Manual for a Sales Position
Follow commands verbatim. Be quiet, graceful, prompt!
He fired a predecessor who shuffled, tripped and stomped.
Only idiots are bashful. You should look him in the eye.
Do not pad expense accounts. Do not cheat or lie.
Do not applaud suggestions merely on a whim
unless they are suggestions that were made by him.
You are the very first product that you have to sell,
so follow these few rules and I think you will do well.
The prompts today are verbatim, prompt, bashful and applaud.
The Art Lesson
I look at Carolyn.
The teacher hovers over her bright shoulder.
We are sisters, bright and dark.
I stuff a bird’s nest into the hollow of the soft stone I have carved.
My mother will not like it.
She will only recognize the beauty
of the smooth hand
Carolyn has carved from alabaster,
That night, I stuff a snarl of Carolyn’s hair into
soft dung from the horse pasture.
I shape the Mimi spirit from the dung
and place it under the register in our room to dry.
When the cold snap hits,
the room takes on a feculent odor
and she wonders what is causing it.
For three days the Mimi spirit fills the room.
I reach under the register
and its outside surface crumbles in my hand.
I scrape its powder into a small pile.
The figure that is left I put in my pocket.
It is hard-baked.
The hand that held it smells like dead grass.
Some of the powder I sprinkle in a fine line
on the top of the frame around her vanity mirror.
The rest I save in my handkerchief.
The Mimi spirit I take back to class
to put in the nest.
My stone is a stone––
Hollowed,
grey.
with natural holes pockmarking it.
When no one is looking, I cut my finger with an Exacto knife
and collect my blood.
I unball my handkerchief.
I sprinkle the powder into my blood
to make a paste.
I take a fine brush from the cupboard,
paint the Mimi spirit.
They are all in front of me.
Carolyn. Andrew.
The teacher is in front of me.
No one notices.
I hear her laugh.
I pull a loose thread from my skirt
and wind it tight around my finger
until it turns white.
I take moss I’ve gathered from the oak trees
and I make hair.
I take the ankh-shaped clay tool
and scrape a hollow in the stomach of the Mimi doll.
I go to stand beside my sister,
taking the very small sharp paper-cutting scissors.
They are all watching her,
but no one watches the part of her closest to me.
She laughs, creating the diversion I need.
I quickly cut the very small piece
from inside a fold of her full skirt.
Later, she will blame it on moths.
I have told her about cotton-eating moths,
and she is a sister who always believes me.
I go back to my table at the back.
Still, not one has noticed me.
I trim material away from the part of the pattern I seek.
I cut out the very small figure of a child.
I roll the material I have cut away from around the child
into a tight wad
that I stuff into the new womb of the Mimi doll.
I roll the child into a ball
that I chew and chew
before swallowing.
I put the Mimi doll back into the nest in the stone.
Tomorrow I will pack it in a box.
Tomorrow I will wrap it in paper and ribbon.
Tomorrow I will give it as a gift to my mother.
Carolyn will give my mother the hand
and she will put it on her dresser
to display her bracelets and rings.
My stone will lie in its box
in my mother’s bottom drawer.
Next week I will steal into my mother’s room.
I will put the box under my sister’s bed for three nights.
I’ve already dug the hole beneath the willow tree—
in the soft soil where my father used to dig and dig.
Years from now, my mother will wonder where that box went.
Carolyn will have gone away before this, but not me.
I’ll say, “I don’t know, maybe Carolyn took it.”
My mother will slide her gold rings from the fingers
of the hand my sister carved for her.
She will love to stroke the cool hand.
But Carolyn will just keep going and never come back.
This is a poem I have written and rewritten over the past thirty years but which I’ve never published. It’s a dark poem and perhaps that is why I’ve never published it. I can’t remember what prompted it. Certainly, nothing from my own life, but I recently found a folder of very old poems and decided to try to rework some of them. “The Art Lesson” is one of them.
for dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night.
The Wager
When I was a mere teenager,
my dad made a little wager.
Could I manage to exist
by guile and craft and will and fist
without allowance or assistance?
It was not at his insistence,
and in no way was I miffed
at his challenge aimed at thrift.
I packed a bag and caught a lift.
For one year I would simply drift.
Quietly would I abscond
and win my keep as vagabond.
I’d leave a life humdrum and canned
to live a life less gray and bland.
And thus I started my vacation
around our great and varied nation.
