just as you were starting to say something apropos

Someone had seen a drawing of a swastika he left on the table and people were getting worried, as if a swastika had any relevance in their daily homeless American lives. They pointed fingers at the small man who always wore long scraggly hair, dark sunglasses, a peace shirt, and a knit red sweater. Maybe Bob Dylan neglected in abstractions for thirty years. Cheech and chong, his therapist said.

I went to find him, interested in how his jumbled words would explain his jumbled drawings, and also embarking on an investigation of the things that make people afraid. He sat calmly in a sun-illumined chair and told me nicely to come in.

I asked him if he liked to draw. “Of course,” he said. “I plan on doing some drawing later today.” And he opened his drawer to reveal of pile of index cards all filled with the same collection of symbols, swastika included. “Can you tell me about your drawings?” I asked. The Babysitter’s Club taught me that’s what you should say when a child proudly presents you with a creation you can’t decipher.

“It’s the ten commandments,” he said. I asked him to explain each symbol to me. He pointed at the first, a stick-table with arrows drawn around it, and acted like he was reading words on the symbol: “Hail Mary full of grace the lord is my shepherd I shall not want you shall have no other gods before me amazing grace how sweet the sound.”

When he had gone through all ten of his symbols in mixed words from scripture, songs, and catachisms, he paused and looked at me. “Looks like you got an earring in your nose. It doesn’t seem very apropos.”

Unexpected words from a such seemingly free-flowing man. First surprising that he considered it not apropos and second that he used the word apropos, something I never before found in regular conversation but was glad I now had.

“You like that one? Put it in your dictionary,” and with that he lifted his hands to mimic playing a violin and started humming amazing grace.

“Amazing grace?” I asked.

“I sing for my supper. It’s the ten commandments. “

poetry reading at a borders bookstore

They sat welldressed and clustered, walled in by a Borders bookshelf, I gazing in at the poet speaking into mic from the side. Beside me sat a disgruntled man clearly not present because of the poetry but willing to give it a chance. He ate a reeses fastbreak and giggled during pauses in her words, discovering some kind of secret humor in the professional mask this woman wore as she read pages from her chapbooks which she had marked earlier in preparation for people to hear.

I hardly heard her over the sound of the thick man in purple suitcoat whose white-haired-head bobbed as each poem reached an end in attempts to convince the room he understood and approved its message. The poet interrupted herself mid-poem to acknowledge the entrance of those who belonged in the circle of people she had come to entitle “poetry,” speaking abstractly of her wonderful acquaintances in attendance.

Earlier that day at the homeless shelter, my coworker started strumming the blues on his guitar. A woman stood and sang in sultry impromptu voice:

well
one summer night i was walking
i was walking down the road
and well
if you asked which way i was walking
i couldn’t tell you yes or no

And her passion-sound was poetry to the homeless inhabitants of the room, everyone bobbing their heads to the senseless words composed while they watched expectant, somehow thick with meaning.

When the woman sat down, they turned to me, asked me to read a poem of mine. After watching her and understanding what life was, none of my practiced planned poetry survived on pages.

No. I watch from the side, wondering why poetry is segregation and classification in the places and ways it sounds.

a light growth of green dreams drying

I followed the rain drops along the uniquely dusk-colored handrail up to the porch elevated enough to overlook the street and entered into the greenery haven: a porch perfected with complementary walls of vines and twisting leaves caressing its boundaries. I looked around and breathed, a sneak gratefulness for walking in the steps of the people who lived here and pretending this space was mine—the shocks of flower, the bamboo chair, the rain dripping over the green netting and cooling the day.

Then I knocked because I came there to knock and waited. The old man with the look of utterness opened the door and smiled his confused old man smile.

I handed him his lunch with a pressing desire to ensure that someone would enjoy this day from the green space where I stood. “Do you ever eat your lunch out here on the porch?” I asked.

“Well I was sitting out on the porch but I came inside because it started raining.”

“Wouldn’t it be so nice to sit out here with the rain and eat your lunch?” I felt like a somewhat sales person with no clear profit goal.

His eyes got surprisingly big. “You know,” he spoke in wonderment, “All my life I’ve been eating my lunch in the kitchen. You’ve really given me something to think about. Maybe I’ll do that someday.”

And when I left, I’m sure the old man walked slowly back to his kitchen and left the porch begging to be sat on empty, and I walked back to a car hoping that words carry potential for change.

it’s only fallen frames, they told me

After driving to the store to acquire my mom’s requested milk and onions, I pulled to the parking lot’s exit and, giving into an explosive need to break free that was jittering like too much coffee inside of me, I turned onto the street away from the direction of my destination.

