IMG_7361The novel Clio’s Mobile Home is a facet of my creative work. Several characters in my novel write poems; I am serious about writing poetry. I also work on short shorts, and short stories. They are all modes of thinking about identity, transcendence and beauty in contemporary life. Art keeps us aloft, but it is more than decoration. Its force can be astounding. The artist becomes an instrument, and art lives to tell the tale.

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The World Holds its Breath

They don’t call French villagers malin – wily – for nothing.  We were inching forward in line at the only boulangerie in town, admiring the baguettes leaning like bayonets against the metal rack.  Should we try the pain de compagne, or a slim flute? A little village lady, in a flowered house dress, with crinkly apple cheeks, heard our English — the cat was out of the bag!  — and began chattering.  

What were we doing in this picturesque but mini village, how long would we stay? Baguette, s’il vous plait, I said, then answered her, and as we left the closet sized space, she followed me out, now speaking French and launching into a long story of her dear friend who studied with her at university and lives in Vermont.  Under the extravagant shade of the platanes, passing regulars drinking early on a bar terrace, we talked about my years in France. We walked down to the fruit store where a vendor was arranging pyramids of peaches.  My now best friend advised me on tomatoes, and white nectarines, plums.  

Standing near a fountain, still chattering, I finally smiled and said I had to leave.  She grasped both of my hands and held them in her smooth, peach-like palms.  “I’m praying for your country on November 5th.”  

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Dear Hip

Dear Hip, you who made me, snug socket,
master of the pivot, pea in a pod, bat hanging in its bone cave.
Through sinuous turns you made me sinuous, hip.

Cross-legged child to woman with legs.
Dancer taking on hip hop kids, having clacked
Round moguls of ski slopes. The turn.

What would be crux. Lap maker, taker. Open
open to flights of love, supple translucence,
tasty weightless all supple flesh. Open-legged

to deep creation, crowning heads of my babies.
Wandering poet, shooting from the hip.
Bones with their gelatinous lip get chewed out.

I said, surgeon, let me still shoot from the hip!
And welcome the newcomer, welcome.

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Shanah Tovah

The breath scent of mother fig

under the chuppah of life

time got sucked up into a late-summer straw

fully enjoyed, fortunately, but fast fast fast

leaving us reeling – never ready, breathless 

standing under canopies of scarlet leaves, 

in wind faster than the mind, among unheard cries, 

before doors of the open ark

leaning face to face with All That Is

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Hey, Post-Birthday

Take a cross-section of any of my parts – skin,
tongue, toe — and study cells under the microscope – 
It is IT, always my center, though it is 

always changing.    A center comes into view
when feted by friends, flutes, champagne:
a hot, smart feeling of being where I am,

having managed forks and multiple roads,
having gladly passed through angsting!

In the winey glow and afterglow, 
nothing was scrawled on a napkin,
my new/old self could hold that wisdom.

Seepage between days (even two!) is keen.
If a 5am half-dream hadn’t tossed up
that cross-segment image, I might not have

remembered to fete both that
and the querying being, no matter what
time or place, always the center.

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Harvest in the Dark

Late summer dinner:
Ripeness collides with early night. 

I slice tomatoes, each a mini sun, 
as crickets lay their sound bed down.

Corn percolates in the boiling pot – 
Outside, velvet dark. 

To stay good with the powers beyond, 
I notice the once-only moment,

though its sisters spin in repetition 
each New England September.

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Inside the Summer Chant

My best poem of last summer…a winsome stranger.
When then friends asked about a line, I confided 

its secret.  I was so tuned.  Now Greece is far away,
another September song come. I lean in.  

As I stand by the window slicing tomatoes and bread, 
the inside of the chant gives….   

No shade between us then.  Pure radiance.  
Voicing summer’s depth. To carry into go-go fall.

Stay the sunstruck course. Love whatever flows.
Sorrow turns, it’s not about you. 