In California, I mowed lawns,
in Texas, worked at shucking prawns.
Combined wheat in South Dakota.
Then made off for Minnesota.
Washing pots and dishing curry,
worked my way down to Missouri.
In Tennessee I met with luck
and crossed the whole state in a truck,
but by D.C. and Baltimore,
grunt labor had become a bore,
so when I finally reached the ocean,
suddenly I had the notion
to make a call to dad from son
telling him his son had won.
The call I made was not in vain,
for next day I was on a plane.
Tattered, back-sore, sunburned, chapped,
I showed my dad the miles I’d mapped.
He slapped my back and said, “Well, son,
you’ve done what I wished I had done
before I did each of those things
that doing what one ‘should’ do brings.”
He slapped a check into my hand
and promised college, job or land.
I would be sent to school or hired—
whatever now I most desired.
I told my dad I’d let him know
but for just now I had to go.
I hit the bank and cashed his check,
bought new clothes and washed my neck.
Grabbed my passport, kissed my mom,
let her feed me, dropped the bomb.
Hugged my dad, then counted coup
and hopped a plane for Katmandu.
I hadn’t traveled my last mile,
but from now on, I’d go in style!
The prompt words today are drift, humdrum, abscond and wager.
The Willow Cutters.
They gather in circles as the day ends.
Men sit in one circle, closer to the lake.
Women, still standing, cluster laughing around a ribald tale.
They’ve been cutting old willow, then burning it for weeks to clear the mud flats.
Now new willow, red-veined with opalescent skin, springs up from the graves of the old.
The teeth of slender leaves cup up to catch the far-off whirr of rain bugs in the hills.
Every night louder, their repetitious whirr is as annoying
as the temperature, which grows hotter every day.
The birds all seek their evening perches—
night heron on the fence post in the water,
blackbirds in orderly evening strings,
swallows in frenzied swooping snarls.
A young girl lies on her back in the short cool grass
that in the past few weeks has sprung from the cracked mud.
With her baby in arms, she rolls over to face the red sun and in her journey,
sees the ones from her pueblo who burn off last year’s growth.
Sees also the gringa who cuts the tender willow.
She is an interloper who watches birds, and as she watches,
is watched—the bright colors of her clothes drawing eyes.
She is the one for whom being a foreigner isn’t enough—
an ibis among herons, a cuckoo among blackbirds,
Now and then, all flock here.
As mother with child stands to go,
the willow cutter, too, straightens her back
and trudges heavy, arms filled with willow,
toward her car far up the beach.
As sun like a cauldron steams into the hill,
horses stream smoothly back to claim their turf,
and the other willow cutters circle longer, telling stories, moving slow.
Children run races with the night as sure as new willows
grow stubbornly from the ground of parents
uprooted, but victorious.
This is a poem written the year I moved to Lake Chapala, eighteen years ago. Every day for two years, I walked on land that had formerly been lake. There were acres of willow that I later learned townspeople were hired to clear before Semana Santa, when hordes of tourists from Guadalajara always descended. I was there to cut willow to make lamps. When the lake came up to its former banks a few years later, all of those willows, that grew back yearly, were destroyed. Only their bones now stick up when the lake recedes a bit again every year. They make perfect roosting places for birds. I rarely walk on the lakeside anymore. The lake has remained high enough so all of my former walking places are under water. Instead, I stay home and write poems and post blogs. As usual, click on any photo to enlarge all.
Strange things happen when you stay up all night. I first discovered this at the age of nine, when my friend Rita and I played Monopoly all night and sneaked down the stairs and went outside to see the sun come up. It was strange to hear traffic start out on the highway two blocks away, to see the milkman begin his rounds, to see the sky turn from black to gray to pink to a bleeding gold.
Sixty-two years later, I have just had a similar experience. After a sleepless night, just as I was ready to fall asleep, I experienced leg cramps along with a difficulty in breathing that I’ve tended to have lately. It is not exactly that I can’t breathe, but a feeling that perhaps soon I won’t be able to. These two factors drove me outside and into the pool which, although it had been too hot to swim in at midnight, now had cooled to a lukewarm temperature above body temperature, but barely. (My pool is filled every other day with water from very hot mineral springs.)