A few sporadically chosen turns, and I found myself driving fast through the long, curvy road of the Bedford metroparks, the woodsy haven in the middle of the over-developed suburb where I spent much of my growing-up life wondering around. The trees grew into my road roof that filtered the bright Sunday afternoon sun into granting my body a rare chance to press pedals that propel me effortlessly fast.

The kind of autumn day you dream about.

Driving past all the people walkingrunningjoggingstretchingbiking in herds or alone, I felt crisp cool breezes and listened to sullenly hopeful speaker projections, moving and moving until an end. The end arrived with the sight of an opening that led into Tinker’s Creek, the place where my grandma brought me on young summer days. Once she instructed me to collect rocks that we took into Sunday school the next day and painted. I had painted a bird on mine.

Here, on this starkly unaverage day, I pulled the car next to the creek and watched a moment the woman with her hand tucked safely inside the man’s elbow, together wondering through each other’s company in the form of a grassy space with no destination. The look of content from a distance.

Then I ripped my shoes into shreds and ran to the stream, plodding into the cool water to collect the perfect rock, painted it with poetry and threw it into the sky, called it ebenezer to immortalize the autumn day and the falling away from things I’ve known and the necessary death of some parts of me to allow the experience of rebirth.

It’s mostly about rebirth.

all the surprises in a size too small

In middle school in the cafeteria a friend squirted mustard on my brand new white shirt. Her mustard, her fucking clumsiness, my brand new shirt (these types of angered phrases flew across cafeteria trays). I felt angry and I hadn’t yet learned the effects of thrusting my unfiltered young feelings into the face of another young person who would feel something like scared in response. As I said It’s okay in a tone that exuded my regard of it not being okay in the least bit, I could see the wow, what’s her deal? eyes  reflecting their way around the occupants of the table.

Back then I was flooded with thoughts of perfectionism, and when things deviated from my preconceived picture—especially when outside the jurisdiction of my control—I felt the falling away too full.

Now it’s different. Today I knocked a bottle of paint all over the floor of my room and laughed out of trained habit. I shrugged when someone told me little boys were outside messing with my bike. I barely noticed when the group of high school volunteers I spent exhausting hours working with this morning broke a chair and ruined a room when I left them alone. I couldn’t recall how to feel when I walked in on a man who had recently thanked me for being so kind to him sprawled dead across his bed.

Growing up might be synonymous with becoming numb to the things that you once felt so full.

maybe only ruin could take its full measure

In church the group of children gather in front with the woman wearing a churchy hat. Her soft girlish voice instructs them, “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and she begins outlining a letter U in the air to the beat of an imaginary song: “Ready, set, sing.”

Fifteen small mouths obey and start singing on whatever note their voice finds in its opening.

My mom is stationed at her every Sunday seat: sloppily at the piano, one leg folded underneath her and slouching over the keys she knows how to navigate so well. She waits there all morning for hints that a moment needs musical accompaniment.

She deciphers this moment as one and tries to slyly press keys in search of which one their voices could migrate to and stay awhile. We must make wrong sounds to uncover what’s right. Jesus loves the (PLINK) little chil(PLINK PLINK)dren (PLINK)… And it goes on, interrupting the barely-song with blatant sounds of WRONG FALSE FAILURE PAIN

until that moment when she somehow suddenly knows. That slight switch of knowledge released by her pressing a key that opens something inside her, invisible to all the onlookers cringing with each bad note, lets her shape every finger made new into perfect chords, drawing the dissonant child voices into an accord for now. Tricking voices singing into sounding like song. Immeasurably better than before she started. The wrong notes that carried her there fade into backs of minds.

I am my mother’s well-intentioned searching fingers. I’m dissonant and intrusive and can’t wait until things fall into place so I can just play.

freed—the broken thermometer’s mercury running away

I’ve been recently lost in frustrations of losing.

But today. Today I found my checkbook stuck to a roll of duck tape under my bed. I found my poetry tucked inside a packet of papers in my office from a grant writing seminar. I found circumstances that led to a long, enjoyable conversation with one of my clients, and I found the ability to make him laugh for the first time in the several weeks he’s been here. I found a bag of cheetos to fulfill a craving I’ve had for two days. I found some words to express a yellow moment I’ve been previously unable to describe.

