191. CREDIBILITY 101 AND THE PATRON SAINT OF WRITERS

From the Archives

(February 2006) Superbowl Sunday—the most dangerous day of the year to be female in the United States—came and went.

I guess the combination of alcohol and testosterone and heightened emotions and high-fivin’ with the dudes when your team scores big and hours of aggression must make some men feel the need to go home and assault the women who dare to love them.

A sad state of affairs indeed.

I did not watch the Superbowl (although I would have cheered for Seattle if I had).

Instead, I attended a wimmin’s gathering in which we formed a sacred circle and celebrated St. Brigit and our collective emergence from the dark winter into a season of new growth.

Our smudgesticks and poetry and candles lit in the four directions and laughter overflowed.

I read a Mary Oliver poem when the decidedly decorative talking stick made its way into my hands and believe it was well-received.

In between all of our ceremonial hoo-ha, we ate really good food and drank really good wine and ate delicious lavender- and chili-infused dark chocolate.

Mmm!

Of course, we also flipped on the game at halftime so we could watch Mick sing about his inability to get satisfaction, then wound up having an impromptu and quite spastic dance in the living room.

(I was hoping that Mick would “accidentally” flip open his shirt and expose his breast, but he showed more restraint.)

So yeah. Good energy abounded and the whole event reminded me of just how much I treasure women who have done their work and settled into who they are and are comfortable with themselves and aware of their power and who are not intimidated by mine or yours.

St. Brigit is the patron saint of writers, so I guess it was as appropriate day for Betty Friedan to die.

•

I did not get to see Tree this weekend, even though she was briefly in the mountains. She had her lumpectomy today and they removed two suspicious lymph nodes ...

... and even typing that is making my blood run cold and my throat clamp down.

The randomness of this is just so unfair. I mean, I was living the rock-’n’-roll life style way back in 1988 when Tree and I got together and am still staying up too late and eating too much bad-for-me food and indulging in good bottles of vino as she counts every morsel and competes in triathlons ...

... and I can’t write more than that on this topic right now because this news is just too overwhelming.

•

We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible.

That’s what a preacher at Al Omari mosque said in response to a cartoon depicting Muhammad.

This would-be beheader and other extremists consider it blasphemy to print the image of their god and they really consider it blasphemous to depict their god in a bomb-shaped turban.

(Yet they’re in favor of beheading people who see the world differently and expresse those beliefs openly.)

Maybe the cartoonist should consider this preacher’s protests and the actions of that homophobe in Boston who attacked three gay bar patrons with a hatchet and revise the cartoons, convert the turban into a robe, and depict an axe-toting Jesus as well.

(You know, like that old Molly Hatchet album.)

Nice to know that religious fanatics have not completely silenced dissent here though.

The Washington Post recently ran a cartoon that featured "Dr." Rumsfeld writing “battle hardened” onto the medical chart of a quadruple-amputee soldier’s chart. This prompted protest letters from all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

(The administration is still throwing out barbs about the so-called liberal media too but hey, no comparison.)

And here’s more hope.

Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation recently grilled former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales about notifying the White House about the Plamegate investigation, then waiting till the next morning to inform them that they had to preserve all the materials relevant to an investigation (thus giving them time to destroy damning materials).

Now Scooter Libby’s lawyers say that emails from Cheney’s office were deleted contrary to White House policy or, to use their spin (which is reversible. See? You can flip it over to the corduroy side and apply it to those electronic voting machines that registered Bush votes when voters chose Kerry):

The computer system at the White House is supposed to automatically archive emails sent by the president and his aides. For reasons that are still unclear, these emails—which may or may not be relevant to the Plame investigation—were not preserved (from the NY Daily News)

As the church lady says, how conveeeeeenient.

For reasons that are still unclear? I mean gawddamn, how much clearer do they need to be?

And one writer accuses Gonzales of tipping off the White House five days earlier.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson notes that,

if there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give his State of the Union address from Oprah’s couch.... Bush should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day.

157. IDLE AND BLESSED, OR, JUST ANOTHER SPECK IN THE STEW

From the Archives

(September 2005) First day of autumn, my favorite time of the year. Our days are getting shorter. The air is getting crisper. And our grandmother trees are transitioning from busy food-making preparations into their long party season of stored sugar highs. The state fair. Apples. Rakes and leaves. And finally we leave the steamy 100° days behind. Full speed ahead to the chlorophyll—seep into those branches and turn our leaves to gold!

I like to think of those sugar-loaded winter trees as statelier versions of that annoying little addicted sister in John Waters’ film Pecker, petulantly shouting “Me want SUGAR now!!”

But we were talking about autumn, weren’t we? The mountains’ fine crispness and leaves.

Mary Oliver says she doesn’t know exactly what prayer is, but she does

know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

What do I plan to do? I plan to be outdoors—making art, making music, making love.

