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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
We were winding around the margins of a small village in the margins of Portugal,
looking for a late Sunday night dinner. Earlier there had been sun-drenched
empty alleys…now a traditional room, wooden sideboards with wine glass
on crocheted lace. White tablecloths layered with sheaths of white paper.
Dried thistle, old gourds as décor. Bright white glow coming from a
Magnum ice cream freezer.
A girl in a princess dress looks back at her parents as she races for ice cream.
In this forgotten corner of rural Portugal, the three other diners
clutch phones to their ears, shouting Kamala! Then Biden, then back to
Harris… the balding 30-something with his scruffy beard, the chubby bespectacled companion, the woman with flowing dark hair, all consumed by the political stage.
Their pork cheeks arrive, they fill glasses with more local wine
from their carafe; order another, gesticulate, talk to each other,
talk to their phones, in mixed languages –the word of the day,
Crazy, crazy!
Some might see the Azores, islands aboriginal and tending back to pasture green, as a perfect chance to return to the garden. The undeniable lushness, the backing track of cooing doves, the garden both arid for grapes and tropical for papayas.
But green is so restrictive! Here in Terceira, there is an excess of what human eye, ear and skin can take in. A more updated model would be a collage of a garden in constant becoming, where nothing is excluded from the party.
For what of porous black lava, off-black and red and gray as open sockets; what of the wandering mist in interior moonscapes, the headlike blooms on slim tall stalks? What of the green of geckos that rush through time like toy dinosaurs? What about white-washed cottages that speed behind us like white notes on a black page? Forests that are self-misting? Birds that swoop to open windows with their fright song, at night, confusing all categories of bird, insect, mammal.
And yet it is peaceful; I thought I saw the lamb lying with a lion (or maybe a faded watercolor, framed and tipped sideways above the cotton lace bedroom.)