And suddenly I feel my neck craning up over the crowd anticipating everything remaining for me to see.

meeting the coast of maine

I watch waves larger than my eyes know crash into themselves and send their spray in the air like a father tossing a gleeful small child up and up when he comes home from work. The child goes airborne and explodes, flies, spews parts in all directions, crashes deathly to jagged ground. Too much power.

Wondering the rocky coast line, words drift on wet air from a bystander: “The ocean is so powerful…  God is amazing.”  Necessary abandonment of these words to get closer to what the water is.

I plant myself and sprout slowly from a rock overhang jutting out in a manner reminiscent of the opening Simba scene in The Lion King. The spray could devour my dangling feet if it reached with a slightly greater effort. Thought streams something like:

the need to give the ocean the credit she deserves for her tantalizing dance with the rocks that scrape her body’s outlines instead of condensing her into the word God which finds more over-use and consequent haze than the words love or starving or beautiful. But where the words? There is water there is rock there is me there are other people there is an overwhelming something greater somewhere somewhere somewhere and never right words for all the combinations of how we many meet, collide, create something like living to not be said. Hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings and become only further indebted to the ocean because her waves’ melodrama drowns my sound.

An old man standing near turns to my friend, says of me, “Must be meditating.”
“More likely writing poetry in her head,” the words from a friend who read my moment well.

The old man laughed out loud at a something real he considered a joke, a sound that couldn’t carry to my ears over the more pressing although less formed perceptions of an ocean’s handshake.

summer standing still

 

 

 

 

 I walked in on new summer when she wasn’t
expecting me:

just as she woke in the morning with a hint of drool still sticking to her chin while her face glowed radiant, refreshed by sleep. She was in her element, envisioning no audience:

I paused to watch her through the kitchened chaotic remnants of a last night’s toying with life’s movements, where two glass doors stretched like arms open wide to embrace me from across the room, framing summer’s substance:

on a back porch, old speakers stacked projecting lighthearted tunes in the ears of two porch inhabitants:

one a skinny boy with scruffed curly hair slouched like comfort in a wicker chair, legs crossed, shirtlessly wearing decaying brown corduroy cut-offs. And the other a skinny boy with tousled blond hair that speaks of inattention, blue cut-offs hanging from his waist, leaning purposefully careless along the doorway’s side, and eating an apple.

I saw backs:

faces were directed silently to the same uneventful place:

green. Green of every possible shape and size growing from stems or branches covering the back yard’s wooden fence. They watched it captivated like a movie. More green than the eyes still stuck in spring could understand. And to the right, bright red growing from a bush. The scene frozen in sun-filled warmth:

the stacked speakers, the skinny boys, the apple, green, the red:

summer arrived.

soundless words

Saturday granted me a mandatory task: spend 5 hours in alone silence.

Saturday granted me the perfect placement for such a task: a strange, new spot on a lake surrounded by trees

I set out to explore silently 5 hours.

Wondering through a cracked-open gate, I moved into an opening where brightly colored shapes sprouted to towering from the ground: an empty carnival. Rides stood eerily still as laughing kids and bustling crowds who once filled the space floated down ghosts in the beginning rain.

I entered the ancient tilt-a-whirl ride, pulled up the metal bar and sat in the car untilting, unwhirling, but curving to protect me from the rain. And me, giddy and giggling at the stillness of a ride most people move through quickly as rain tapped my feet.

I ran barefoot across a nearby field of white dandelions and collapsed in the middle so my sight contained only knee-high dandelions and sky.

I wondered into the woods and found a clearing furnished with carpet, chairs, lamps, a toaster oven, an old merry-go-round horse named Mike. And on the outskirts, an ironing board.

I climbed on a fallen tree dangling over a stream and wrote about everything. About my memory of years ago discovering an impressive treehouse in the woods behind my sister’s house and about my comrade during that exploration which contrasted my current aloneness.

I stepped into the cold stream and splashed all the way along its current to where it found the wide open lake. I was crazy-laughing as I and my clothes grew increasingly drenched and the stream restored became pure lake.

I sat by the lake on a log and read poetry out loud to the waves hitting the carcass of an enormously decaying fish.

After the 5 hours of silence ended, I re-met eight people who had similarly spent the same time in silence. I discovered that other people had stumbled across the same scenery I had; one had traveled almost exactly the same path as me.

And then I knew.

That we’re never as alone as we think we are. That things happen always with the power to change everything if only we were aware. That life at its most right involves a balancing between climbing inward and stretching out.

That the bare-bones potential of any day is that there’s always something new to explore and contemplate and say and create.