Query
Have you a pattern for your life
wherein you’ve cut out stress and strife,
only allowing perfection?
Is every day a new confection—
cherry pie and chocolate cake?
No rejection? No heartbreak?
No erstwhile friends or jealous crazies—
your entire life a field of daisies?
It must be great, without a doubt,
but what have you to write about?
The prompt word today was pattern.
Leftovers
New words fly at me in a swarm.
They do not mean to do me harm,
but still I feel beaten and battered.
They might feel they haven’t mattered
if I do not use them all,
and yet I feel the beach’s call.
The dog is clamoring to be fed
while I am writing this instead.
The guilt of it cuts like a knife.
I’ve got to go and have a life!
I save the words already used,
and lest the others feel abused,
I leave them on the page as well
to tell the stories they might tell
If I had the time to use them.
I hope you’ll take time to peruse them:
fife strife excel tell bell yell cell
The prompt today was swarm.
You flavor my memory with common tastes: Spam and corned beef hash.
You wanted to be the common man, but you were anything but.
The bold aggression and the subtle feminine sweep of what you formed—
beautiful. Your hands never clumsy as they sculpted wood and stone.
Metal bent and melted into beauty at your touch,
and colors lifted the wings you gave them.
I floated, also–– too independent to be formed by you,
but still uplifted that a man like you could love me.
It validated something in me—those hard choices I had made
because I listened to something vivid in myself I had not yet found a name for.
Dreams taught me. And synchronicity.
I had always wanted to be a wanderer—to try to quench those yearnings
that had haunted my daydreams since I was a child.
I cut the ties that bound and wandered West to find you—stable man
pinned by your wings to obligation all your life.
Instead of pinning me down, you wandered with me.
The gypsy life of making and selling art. The easy camaraderie of that circus life.
The vans and wagons circling every weekend in a different convention center parking lot.
Nights pulled into the woods or by the ocean.
Short nights in transit, parked in neighborhoods where we’d be gone by six.
The song of tires on the road, Dan Bern and Chris Smither. Books on tape.
Pulling quickly off the road to lug a dead tree or a well-formed boulder into the van
or to engineer its route up to the roof,
so we returned home as heavily laden as we had departed—
bowed under by the fresh makings of art.
The texture of our home life was silver dust and wood curls.
Its sounds were the stone saw and the drills and polisher.
The heat of the kiln hours after it had lost its art.
The fine storm spray of the sandblaster,
the whine of drills and whirling dervish of the lathe.
The smell of resin, redwood, stone dust, paint.
The sharp bite of metal. The warm bread smell of cooling fired clay.
Every bit of my life was flavored by what you loved––what I loved, too,
our interests merging so completely that for awhile
we had no separate lives, but one life welded end-to-end.
These remembraces are not organized or filed.
They flutter into my mind like hidden lists blown off tall shelves.
That life now a scrapbook of the past with certain photos plucked out
to be tucked under bedroom mirror rims or carried in wallets.
Snap. You put yourself into my mind.
Snap. Another memory follows,
and I am an old woman replaying her life.
Snap. The creak of the tortilla machine across the street in the early hours.
The loud rush of the surf, the rattling startup of a motorcycle.
The raspberry seed between my teeth,
the scent of the dog’s bath still on my hands,
sand gritting the sheets
and art projects taking over every surface.
Snap. I am me, looking for the next adventure.
Below photos snapped a few minutes ago. Proof of the tale. New projects.
Click on first photo to enlarge and see all photos.
The prompt today was vivid.
I Imagine
I imagine one more holiday.
My mother sits at a large picture window
looking out over a broad beach,
watching dogs fetching sticks.
Then, because she cannot help it,
she takes her shoes off to walk through packed sand.
I imagine her sighting the offshore rock
where puffins nest.
I imagine footprints—hers and mine
and the paw prints of the dog—
someone else’s—
who joins us for the price of a stick thrown
over and over into the waves.
My mother could count her trips to the beach
on one hand,
and most of those times have been with me.
Once, in Wales, we sat on the long sea wall
under Dylan Thomas’s boathouse.
A cat walked the wall out to us,
precise and careful
to get as few grains of sand as possible
between its paw pads.
As it preened and arched under my mother’s smooth hand,
its black hairs caught in her diamond rings.
The other time we went to the beach
was in Australia.
We stayed out all afternoon,
throwing and throwing a stick,
a big black dog running first after,
then in front of it,
my dad sleeping in the car parked at the roadside,
my mother and I playing together
as we had never played before.
My mother and the ocean
have always been so far divided,
with me as the guide rope in between.
I imagine reeling them both in toward each other
and one more trip.
My mother, me, a dog or cat.
Wind to bundle up for and to walk against.
Wind to turn our ears away from.
Sand to pour out of our pockets
to form a small volcano
with a crab’s claw at the top.
So that years from now,
when I empty one pocket,
I will find sails from by-the-wind sailors
and shark egg casings,
fragile black kelp berries
and polished stones.