Not feeling like doing my regular exercises, I floated and swam a bit, but very soon noticed a very large light just above the horizon. At first I thought it was another in a series of recent wildfires lifting its head over the mountain. It was a large glowing shape much bigger than the moon. I had looked at my alarm clock as I rose from my bed, and at 5 a.m., surely the moon wouldn’t just be rising. It was clouded like a fire obscured by smoke, and for a good five or ten minutes, I was sure this was what it must be, but as it rose higher over the neighbor’s house, I realized that it was something in the sky. It was roughly oval in shape, with the points of the oval pointing up and down, not side-to-side.
As it rose higher in the sky it grew larger but stayed indistinct—like a large fuzzy, uneven-sided bright oval larger than the sun and somewhat fuzzied and diluted by clouds. It had an otherworldly effect and as the stars came out above it, it seemed in stark contrast to the clear silhouettes of the palm trees further to the West. Did the moon ever rise at 5 a.m.? Surely not. The moon rose at night and set in the morning as the sun rose. Could this be the sun rising at 5 a.m.? If so, there were no colors of sunrise flooding the sky around it.
Much too big for a plane, what sort of phenomenon could it be? The very early morning darkness gave no other hint of the day to come. I floated in a surreal eeriness, tempted to go in to look up moonrise and moonset times, but some superstition and need to see what happened next kept me floating in the warm soup of my pool. Suddenly, something large lifted into the sky above the neighbor’s house and flew directly in front of the glowing object in the sky to swoop over the pool and then barely clear the roof of my house in a swift arc. At first stunned by what seemed to be part of the eerie situation of the light in the sky, I soon realized that It was a large white owl–one my friend Patty had seen twice years ago but which I had never seen in the eighteen years I’ve been living in this house.
I floated, stirring arms and legs as though flying myself, completely mesmerized by what seemed like magic. Who would believe it? All-in-all, I remained in the pool for a half hour, watching the eerie light as it rose almost imperceptibly higher. Its shape was nebulous, as though hidden behind thick clouds, at times growing more pointed, like a vague quarter moon with its tips pointing to the right and a bit tilted to the left.
Until finally, without ever rising 1/16th of the way across the sky, within seconds it vanished. One second it was there, the next gone.
Was it thick clouds that had obscured it that quickly? Only the evening before, I had found my waterproof camera and looked in vain for its battery. If I had located it, I could have taken a photo of the phenomenon. With the light gone and the water cooling, I groped my way up the steps from the pool and into my bedroom, where I dried off, slipped into my nightgown and picked up the laptop I’d abandoned in bed.
“Moonrise and Moonset for Ajijic, Mexico” I typed into the browser and was quickly presented with the following information:
Moonrise, 3:29 a.m., Moonset, 3:33 p.m. How could I have not known that the moon sometimes rises and sets in the daytime? By the 31st of the month it will rise at 5:17 a.m.! I then remember having seen the moon in the sky long after the sun has risen, but somehow what my eyes have seen has not been seized by my mind!
It now occurs to me that I can take my regular camera out to see if there is anything to see. I do so, looking up at the totally dark sky. The first birds have begun their twittering even though no light other than a few stars prompts their songs. I see one wispy cloud in the pitch black sky, a bit higher than the light I had seen a half hour before. And then I see a brief glow which vanishes before I can snap a photo.
Darkness.
Then another dim glow. It has to be the moon emerging now and then from behind clouds. I snap photo after photo but nothing shows up in the frames I check. Then suddenly, one more chance. I snap the shutter, click to see what I have captured.
It is not much, but it has at last assumed a vague moon size and shape and at least it is faint proof of my last hour’s adventure.
The first church bells of the morning peal out. When I return to my room, It is 6 a.m. by my bedside clock.
I look again at the screenshots I’ve made from the moonrise/moonset site.
What the white owl has probably always know I have learned for the first time tonight.
For Cleo’s 98th birthday, she and her husband John treated 30 or more friends to dinner and drinks at Viva Mexico. As we were all leaving, Tia Lupita presented Cleo with these gorgeous flowers from her garden. It’s the most beautiful bouquet I’ve seen in years and Cleo is the most beautiful birthday girl I’ve seen in that time as well. She lives just a block from me and is John’s bride of two years. Happy Birthday, once again, Cleo!!
Click on photo to enlarge.
For Cee’s FOTD
(Click on first photo to enlarge all.)
There seems to be so little we can control lately, but perhaps this challenge will help restore some vestige of order. Send me your most inspired photos on the subject of “All Lined Up” by putting a link to your blog post in comments below.
Be sure to see others who have published links to their “All Lined Up” photos below in the Comments section:
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 