Writing It Up In The Garden

A Person Can Break A Neck Trying To Write An Honest Poem*

2012-01-25T08:06:00.004-05:00

*(With thanks to Charles Simic for this favorite line in one of his poems for the title.)

I have sat zazen my entire life

& committed every infant pink &

bruised purple morning to memory. I

have fasted & grown gaunt seeking visions,

having raised Presence to my soft red lips

as one lifts a chalice filled with Holy Blood

Of saviors, saints & the wisest madmen.

But it was not until the dim flicker

Of simple light, shadowless on the wall

of the cave that is my heart, scratched in an ancient

hand, that I was so stirred to finally

make out the blessing, once too blurry to read:

"let your writing be your practice,” it said,

let your practice be what you bleed."

Mike Biegner

Jan. 2012

Afterlife

2012-01-19T19:30:00.006-05:00

That line is paper thin,

She told me.

I can hear the footsteps

Even when they fly—

They leave their footprints sometimes two chords deep,

They pass through me,

And when they reach my rib cage, I kind of fold inside,

I stop what I’m doing and I pay attention.

The trees look different when that happens;

They sway the way my grandfather laughed

When I showed him my crayons.

You know my father visits.

Sometimes he hides behind his dahlias

And poof he points out the dew drops

Just as if they’ve been there all along.

And sometimes the clouds spell words

Embedded in my memory

Now Karla, I told her.

This cannot be proven.

You die, I die, this much we know.

But at that point the buddhists think one thing

And the republicans another

And you know that priest

Who told me I was risking heaven,

Me, who follows 8 of the 10 commandments.

I dismissed him, but he could be right.

It would have to be two way communication,

Don’t you think, if the dead could speak?

You shouldn’t doubt, she answered,

Your friend Renee told you yourself

To say fuck as a prayer

And see astonish as a sign.

And I’ve watched you raise a broom to the ceiling,

Knocking a hello from here to there.

You told me yourself,

Time isn’t linear

And love outlasts a fleshy mess.

Why doubt it, she said.

Why be dead

When you might not die?

What mother would leave her children

here floundering, trying to understand

how something holy cannot hold water?

You might be right, Karla,

i hope you are.

But even thin lines are still lines

And lines have two ends.

i can’t follow two ends.

I’d rather just one

I’m a circle girl, Karla,

And you know what?

Circles might be paper thin too

Karen Jasper
January 2012

Mindful Connections: It is time

2012-01-09T11:46:00.001-05:00

It is time …

It is time to shift our focus from needing the attention to giving attention, needing healing to providing healing, approaching the horse through our wounds to wanting to heal theirs.

Horses have been in service to humankind for century after century. Building our roads, logging our woods, fighting our wars, the horse has patiently and diligently helped us evolve. In more recent times the horse has become less utilitarian and more recreational and status enforcing. Nowadays, the horse is part of humanities self-inquiry, therapy and personal healing process. The willingness to reflect back to humans what the horse is faced with provides tremendous help and support for the individuals’ development.

Yet I wonder, what are we doing for the horse? Who is in support of their well-being? Horses have physically adapted to the inadequate housing and keeping arrangement of most domestic settings, mentally adapted to the predatory approach by humans, emotionally submitted themselves to the ongoing domineering and fight for, or lack of, leadership, all while being spiritually broken down for the sake of service. Are we just so used to their kindness and willingness to adapt that we don’t feel for them, of them?

Why, I wonder, do only a few people see the opportunity for all to be well and wholesome? If we were to take care of the horse, if we were tuning in to the intrinsic need of both, human and horse, to connect mindfully, heart to heart, humanity, the world, would be such a better feeling place.

As I heal the wounded carriage horse, I expand my wisdom.
As I preserve the spirit of the young horse, I expand my abilities to guide and learn.
As I see life through the herd leaders eyes, I understand his role and responsibility for the herd’s wellbeing, and thus I support him by putting my needs second.
As I am mindful with the horse, I become mindful for all.

I believe if humans take care of the soul family of the horse, they will be changed too. They will be lighter, more knowing.

When you see through their eyes, feel of their body, connect spirit to spirit, healing occurs naturally.

Nicole Birkholzer
http://www.mindful-connections.com/

Broken

2012-01-04T13:28:00.000-05:00

"You piece of crap."

He said it quietly, deliberately, as he looked me in the eyes then walked away.

I took a deep breath, rubbed one of his classmates on the head, and turned to walk back inside the school.

He was having a bad day, my boy. He's called me names before -- stupid, ugly, dumb, old lady and, most recently, the scum between his toes. I've gotten good at letting it roll off my back.

"It's not about me," I tell myself. "I'm just the one standing in front of him, and he doesn't know what to do with all of his anger, frustration, rage, and sadness. He's broken."

That was in September, October...but it's December now, and "you piece of crap" kicks me in the gut. Not because of the words, but because it feels like all the work we've done -- all the work I've done -- these past few months has been for nothing. We're back to Square 1. He doesn't trust me.

It's a gut check too because we live in a world where an 8 year old boy can be this damaged, this broken. He is funny, smart, so freakin' charming, sweet even...but sometimes, the light in his eyes goes dark and he is gone...far away in an instant and I can't get him back.

"You piece of crap."

The words echo on my heart. All the positive recognition, all the playful teasing, all the sideways-secret smiles, the sing-songy "JJ has his homework" on mornings when he approaches the homework bin, all those moments that he raises his hand voluntarily and I dare to hope we've made it -- all of that is dashed on the rocks with those 4 words.

It's not about the words -- I'm tough -- the words roll off my back. It's about the look in his eyes that says, "I don't trust you. You can't win this fight. I won't let it happen."

Kristin McCue
Nov. 2011

Before I knew my name

2011-12-30T10:25:00.001-05:00

Before I knew my name, my soul was touched by God.
Before my tongue had words, my soul was touched by God.
Before I drew a breath, before I had a face,
Before I nestled in my mother's blood,
My soul was touched by God.
Before my parents clasped their hands,
Before their parents suckled milk,
My soul was touched by God.
Before the rain and ground conjoined,
Before the moon could tend the tides,
Before the sea and land were struck,
Before divine light split the dark, my soul was touched by God.
Oh, my soul forgive me for the times I do not know you.
For you have been faithful, steadfast more enduring
Than time itself.

Anne Lindley
anne.lindley.writes
8/2011

A Fine Year for Moss

2011-12-23T13:59:00.000-05:00

In the end, Anne came to a decision. She chose the larger of the two stepping stones and moved on, snapping out of her frozen footsteps and on down the steep and treacherous path through the woods. She now passed through an untouched part of the forest. Lime green ferns laced the edges of fallen logs, Astroturf moss padded comfortable old stones. This moss was thicker and somehow longer than any Anne had ever seen. This was no delicate moss. It carpeted any hard rock or tree trunk it could settle on. It was, thought Anne, a fine year for moss.

Her destination was a particular point by a small brook, which she had discovered at the beginning of the summer. She rarely visited this spot because the path to it was a linear one. She preferred to walk in circles. Usually her hikes headed out from the day’s beginning in one direction and ended by coming home from the opposite direction. Straight lines bothered her. Retracing the steps she’d already taken was redundant. Anne found little grace in the shape of the back-and-forth walk.

But sometimes it wasn’t grace she sought. On some days, she sought solace. And little or no spot offered comfort and solace, and protection, on quite the scale as the little spot by the brook before which she now found herself standing, all underfoot slippery leaves and wobbly rocks forgiven as she stopped and breathed and let the water fall in on her ears, slowing her, soothing her so much, and so swiftly, that in an instant before she knew where she was, she wanted nothing more than to drop to her knees and then to her belly and then to curl up for a deep, deep nap there by the brookling brook.

To the right of the path, the water welled up in a small pool, into which the brook spilled from a series of rock-formed waterfalls. It was the pluck-pluck call of the water from the far side of the mossy rocks into this small pool that Anne found so mesmerizing. When she had first seen this spot it had been enough for her to stand on the path and admire the tiny waterfalls and crystal-clear pool, shrouded from the glare of high noon by the indigo hemlock fronds rising in a military stand on the northern flank of that damp and shaded slope.

But today she stood on the path and weighed the force of her urge to nap against the solid attraction of one particular rock higher up the water fall against the risk of the treacherous leaves that lay in between her fatigue and the rock’s attraction. She knew not what lay underneath those leaves. Just to sit, that’s all she wanted. To sit. To not think, for just a minute. To not think.

She toed the ground.

What would the scarecrow man with the orange jacket do? What would Rachel do? What would dear Richard do?

And so pretending she was anybody but herself, Anne Dexter stepped off the path.

It took her ten minutes, but she did reach the rock higher up. She was a careful person, that much was certain. But finally she attained her destination. She stepped onto the flat rock ledge, looking about her at the falling water, the hemlocks, the pale blue sky peeking through.

She lay down on the rock. Without thinking, she fell asleep

When she woke up just a short while later, she felt something different. Aside from her sore hip, she felt, just, different. She felt alone, most definitely, but also ready to not be alone.

From her spot, she could see a green that hovered just beyond the reach the of the hemlock trunks. The forest floor? She squinted. She dropped back her head. She widened her eyes. She took in her breath, lest it be stolen by what she saw.

What she thought might be the forest floor rising through the trees up a steep hill was no forest floor. It was a rock. The largest of all the rocks around. The largest of all the rocks she’d ever seen. A house was the first thing that came to mind. The rock was a big as a house. Maybe not Jim’s new house or Rachel’s old house, but possibly the size of her little middle-aged house by the Green River. And she hadn’t seen the rock at first because it was entirely grown over in a thick coating of heavy green moss. It was a fine year for moss.

There the rock was. There the rock had always been, staring her in the face. She had not even seen it. How could there be such an impossibly large rock just tossed here in a jumble of already very large rocks beside this wee little brook meandering on the far side of her feet.

For the first time in a long awhile, she found herself wishing Richard were with her. Her mate there, to help her to make her way across the ditches and sinkholes to the large rock, someone who could help her to climb the rock, to best it, to sit astride it.

As it was, she could get nowhere near it. She had her limits, even on this extraordinary day, that she did know.

And so she stared and stared at the rock, trying to memorize the heft and weight and looming impossibility of this moss-covered behemoth.

The path homeward, when at length she regained it, suddenly seemed entirely beside the point. There was now only one way to go and that was back where she’d come from. For the first time since she could remember, she would retrace her steps and redo the thing with pleasure and with grace. Never a word used much in her vocabulary, again had become a word she would begin to use more often.

Linda Stevenson
November 2011

In Between

2011-12-18T21:15:00.000-05:00

a space with wisdom
a space with green
I think every one of us
should get to know
our in betweens

ripe moss sinking
darker and darker
earth’s musk, weeping
like crippling desire
another root’s energy
beckoning a demise

still, the lime green shoot
creeps and slithers
the brownish moss
and weakened spirit
a reminder of the haunts
from past and future

it grows
chokes the old
and finally emerges
into the land
of in between

imagine yourself there
steady, what hurt you before
will always transpire to be
but you can refuse
it’s gripping return
and instead
discover
how you can be
the only connection
between the spaces

how long can you linger
in your in-betweens

Jenn Drumm
November 2011

Peaches

2011-12-16T10:33:00.001-05:00

Robert leaned back from the well-scrubbed oaken table that took up the sunny side of the kitchen, his bad leg propped on a stool, cushioned by Katherine's folded shawl. He watched her confident hands as they emptied the dirt-encrusted basket of its cargo of late-season peaches, building a rounded pyramid on the counter by the sink. Water splashed. Then the afternoon sunlight began to flash against her knife, which quartered and pitted the peaches faster than his eyes could follow. Mesmerized, he sat motionless as the pile of damp golden pieces grew, until he could count the few whole fruits that remained: 6, 3, then one. The knife sped up as it pressed towards the end, chattering against the wooden board. A splashing sizzle from the stovetop drew Katherine away from the impromptu still life, but Robert stared fixedly at the heap of peach slices.

With a sharp metallic clang, Katherine dropped the huge lid she'd been holding while she surveyed the boiling glass jars. The sound galvanized Robert, whose hands jumped to the table's surface of their own accord, cupping taut air as his finger strained towards the absent trigger. His eyes roamed the kitchen, alert and wary, and he didn't hear Katherine resume her cheerful humming as she began to line the glass jars up on the clean white towel.

The splintered peaches gaped at him, sprawled helplessly in their massed pile. Each lay at an impossible angle from the next, as if unable to recall what it meant to be whole. Arms, legs, curved against the black ground, blue and khaki and grey pieces of uniformed waste.He felt himself teetering on the edge of a deep chasm, while an invisible tide drew away the sand beneath his feet, bit by bit, each departing grain disrupting his balance that much more. He could only put up token resistance as it eroded the ground on which he stood and the familiar internal contours of self.

He squeezed his fingers around edge of the thick oak slab that formed the table's top, clutching until the sinews in his fingers stood apart from the white knuckles. He sent his index finger probing the board's underneath, seeking a sharp splinter that he could drive into his eager flesh, craving the pain that would anchor him in this kitchen, on the chasm's rim. But his finger only caressed the satin-smooth grain of the ancient wood, generations old.