Lightness in the chant; all paradises on earth
are leavened by laughter.

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Barcelona Pavilion’s Chaotic Now Moment

I was star-struck the first time I saw The German Pavilion, the model house designed in 1929 by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich at the foot of Montjuic in Barcelona.  This low-slung, elegant landmark of clean lines and reflections remains in my mind for its conjuring spirit –carefully crafted artwork that produces a series of perceptions both stable and evanescent.  It hovers, a seeming experiment in timelessness, though its stripped down modernism certainly broke norms nearly100 years ago.  Its magic struck me last week, mesmerized again after thirty years by the gorgeous “dawn” sculpture by Georg Kolbe, reflections that bind inside and out, elegance, wordlessness.  But words written in the brochure gave it a whole new meaning.  

Quoting the brochure: The 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition “coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the continent: Europe between the wars. A period marked politically by the breakdown of liberal democracies, the spread of fascism…”  As if the tongue of a bell was swinging and banging against my insides, setting off reverberations – all relevant, this is now.  Breakdown of democracies, turmoil, fascism.   

It didn’t stay on that note – the clapper swung in another direction, to possibilities found in art: “Every period of crisis also brings renewal – and the art scene of the time perfectly encapsulated this spirit, which gave rise to the emergence of the avant-garde.”  Modernism pushed back against obfuscation, fussiness, lies with an idealism that “understood beauty as the manifestation of truth.”  Ninety-five years later, we have exhausted much of that same idealism.  But why not, even in our jaundiced era, in this do-or-die moment, see chaos as an opportunity to reassert all that matters, in language both new and essential?  

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Shifting Homes

How versatile, pliable, handy the word “home.”
Slippery as soap, foamy and comforting in a body way. 
It was someone else’s room yesterday, but today, it has winked,
it has taken our toothbrushes into its interior.  Its name
rolls off our tongues after a day of being on the outside: 
“let’s go home.”   The way of its shutters, the doors,
the morning jasmine, corners where the sun enters
and where it doesn’t, the ways of home. Wherever beauty strikes,
that becomes a home, a place of alignment, shelter, a quiver of peace.

We are pliable, something of wanderers.  Those who are also
between places recognize us.  The Dutch-Swedish-Kenyan
owner of our “home,” now settled in France, peered and asked me, 
“But do you really feel American?”  I could have said the easy no.
It forced me to say I wander by choice, at least partly because
I am, at least partly, American. My complicated hybrid self
longs to constantly de-familiarize.  My heart seeks its
kin, values, values, a parasol pine, a chance meeting with a kind stranger.
The creative need to refind a flowing fountain, to re-source,
to see what trouble I can find on the lost road.

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Silence of the Monks

Monasteries and hermitages, a faint silhouette in a shimmering light. As we arrive by car, then foot, or by tortuous road, the outline thickens against the ochre stone and cliffs. They loom as minor fortresses, angled like a prism, slim windows for spying enemies or contemplating empty skies. Such extremes, oh monks, for what? Why load your donkeys with marble and limestone, why live in spiny dry isolation far from your fellow humans? What lay on the other side of the extreme – what wretchedness, what bitterness.

What closed door to a human garden?

Then again, I’m climbing these roads for what — To stay in a renovated monastery, to sit on your stone bench by the small window, to escape what chaos, to rest in what calm.

Even as I carry my backpack dotted with buttons: “all is chaos” and “restless recalcitrant.”

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She Plays Still

Her bright caftan flows around her body
seated in the middle of a crowd.  
Her feet in jaunty sandals still exposed. 
Her tune – not the drama of fado, simply
her breath, her face, the simple but bright
melancholy of her melodica.  She has known fate –
she has known it as Lisbon has known 
fires and near-destruction in succession.  
Her sockets are fused, she survives still.  
Victim only in words.  There is an oasis about her.  
She is an oasis.  Someone loves her.

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