A pal and I have been talking about death a lot since the hurricane hit. She’s terrified of dying and says her fear interferes with her ability to enjoy life in the present tense. “Just knowing I’m going to die ruins it for me,” she says.

I’m not particularly afraid of dying, but really don’t want to die in pain.

Still, I rage against the dying of my light as much as anyone else, mourn and miss loved ones who have been dead for years, and go to the gym on a regular basis in an effort to stave off the inevitable.

And, unlike my friend, I don’t believe that there’s some benevolent being with his eye on this particular sparrow, that one day he will come scoop me up in his kind godly hand and set me down on some proverbial street of gold.

I don’t believe (or disbelieve) in previous lives either, have never once though that I might really be Cleopatra or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Sylvia Beach reincarnated.

I am, on the other hand, very fond of the notion that, since I am composed of matter and antimatter (which doesn’t disappear), then I might simply change form and continue to exist, with possible awareness.

If this is the case, then I would like to settle into the form of a Pacific NW river rock that can smell the air. I recognize that it’s just as likely that I could wind up a speck of dirt stuck under some stinkin’ cow turd in rural Texas though.

Frankly, I know that I probably won’t settle into any particular shape at all, but will instead mix with all the other dispersed beings in the universe to form some giant universal stew that, with luck, is cognizant of our universality.

And that notion doesn’t bother me much at all.

86. VIOLENT PINOT POETRY

From the Archives

(May 2005) I checked my e-mail a little while ago. My spam says that Women Will Love Me and that Julie [7] says Hi Honey.

Am eating some locally made brie on crackers and drinking a nice glass of pinot noir because the lovely woman in the Whole Foods wine department snared me as I walked past with my creamer and cilantro.

“Hi there,” said she. “Would you like to hear about our pinot noirs?”

I thought well I would certainly like to look at your dimples a while longer and my purchases ARE disgustingly alliterative, so sure, show me your wares.

She described several pinots as I studied her gorgeous jaw line, then I said, So tell me, which pinot that doesn’t cost a small fortune has made you smile most recently?

She grinned at my question and handed me the bottle that I have just now opened, which is quite good ... plus I get to imagine her dimples deepening as she discovers this taste.

Yesterday, I passed the Joy Delight Commandment King Church van on my way up the mountain. I really wanted to look through those tinted windows to see if the bus was filled with shiny happy people (who probably wouldn’t get that REM reference) too. Their name reminded me of the (shiver) Baptist camp where I spent too many summers.

Whew what a God um forsaken place that was!

The shiny happy counselors confiscated my Neil Young cassettes (AKA Devil's music) way back in 1976 and I still want them back. They also forced me to memorize Bible verses and recite them before getting in line for my meals.

In my book, if you f*ck with someone’s food, then it’s brainwashing.

I did enjoy canoing there though—when the counselors left me alone. Usually, though, they decided that this introvert spent too much time alone and so called me in off the lake and made me join in a variation of kickball/dodge ball that involved us kids pushing a ball that was bigger than all of us combined up and down a fresh-mown field.

Idleness is the Devil’s workshop, I reckon, so canoeing instead of playing with big balls must have put my soul at risk of eternal damnation. Or something.

(Just an aside but wouldn’t you think that someone who places a bumpersticker of the American flag announcing These Colors Don’t Run on his truck would replace the dumb thing when it fades to almost white?)

•

My friend gave me a copy of her spiritual autobiography yesterday. She grew up attending a Seventh Day Adventist church—“the cult” is what she calls it—and first encountered television and films as an adult. She can’t watch either though because the violence is too real and the stories make her lose her faith in the goodness of people.

This fascinates me.

She wrote this last week:

You aren't afraid to go anywhere, are you? I just managed to make it through [my blog entry] SITUATIONAL ETHICS. You grapple with things I can't even get close to without nearly dropping off some inner edge. The first time I heard about snuff stuff, I threw up, and couldn't sleep for days without waking up screaming. How can you ponder these things, and then go about your daily routine? ... I wish I had not read that entry! Please remind me again that the vast majority people are not out to damage other people.

Um, okay. The vast majority of people are not out to damage other people. There’s no tangible evidence that anyone has ever made a snuff film. And, when you think about it, we mostly find a way to love extravagantly despite it all.

I wrote a short story and painted a disturbing, multilayered torture painting that Mud dubbed “The Angry Painting” in an effort to get the snapshots I talk about in that entry out of my head. I wouldn’t say that I ponder atrocities and then just go about my normal routine though.

We carry all that shit around with us like luggage (note absence of baggage here), I reckon, just as my body carries around every punch my father ever delivered and all the terror I felt as a child, and so it stays tensed and ready to bolt even now if I’m not paying attention.

