small

I have reopened my small blog after two years. I have missed posting photos, something I did at my last blog, synch-ro-ni-zing. It seems important to keep this washed stones space for words, and that space for one photo a day of something small. All these things are just fingers pointing at the moon anyway.

Sorry I'm feeling quiet about responding to comments at the moment. But my heart is full of you.

Windy lake

The weather changes in a flash. One afternoon winter sunlight low in the sky is magnified too brightly and beams directly into the glass porch off the lake. The next the temperature drops thirty degrees, wind chimes dong coppery, and everything is gray—gray sky, gray water, gray trees, gray cottages, gray geese flying and honking—everything that is except the white caps on top of shuffling waves and foam rickracking across the surface.

It was November like this the first weekend we spent at the cottage with oaks on the hill black-striping the view down to the lake. I was seven and it was 1963. Grandpa had bought the house for Mom and us kids so we would have a place in case something happened to Dad. We owned no home as the parsonage belonged to the church.

There was no TV here that first weekend, but there was a radio, and from it we learned that President Kennedy had been shot. After that Dad decided to take us all home early so we could watch things unfold on the black and white TV.

Of course something eventually did also happen to Dad, and to Mom, Grandpa, our brother, uncles, aunts and our one cousin from Virginia who visited the lake with us in 1966. We euphemistically held their deaths at arm’s length of some future day: Something will happen. Now their frozen faces smile at us from photographs on the fridge, knotty pine walls and shelves.

This Thanksgiving weekend I read letters from the dead in the white scraps of waves. They keep coming and coming from the other side. I couldn’t keep them from coming if I tried. There is comfort in these letters that seem to say over and over, “It’s really all right that something has happened” as they slap and dissolve against our shore wall. Geese fly, honking, in the opposite direction, and the wind chimes are blown every which way imitating their flight, their sound, their life.

Bells and Crosses

This poem is merely a vehicle. Though I have come away from Christianity, I mean no slight or offense to that religion here. Or to any religion. But for me, it was and is not sufficient. For some, the forms of religion are resplendent with meaning and beauty. 

I do feel deeply that religion is manmade, though most followers of it would decry such a declaration. I have always, even as a young child, been most interested in what lies underneath, inside, behind the forms of any particular creed, though there were times when high churches blew me away with their sober sacred spaces. I am even bold enough to believe that Jesus himself would wish symbols away that become over-burdened with import. He who did not own a home or carry much with him. Yes, he carried a cross, once. And then he left it there.

This speaks also of other realities, not only religion. Everywhere I turn this week I am hearing messages of form — foreground, background, and what we pay attention to.

Bells and Crosses

Hung with darkness
or rung with excitement,
crosses and bells
would otherwise be ciphers
empty and clear of meaning.

Forms alone, yet they
have been strung with cloves
that line my nostrils,
gaping like sepulchers. 

How gladly chimes
the clapper on Sunday morning
against the walls of the bell.
“Come to the warm table”
it seems to sing and vibrate,
laid white under the cross
with wafers, wine, and “be redeemed.”

I remember the joy of this banner,
when wine was imagined
as blood and bells' cups
rang their truth upside down. 

But these forms no longer
interest me, dissolving
into other matter
in the background.

Just another tree in the woods,
and another manmade
iron contraption in the city.
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Madame Heart

I dreamt a scene. A woman’s head floating in a blue sky above a landscape arid with rocks and scattered manmade metal. Or was she above the sea with ships moored in the harbor of her neck? It was a Dali painting. Next day I strolled through the Dali museum into this room and that with melting clocks, stilts and butterfly sails, turned a corner and there she was floating on the wall. Exactly, though I had never seen the scene before except in my dream. I have not been able to find the painting anywhere since, and the museum is too far to go see again, to know it is real.

But what is real?

The dream? Dali? His vision? Surreal, it is called. Sir Real. For what is reality except what each of us sees, feels, perceives? Hello, Sir Real, nice to meet you, Madame Real.

Of course she was me, that head. Some version of my reality. Existing in me before Dali created her. Mind disconnected from heart, in control until the reverse happened through years and landscapes, each small keys that upended the house, doors broken open releasing the heart to graze above the world, wild, free.

But it becomes too much, Madame Heart. The butterfly sails cannot be sequestered in the harbor, nor can streetcars of progress stay on the tracks grown over with poisoned weeds, like jittery men getting somewhere they are not, everywhere there is virgin space, looking for somewhere to die.

Empty blue sky. The one place a heart can watch from, uncluttered.

~ with thanks to Erin
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