It belonged in this scent-infused kitchen, as he did not. The ripe, fruity smell of cooking peaches had spread through the room, fortified by the smoky tang of smoldering logs, all without Robert noticing. He was startled to see that nearly a dozen jars of glistening round peaches now stood at the end of the table. Katherine stirred a final batch on the stove, her mouth moving.

"… and I've kept enough to make us a nice, large cobbler for supper. Your favorite." Her lips continued to move, as she turned her head to smile at him.

With an internal scramble, he tried to find words that would not alarm her. He was spared the effort when a frothing hiss and sudden acrid smell warned her the pot was boiling over and she swung back to the stovetop and began to stir the mixture. He quivered, relieved that he need not force his throat to shape insubstantial words, but aware once again of the lapping tide.

To forestall it, he shoved himself back from the table, lifted his leg to the floor and fitted the splintering crutch under one arm. He heaved himself up, stood in precarious balance for a few seconds, and then took one tentative step.

"I'll just go and check on Sophie's progress, then."

He took her answering murmur as assent, and turned towards the doorway. As he moved slowly down the hallway, he passed the pantry where columns of round tomatoes and pickled cucumbers already stood massed for the oncoming winter. Their cheerful colors dizzied him, and a heady, yawning darkness opened in his mind. He felt sand slipping away beneath him. Scrambling for purchase, Robert gripped the crutch more tightly and kept going, down the long hallway that led to the library.

Liz Bedell
November 2011

Mirabai at 513

2011-12-14T14:30:00.000-05:00

When I was in the body of Mirabai
I would brush my long black hair every night,
108 strokes, one for each of the names
of my Beloved.
Down by the river where I filled my jug
I was overcome with longing...
the flowing of the river was the
moving of his hips was the wind
moving in the trees was his moving hand
on the nape of my neck.
The unmarried girls giggled and splashed
and their gold bangles gleamed in the sun;
I was silent with thoughts of Him.

During the monsoon season,
maddened by the peacock’s cry
in the courtyard, I scarcely noticed
when they tried to poison me.
with their black stares and
their lectures on duty, their
chapatis that stuck in my throat,
and the intolerable talk of marriage.
What do they know about marriage
who have never met Shyam?

Later I followed a band of beggars
out of the palace, out of the
stone gates; and never looked back.
All day the hills called to me, away, away,
and the grass was singing
his names for me, my names for him.
I walked for miles, enraptured
by the sudden sight of his smile
on the face of a simple cowherd boy--
oh no, I must have been mistaken,
I must be deluded again,
it comes from always thinking of Him.
the one who lives inside me.

When I was in the body of Mirabai
I knew nothing but this rapture,
and the pain of this rapture,
of the cracked red earth before the rains came,
I did not know it was possible to suffer so.
The peacock’s cry piercing my
heart in the dead of night,
my bed always on fire.

No one can say I wasn’t faithful,
who has lain on a bed of flames,
who has not known a single moment of
peace since you touched me that way,
who has kept on dialing the phone
long after you stopped taking my messages,
who has tried to commit suttee
a thousand times but always come back
to this poor solitary self.
Oh my midnight blue lover,
why didn’t you come back
to finish what you started?

When I was in the body of Mirabai
I did not have a smartphone
If I had I would have sent you texts to
die for; would have followed you on twitter
wherever you roamed, would have blogged
about your perfections, would have
worked out my perfect body in Curves
and seduced you on a tropical cruise.
But I was a Rajasthani princess then
and I gave up everything for love.
You remember me--
your humble servant, Mira

Judith Hooper
November 2011

The Stars Are Either A Giant Word Hoard of the Universe or Venerable Ancient Monks

2011-12-12T12:17:00.000-05:00

Into	- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --	Automatic
The	- - - - - - - -	As
Taciturn	- - - - - - - -	Swallowing
Blue	- - - - - - - -	Face
Black	- - - - - - - -	Them
Sky	- - - - - - - -	Stars
Speak	- - - - - - - -	Child
Your	- - - - - - - -	Them
Piece	- - - - - - - -	Yellow
Stringless	- - - - - - - -	Winking
How	- - - - - - - -	Monks
We	- - - - - - - -	That
Were	- - - - - - - -	Glare
Meant	- - - - - - - -	Back
To	- - - - - - - -	At
Pass		Our
Through	- - - - - - - -	Gelatinous
Unafraid	- - - - - - - -	Monkey
	- - - - - - - -	Brains

Mike Biegner
November 2011

The Grand Gathering: Wednesday meets Monday

2011-12-12T12:15:00.000-05:00

On December 7, a Grand Gathering of Nerissa's Wednesday and Monday writers came together at the Big Yellow House for food, festivity, and sharing our writing out loud. It was great. We've revitalized the Writing It Up in the Garden blog to keep up the connections we made that night and to cultivate the generous urge we felt to share our best work.

WIUITG writers! If you have something you've started in one of Nerissa's classes or workshops that you'd like to share with the rest of the Big Yellow World, send it to me at anne.lindley.writes@gmail.com and I will get it posted for you.

--Anne Lindley, blog consigliere

The Last Time You Were Here

2011-11-15T20:42:00.001-05:00

The last time you were here You were driving on highway five in California Trying not to smell the cities of cattle Fetid and groaning with institutional dharma. He was riding shotgun And you wanted him clean of it. “Look over here,” you said, pointing to the birds, to the west, to the ocean. But he turned and saw And you could not offer an explanation. You stopped in a small town Hoping the flowers would distract him. You found a salon and got a hair cut Which made you look like your sister. You left the hair on the cutting room floor. Over lunch, you told him about the time You were on the fifty-first floor Washing your hands at a sink This was when you were in a wheelchair The bathroom had no walls And the drop was a roll of the dice away. He said, “You were lucky. But why do you take such risks? Stay here next time.“ And later, after mouths full of chicken cooked in wine with artichokes and olives, “Did you save your hair? It’s good luck to save your hair.” You kissed him goodbye and got back into the car and kept driving south Cresting a hill, there was the snow shimmering off the mountain Larger than life Larger than Hollywood So large it might be all a dream Or a film Or the afterlife And you turned around, back to town, To convince him to come with you, That this time it didn’t have anything to do with luck. Nerissa Nields November 14, 2012

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2010-04-28T15:46:00.001-04:00

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Double or Nothing, Part 1

2008-06-22T22:56:00.000-04:00

Mark keyed in the code to lock the scooter down, and hopped off. The garage's automated machinery swallowed it down as if it were a tasty morsel. Mark always felt a pang watching that happen, for in his mind the scooter was a tasty morsel, a sleek, fast machine he'd spent long hours rebuilding and tuning until it was more an extension of his own mind and body than a separate piece of hardware. He knew the garage would disgorge it on command when he returned in a few hours, for Harvey's Hangers and Hot Pads was the most reputable garage company on Iskandar. Resolutely he turned his back on the garage's Acceptor pad and walked toward today's goal: The Riviera. The Riviera spread itself over a thousand square feet of the outer shell of Iskandar, and projected two floors beyond the shell. Prime real estate. Mark walked across to its innermost floor, styled to look like the top deck of a world-bound riverboat, complete with railings and things called life-preservers, which served no practical function here on the inside of Iskandar, but certainly added ambiance. The Riviera's owners had installed a full motion holoplate on the corridor's ceiling and walls, and the illusion that one was sailing down a river on some wild planetary surface was spoiled only by the fact that you couldn't actually lean over the railing. Mark nodded to the greeter standing by the staircase on the otherwise deserted "deck". "Evening, Frisk," he said. "Evening, Mark," Frish replied, nodding back politely. "Come to try your luck again?" Mark grinned, "Sure, it's got to turn sometime, doesn't it?" "That what they all say," Frisk replied, shaking his head in mock concern. "Just have a good time, and don't bet it all." "I only bet it all on a sure thing," Mark replied, and added silently to himself, or when I have no choice. Descending the stairs, the boat theme continued, with the vast, mostly open expanse of the second floor mimicking a riverboat casino. Tables were spread out at comfortable intervals, and every one was surrounded by well dressed people either chattering excitedly, or watching the turn of a wheel or the fall of cards in a quiet hush. Beautiful, scantily clad men and women circulated through the crowd or hovered at the elbows of serious gamblers in a tradition as time honored as that of the Gambling House itself. Mark walked over to the outer wall, looking out through the diamondite windows across the surface of Iskandar. There were no other projections in the immediate vicinity of the Riviera, for which the owners paid quite a premium. A little farther away similar two and three floor projections could be seen, and in the distance were the long extrusions of the heavy grav industrial towers. Beyond them, clearly visible through the crystal clarity of full vacuum, soared the mile high tower the residents of Iskandar called the Light House. At its tip strobed the beacon that marked Iskandar's position to all craft that might be navigating through local space. Mark looked downward and outward, searching for one such that he had been told would be arriving at this time. He accessed the data feed from Worster's, one of the firms that handled traffic control around Iskandar, and his inner HUD drew a flashing circle around a tiny dot making its way from the horizon toward the Riviera. Mark watched long enough that his auxmod could calculate the trajectory itself, and confirm the data from Worster's, and then headed for the stair to the third floor, where the dock was located. As he emerged onto the outer deck he was assailed by a barrage of advertising. Unlike the single purpose deck above, this level tried to be everything to everyone, providing shops and outlets for any conceivable service an incoming arrival might have, from restaurants to a furniture showroom.

Ossuary

2008-02-27T07:33:00.000-05:00

So calcified, so calcified. Robbed of marrow, rung and hollow. Bleached and dried. My bones sing inside. Sharp and brittle, flute and whistle. Deossified. Such music is undignified. Yellowed relics, cap and tunics, cut and tied. Muffled, cracked, metasticized. Planed and honed. Bone de-boned. Unsimplified. -Michael Mercurio

