On, In, and Around Mondays: The Keeping-Bottle

The living room floor has been covered with catalogs and papers. I asked her to look through them. She is old enough to take part in such big decisions.

We are trying to choose a distance-learning high school. A next step in our home education life. I can still remember how this dark-haired child called me out of the work-force at a mere seven months old, by going on a hunger strike. She's always been one to know what she wants.

But as she looks through the piles of paper and propaganda, I can see this isn't easy. Her eyes light up at some of the course descriptions. Then she asks, "Do I have to take a language?" Then she talks at length about how kids should have more choices. She starts an essay, sets it aside.

We go walking.

It's a beautiful day to go around the lake at Rockefeller Park. She holds my hand, tells me that today the water is the kind of blue she wishes she could put in a bottle, take home, and peek at whenever she wants.

At the far side of the lake, she takes a detour onto a hill that overlooks the water.

"Mommy come!"

I pick my way to where she stands, watching the water move before the wind. We hold each other. "I love you," I say, my face in her hair. Then I tell her I love the way this hill, this water, this blue feels like forever.

"Yes," she says.

After a while, we go back to the path, and now we walk as one. Her hands are cold and she has her arms around my waist, so she can share the warmth of both my pockets. Our stride must match now, to keep from stumbling.

We are near the final curve of the lake, and she starts storying. The lake weeds look like hair. It is lake people having a picnic. And the brilliant triangles of light that keep emerging and descending must be ice— a visitation from the lake world below. This is a castle. That is a rock for mermaids.

Now the path turns right, and the water falls away. I want my own keeping-bottle. For this blue, and the lake people, and my girl, my girl.


---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

Writing in Fairy Tales

I liked this idea from Kim Addonizio. Write a poem from the point of view of a fairy tale character. It was supposed to be written at a point-of-decision. Mine doesn't really do that, but I mention it because I think it could be helpful.

If you write a fairy tale poem, feel free to leave your link so we can find it. :)

Cinderella

I pretend at being
poor, disliking this job,
but at night
I eat the ashes
while they are still warm,
and the taste of silver fire
is like nothing
you've ever known.

Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday.

On, In, and Around Mondays: One Name for God

"You see? That's a little bit of God."

I used to walk my children around the yard and say these kinds of things, pointing to some iridescent petal, or offering a a blade of grass to touch.

Today I was reading about the Gothic builders, who believed that the physical stuff of our world somehow reaches to the Divine. It is why they built as the built. Soaring cathedrals filled with light.

There is no cathedral here. But there is beauty. And this is what the medieval mind equated with God. Indeed, one philosopher of the time claimed that beauty was the only name for God.

As a poet, I see how other words can stand in for the word beauty, just as beauty stood in for God, in the medieval mind.

I look into my teacup, and say blossom-tea, and think of God unfolding into sweet water (thank you, Susan, for suspecting I would find this tea beautiful. I do.) I look outside my back door and say, moss-soft-and-life-green, and think of God.

Roses on the counter. Daughter turning pages. Piano, guitar, flute, waiting in the golden-sunset room. Plum candles. Japanese bowls. Forsythia swelling near my window.

Dostoevsky said that beauty would save the world. This morning, as I say its names, beauty is saving me.


---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

On, In, and Around Mondays: If Only the Table

"Can we make the table round?" asks my older daughter, on one of the nights we are alone.

I begin to say no, but cannot think of any good reason to persist in refusal.

"Sure."

We pull the dark oval apart, lift out two sections, hide them behind a brown living room chair. Then, body facing body, we rejoin the table to itself, into a circle so small we can easily hold hands around it.

I am reading about medieval spirituality, how it was more embodied than our own. Accordingly, cathedral design focused on the embodied God-in-Christ, rather than the Trinity. The table, or altar, was a focal point for where the Bread of Heaven met people.

I'm also reading the two final essays in The Spirit of Food. Both have the language of bodies and tables. Both have the language of finding and losing. One woman loses her early confidence in love, after reading a letter from her father, who cautioned, "Everything changes... You will bind yourself to someone who will change, and in the very dark moments, you will not know who he is."

