Bumper Sticker This vehicle brakes for flying leaves, blackbirds settling over corn, deer in the headlights, lightning branching overhead, rainbows, spotted ponies. This vehicle brakes for flying leaves: watch for sudden stops.
We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate... Rilke The air moves A mother bending over her child is blown away The reel rotates - 30 frames a second - we don't notice the extended arm the beckoning finger until the boy is long past grown and the woman gone from the room The shadow shifts leaves dapple branches break and float downstream I stand and as I breathe the molecules rearrange and everything is elsewhere - your image in the water shivers expands in circles disappears
Stone House A story in the local news described a woman building a stone house. In the photograph she had the quality of stone: solid, elemental, unadorned and old She began at 60. I was 40 then and open-mouthed: How brave to take it on, apprenticing to rock, the unforgiving weight of it, risk comfort for a new adventure - because she was herself. Was I? — content, my house well furnished, tight, the children growing up, my husband bringing money in — her house might not be finished in her lifetime: I envied her, her courage; permission to start over; the possibility that faith was endless. Now I am 60, 700 miles from anywhere: Change comes in any case: you bend your life and you don't notice that you're out to sea; cannot say for certain which decision cast you on this stony island. Call it daring call it open, never ending Oh, but you forgot you're arms would ache from lifting, your fingers stiffen; that you would know your own incompetence and be afraid. You might sleep badly in a stone house in an alien wind. We end up where we are, dress for the season and every day we check to see if what we planted will take root. The gulls fly over and the eagle steals the osprey's catch. Is that woman 80 now; is she still working? Is her house sound, has she embarked on something new? No matter, I am here fixed on this rocky shore, watching the beautiful endless ocean.
Ending "When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky: before you cut down a mahogany, you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should ask permission of the keeper of the stars. The roots of all things are tied together...." Chan K'in, T'o'hill of the Lacandon Maya -- Little Prophet of the Great Water When the last dumb, dodo died, did planets tremble? And when the passenger pigeon dropped in flight, did Spica shed a tear, or fall with the falling of a great mahogany? Subtract the weights of whales from water, will the moon alter its course and Venus pause in orbit? Should earth return to dust will the stars taste ashes?
Dear Mr. Pinkwater Pedro, a double-yellow-headed Panama parrot died of an excess of alcohol administered by a middle aged man with a Yiddish accent who walked around the house on weekends in his underwear in the kitchen in the winter in Chicago a long time ago. He was devoted to the parrot who returned his affection & demonstrated with shrieks, gyrations & frenzied activity each day before his master’s return from work. The bird had pneumonia, in those days vets didn’t know much about parrots – but the zoo said keep him warm & feed him stimulants. My brother-in-law kept macaws but they also died in a cold spell in San Diego. His wife made parrot feather earrings which she sold at swap meets. (They are now estranged.) She gave me a pair: beads & red & yellow feathers that I like to wear. Paco, the green-headed macaw at the Baltimore Zoo lives outside even in the winter. He – or may he is a she – I don’t know much about parrots— has accommodated to the climate & should not get pneumonia if not subjected to acute changes of temperature: He can’t be kept inside too long. Psittacine birds are unpredictable. They have mood shifts: insist on picking their own friends. Ursylla’s yellow-naped accosted guests at parties, claiming the most attractive shoulder. He loved a Labrador: they barked & played together head in mouth. The dog was killed; the bird was silent as a stone for weeks thereafter. Craig could handle Paco – “A big macaw,” he warned “can break your finger.” But Craig left for Africa To save the mountain gorillas. I read a dozen lories suffocated in the hubcaps of a Jeep crossing the border from Mexico, smuggled in for a pet store in Dallas: No one made any money. A suitcase full of peach crowned conures was confiscated by the Fish & Wildlife Service from someone who looked like the guy in Romancing the Stone – Remember: His cages were smashed by a bus on a high jungle road: Kathleen Turner was on it ….. There are fewer parrots than there used to be.
The scent we come to know as salt blows from the bay. At low tide the brown shore is heaped with ocher drifts of beaded seaweed strung with snails dry and dull above the water. And periwinkles line up on rocks like lanterns – like cockles in the garden. The bright crack of live shells under foot; towers of mussels and whelks, comfortable on each others' backs – ready to drop or hold on for dear life; water lapping; light flaring on the ripples – the raised arms of swimmers headed out to sea — it is too cold to swim to Portugal or even to the other side... The wind argues with the page, the young man playing the guitar, with whom I contemplated running off, again, is gone and the gulls quarrel; they come by – masters of where the wind takes you, sliding on air like knives through the joint, like music following the path, easing into the sea. In my dreams I am always twenty and often saying no; this is another life: let it drift on the ocean; let it sink or let it swim.
Bike trail When we pedaled along the gravel in the green-fuzz summer sunlight the old dog would run in front. Once I skittered into her and fell forward, being careful to lead with my hand —guarding my head from experience. The stone in my palm thrummed with the hum of an old train ticking along the lifted track carrying travelers farther than we could travel under our own power. She was — I can only describe her this way — all heart, that dog — always in front, panting, even if she had to lay up for days after. We buried her where all the others lie, cats and rabbits, bones now, just watermarked, petrified rocks marking the place and they gone on to spirit. Their animal noises, the repeating huff of the owls in the pines next door rarely echo in my new white rooms, where our children make appointments to go elsewhere and you ride off the gravel path to another life.
The Collector The point was artifice – each element arranged beside another each in specific relationship to that – a display of the peculiar pain or pleasure at the heart of each and at her heart – so much and many that they lost their edges. She collected things: coquina shells, sea biscuits, sand dollars, mermaid’s patinated tears, a furled torch of a whelk, brown paper bags of broken glass lined up along the basement walls, (the sea whispered below the kitchen. Dried thistles bloomed in pottery, broke and scattered on the floor; they stuck to her fingers when she picked them up.) and also particularly twisted branches, with shelves of fungus, or a kind of lichen. She gathered bones, arranged them along the window sills – jawbone of a doe, the skulls of seals and dogs, the noseholes nets of airy bone, thorns in the sockets of the eyes. Each year her body thickened, she discovered lightness; each day remembered voices spoke – harelip – ah, touch the rabbit’s nose – the joy of it, of tracing out the meanings, a web of understanding, knots of questions waiting to be answered. The children grew and went away Their hair turned gray They wrangled with their lives She labored on with the collections Her mother turned to stone Her joints grew stiff and she did not recognize Her image in the mirror. Clouds moved across the changing sky, The insects gnawed the wood and left neat piles of yellow dust along the floor. Feathers framed the windows. The colors of the stones, the brittle flowers, the scarab beetles, faded: There remained a lovely fragile frame; A structure of pale memories, drilled through with the unknowable, Where light comes in illuminating bone.
finding my voice 