Dead, Again

2007-10-17T22:15:00.000-04:00

Oct.2007 “A coward dies many deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Ceaser. Boy, Shakespeare had it so wrong. This weekend I journeyed to my childhood home for the last time. I went down to gather with my brothers and sisters to help my Mom move from her house of fifty plus years to another house further out on Long Island. Where suburban spread had scattered my siblings who remained on the Island, my Mom stuck fast to the small house in Franklin Square, a suburb just outside of Queens and a short 35 minute train ride into New York City. When I spoke with her earlier in the week she mentioned how everyone was going to be stopping by to help with the move. I told her, of course, that I would be down to lend my back and heart to the move and I could tell she was relieved. “Oh, that would be great!” she said. I could tell that she had landed the answer I knew she had been fishing for. I drove down Saturday morning over the same route I had for the last twenty years. When I pulled up to the house the movers were just finishing closing the truck and I could see my Mom sitting on the stairwell that led to the upstairs with the front door wide open. It was a very warm October day and the sun drenched the house with a sort of golden-amber hue. With my old Minolta 202 slung over my shoulder, I took some pictures of the outside of the house. “You a photographer?” one of the movers asked me. “Nah, just one of the movers,” I replied. When I stepped into the living room it was bare and the emptiness caught me completely off guard. I heard myself wheeze lightly, as if I had been sucker punched and my breath was drawn out against my own will. For the years I’d lived here, I had never seen the rooms so barren. I hugged my Mom and thought how stoic and frail she looked. She smiled, but it was a smile of duty. She had been through a lot over the months with the sale of the house. I know the physical strain had taken its toll, but there was the emotional toll that we really never talked about. I had seen this look once before. It was at Daddy’s funeral a million years ago she wore that look: that look of uncertain weariness. Thank God my sister Denise was there, directing the movers and my mother with the skill of Patton moving his tanks against German Panzer divisions. Together we cleaned up what remained: some clothes, a mirror, some plants, some switch-plates. We stood by the wrought iron railing that led to the upstairs, the same railing we used to slide down when we were kids. We were considering what else had to be loaded into the last of the cars when Denise unscrewed the decorative brass finial that adorned the end of the banister and tucked it into her bag. We used to do the same thing as kids but then we would use the brass ornament like a microphone and sing into it. “The new owners won’t mind if we take this,” my sister said. We kept finding pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters on the floors of the empty rooms. We would pick them up, only to find more later on. “It’s Daddy,” Denise said. “He’s trying to tell us something.” When the movers and Denise left, it was just my Mom and I. I went from room to room and took pictures. Then I just stood in each room and recalled some event that took place in each of the rooms. I touched the dark pine paneled walls of the upstairs rooms where Joe and I lived through our high school years. I stood on the exact spot where my trundle bed stood and recalled as if it were yesterday that morning when my brother-in-law climbed the stairs to wake Joe and me to give us the news about Daddy’s passing after his stroke on that day that changed everything for all of us. I went into the garage where I had once destroyed my sister’s ten speed when I was first learning how to drive. As I was backing out of the garage one day, I accidentally hooked the frame on the car bumper onto her bike and rather than get out of the car to see what was holding it up, I simply gave the car more gas. I still owe her a bike to this day. It was in this garage that my brother Dave and I took apart the engine of an old Pontiac Le Mans Grand Prix that our neighbors gave us. I helped him do a valve and gasket job on the engine. He actually knew what he was doing; I just liked getting dirty. It was in this garage that the old Dodge Plymouth Valiant given to us by our cousins Sam and Rena lived – my Dad loved that car. I went down the basement and found some of my old high school poetry scribbled in chalk onto a wood panel by the washing machine. There on the wall was the remnant of a Mari Evans poem: “If there be sorrow” was all that was left – the first line of the poem, the rest of the poem was all washed out but I remembered it and I recited to myself it in a dark, moist whisper: “If there be sorrow/Let it be for things/Undone, unachieved, unrealized, unattained/To these add one:/Love withheld, love restrained.” I went outside and said goodbye to the multi-stemmed Black Birch tree in the back yard. It looked like a hydra with its many thick trunks. The many stems made it ideal for building a tree house and I remember nailing boards of plywood between the trunks, and two-by-four steps climbing high to the top of the tree. I touched the tree and said goodbye to it like it was a person. Just next to the tree was the concrete patio extension that jutted out from the main patio that my Dad poured when he bought that brick façade barbeque pit. He built it during an era when barbeque pits were the rage. I recalled how as a kid I stood at the other end of the yard and pretended I was pitching for the Mets hurling a heavy sponge ball against the brick backstop of the pit until the brick began to give way and the façade started to crack. The barbeque pit is long gone but the concrete extension is still there, intact and as fresh as when the concrete was first poured. I went back inside and loaded my car with a few more things. My Mom hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was 10:00AM. She was starting to shake. “Ma,” I said to her, “you’re diabetic!” Then I mouthed the words in an exaggerated deliberateness: “You have to eat!” I drove up to Dunkin Donuts and got her a croissant and cup of coffee. Afterwards, I went outside and finished off the roll of film, then put my camera into the car and walked back in. She was on the steps again, with that same look: overwhelmed but resigned, uncertain but sure, tired but anxious. I hugged her again and tried to say something wise, offer up some verbal balm that would soothe whatever anxiety or doubts she had. Up to this point, I had been cool, nostalgic, but not really sad. I felt grateful, really, really grateful - for being able to say goodbye to this place, this sacred place in my life that had harbored me all those years. Growing up here had been nothing if not a safe haven. Whatever interior, spiritual life I possessed now as an adult was formulated here, within these walls. Then I felt the lump in my throat and that burning behind the soft of my eyes. I said nothing – I couldn’t - but my Mom did: “We had some good times here, didn’t we?” I wanted to say “yes” but I was crying. I hugged her again, nodded and turned to leave. I got in my car and drove off sobbing past the nicely trimmed Long Island lawns. As I was composing myself in the car, trying hard not to seem psychotic (now the picture of some man sobbing in his car, alone, would barely raise an eyebrow in New York, I had been living away from New York a long time so naturally I felt self conscious) it suddenly hit me what it was that I was feeling: I was dying. I knew that I would never be back this way again. The friends I had in high school are no longer in this town; they are all over the world now, and now my Mom too would be gone. I had no business being in this neighborhood ever again. I was experiencing grief, not for the loss of some good times or old memories – but the real and actual death of who I was back then. The person I was, the one who grew up in this house, was gone – actually had been gone for some time but now the last tie was severed and it was like mourners throwing their handful of dirt onto a coffin. This was my way of experiencing the death of me as something real, something tangible. In a way I felt a little relieved. We would be retelling the stories of the old neighborhood on any occasion we could – our family life is built around this sort of story telling. But I was free to feel sad for the loss of who I was back then. The words of the mystic Julian of Norwich suddenly came to mind: “All shall be well, and all shall be well. And in all manner of things, all shall be well.” As I heard these words bubble up from my heart, words that often comforted me, I eased into the loss like a pair of new jeans. I headed over to the new place where in true Biegner fashion we made (what else?) but a party of the event, moving my Mom’s things into the new house thus opening another chapter, starting yet another story, beginning another epic tale to be told at some later date and time. We worked hard and ordered out for dinner together and got her settled into her new home. Like an old fashioned “barn raising”, we were tired but happy, really happy to be able to be together for something like this. Not everyone can say this. Not everyone has the ability to be together and celebrate the passing and comings of old and new things in their lives. We do not die once but many, many times over – coward or courageous soul. During these threshold moments when we are afflicted with the blinding clarity of truth, it hits us square between the eyes and we are defenseless to stop it. When we are forced to give up our childhood home it forces us to give up at last our identity of who we thought we once were. Once we accept this identity as the sham that it is – for we are never really who we think we are, anyway - we are free to pass. It is not until we recognize these moments in our lives that we finally understand the freedom of this sort of loss. With just a bit of pain and a bitter hint of melancholy, we can let go as we move on and allow ourselves to grow just a little bit more.

Buddha Moon

2007-09-28T09:01:00.001-04:00

Pin Oak, Hemlock, Black Walnut: When the great Chaos named these trees The Wind that touches us all carried these names to us. In utero, before I even knew what words were - Before I learned how names could disjoint and categorize, Before I knew Song, there was Wind In the flirtations of mosquitoes, In the graceful applause of flapping birds in flight., Before I knew the hammering of the clock There were acorns dropping through Forest canopies Tapping at the feathery bed of raw umber pine needles That is Forest's floor below. Tree Frog sings of Night to come As Holy Dusk fills space left by vacant leaves And craggy branches as they wave madly about. A Buddha Moon rises to rest its belly Over the closing lids of Sunlight’s eyes And skips Horizon’s rope to wake me wide.

Reasons I Can't Sleep

2007-09-16T14:11:00.000-04:00

Two cats squall in the dark trees behind the house. They sound like—what? A pair of alien babies raging at their lazy parents On and on it goes, they must be tearing each other to ragged furry bits I’ll find bloody fluff on the lawn. Beside me you lie listening too. The bills are due. The leaky tub. The mysterious must in the downstairs hall. And a number of nagging phone calls, some we made, some we should have but didn’t, some that come ringing when we’re just about to get out of the house, bringing news from various fronts from the west, reports on the latest tragedy—a double mastectomy, a fractured pelvis (she slipped on an airport floor), a mahogany breakfront that nobody wants or needs (call the salvation army, please!) From the east, it’s the child’s school calling, you didn’t send enough food for his lunch, she refuses to sit at the peanut-free table she used a four-letter word during writing time Shit, who wouldn’t It’s 3:14 The cats have stopped. You’re snoring. I’m spiraling endlessly from worry to memory and back dreams I should have let go everything I should have let go last time I saw him, my father looked so old I remember him driving his convertible GTO, driving us for ice cream with the ragtop down and now there’s only one thing I’d like to know how does it all go so fast when the night is so long so slow Debra Jo Immergut

The Hungry Ghost and the Holy Ghost (Sermon)