The other essay writer lost the illusion that her table could provide a secure seat for a girl who seemed to heal but eventually took her life. This revelation especially arrested me, as I learned this week that a friend's husband just took his life on the first day of March, a day which has always reminded me of spring.

Both writers likewise found ways to join to others and be, at least for a time, fed.

I think about my own daughter's desire for a little round table, and I wonder if she's hoping that the trinity of her and me and my littlest daughter will somehow create an unbreakable circle— where no one is lost forever, and there is always room for another hand to share the bread of earth, or heaven.



---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

For a Nation, For a Single Life

I cannot wrap my mind around the suffering that is Japan, a nation. Neither can I conceive of the loss of a single life, at the home of a friend this past week.

Then my little girl brings crystalline purple into the house, smiles. "All the crocuses are open outside!" she beams. I cannot hold the experiences in tandem.

For a long time, I stare at the way the light is coming through crocus petals. The petals are already wilting, and I know that tomorrow they will no longer be a filter for light, for day.

I open pages to a book called, simply, Beauty. (Thank you, Kathleen.) The words console, though at the same time nothing could ever, ever console...

At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible to the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty...

All the frailty and uncertainty was seen [by the ancients] to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness.

I look at the crocus and see that the light has moved on. And I wait for tomorrow.

Don't Piss it Away

The last speaker of the IAM Encounter weekend was Dana Gioia. I've tried to read his poetry before and enjoy it, to no avail. But when he gave voice to it himself, I was quite taken. It made me glad that I'd at least purchased his book Can Poetry Matter? before the bookstore had packed up and disappeared.

And I have to say that it is Gioia's particular words, "don't piss it away," that have stuck with me. Imagine, a whole conference come to that simple conclusion.

For me, the conference had been going in a distinct direction: beauty, which I'd recently suggested might be my point of activism.

This is perhaps a "soft" thing that isn't always seen as important for business and success. Yet I'm coming to see it as absolutely essential. Because without beauty, we are droids or zombies or maybe remote-control cars— capable of power and activity in their way, but probably not transformative in the true sense of the word.

Some of the beauty that lives inside me has yet to be given voice. I felt that keenly after this conference. Some of the beauty that lives inside me simply needs to be owned and defended. And some of it is yet to be discovered.

How about you? What is still waiting to be given voice, owned, or discovered? Gioia has four simple words for you and me: don't piss it away.

What's in a Word?

Parting

I hate the word
goodbye,
the way it tries
to bring God
into the picture—
like a priest holding
the y of a rosary
crossing himself
over yet another
burial.


Over at TheHighCalling.org, we're thinking about words. Wanna play? This post is also in honor of One Shot Wednesday.

On, In and Around Mondays: Encounters are Generative

We walked North, kept the river behind us, or to the left. We spent a brief evening eating tortillas, beans, rice, salsa. And we talked.

It was the last night of the Encounter conference, and we had... an encounter. I know that, because when you have an encounter, something is always born. Bonnie loves poetry and Brooke sings it.

So it only seemed natural that out of our encounter... some poetry was born...


One for the Boys

You shut the doors
on me,
turned knobs
against night,
against how I sang
our blue-plucked
song.


Night Tune

to Bonnie and Brooke

Cry for me softly,
boys, open the doors
I'll sing of oaken trees

felled for a melodied
striptease of slatted floors
I'll sing of oaken trees

danced like Penelope
near thresholds of worlds
cry for me softly

sing back and echo me
as a river moves towards
I'll sing of oaken trees

girls strumming quietly
memories in minor chords
cry for me softly

hills upon lighted hills, or
faces past this old porch
will sing of my oaken trees,
cry for me softly.


---

On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.

If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

<a href="http://seedlingsinstone.blogspot.com"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5083/5217906589_c7120874ca.jpg" width="308" height="69" alt="On In Around button" />

This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...

The Difference Between

There was a time

we met by water, day was light and cool,
the water moved as it is wont
to do. You moved me with your words,
or was it with your silence.
The years have passed and silence too
and words as they are wont to do.
There are days
you can't remember water,
how it moves, or the difference between
silence and our words.

Post in honor of One Shot Wednesday.