And reduction 

 
— from Pacific by Paula McLain

1.
And how are you dying, I write.

I mean doing, but maybe not.  

2.
I’m writing to her. Some people reach for the phone, trying to call a mother long gone. Sometimes while writing my pen takes an unexpected turn toward her. 

We weren't penpals, or even pals in the way of today's mothers and daughters who are friends. For years we fought, too much alike and too different too. Later, we grew close, sharing quick banter, books, and friendly phone calls. 

3.
This is what you do after a death. You remember, and then you worry you have mis-remembered, that you rewrote the truth. To make it more. To make you hurt less. 

4.
I try to wear things from her closet, try to hold her close. But the things only make me feel far away. Her tan sweater is my color and style, but does not feel right. The skirt is too tight and long. The jacket with leopard trim is a perfect fit, but when I wore it last week I couldn’t wait to take it off. The jewelry too.

I am not her, and this may be proof. 

Or maybe she didn’t like these items either, and they hung in her closet, as they will in mine, as a good idea but not quite right. I don’t recall her wearing these pieces. Even my father, upon seeing me in her sweater, said, “Oh she would have worn that before she got so small.”  

The weight and the struggle, that’s the thing we share. And so, I inherit the neurosis — insecurity, insufficiency, body image, the triad of the Myron women. I knew this all along, and now standing here, awkwardly displaying her clothes, I know it even more. Was I trying for homage, or just some sort of connection?

The only thing that fits, the only thing that that feels right, are the makeup brushes. Nice ones, expensive ones, she bought when the two of us went to Bobbie Brown for makeovers. Make us pretty! Make us good! Make us us, but better.

We didn’t do these sorts of girly mother-daughter bonding things, but there we were — four or five years ago — at the makeup counter getting pretty. Frugal as always, I bought just a bit, a lipstick or blush. To my surprise, my mother who wore little to no makeup, bought the whole suite: concealer, foundation, eyeshadow, blush, bronzer, and the expensive brushes too!     

Cleaning out her closet last month, my sister and I extracted the few items that were our size or style, and piled up a dozen bags for donation. After the main closet, the second closet, the coat closet, and the dresser drawers, we thought we were finished. Then my father motioned to the bathroom drawers. He couldn’t take the reminders at every turn. And so we picked through her lotions and potions, her brushes and combs, and a handful of makeup, smudged and worn. To my surprise, from that day years before she had kept the makeup chart, a drawing of a face with application instructions — and she had kept the brushes. 

The next day I applied my own makeup, and finished up with the largest brush. Bronzer it said in small letters on the handle. I didn’t have any so I just swept the soft bristles across my face. And there she was, a golden highlight across my cheek. 

5. 
My mother appears in a dream. She isn't center-stage, which is unlike her, but a hovering, a shadow. Still, I had a sense of her, and now awake, I see this is the truth of motherhood, of mothers and daughters, or maybe just us.