2007-01-22T10:13:00.000-05:00

I had grand plans to preach a sermon that would somehow tie up the strands of Christianity and Buddhism and modern day psychological wisdom and allow all of you to leave this building feeling vibrant and renewed and inspired and full of understanding, and incidentally think I was a really great preacher. Instead, all I wanted to write about was my eating disorder. Is that even a sermon? Isn’t that totally narcissistic? Isn’t that completely inappropriate? I don’t know, but I do know this is West Cummington, and if someone’s going to stretch the definition of “sermon” anywhere, this is the right place to do it, though I have cleverly hidden the fact that the protagonist of the sermon is really me. Lately the word “Abundance” has made its new-agey way into my various lines of vision—the books people give me to read, the emails that come across my desk; it’s peppered into sentences from the mouths of some of my best friends. And when I’m face to face with one of these friends, it’s all I can do to keep my mouth from twitching or my eyes from narrowing. And it’s not just that the word is new agey. After all, I’m a life coach. How much more new agey can you get? It’s that the word “Abundance” has to my mind the ring of winning the lottery, or a roasted pig with an apple in its mouth. That and people who use it in a sentence often precede it with the phrase, “manifesting your.” Warning: If you listen closely to this sermon, you will find the word “manifest” in several of its manifestations at least three times. To this descendent of the Calvinists, the word “Abundance” smacks of greed. It makes me nervous. And I happen to have a client—I won’t say she’s my favorite client, but she is definitely the one to whom I pay the most careful attention. This client, you see, when she hears the word Abundance, for some reason it makes her scared she’s going to gain weight. So I said to this client, “really? How strange.” And then I give her the instruction I give all my clients: I tell her to meditate every day, and to notice her habitual thoughts, what Jack Kornfield calls our “top ten hit parade.” You know, the top ten things over which each of us as individuals obsesses. Some of us obsess about our neighbor’s terrible taste in Christmas decorations (and how they are still up, even though it’s mid January) and others will obsess over the big game in high school where the should-have-been winning field goal missed by inches. I have plenty of respectable fears: fear that the world will be destroyed by our greenhouse gasses, fear that humankind will not overcome our prejudice and hatred in my lifetime, fear that my small beloved Northampton will become so yuppified and gentrified and supersized by the time Lila’s a teen-ager that we may as well live in the Washington DC suburbs where I grew up. I suspect, knowing this congregation, that you might share some of these fears. They may even be in your top ten list too. My client, however, believes that if she eats an almond she will instantly gain five pounds. And she’s not alone, either. One morning last week, I picked up the new York Times and read a story about how, in Brazil, their once rather zaftig ideal has been replaced with our insidious anorexic one, and to date, six Brazilian models have died from complications of anorexia. Meanwhile, in our country, we have what the same newspaper commonly refers to as the obesity crisis. So while I’d like to joke about my client’s obsession with weight and body size, I know it’s no laughing matter. Not for her, and not for anyone else who is in pain at the sight or thought of a doctor’s scale. My client, you see, is in recovery from an eating disorder. Sometimes she wants to say, “I have recovered from an eating disorder,” but as anyone who’s been through a 12 step program can tell you, members never really recover; they simply have a daily reprieve from the addiction, compulsion or manifestation (see, that word again!) based on their fit spiritual condition. (By the way, I know people who are addicted to going to 12 step meetings. I have a friend who’s been in recovery for over 30 years and she goes to 21 meetings a week. Her two children barely know her. She’s a wreck. I saw her recently and she told me she’s hit bottom and is now going to Overmeeters Anonymous.) Anyway, as I was saying: some days my client feels completely free from her crazed thoughts about how huge her body is, how in just a few minutes she is surely going to balloon up to twice her size and how even a whole roasted pig with an apple in its mouth isn’t anywhere nearly enough to satisfy her boundless appetite. Some days, she might have a shadow of a thought like this, and from her evolved 12 steppy/ Christian/Buddhist/Somatic Experiencing place of Witnessing, she can gently offer compassion to that Jungian shadow self. She breathes in and out and feels her heart expand to twice its normal size, and she knows that she has enough, she does enough and she is enough. She is free. She would no more get on the scale than she would eat a whole pig. And then there are the other days. These are the days when she rushes into Barnes & Noble to buy a friend’s child a copy of Jon Muth’s wonderful “Zen Shorts,” a children’s book based on Buddhist stories, and she passes by the display of the newest diet books. She pauses. Then she keeps walking: Stay away from the book display! Just say no! And then on the way back, she pauses again, thinks, “One little peek won’t hurt me. Well, it might hurt me, but it won’t hurt anyone else.” And so she picks up the latest diet book—this one is about how if you remove all flavor from your food, you will soon lose your appetite and pretty much be able to eat whatever you want and never gain weight, because food now has the appeal of dried old shoes to you. All you have to do is boil your chicken, boil your potatoes, eat a lot of kale and make sure you keep everything separate because it’s in the mixing of foods together that temptation gets its evil foothold. Oh, and take fish oil supplements. She starts to imagine how she will explain to her husband why they are suddenly eating nothing but boiled cabbage for dinner. But before she picks up the book and races to the counter with it, she pauses (see, her life coaching is paying off.) And for some reason, the passage from Mark about the loaves and fishes comes to mind, and along with it, the word “Abundance.” She suddenly has an image of a vast spring meadow, somewhere far up in an alpine setting, Jesus’s lilies of the field, purple and yellow violets everywhere, Grieg’s springtime piece fluting away in the background. She takes one of those famous deep breaths and puts the book down. She begins to talk to herself, gently. Why do I have to do so much all the time? Why do I worry so much about being hungry? Why do I equally worry so much about getting fat? Many people who suffer from addictions or compulsive behaviors get diagnosed with anxiety disorders. This is a fancy way of saying that we’re scared and that taking in the substance or acting out the behavior calms certain regions of our brains, allowing us for awhile to feel less anxious and believe we appear to others as more normal. Addicts are famous for hoarding. The text for Alcoholics Anonymous is full of stories of alcoholics hiding bottles in hampers, the tank of the toilet, in pockets of dressing gowns, etc. Food addicts find clever ways to eat entire pies and cakes from the bottom up, so that when family members remove the lid of the cake tent come across just the frosting, hanging out above a nibbled away skeleton. We do this because we’re afraid there’s never going to be enough. How could there be when this hole inside me is so vast, so bottomless, so…abundant…that no amount of anything could ever fill it? We live in an entire culture based on the Abundance/scarcity spectrum. The people who immigrated here over the past five hundred years were generally escaping terrible circumstances—famine, poverty, crowded living conditions—scarcity. And what they encountered, or at least what they hoped to encounter, what is part of the American Dream, is Abundance. Geographical, financial, psychological and emotional (for what is the guarantee of the Declaration of Independence? We have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We do???) And we have ample ways of getting our caloric needs met. We evolved as a species designed to keep from starving at all costs, which is why so many of us lucky survivors inherited our ancestors’ slow metabolisms. Their efficiency led directly to our existence. Up until really midway through the last century, chubbiness was a sign of wealth. The waif-like were poor people; people who used their bodies to make a living; people who couldn’t afford to eat meat or sugar; people who measured out their precious sticks of butter as if they were gold. Now, the cheapest food sources are also some of the most densely caloric; sugar, flour and fat are plentiful, and a large part of our population subsists mainly on these three food groups. It’s meat, fish and vegetables that are dear. In earlier times, we knew instinctively that these were the prizes of the hunters and gatherers, of the farmers and gardeners alike. We worked hard to put these things on the table, knowing that sugar and butter, though equally hard to come by, weren’t the foods that would keep our children strong and healthy. You would think that we would relax now that we have enough to eat. But somehow we don’t. Rather than be grateful for what we have, we remain anxious that we don’t have enough. My client knows this all too well. Some days her anxiety revolves around fear that she won’t get enough cereal in her bowl. Some days it revolves around fear that her jeans will be too tight. It’s the same coin; different sides. But she’s been paying attention recently. She’s been noticing this feeling, this godawful never enoughness, this sudden fury with her body for having such a ridiculously slow metabolism that keeps her 1. fat and 2. hungry, and she’s been watching it. In Buddhism, this constellation of feelings is imagined as a Hungry Ghost, a being with a huge body and a tiny head and mouth. This Hungry Ghost takes over her body at various times with alarming predictability. When she gets on the scale, for example. No matter what the number is, the Hungry Ghost seems to rouse himself and peer down and if the number is low, he says, “Whoopee!! Let’s party!” If the number is high, oddly, his body grows larger and his head and mouth grow smaller. He feels greedy, selfish, like a loser, and this makes him want to overeat. My client notices when she’s gained a pound or two she also gains a fear of being hungry. And furthermore, she notices that this fear of hunger is actually worse than the hunger itself. So she eats a little more at her meals in order not to feel hungry mid-day, or, worst of all, hungry in the wee hours when she wakes up thinking about her daughter’s college education or how terrible she is at keeping house plants alive, or how she’ll never write another coherent word again. The wee hours are when the Hungry Ghost is at his most powerful. My sense from the passages we read is that Jesus probably knew the Hungry Ghost. Jesus surely met him during his forty days and nights in the wilderness. The devil tempted him not dissimilarly to the ways in which our immigrant ancestors were tempted: with food, with land and with power. Jesus was hungry—it said so in the Bible. And yet he was wise—being Jesus—and he knew that the food with which the devil was tempting him was not real sustenance. It was the kind of food that fills with no real nourishment: “Man does not live by bread alone,” he says to Satan. And, when we take our awareness away—when we are asked to play God, as Jesus was when the Devil challenged him to test his powers or promised him omniscience—we believe the Hungry Ghost’s lies—that it’s all up to us, that there’s never enough, that we’re going to have to eat and eat and eat through that tiny little mouth while our belly grows ever bigger. Jesus didn’t eat, didn’t take the bait, so to speak, because Jesus had faith in his God. He had made a commitment to fast for forty days—to be with life on life’s terms, to be with what was-- for his own reasons. I suspect he knew there would be a prize far greater than the present ending of his sufferings if he stayed his course. Similarly, the Buddha sat all night beneath the Bodhi tree to witness all of his fear—the armies of Mara-which came to torment him, and at the end of his suffering he placed his hand upon the ground so that the world would bear witness to his ability to stay present. To stay awake, to remain aware, to be mindful. When my client eats a meal, she has to be mindful. She can’t zone out and grab a handful of nuts. She has to look very carefully at her portions and make sure she’s getting not too much and not too little. To do this, she can count on what the Buddhists and the somatic experiencers call Awareness, what the 12 steppers call Higher Power and what the Christians call Jesus. And after years of hanging around wise people, she is learning that she doesn’t need the Hungry Ghost to go away. She just needs to know he’s there. She still might feel ravenous and fat simultaneously, but she doesn’t have to act on either of those feelings when she has that divine quality called Being Awake. And oddly, the feeling of never enoughness, that hole inside her, seems gently filled when she comes into presence with the breath, with the Hungry Ghost, with the teachings of Jesus. Last week in church, Cherylann talked about rituals, and I realized that my client’s ritual of bowing her head and thanking God for her food and also for her ability to eat the right amounts is a big part of the solution to her previously disordered way of eating. When she takes this time to thank God, she is practicing gratitude: thank you for this food. Thank you for mindfulness. Help me to be awake as I eat; thank you for enough. Help me to see what is enough. I don’t get to know why I am so fortunate to have this beautiful bountiful meal while someone else goes hungry, and I eat it gratefully in the name of that one who doesn’t have enough. And suddenly, I got it about Abundance. When we give thanks from our hearts and souls, we feel richly blessed and right-sized and incredibly grateful. Abundance, after all, is gratitude made manifest, the tangible form of gratitude. Abundance is what we experience as soon as we become grateful. My daughter has learned how to wave. One of her babysitters taught her last weekend while I wasn’t looking, and now she crumples her hand in towards herself, thoughtfully and meditatively watching the collection of fingers pulling in to the hand. And although friends say, “Just you wait; it only gets better,” I can’t imagine anything better than this moment in time, this fleeting milestone of development, this nascent greeting, this early communication. She seems to be in an in-between place currently; in between infancy and the toddler she is threatening to become every time she does her army crawl across the carpet, or almost lifts herself to standing by grabbing onto the neck of my guitar. But then again, she has been on her journey since the moment she came into the world--always in between one stage or another. And anyway, I think my work is to notice that hers is not so much a journey as a constant arrival: now. Now. Now. Now Now. For me, this is the definition of the Holy Ghost: the merging of the sacred and the everyday, recognized in the present moment. When I can be fully present with my daughter and see the holy in her, a third presence manifests. “Wherever two or more of you are gathered, there will I be,” says Jesus, who left his Holy Ghost to remind us of his ever attentive, ever present completely unusual and absolutely ordinary humanity. So when my client comes over for a meal, which she does with uncanny frequency, we’ve been inviting the Hungry Ghost to join us at the table. And we invite Jesus too, since he’s a relaxed kind of guy and always seems both patient and amused by the Hungry Ghost parts of us. We sit down to our meal; the flavor and textures, the way they mingle, we breathe a few times. We imagine that field up in the mountains, the one full of violets and lilies. We eat until we’ve had enough, and to my great surprise, my client has left food on her plate. There’s food in the serving dishes, which we will wrap up for another meal. We give thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Scripture Passages: The Temptation of Jesus 1Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. 2After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3The tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread." 4Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" 5Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6"If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written: " 'He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'" 7Jesus answered him, "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 8Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9"All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me." 10Jesus said to him, "Away from me, Satan! For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'[d]" 11Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. Matthew 6:28-30 28"And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, 29yet I say to you that not even Soloman in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. 30"But if God so clothes the (C) grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? (D)You of little faith! Mark 6:39-45 (New American Standard Bible) New American Standard Bible (NASB) 39And He commanded them all to sit down by groups on the green grass. 40They sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. 41And He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up toward heaven, He blessed the food and broke the loaves and He kept giving them to the disciples to set before them; and He divided up the two fish among them all. 42They all ate and were satisfied, 43and they picked up twelve full baskets of the broken pieces, and also of the fish. 44There were five thousand men who ate the loaves.

Morning Meditation (What The Bats Told Me)

2006-09-28T22:39:00.000-04:00

“How we long for morning!” is what coffee sings To us with aromatic melodies. How tissue soft it is; how cat-like it stretches, This colorful ribbon that is worn around the Neck of the day. We remember things: like how to throw a curve ball – Toothy seams touching fingers callused by rawhide. Like a curveball, the day spins away from us, Once it is released, once it is pitched. Morning is the empty glass bottle, all angles And curves that sits with the patience of a garden, Wild with the kind of wanting that we do not Usually carry around in our wallets Like pictures of our family. Desirous as a hairpin that needs to control; Searing as dry ice in its stillness; As insistent as a cell phone. Even the bats above, turning in for the day, know That light has a serrated edge like a quarter With which it tries to grip the slippery dark And push it down. We may doubt everything else about our lives But never how the morning is ours – How we belong to it – How right it is to love the felt part of the day Before it turns on us. M C Biegner 9/2004

Daylight

2006-06-26T21:22:00.000-04:00

Shade moving freely, as quiet as oil, I thought it was you for one long moment. It held lust and rage just like you did once, Now it holds surrender the way summer Air holds moisture. It seems we would not be Able to save each other like we thought We could. Our new worlds drawn out in crayon, We drew all the fantasies we would need. We made play, like children. Still, as newborns, We sought relief in cool, shifting shadows. Until daylight wore us down with the strength Of Tidal fingers sculpting a beachhead. Until we peered over the water’s edge And recognized who it was that we were, And to whom we ultimately belonged. M C Biegner 6/28/06

dad, carole king and autumn

2006-05-18T09:54:00.000-04:00

The girl opens the front door to her house a crack. The toes of her small bare feet are on the colder metal door frame and her heels rest on the warmer wood floor of the house. It is fall. The leaves have started to change from a duller shade of green to sharper shades of yellow and orange. But it is still early enough in the season that the cold bite of the air is surprising to her cheeks warm and flushed from the prancing and leaping and turning, the grande jete-ing and pirouetting that she had been doing throughout the house just moments before. Her dad’s favorite evening-time music—Carole King’s Tapestry album is playing on the stereo in the living room next to where she stood. Some nights he would push the coffee table to the side of the room and take her fairy princess ballerina hands in his big dad hands and pull her onto their dance floor. She liked to stand on his feet and dance to songs like “I Feel the Earth Move” and “Smackwater Jack.” Sometimes her mom would come in with her brother after dinner was in the oven and she had some time for dancing. Then they would all rock their hips and snap their fingers and all sing along. This particular evening the girl’s mom had taken her little brother and sister for a ride in the car while she did some errands. And the dad wasn’t dancing or even sitting and reading the paper in the living room like he liked to do on Sundays. The girl leans forward on tip toes and peeks her messy pig tailed head out the door a little further. She smells something like burning and sweet and sees her dad sitting on a chair on the front porch smoking a pipe, eyes fixed on something out somewhere in the yard in front of him.

“Daddy, Mrs. Jenson said that smoking is bad for you”

The expression on his face softens to something like amused, but his gaze doesn’t change. “She is right.”

“You just don’t care?” By now the girl has stepped out onto the cement porch, which feels warmer on the bottom of her feet than she would have predicted. She walks over to her dad and leans over, placing her elbows on arm of the chair and rests her head in her hands. Her blue denimed bottom with the flower embroidered on the back pocket sticks out behind her. She is staring intently at the big man who almost looks as if he could have tears in his eyes. He doesn’t move his head, but shifts his eyes slantways to look at his daughter.

“I care. What’s it to ya?” He smirks, teasing.

“Then why do you do it?” She stands up, hands on hips.

“Pipes are different. And I don’t smoke them all the time. I just like to sit on my porch when the seasons are changing and smoke a pipe. One of the little joys of my life.” He says that last sentence with an extra dramatic emphasis and then chuckles. The girl chuckles too.

“It does smell nice. Can I try?”

“No, But I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

“When you grow up and have a house and a little girl, then you can sit on your front porch and smoke a pipe and undergo interrogation just like me.”

The girl smiles.

“What’s interrogation mean?”

“Questions.”

“Oh.” She giggles.

“Ya know, this pipe belonged to my father. When I was growing up, my father used to like a good pipe once in a while, too.” There is silence. His eyes are full with almost-tears again. The opening notes of “Way Over Yonder” can be heard from inside the house. The little girl looks down, uncomfortably. They don’t ever talk about grandpa because they don’t want to make dad sad. Grandpa died before her mom and dad even met. “Check this out.” He blows out a few smoke rings.

“How did you do that?” ”Very well.” The little girl rolls her eyes. The dad laughs from his belly, pleased with himself.

“Da-ad.”

“What?”

The girl sighs, defeated. The dad returns to looking out into the yard.

Every fall for the rest of her life, after they have spent an afternoon raking piles of leaves, she will observe her dad having at least one evening like this. Every year she’ll peak out the window and he will be sitting there, blowing smoke rings and staring out into the front yard. She will just know that he is thinking about his dad. And every year she won’t go outside and sit next to him and she wont hold his hand and ask about the grandfather she never knew.

But for now the little girl returns to the house and goes into the living room and decides to continue dancing. The perfect ballet song is playing and she moves slowly and gracefully:

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue An everlasting vision of the everchanging view A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Her dad remains in solitude and silence on the porch until dark.