The bones of my mother. The dreams of me.
From the other pocket, empty,
I will pull all the reunions I never fought hard enough for—
regrets over trips to the sea we never made.
And I’ll imagine taking me to oceans.
Walks. Treasures hidden in and hiding sand.
Someone walking with me—
someone else’s child, perhaps,
and a dog chasing sticks.
Note: I never took that last trip to the ocean with my mother, but I think of her every year when I come to stay at the beach on my own, and this year in particular, every time I throw the stick for Morrie and every time children come to play with us. Here is a link to my favorite photo of my mother, plus other stories and poems about her.
Written for the dVerse Poets prompt, Prose Poetry.To play along, go HERE.
Mapped-out Life
If you’re unhappy with your route—
dissatisfied and full of doubt—
then you might be second-guessing,
looking for your parents’ blessing,
wanting to please everyone,
putting duty before fun,
overlooking the main one
and therefore satisfying none.
You are the one to satisfy,
to be led by and to gratify.
The principles by which you’ll bide
must be the ones you find inside.
So if you make a faulty choice,
at least it’s due to your own voice
and easier to rectify
than if you’ve chosen to rely
on rules laid down by another:
boss or lover, dad or mother.
So when you step out on that road
that takes you to your life’s abode,
be sure that that first step you take
is one you’ve chosen you should make,
led perhaps by older, wiser
family member or advisor,
but nonetheless, just right for you—
what you cannot help but do.
For when you’re older, you’ll figure out
that’s what life is all about.
The prompt today was “doubt.”
jdbphoto
No Biker Chick
The reason I’m alive and kickin’
is because I’m such a chicken.
As the storm clouds form and thicken,
you won’t find me riding frikkin’
motorbikes, lest I be stricken
by a lightning bolt to sicken
and my death to surely quicken.
Sidenote: The Quickening is a phenomenon in the Highlander films and television series. Beheading a character known as an “Immortal” produces a powerful energy release from their body called a “Quickening.”
The prompt word today was quicken.
Tonight, one of my favorite blogs, written by Carol and titled “Relax,” published a poem that begins with the lines:
Tonight, I am missing
all half-grown kissing
–oh! I meant kittens—
an orange one, Mittens,
(HERE is a link to her entire poem.)
I, however, loved the original typo (or contrived typo) and challenged her to make a poem starting from it and remaining with that idea. I promised to do so myself, and have, hoping she won’t mind my stealing my version of her first line. Here is mine:
Empty Nest
I’ve been missing
that half-grown kissing
that lasts a minute
with chocolate in it.
Runny noses.
Heads of roses
picked off stems
like rarest gems
presented in
a tuna tin.
Priceless treasure
for my pleasure.
My life lacks
these loving smacks––
even a quickie,
albeit sticky
with peanut butter.
A parting stutter,
and then they’re gone
and off upon
adventures new,
away from you,
taking their kisses
to other misses.
I’m awaiting hers. Are you up to meeting the challenge, Carol?
jdbphoto
Too Much Information
There is too much of everything—
things constantly developing.
There is no time to fool around.
We’re always off and “somewhere bound.”
The days of lying in the grass
and watching ants? They are long past.
Instead I lie upon my back
with laptop and my battery pack,
plugged into the confusing world,
downloading facts dispensed and whirled
together in my spinning brain.
I want a simple world again
composed of only what’s around me.
All these facts stress and confound me—
glossing over the fact that
I’m really only where I’m at!
Ironic that as I tried to save this, my computer refused to do so or to add the photograph to the post because the startup disk was full. No more memory––too much information!!! I’m going to try to post this, remove things from my computer, and then post the photo to go with it. (After one hour of removing files from my computer—success!!! Photo is added.)
Overwhelming is the prompt word today.
Queen of Clean
Squeaky clean, squeaky clean—
no errant coffee ground nor bean
mars my kitchen’s pure hygiene.
My kitchen floor is so pristine,
of cleanliness, I am the queen.
But if you catch it in between
those days the cleaning girl has been
working her magic on the scene,
I do not brag. I do not preen.
I fear my house has lost its sheen.
I blame it on the dog, who’s keen
on dragging sand home from the beach
and brooms and dust rags I can’t reach.
So to you who daily teach
rules in fastidiousness, then preach
that cleanliness is right there next
to godliness, I’m clearly hexed.
Except for that one day a week
when I, too, am a cleanliness freak.
Rose
We are all filters of the world,
taking the news in—the happy births
and inane deaths, the charities and cruelties,
the beauties and the gross ugliness
of nature and of human nature.
These things pass through us or get stuck,
taking us with them into the poles of our own natures.
Those ills of the world we choose to dwell on
change us if we are not careful to let them go again
or to act in a manner opposite—
which causes us to seed new hope
which just might, just might
catch hold in the sieves
of others
and bloom.
A concrete poem is one that takes the form of what it describes. I could find no photo of a rose in my photo library, so the form of the poem will have to do to illustrate its meaning.
The prompt today was “filter.”
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 