But my body also carries around healing caresses, the comfort I feel falling asleep as my lover kisses my eyelashes, a snapshot of my little brother at age 4 holding out his grubby little hand and saying “I Made You a (dirty) cinnamon toast ball,” and so many acts of kindness, and passion and love and unsolicited generosity. So there is some balance, I reckon, if we’re fortunate.

I don’t think my friend could read JM Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians, but his main character asks similar questions.

This pal has lost faith in humanity because a patient told her horrible abuse stories last week, in which a father anked his daughter out of bed and held her underwater till she thought she would die every time she peed in bed. This has made her lose faith in our goodness. Again.

I’ve been pondering what poems to send her way.

I'd send Vassar Miller’s sonnet “Without Ceremony” to myself, but am not sure it would comfort her. The final stanza of Frank O’Hara’s “Steps” would comfort me too:

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

but I believe I will send her Kathleen Lake’s “In The Absence,” Mary Oliver’s “Morning Poem” and “Poppies,” and Wendell Berry’s “Work Song. Part 2, A Vision: The Wisdom to Survive,” which seems like the perfect poem for her.

51. HOW SHALL I TOUCH YOU UNLESS IT IS EVERYWHERE?

From the Archives

(March 2005) Here is the beautiful final section of “The Gardens,” the concluding poem in Mary Oliver’s American Primitive (1983).

You gleam
as you lie back
breathing like something
taken from water,
a sea creature, except
for your two human legs
which tremble
and open
into the dark country
I keep dreaming of. How
shall I touch you
unless it is
everywhere?
I begin here and there,
finding you,
the heart within you,
and the animal,
and the voice; I ask
over and over
for your whereabouts, trekking
wherever you take me,
the boughs of your body
leading deeper into the trees,
over the white fields,
the rivers of bone,
the shouting,
the answering, the rousing,
great run toward the interior,
the unseen, the unknowable
center.

How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere? It really is a blasphemy to write prose after those lines but here I go typing away.

I have been bent over my table working at the computer all day, but just stopped to cook up a skillet of spinach in garlic and olive oil with a healthy serving of lemon zest atop it. I edited 192 freelance pages today and my brain is crispy-fried and throbbing and in desperate need of poetry, connection. It is also spilling over with ideas and insights and ponderings from this academic poetry criticism that I'm working on though, which is wonderful and satisfying.

So I'm quitting work now, while my back still bends. Will do karate catas to stretch out/move, then lie on the sofa in my big-ass HRC T-shirt and black bikini underwear to watch basketball tournament games.

And oh goodie. I have half a bottle of red wine that I intend to drink during the games. Red seal ale would be a better choice, but oh well.

27. IN BLACKWATER WOODS

From the Archives (March 2005)

IN BLACKWATER WOODS
by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

26. OLIVER’S POPPIES

From the Archives (March 2005)

POPPIES
by Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But also I say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

25. OLIVER’S MORNING

From the Archives

(March 2005) I love Mary Oliver’s poetry, especially when I’m locked indoors but aching to be outside. I know I already pasted a few of her poems in the blog, but am staring longingly at my river rocks and wanting to go for a hike, so I’m adding a couple more.

I hauled these rocks back from the Pacific NW—and man were they heavy!—so I can look at them and pretend that the wind is blowing my hair as I walk on a Washington State beach where the sand looks as if Keith Haring drew the cartoonish ruts from above.


So here’s another of my favorite Mary Oliver poems:

MORNING POEM
by Mary Oliver

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches—
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead—
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging—there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted—

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

21. SEXY POND POEM

From the Archives

(March 2005) Here’s another poem—a nice, sexy springtime poem, also by Mary Oliver, to celebrate the fact that the sun has come out.

BLOSSOM
by Mary Oliver

In April
the ponds
open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there’s fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale—everything else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood—we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals,
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.

Please note that those lines are set flush left because I don’t know the HTML code for random poetry indents. Mary indents them though.

READING: Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman’s Civil Disobediences: Poetics and the Politics of Action

LISTENING TO: "Barricades and Brick Walls” by Kasey Chambers (Barricades and brick walls can’t keep me from you. You can tie me down to a railroad track, you can let that freight trail roll....)

SINGING IN SHOWER: “Tainted Love”—and yes, as a matter of fact, I was dancing in there!

20. OLIVER'S AZURES

From the Archives

(March 2005) Here’s a poem by Mary Oliver. I’ll post an absolutely beautiful (and sexy) one of her poems later, but am feeling weighed down/frustrated with some stuff right now—which made me think of "Spring Azures." Think I’ll put on my gym clothes and go for a nice long walk, now that the sun has finally come out.

SPRING AZURES
by Mary Oliver

In the spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows—
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking—

don’t seem enough to carry me through this world
and I think: how I would like
to have wings—
blue ones—
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London—a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed,
seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows.
Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark eyes—
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,

to a life of the imagination.