Easy Planting

2006-05-06T08:38:00.000-04:00

There are early mornings when Winter has not released its white knuckled Grip on patches of ground just yet. Still, I make a hole and clear out space in you the way A trowel removes the dark chocolate clay of earth. As I dig down further it is striped with strands of coarse Blonde sand that makes a type of coffee blend That is a luminous tint, it shines almost like ceramic. The secrets of living are always aromatic: The scents of new grasses teased out by breezes, Manicured, manured plots bulging with richness, While nearby rowdy and fragrant hyacinths urge me on The whole time. The gritty feel of you under my fingernails, The damp stains on my knees, The way my finger feels as it slides Down the carved wooden trowel: This is foreplay I tell you. The days of easy planting sustain us far beyond The ways that the hard packed snow of our failures betray us. M C Biegner 5/2006

Nerissa's Easter Sermon

2006-04-25T10:13:00.000-04:00

Call to Worship M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because God cannot be contained M: Why is the tomb empty? P: Because Jesus lives in you and me now. M: What will you do now? P: Recognize everyone I meet today as Christ in his many distressing disguises. Scripture: Tom Nields-Duffy: Luke 23: 13-49 Gail Tenney Nields: John 20:1-20; John 21: 15-17 Sermon “If You Want to Live, You Gotta Die.” When considering what I wanted to talk about on this Easter Sunday, it occurred to me that people looking for the answer to the question, “Did Jesus really die for our sins, and if so what exactly does that mean?” might not be the same people who would wander into the West Cummington Congregational church today. This is actually my first Easter here, and when I inquired about Easters past, I heard a rumor that Stephen began a sermon with the statement, “It’s a METAPHOR, people!” With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot, for the past six weeks, about resurrection as a metaphor. I’ve been thinking about life, death and rebirth; I’ve been thinking about the phase which Lent symbolizes so beautifully: the period of being planted, when we are still in the darkness of underground, hidden from the world, churning beneath the soil and metamorphosing into some new form: like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, a red bud unfurling into a big green leaf. It might occur to you, looking up here at me in all my girthly splendor, that I have another reason for meditating on this topic, but we’ll leave that alone for now. I volunteered to preach the Easter sermon here, in part as a ruse to get my parents to come up for the weekend. As soon as I heard I’d been given the green light, I freaked out. My preparations for writing this sermon consisted of pondering a sentence I heard recently from an Episcopal priest named Cynthia Bourgeault: “If you want to live, you’ve got to die.” Also renting all four disks of the Complete Beatles Anthology. What, you might ask, do the Beatles have to do with Easter? Being that this is West Cummington, I’m not that afraid of you coming after me for implying that the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. I’m pretty sure that none of you burned your Beatles LPs back in 1966 when John Lennon made this infamous declaration. The Beatles, like Jesus, represented leadership to a group who had previously felt unseen and disenfranchised. The Beatles had a new, fresh message, of peace, love and understanding. They lived their lives-or at least their twenties-- for their music, and as George Harrison said towards the end of his life, they gave their nervous systems in service to the cause. One of them died a martyr and another was proclaimed dead, though he apparently rose again, backwards lyrics and mysterious license plates notwithstanding. But the real reason I bring the Beatles up today is because for me, born in the late sixties, they were a powerful example of humans who seemed larger than life and who lived to the fullest, never holding back, and who simply, finally, self-extinguished, like fast burning candles. And yet, they live on, even though their music is no longer in the top ten, even though half of the group is physically dead. Through the vehicle of fame and artistry, they have achieved a kind of immortality. It was easier for me as a young person to understand the Beatle myth than it was for me to understand the Christ story. They were flesh and blood to me, even though they had long stopped making music by the time I got turned on to them. One of my first spiritual experiences came after I learned that George Harrison had introduced the other Beatles to Transcendental Meditation. I took the practice on, though my version of meditating involved sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed and fantasizing about meeting all the Beatles on a desert island. Jesus, on the other hand, was a disembodied and invisible presence on our Presbyterian cross, a pastel drawing in a Sunday School book, a character in a song I didn’t like called “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” We humans, or at least this one, learn best from stories. That’s how I make sense of the world, and given the myriad stories in the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the many Buddhist parables, not to mention Greek Myths and the folk tales of every tradition on earth, I think I am not alone. Jesus himself taught through parable, or as a previous sermonizer in this pulpit suggested, koans. And as we have discussed, those stories sometimes made a lot of sense: like the story of the Good Samaritan and the story of the Prodigal Son. But some of them are real head-scratchers: the one about the master of the vineyard who pays all the workers the same wage even though some of the workers worked from sun down to sun up while others worked for a mere hour. The one about the resourceful brides who wouldn’t share their oil with their sleepier and less on-the-ball sisters. The one from Mark about Jesus killing the fig tree just because it wouldn’t bear fruit out of season. For me, these stories begged the question: who is this Jesus and why should I worship him? And yet, funnily enough, as an adolescent I was happy to forgive the Beatles for experimenting with drugs, cheating on their wives, fighting pettily with each other about songwriting credits. That just proved they were human. Jesus was supposed to be the Son of God; some said he actually was God Himself, or at least one third of God. I wasn’t yet focused on the fact that Jesus, too, was fully human. As I grew older, my faith began to change, though my love for the Beatles did not. I began to read wonderful exegeses of the scriptures, heard sermons from different traditions about who Jesus was and what Jesus meant to do. After a very brief dalliance with Campus Crusade for Christ, I rejected the literal in favor of the literary view of Jesus. I read Elaine Pagels and dove into the Gnostic Gospels. I read Wordsworth and Emerson and wrote papers about William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker, founders of the Unitarian Church. I had many arguments with fellow Christians in school about the meaning of the resurrection and whether or not we were supposed to take the Gospel as actual history (their view) or as myth and poetry (mine.) “Jesus is a radical socialist Jew!” I shouted. “Jesus came to right the wrongs of a petty, materialistic society! Jesus would weep if he saw the condition of the church today!” I pointed to the scriptures about the Pharisees, those petty pedants who missed the forest for the trees, who worried about plucking grain on the Sabbath and tried to understand God through their intellect. “God can only be known through the heart, and through direct experience!” said I, paraphrasing Emerson. The truth was, I was as guilty as they were in this respect: I was only experiencing God with my intellect. I could point out that the Bible mentioned the need to care for the poor 2000 times and homosexuality only twice. I could point out, to fans of Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell, that Jesus abhorred it when people prayed in the streets. I could point out that the Gospels contradicted each other many times over, so how, therefore, could we take the Bible to be the literal word of God? And so on. But what I was failing to do was what I said I needed to do: see with the heart and not the mind. And more importantly, that I had to die to something if I wanted to live. I experienced the Beatles with my heart. I could also analyze their music and write scholarly papers on why they were the greatest pop band of all time. I could learn their songs note for note and memorize each of their individual discograpies. But in the end, the reason I loved them was wordless: it had to do with the way the music made me feel, especially when I lay in bed alone in my dorm room with the lights out and just listened to “Across the Universe” and “Hey Jude.” Music, like God, is ultimately an emotional experience. It wasn’t until I had a personal crisis myself that I began to experience God in this way, in the way music could reach my heart and align me, wordlessly and lovingly. I was thirty, immersed in a very ambitious music career, striving to be the next Beatles, and very sick with an eating disorder. I had tried everything to get well. I had a wonderful, gentle therapist, a supportive family, an acupuncturist, a meditation practice, about fifty books on the topic, several good friends who had been through what I was going through and a fierce determination to beat what was clearly a kind of addiction. But nothing worked, and as hard as I tried to get well, I kept getting sicker and sicker, more and more desperate and confused. What finally changed me was a kind of death, also known as surrender. I surrendered to my inability to conquer my problem alone; I surrendered to my limits as a human being, and I asked for help from Whomever was out there. I got on my knees and said a prayer, and with that prayer, a presence came; a wordless, loving, clear presence. A calm came over me, and a relationship began. I felt like Helen Keller in the last scene of the Miracle Worker: what had previously been an academic idea suddenly became direct experience. From that moment on, I could see. And what I could see was a God who loved me no matter what, a God I both recognized from the Bible as the loving father of Jesus, and-to my great surprise—as Jesus himself. And the stories in the Bible fell away at that point, seeming more like the scaffolding intending to hold the building in place as it was being built than the building itself, within which I was now dwelling. Actually, not all of the stories fell away. Some in particular remained and took on a vibrancy I had been missing previously. The many stories of Jesus healing hopelessly deformed and mutilated people began to resonate with me. As I felt myself healed, and around me saw others getting well, too, I saw first-hand the power of faith, the way God could enter a life and transform it from hopeless to joyful. And I learned a new definition of sin. In its original definition, sin meant, simply, that which separates us from God. No judgment, no shame-just separation. The absence of presence. From my meditation practice I was learning how elusive presence could be; that even as I sat diligently hour after hour, day after day, it still was like pulling teeth for me to just stay present with my breath, with myself, with that one-pointed concentration. Presence in and of itself began to feel like God, or at least the bridge between God and me. And I was playing with another definition of God. What if God was Reality? What if God was the river that flowed north to south? What if all God wanted from me was to show up and let the river carry me where it would? How would my life be transformed if I took that as my savior? That surrender to what is, and the simultaneous knowledge that no matter how bad things looked in the moment, what would never change was God’s absolute and perfect love for me? Here’s where things can get a bit soupy—I know it makes a lot of people uncomfortable when speakers veer off the road of Biblical text and go cross-country with their “woo woo” experiences of God and Jesus, but I have no other way of telling this story. Like Paul, a writer with whom I have many issues, I found Jesus on my own road to Damascus and experienced him close up. Because of this I am forever changed. I was experiencing Jesus the way I experience music-wordless, timeless and the truest communication I’ve ever had. In this new view of my role and God’s role in the way life went, I grew a new perspective on the crucifixion story. For here was Jesus, someone whom I had come to know, not from the pages of the Bible, but in my own life, as a presence, a brother, a loving example of how to stay present with whatever was. As a healer, as a teacher, as a friend. I had a new perspective about the cross. I saw Jesus’s willingness to surrender to humiliation and torture as the ultimate expression of surrendering to What Is, even when What Is is grisly and inhuman and seems to be, at least to the disciples who fled the scene, the absolute worst ending to the story. But what I also know from my own experience is that if you really stay with What Is, no matter how miserable it may be, it will change, and more importantly, you will be changed. Everything dissolves eventually-everything and everyone dies- and everything-including you-is born anew. You wake up, look around you and blink and say, “how did this happen? I seem to have become transformed.” Elaine Pagel’s discussion of the Gospel Of Thomas had a huge impact on me when I was first coming into this new relationship. One of the ideas she posits is that Jesus can be interpreted as a kind of divine Twin (Thomas means Twin). As so, goes the theory, he really is both the Son of God and the Son of Man—and part of his message is to show us that we, too are sons and daughters of both God and human. To use a term coined by our modern day priests, our friends the psychotherapists, we could say that Jesus was the purest example of the Authentic Self we have yet experienced in a person who walked this earth: Jesus had such a clear understanding of reality and human nature, was always able to be himself, with no apology whatsoever, was always able to look straight ahead and walk where he needed to walk, even if that road took him across a lake near Gennesaret or up the hill to Calvary. Cynthia Bourgeault, in her wonderful analysis of the Passion story, shows how all the characters within it represent aspects of our false selves: Judas and his fear and greed and deceitfulness; Peter and his cowardice; Pilate and his ability to see the truth but unwillingness to go with it; the soldiers with their violence; the mob with its cruel taunts, and finally the thieves on either side of Jesus in the Luke version of the story. One thief says, “If you are the Son of God, get off the cross and save us too!” He joins the voices of the mob. The other thief says, “Shut up! This man is innocent, and we are guilty! Yet he dies with us!” He turns to Jesus and says, “Jesus, remember us in the kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus turns to this thief and says, “In truth I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Today. Right now. You are with What Is and that, when we really accept it, is Paradise. And I believe one of the most crucial lessons Jesus taught us, both before his death and through his post resurrection example, is that he is within each of us and always has been. In Matthew 25:45, he says, “As you do to one of the least of these, you do to me.” After his death, he asks his disciple, “Peter do you love me? Then feed my lambs.” Pardon the Beatles pun, but the Jesus I have come to know really is within and without each of us, and I can no longer look at any individual and not see Jesus somewhere lurking within, in his distressing disguise. I still love the Beatles, although they no longer enter my life on a daily basis and teach me how to live. I tried to follow in their footsteps for years and it didn’t work. When I tried to find heaven through a number one hit and the love of a huge audience, this route made me sick, and then sicker. I guess I was a sinner, meaning I was separated from everyone else, trying to be above everyone. When I walk in the footsteps of Jesus, by which I mean when I walk my own path, understanding God through my own heart and raw experience, letting the light of God shine the way, I am well. More importantly, I have company. This is the kind of life everlasting that I believe in today.

Don't Forget The Sadness

2006-02-10T21:48:00.000-05:00

Sadness gets mixed into everything we do, like your one tear that fell into our coffee. I think how it was the perfect miscegenation of spirit and earth for nothing is ever pure in this world, but neither is it puritanical: for we will never abdicate control! It is just the meniscus of egg white dropped into a bowl, touching the flour; it is round globes of oil which resist mixing with the opaqueness of cold milk; the separateness of these ingredients is what we overcome, making batter our mouths know is true and so inclines us to earnestly want one more piece of cake. M C Biegner 02/10/2006

Your Job

2006-01-19T16:52:00.000-05:00

your job is not to find yourself between couch cushions like a lost quarter

your job is not to find yourself in the peaked mountains with spectacular views

your job is not to find yourself at your office, standing tall on the rung you were awarded

your job is to stop looking and let yourself be lost

your job is to muck around in all that stuff you have all of it

and from the muck make a vessel that stands up adding the pieces all the pieces even the ones you think are trash to a space front and center

the garbage the broken pieces the ones that don’t match

all of it you have to use all of it

and one day you’ll stand back and look and tears will come to your eyes never having seen anything like it before.

Steps

2006-01-02T14:05:00.000-05:00

I can feel the ice under my feet as I make my daily walk down Comm. Ave. I didn’t really expect this weather, just expecting a little colder air as the days wore into December. But now my feet hit hard brick and stretches of thinly crusted snow. The slippery wet leaves seem to be gone, which is rather a blessing. There are always those last few weeks of fall when the piles of leaves become dampened down by late rain, and you simply can’t trust your footing. I prefer the ice, even if the soles of my shoes lose all their softness.

I miss the smell of summer, it is so much more complex. The winter air is bracing, but it is just that; clear and cold. It lacks the subtlety of infinite life, of plants, dogs, and people. It even lacks the sounds of warm weather, the conversations, the open patios, the cars cruising by with radios hopping. In winter, I can barely sense the trees, but I know they are bare, as bare as the earth and the sky. As bare as the car windows rolled up tight. As hidden away as the passers by with their scarves wrapping half their faces. You can hear all that life pulled in tight. The winter air quickens my step, makes me feel sharp and awake, but it separates me from the world. I am on my own now to navigate the way, single steps taken on cold brick.

December 5, 2005

You Begin

2005-11-14T06:34:00.000-05:00

This is how it happens: How a dog-eared evening With a long, sad face And wrinkled clothes Reminds us that temporary things Must be temporary. How boulders are turned into stones; How comedy and tragedy become history; How we become strangers all over again. It feels like tiredness; It stretches on and on like insomnia; It is as relentless as absence Yet, oh how it transfigures everything! First: It does so without malice. Second: It does so without conspiracy. Third: It does so without blaming anyone. So rake the leaves back onto the trees If it helps you; Buck up and stiffen the soft horizon; Push back the killing frost And hold the hunter moon at abeyance: The trees and the plants and the farmers Will not mind one bit. But I swear, this is how it happens, This is how it starts And where would I be in you otherwise?

2005-11-09T19:44:00.000-05:00

I went to her for a hug and the rosary. Patriarchs carved in wax provided the light as we moved our hands across necklaces of seeds and asked our mother to pray for us. Outside--the moon bulged with light. It would be enough. We reached the end of our strings, touched our minds, our hearts, and our wings and watched the patriarchs dim with one faint exhalation. Cassidy Smith

Being There

2005-10-20T22:11:00.000-04:00

The air is filled with the morbidity Of wet orange leaves. There is no way to fake the investment. There is no voice mail to leave. There is no email to send. There is no package to Fedex. For this is how it is: You have to be there When the geese fly in In “V” formation, Over a winking sun, In the early morning You know that nothing is ever lost. Like gauze wrapping open sores, These wounds are just passports Into the foreign land of others Who understand the language And who know the terrain. For this is how it is: You have to be there When the geese fly out In “V” formation, Over a killing frost, In the early morning.

A Short Story

2005-10-19T10:56:00.000-04:00

I am short. I have always been short. It’s never been something I have given a great deal of thought however I am reminded time and time again how taller people seem to have the upper hand in most things. Certainly at concerts and movies I am reminded. I think of how easy it must be for taller people stand and not have to do the “bob-and-weave” like some prizefighter to see a performance. In certain athletic events for sure, height lends an advantage – basketball of course comes to mind. Having played basketball all my young adult life it was an interesting study in psychology to have to play against people who were taller than I was. Psychology suggests being short can lead to “Napolean” complexes where one attempts to overcome one’s physical deficiencies with huge egoistic displays of will and power. Even in the language we are dissed: we “come up short” and possess certain “shortcomings” all terms that conjure up pejorative images. The language itself suggests to us what we all seem to already know: that being short possesses inherent difficulties. So this is why I find the gospel story of Zaccheus so intriguing. Luke provides us with such a great detail about Zaccheus’ height you have to wonder why? What was the point of such an arcane detail? Why did Luke alert us to the fact that he was short? Here’s the reading from Luke: Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today." So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, "He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner." Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost." So Zaccheus was a short, rich man. Clearly, his lack of height did not prevent him from becoming a “success”. Of course, no one needs to be reminded that he was a tax collector and they were not the most popular of people – sort of like today’s politicians or CEOs I would imagine. He was interested in this itinerant preacher who socialized with his kind, though frankly, between you and me, I think this postmodern thought of these wealthy Jews that were hated by their own people sort of misrepresents their social status. We almost feel sorry for these tax collectors but wealth back then was the same as wealth today, and most wealthy people I know don’t seem to mind their lives. I’m sure these tax collectors had parties with other lawyers and tax collectors and even invited some of the Roman Senators for the occasional lamb roast. So let’s not feel too sorry for stubby old Zaccheus. He was doing just fine, probably had a timeshare in Palestine, overlooking the Mediterranean. All this, and he was short. Maybe he was one of those with an overcompensating ego. Still Freud was a couple of millennia away so all anyone probably thought of Zaccheus was that he knew how to get the things he wanted. Then Jesus comes along and Zaccheus wanted one more thing. He wanted to see this preacher. He wanted to hear what he had to say but the crowds were crazy. He couldn’t see. So he finds a Sycamore tree. Now the Sycamore is a large tree with small flowers. Legend had it that Persian King Xerxes found this tree so beautiful he actually assigned it a personal bodyguard. Now I don’t know that Luke had this story in mind, but the Sycamore is a large beautiful tree. It’s wood provided shelter for the pilgrims who first came to America. It is almost the antithesis of how we picture Zaccheus. He climbs the tree presumably scrapping with the crowd, throwing the occasional elbow here and there. And there, aloft in the soft breeze of the Sycamore, Jesus sees him. Zaccheus’ ability to overcome obstacles has caused him to seek the goodness that is represented in Jesus’ message. Though the path is crowded with others, nothing, it seems, will get in Zaccheus’ way. In essence his ascent into the tree almost foreshadows Jesus’ “climbing” his tree later on as he dies on the cross. It is this ability to shed his old life and leave his earthly concerns below that makes Jesus look up at Zaccheus and pronounce salvation to his house. Zaccheus almost seems to promise a new life when Jesus implores him to come down, willing to pay him back four times what he may have defrauded others. I love the description of the grumbling people when Jesus announces he is going to stay with Zaccheus. It seems that we humans have not changed one iota since those days. We seem to be a species that is so incapable of allowing another to have one moment of joy without us wanting to step all over it. Zaccheus probably had visitors at his house, but certainly no holy men such as Jesus. No spiritual celebrities ever stopped there – not the Pharisees or Sadducees certainly. It would be, I assume, akin to the Dali Lama or the Pope coming to my house. Better clean the bathrooms for sure! In the end though, it is Zaccheus’ shortness that causes him to find the way. Because of his limitation, he seeks to overcome his inability in that overdeveloped, Napoleanic ego of his, It is our disabilities that help us discover what our limits are: are we too “short” in loving others? Are we too “short” in forgiving others? Are we too “short” in finding the good in people? If we allow these “disabilities”, our lack of stature, to force us into a tree to see the truth, then we become so much more than just what we are not. The measure of who we are as spiritual beings is not made in what we cannot achieve, but in what we have overcome and choose to overcome. So I can really relate to Zaccheus. He probably could never have dunked a basketball either. He was always chosen last in the Hebrew School basketball pickup games; I’m sure it took a toll on his self-esteem. But remember that it was what was most lacking in him – his height – that drove him to leave behind earthbound concerns and offer Jesus a place at his table. M C Biegner 10/19/2005

Ruined (A Poetic Fable)

2005-10-07T20:10:00.000-04:00

Poetry has ruined me. More specifically, it has eviscerated the most cynical parts of me and left me split wide open like a wound requiring the most ethereal butterfly bandage one can imagine. It leaves me dangling in the winds of inspiration like a pair of old shoes tossed over telephone wires. It reuses the old junk I have long ago discarded into the emotional landfill that makes up who I am. I traffic in the most lethal kind of poetry too – the kind that bubbles up from truth; the kind that makes me useless for the numerous sacrifices made hourly upon the altars of pop culture. It is a syllogism of the unearthly: truth is beauty and truth is poetry therefore truth and poetry are one. It is an unearthed rarified beauty discovered rather than made, the way wires pull radio waves out of thin air. I sell poetry for food and the occasional cigarette – just the romantic ones – because it seems right to me that I live off romance in a macho, Hemmingway-standing-over-a-big-game-kill-in-Africa sort of way. The romantic sensibility has long become the vestigial organ of the twenty first century. I, for one, would love to change the basis for all commerce the way Richard Nixon in August, 1971 removed the gold backing of money. I would make poetry the basis by which all things are valued. Sometimes I hand roll a couple of fresh fragrant haikus and inhale their warm delicate structure and natural flavor. I hope that a few syllables of haiku will lodge themselves into the wet mucous walls of my lungs to foster great big tumors of metaphor or alliterative coughing that would result in me hacking up a few juicy couplets which I could use somewhere else in my writing. In the mornings I would mix up a batch of sonnets and cover them with sweet refrains of tumbling verse, served with a few sprigs of villanelle poems on the side for breakfast. We would consume them together, drinking coffee then later play the “Howl” version of Boggle where the object is to find anagrams from the letters that start lines or phrases from Ginsberg’s great classic poem. On weekends I head out to do chores around the house so I go down to the hardware store and exchange a haunting blank verse epic for a couple of gallons of paint and the clerk is simply overwhelmed and starts to weep. “This is way too generous for just these two gallons of paint,” he says and provides me change in the form of a few ad hoc limericks. Though this may strike you as odd in today’s world, and since poetry has ruined me, in this new world even hardware store clerks are nourished by poetry. The farmers who grow my food, the doctors who heal me, the teachers who instruct my children – in a ruined world poetry is like oil where people must line up and fill up their big SUVs with rhyme and alliteration and lyrics and meter. Where people line up now to give up hard earned money for random numbers, the quick pick would be changed to randomly select quotes from Shakespeare, Dickinson, Whitman or Ferlinghetti or Hughes or Chaucer. Poetry can ruin a world in ways that other things can only imagine. A few years back, Death came to take my best friend who was sick and dying from AIDS. I wrote poems to the many hospitals he frequented to pay for all the MRIs and CAT scans; for the blood transfusions and hours in the ICU; for the nurses and doctors and physical therapists who all tried to heal him. I wrote poems to the pharmacies to pay for all the drugs he needed. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until my hand cramped; until I filled dozens of journals trying desperately to save his life. On that last night, when Death came to take my friend, I quickly wrote this and handed it to him: New Day Like the heroic quiet light Of a sun that sets, You looked me straight in the eyes – Someday when our eyes lock again When the brown from your eyes Makes a haughty earth Upon which I will take all my stands; And when the blue from my eyes Gives you gentle and earnest repose; In this brand new place We will talk of many things About How to make everything fresh again. We will carry on important conversations Of what we always thought heaven Would be like That will fill large wheelbarrows. And everything we speak of Will fit inside the wheelbarrows With room to spare: What I love most about you And what you love most about me And what remains lamely behind, Draped over the heavy furniture Of all the living that we did. Poetry has ruined me and it seems to have ruined Death as well. The last I heard of him, he left my friend ashamed and crying and is now working in a garden center somewhere outside of Seattle. She walks in beauty like the night. There are no fewer than one thousand things in this ruined life of mine to which I could apply this single line of Byron’s. I carry it with me with all the jealous verve of a newlywed. I cling to it tightly as I do my credit card or driver’s license. I fiddle with it in my wallet as I head into a local bar for a nightcap. This one line has got to be good for a small glass of sherry for sure. M C Biegner 10/6/2005

Katrina Plays the Race Card

2005-09-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

Katrina Plays The Race Card The race card has come up again. Katrina has landed like a ton of bricks and heaped third-world type devastation upon New Orleans and Mississippi. The faces we are seeing on TV without water and food, without homes or clothes, seem to be mostly black, so now the race card has come out. “Why did it take so long for help to arrive?” everyone wants to know, and was this simply a coincidence that the people most affected were black and elderly and poor? A discussion of this is not a bad thing, of course. I believe any occasion is a good one in which to discuss race relations because we so want to put this behind us we can almost taste it. People are angry because things should have been different. First, if a mandatory evacuation was in effect prior to the storm, why didn’t the state of Louisiana and Mississippi and the city of New Orleans provide the means with which to forcibly remove people who stayed in harm’s way? Why weren’t there busses supplied earlier on to help those who wanted to leave but simply couldn’t afford it? Why weren’t other places established to temporarily house those who had no place else to go before the storm? Then, why did it take so long for the guard to get in there and prevent some of the violence? More disturbing than the scenes of the storm’s wreckage were the stories of the violence and the increase of lawlessness when civil society truly broke down. Why wasn’t the National Guard in sooner? The explanation was given that it was still dangerous and they didn’t want any guardsmen to end up as part of the problem, but it seemed like we didn’t see the guard in there for days after the event. If it was safe enough for people to commit violence against each other, then why was it not safe enough for the guardsmen to come in and re-establish order? It’s clear that many things did not go right. But was race really the issue? Many people compared this to 9/11 but that was a different sort of tragedy. The size of this storm and the physics of the levees breaking causing the kind of flooding and wreckage it did was many times greater in area alone than the wreckage of the fall of the Twin Towers. The storm was very large and while the Towers collapse was a very big logistics headache, it doesn’t even compare in the scope of what happened in the gulf. People underestimated Katrina when it was a Category 5 storm, and they underestimated her damage potential as well. Here’s the thing with race: I don’t believe for a second that someone consciously said, “Well, it’s only New Orleans and Mississippi and there are just black people and poor there, so no rush getting in there to secure the area.” That is ludicrous. Still, the people affected were poor and black. Race was an issue in this case in the same way that race is most often an issue nowadays. Race was responsible in the way that the emergency planning for this event did not adequately consider these people who did not have the means to leave New Orleans or the Mississippi coast. Mississippi and Louisiana rank in the top 10 states for poverty. There is a case that can be made that poverty and race are related. If the poor are the ones bearing the brunt of any storm damage and loss of life then clearly there is some sort of link between poverty/race and survival. The same way that a black male has a life expectancy of 69 years compared to 75 years for a white male in this country (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/05facts/lifeexpectancy.htm) can be linked to things like access to better health care and better incomes, so too, being poor now provides a clear disadvantage when being considered in civil disaster plans. The apparent lack of response after the hurricane was just that: an apparent lack of response. In dealing with so many agencies bureaucratic mix-ups are inevitable, though should not be tolerated. The logistics of this rescue effort in such a large area are paralyzing. I don’t believe people watching understand this, and I certainly do not believe you can believe this if you are sitting on top of a roof for days wondering where in the hell the government is. I’m willing to give this administration and the state governors the benefit of the doubt in this regard. I guess I don’t want to believe that people would be this cynical. Clearly things could have been done better and clearly lots of people made lots of mistakes that cost lives. This should be investigated and other states should pay heed to these failings for possible problems in their own disaster planning. But did someone willfully fail because of race? I don’t think so. Such a notion belittles the heroic efforts of all people black and white, rich and poor, struggling right now to save people they don’t even know. The humanity of this event has not been lost on anyone. Afghanistan and Sri Lanka – two of the poorest nations on the face of the earth – are offering money for the victims. Fidel Castro has offered doctors. No one wants to see those people suffer. As time passes, I believe that there will be such a global outpouring of genuine, apolitical support not seen since after 9/11. Sometimes the worst of things can bring out the best of us too – the looting and violence notwithstanding. I believe that the lack of preparation for what should have been done with the poorest and blackest and oldest of citizens in these states was the effect of an institutional racismand classism that plagues all of us. This lack of awareness of or thought about these people in all things: poverty, jobs, civil rights and now it seems in emergency preparedness – are all the effects of the insidious racism which we refuse to believe exists in this country. This is twenty first century racism - the worst kind. This is the kind of racism that sits in the back of our minds and lets us pretend that in the event of a disaster each of us has an even chance of being saved. Katrina has shown us all that it doesn’t work this way. To paraphrase George Orwell, some of us are just more equal than others, it seems. This is the type of racism that is hard to nail down; for which it’s hard to hold someone accountable. We must force our eyes open to the marginalized and poor and black and elderly. They should never be made invisible - within the context of Hurricane Katrina or without. We owe it to the promise of what America is all about. We owe to ourselves since any one of us could be in that same situation. But mostly, we owe it to those who died at Katrina’s harsh lesson yielding hands.

Things Passed Down

2005-08-30T12:17:00.000-04:00

faith yellow cotton dresses with impossibly tiny stitches golden bands with engravings inside the tendency to pick up river rocks laughter tears at the happy as well as the sad dark hair merry eyes the curve of a jaw dimples in the cheeks a face tipped to the wind flat feet child-bearing hips a string of pearls battenberg lace a roll top desk faded photos and a smile worth its weight in inherited platinum

Reflection (after attending a mass in mexico)

2005-08-29T00:04:00.000-04:00

Today, more than ever before, it seems like a travesty to me: Light skinned man Robed in fine white linens with gold trim, Raising the glittering chalice, Lifting his youthful face towards the heavens, saying Take this, all of you… In the pew in front of me a dark skinned woman Wrapped in a threadbare shawl Holds a baby close to her. Another one beside her, A girl with a ragged dress but careful braids and a fistful of her mom’s skirt. Tired eyes, Rough skin, The woman whispers extra prayers as she gazes at the priest. Back home I’d start discussions over dinner about feminism and theology and women’s ordination, and we’d talk ourselves in circles until someone would pull the privilege card: Why waste your energy on this? Women in other parts of the world are worrying about much more urgent matters. And they’d be right. And it’d seem trivial. Until today When the priest’s proud voice echoes This is my body. In front of me she sits, Weakened bones, child at her breast. Her body knows sacrifice. Outside there are others waiting, Frail hands outstretched, hoping To find Christ’s love In just one While each hour Around the world Institutionally advantaged men Play the role of martyr Before congregations of poor mothers.

Evolution

2005-08-15T18:20:00.000-04:00

If you kill a spider it will rain for seven years or at least that’s the way I think it works. This rain could come in very handy in many parts of the world and perhaps Oxfam should look into it. Of course, you would need another bug to stop the deluge from taking over. And then the insect-rights people might get concerned, sacrificing all those bugs when really they were here first. Who are we to impose our species onto the rest of the world, and why do we really think we are the sign of intelligent life? Seems almost the opposite if you look at it closely. How can a species get rid of its own piece of sky when clearly it needs it to breath? Sounds to me like we are definitely making room for someone smarter.

Maybe it really is the cockroaches. After all, they have figured out how to live in all those Manhattan high rises rent free, snacking on brioche crumbs and organic veggie shreds. You can’t get much smarter than that. Darwin probably overlooked this when he was figuring out survival of the fittest. Might have spent too much time with the birds on tropical islands.

A few days ago I watched a heavy set woman walking down the sidewalk with her young daughter. The bright-eyed girl looked to be about eight years old. Just before we passed each other, the young girl skipped excitedly towards a pigeon, exclaiming about the bird. Her mother caught her in her tracks, “That’s not a bird, honey, that’s a pigeon.” And so in goes. In the survival of the fittest, the pigeon is no longer considered a member of the bird family. Probably not elegant enough, or clean enough. Certainly not like a red cardinal or a swift hummingbird. The little girl is learning that some things are just not quite as good as others. Many people might agree with this when they are not speaking in public. Some of us are pigeons and some of us are hummingbirds. The trick is to find a niche that allows you to survive.

But quite honestly, I suspect the hummingbird would actually go down first, the way it needs to flap its wings like it is completely mad, and find those nice little red plastic feeders with the sugar water in them. Pigeons could hang on a lot longer than that. They’d be tussling with the cockroaches long after the last flowers were gone, after the feeders had all been left empty. Their proud chests would stay plump for years after the last trash bag had been put out on the curb. And there would probably be enough air left behind to keep them going for awhile even with that big hole we made in the atmosphere. They don’t need sun block and they don’t mind their own crowd. They would finally be left alone to sit together in the park or perch above all the fancy gargoyles and cornices we tried so hard to protect. And the cockroaches, they can get by with the crumbs, ruling the underworld away from the birds. Or make that the pigeons.

Where is Darwin when we really need him, when we need to figure out how to get more fit? When we need to know how to save ourselves from ourselves? I suppose spending all that time defending himself in court did not make him prone to sympathy for his fellow kind, trying to convince us that we were just animals. How could we, the ones with intelligence, be just another evolved mammal creature? After all, we invented The Gap! Certainly some greater power deliberately chose to place us here, the icing on the cake. The big Day Seven bonus. We get to rule because HE said so. If you popped into this world as a spider, well, we just might squish you. And if it rains, well, we’ve got umbrellas, that’s how smart we are. Too bad about the Garden of Eden, though. I think it only rains there when you want it to. Now look what we’ve got, hurricanes and droughts everywhere you turn, although I have to say, they seem to be more regular events in the places where God is particularly big news, where He has been carefully interpreted and decided upon. In places where Darwin was shown to the door.

Maybe the Garden of Eden is just a made up story, put there to show us what a good life could be like. If we weren’t all so smart, changing the world to try to make it more comfortable. Maybe it was just fine the way it was, with the spiders and cockroaches, the birds and the pigeons. Maybe extra intelligence is not so much the gift as the challenge. Can we figure out how to stop flapping our wings like we are completely mad? Goodness knows, those little plastic feeders will not be there forever. We’ll be looking for the scraps soon enough, trying to find cover. Hoping not to get squished.

Written August 6, 2005

WIUG

Four Funerals and a Wedding

2005-08-11T22:06:00.000-04:00

This past spring and summer has been an inverse of the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral” – it’s been more like “Four Funerals and a Wedding”. It always seems to me that funerals tend to happen in clusters. The old adage that bad news always comes in “threes” seems to have some sort of basis in fact. But I know that the truth is that given a planetary population of over six billion people, a goodly number of them will be leaving this plane to find life elsewhere on any given day. I often tell people who find themselves attending many funerals in a given time span that their problem is not that everyone is dying, but in fact that they simply know too many people. There are some things about funerals that I have noticed. First, no one really likes funerals, not even those who do it as their livelihood. Funeral directors see themselves as offering a consolation service and find satisfaction in that. People fall on one of two sides of funerals either rising to the occasion for person bereft or avoiding them altogether. There never seems to be a middle ground. Second, I’ve noticed that some people – many people in fact – think of another’s death as the last great social hurrah for a loved one; one last chance to “strut their stuff” – or at least the “stuff” of the departed who is no longer with us to tell us what their wishes are. Finally, the trappings of death are as numerous as the stars - the style of coffin, the type of wake, open or closed, flowers or donations to various causes, getting the obituary information out, organizing the sympathy cards, who sits in the limousine with Aunt Betty? Who will cater the after wake meal? The logistics of a funeral are every bit as overwhelming as those surrounding a wedding. The oddest thing of all though is that these details are all carried out while the subject has ostensibly moved along to other things. Personally, I am discovering that as I get older that I find great resonance in the line from the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral spoken by the character Gareth who was a gay bon vivant sort of fellow when he said that he much preferred funerals to weddings because he always preferred social events the likes of which he at least had an outside chance of taking part in. It is an club to which we all will be admitted for certain. At a funeral I attended recently for the relative of a dear friend, I had the feeling that funerals provide a sense of closure which seemed to comfort me. Then I began to wonder if I was becoming like Maude in the movie Harold and Maude: would I soon start to wander in on the funerals of strangers just so I could be part of an event that celebrates a person’s life. I’d be standing there as a professional funeral celebrant with my bright red umbrella amid the sea of black umbrellas amidst the falling rain in the grayness of a cemetery. I’d move easily among the mourners and offer very generic types of kindnesses, and mean them even though I didn’t know the subject in the coffin. “And how did you know poor so-and-so?” they would ask me with kind eyes, looking ato me for one more connection to their dearly departed, to which I would respond, “Well, I didn’t in fact know your brother-husband-son-daughter-wife-sister, but I saw the funeral procession and I am never one to pass up a chance to say goodbye to anyone. And besides as the poet John Donne wrote, ‘Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in all mankind.’ Don’t you feel that is true?” And thus the dialogue would begin. I don’t know if one can make a living as a professional mourner but there are some advantages if one could. For one thing, selecting clothing as I go off to work each morning would be simple. Black on black with a white shirt with black dress shoes, maybe a black rain coat or overcoat for the winter months. For another thing, as a sincere mourner, I would be providing a service for those people who may not have many mourners. It would not be as some sort of scam but as an extension of the fact that I do believe that each man’s death diminishes me, so why shouldn’t I act on that impulse? And if I truly feel this way, why shouldn’t I celebrate the deaths of countless strangers as I go through this life? Still, even if no one would pay for such a service, I might consider it as a sort of avocation, a hobby if you will, with the design of bringing importance to each life that leaves this world. It’s odd, but no one seems to think twice about strangers sharing in one’s joy when a new baby is brought home from the hospital. People – strangers even – would feel compelled to touch my wife’s belly when she was carrying each of our children. We received the best wishes from people we hardly knew when they were born. Why does this idea of wishing others consolation when a loved one leaves seem so odd to us? “Tell me about Henry,” I would say to the grieving widow, and the storytelling could begin in earnest. “Why I remember when Henry was…” and on and on. Maybe as a bartender or psychoanalyst offers the comfort of a stranger’s objective ear, I would offer the fresh meat of an audience who never knew Henry and was ripe for all those stories that seemed so worn among familiar ears. Then Henry would be every bit as much alive at his funeral as he was when he really was alive. I in turn would come away richer for knowing Henry, at least in the abstract and in the most distilled form. Oh, I know that the conditions surrounding one’s death affects the type of funeral one has. The toughest funerals I have ever attended have been for children for example. Drunk driving deaths, murders, SIDS deaths: how does one make sense of death in light of these sorts of circumstances? But you know there never seems to be a shortage of grief in this world, and as a professional funeral attendant I would grieve. Shared grief is shared pain and shared pain makes the load seem lighter if even for a moment. Some people might find it offensive that a stranger would want to share in their grief. Here in America and especially in New England where good fences make good neighbors, one does the most personal things in private and death is the most personal thing for many. Still most funerals are open to the public. I mean the reason one has a funeral is so that it can be open to outsiders. There is a concept among some Native Americans of this idea of “sitting with” the grieving person when a person dies. It is sort of similar to the Judaic tradition of sitting shiva without the formality. It is not the same as the typical Anlgo-American’s idea of baking or making a casserole for a friend when they lose someone. This is wrapped up in the great American work ethic of being busy to make the grief go by almost unnoticed. With some Native Americans the idea is that one is simply present at this time of grief. Our presence shows no great purpose or intent. It’s an idea that conveys the dizzying belief that we are not alone no matter how much we think we are. It is almost zen-like in its approach to grief and I have witnessed it first hand. Just being present to another in life or in death is the greatest gift we can offer another short of offering our own lives. It is a gift to be a witness to another; it is affirming that they mattered, that they counted. This is a sign that we are social creatures and that we need each other to live and die properly. So I am considering business cards with a title that reads, “PROFESSIONAL FUNERAL ATTENDANT” which I would hand out to people at funerals, with a web site and everything. That might seem a bit too corporate and profit driven though. Perhaps advertising should happen by word of mouth, or better yet, word of heart since people always relate to things that come from the heart in earnest. None of us gets out of this world alive, it’s true but we can at least make the process a bit more humane for funerals are nothing if not a platform for the most important type of storytelling that we do. No one likes to deal with the grief and the loss. But the stories told at funerals remind us that all of our lives are comprised of one story after another. Why shouldn’t every person have witnesses to these stories in death, just as in life? Besides, who is to say that these stories don’t continue to grow after we have moved on? Let’s make a gentleman’s agreement right now, shall we? I will come to your funeral and tell the crowded room about what a great blessing you were to this world, if you will come to mine and say the same about me. Is it a deal?

In The Yard

2005-08-10T17:10:00.000-04:00

The red umbrella shielding her,

she strums her guitar.

Her companion.

The pages slipping away.

But she catches it,

she captures it with a pen,

brings it to the strings.

She will sing it

when she’s ready.

Not before.

And certainly not after.

A Saturday Alone

2005-08-10T17:00:00.000-04:00

A Saturday Alone

A lone bird swoops down to the water before lifting up to join another. They move together into the leaves, escaping the bright afternoon heat. A small bee settles onto the with clover blossom in the freshly mowed grass. The flit of tiny insects dashes everywhere, making quick sparkles across the river.

Two dragonflies climb the embankment, one over the other, always together. It is not hot here under the tree where I sit, on the cold marble bench left in somebody’s honor. The breeze carries the scent of the dirt and the green and the heat, but I do not feel it, only sense the heavy air that is just beyond. Beyond the small winding tree with ancient bark marching upward in thin narrow columns, gracing the curves of the branching trunk. On the ground just below, a bush hides its brown leaves, passing them off as berries if you do not look too closely.

The river gives up its current, shining circles changing location when you look away. The clouds pretend to be still as they show off their form against the stark blue sky.

Nobody calls nature a workaholic, but nobody tries to keep up with it either. We are lucky enough when we look up to see it at all, when we know there is dirt in our bones. When we decide to move together, one over the other, finding solace in the shade.

Mountain Sex

2005-07-25T20:40:00.000-04:00

She lays back with deliberate sway Like the most willful sort of dusk Exhales humid breath the way night expels day - And moves with the hips of a dark athletic musk – She taps a carnal beat on wrinkled bark, In dark skies of expectation and fertile dust. This lady knows every climber's destination – She knows the dribbling wantoness Of every cicada's bleating encantation A sonic texture of the mindless climb - She beckons to the showy nudenesss of wildflowers and husky pine; She even knows the hollow tongue caress Of the Monarch butterfly on the go Fresh off his trip from Mexico. This lady reclines with the same sureness of sex That teenagers think of what sex is about - With the compulsion of a highway wreck - Arcing form and jagged boastful breasts She beckons forcefully with tectonic clout - With slender waist and leafy hair that rests On face and neck, dressed only in evening cloud - She calls outward toward a species insurrection, “Climb on, climb on!" this barbaric cry incites this late day resur-erection. M B. 2005

Peanut Shells

2005-07-10T08:07:00.000-04:00

Peanut Shells

I shake them to the ground,

These little somethings like fractured bones,

Only to eventually toss these remnants

Of some unuttered thought,

Like peanut shells,

Onto the floor,

Many, scattered and noisy –

And after all the sweeping I have done!

M C Biegner 4/2005

The Origin of Nerissa Nields

2005-06-13T12:32:00.000-04:00

** In honor of Nerissa's Birthday, this is my contribution to the "Seed Writing" prompt... Happy Birthday Nerissa! ** Once, long before there were humans, after The Most Unknowable of Truths created the earth and the heavens, after she created all of the animals and all of the plants, She created humans. Now, The Unity of All Things loved flowers as Her most prized creation, so She wished to imbue each human with some quality of a flower or plant. She worked long and hard, until She came upon the soul of one Nerissa Nields. The Eternal Forgiveness was tired and asked Crow, the messenger between the spirit world and the physical world, for assistance. “Look into the soul of this one for me,” She instructed Crow, “and tell me what flower’s qualities I should give to it.” Crow looked deeply into Nerissa Nields and thought long and hard. “A sunflower!” Crow said finally. “A sunflower?” The Greatest Mystery asked. “But why?” “A sunflower is hardy and can grow anywhere,” Crow responded. “Plus a sunflower will always point her face to the sun. This one will always seek you, and she will always look for you, just as the sunflower seeks its life in the sun.” “Hmmm…” The Great Breath Of The Universe pondered aloud, “a tropism of love.” “Yes,” Crow rejoined, “a tropism of love for sure!” “But isn’t a sunflower long and gangly? Isn’t it awkward? Does it always stand tallest of all the flowers in the garden, always seeming out of place?” The Lover of All Lovers asked Crow. “Yes,” said Crow, “but the sunflower grows tall until she is so rife with seeds that she finally bows before the sun in humility so she can disperse her numerous seeds all over the ground. She does this so that new sunflowers may grow. But not only that, these seeds will feed birds and squirrels and all other manners of small creatures as well.” The Never Ending Question smiled. She knew Crow was wise – She had made her after all – “Very well then. The human that houses this soul will be a teacher of life and hence a giver of the Living Law,” The Voice of All Living Things pronounced. With that, She breathed the spirit of the sunflower into this creature. And that is how Nerissa Nields came to be. M C Biegner 4/21/2005

Thursday in the Garden

2005-06-13T12:18:00.000-04:00

Thursday in the Garden

(A tribute to N. Nields on her Birthday)

It’s Thursday night and darkness falls on Prospect Street.

In the yellow house on the corner, a group of writers meet.

The building is tall, quiet and Victorian,

Nobody would guess what is happening within.

The tea is hot and cookies are piled,

Muses fly around, showing they’re wild.

We all take our places, some sink into the green couch.

Pens poised above paper, fingers on keys in a crouch.

With a prompt and a blessing we fly at our work,

Nerissa in her chair, one leg propped up by books.

The loon clock wails and Cody will bark,

An ambulance comes, passing the park.

Who knew what magic happens in this house painted so bright,

Synchronicity gets passed around, tossed through the night.

We share and laugh and give fragile egos some strength.

Our unique gifts can emerge proudly, praised at such length.

And we take home the comments, knowing we’ve done well.

I like to think it helps us be better writers, and people as well.

So thank you for your warmth, encouraging and hospitality,

For infusing our writing and our lives with your special vitality.

You have set the stage for writers to reach their best productivity,

And with your love and insight you plant the seeds of creativity.

And from all this grows the gardens, and our writing souls renew,

So three cheers to your home, these writers, and YOU!

-gh

6/9/05

Reconciling the Internet

2005-06-04T07:02:00.000-04:00

Why hasn’t the Catholic Church leveraged the power of the internet? Before you scoff, let me paint a picture. Imagine a new revised Vatican web site. Given the shortage of priests, the internet would be a blessing to some of those overworked priests and allow some of the more mundane ministerial tasks to be automated. First, you would be required to log in to the web site. This would use SSL security and allow the Vatican to start creating mailing lists or better yet, pop up site targets for Catholic pop ups. These could remind Catholics of holy days of obligation and provide advertising revenue for things like Atkins friendly hosts for eucharist. (How about this as a slogan: “When you want the host without the most carbs…” “for those who want to take care of body AND soul”. Logging in could be personalized with the use of cookies: “Good morning . It’s been ~Three Months~ since your last confession”. Penance. Confession. Here is where the web would be perfect. It would remove the fear of confessing your sins and make it open to everyone twenty four by seven. It would start with a link asking you to click on the type of priest you want to “hear” your confession. You would need to read and click the I ACCEPT the legal verbiage that is common with web sites these days. “All confessors subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ and the Virginity of his mother Mary. Furthermore, users of this site believe that the Roman Catholic Faith believe that this is the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic faith…blah, blah, blah”. You get the idea. Click the box if you agree. “CLICK HERE FOR PRE VATICAN II STYLE PRIEST” “CLICK HERE FOR POST VATICAN II STYLE PRIEST” “CLICK HERE FOR A PRIEST WHO SUBSCRIBES TO THE PRECEPTS OF 1970’s LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND THE IDEAS OF THEOLOGIANS LIKE HANS KUN.” which when you click this link would result in a PAGE NOT FOUND message to be sure. Web designers could develop logic that would apply based on the type of priest you choose. This more or less equates to the way penance and other teachings of the church are applied, taught and accepted now. The internet is the perfect vehicle for the sacrament of reconciliation since it provides that anonymity that is required to allow people to confess their most hidden failings- all in secret and with the best security available. This is to say nothing of the benefit of trust issues which many people seem to have spilling their guts out to someone via an instant message chat session, but draw a complete blank when dealing face to face with a real human. CLICK HERE FOR MORTAL SIN CLICK HERE FOR VENIAL SIN CLICK HERE IF YOU ARE NOT SURE CLICK HERE IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE IN SIN This last link would send you off to some of the more gut wrenching writings of St. Paul and some of the more stringent Vatican encyclicals. Soon, that thought you had today about the cute guy or girl in accounting that you flirted with will turn into abject remorse about the very fact that you even have genitalia. Before long you are typing away at a host of sins, some that you never really knew were sins! If you click on the link about not being sure whether it was a mortal or venial sin, you will be prompted with these sorts of questions: WAS THE EXPOSURE OF SKIN INVOLVED? DID THE JEWS REALLY KILL CHRIST? or even trick questions like WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU PURCHASED A CONDOM? Answer that one even by mistake, and the logic of the web program records the sin. (Ironically, questions about pedophilia have been removed from the web site.) All around the page there would be colorful icons of the each of the apostles. When you click on the link, a media player or real audio or quicktime audio clip would start (depending on your platform) explaining each one of the Ten Commandments. Meanwhile a banner would crawl across the bottom of the site real slow: “SEX IS ONLY FOR PROCREATION.” Upon clicking the SUBMIT button, the entire confession is checked for vulgarity, political correctness and a final warning page. Finally your penance would pop up: PLEASE SAY 10 HAIL MARYS, 2 OUR FATHERS AND 5 GLORY BE’S. PLEASE PRINT THIS PAGE OUT FOR YOUR RECORDS the page would read. Of course this would all be in multiple languages. The internet would be perfect for this. Upgrade those servers at the Vatican. I can see the people lining up already. Next: Holy Communion via the internet. No lines, no waiting. Can’t wait for the future to get here! M C Biegner

In Quiet Buzzing

2005-05-27T22:52:00.000-04:00

In quiet buzzing Of the day I find a voice in compelling loneliness where there is great companionship. This is what i have always known about me; That I am drawn from nascent color; of pinks and greens, reds and blues - Living (I have learned) is an act of contrition that needs love and feeds on pain It is a mortal embrace with joy. M C Biegner

Exploration

2005-05-19T20:59:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I am the New World Begging for exploration; Rich with spices Drunk with gold; Hoping to be colonized, Settled and civilized. I have a culture all my own, With my own language And my own customs. I don’t need your flag planted in my soil – Nor do I need to be claimed for another; I want no foreign gods Or Faiths taught to my children In other languages; I do not need pox riddled blankets Or my own wealth exported As the pretext of some sort of allegiance. I do not need to provide you with cheap labor, To make your TV sets or Nikes. I do not need to sell you cheap beef To satisfy your McValues - I am indigenous unto myself You must have the courage To find me and name me. Inside of me is the unknown and the unknowable: These great strengths and my greatest fears. M C Biegner 5/2005

Remembrance

2005-05-18T08:05:00.000-04:00

Re-membering; Adding back Those parts of us we lose Growing up. Re-membering; Adding the limbs of trees We climbed as kids; Adding back Who you are, Who I am.

The Jazz of Daffodils

2005-05-07T07:38:00.000-04:00

Daffodils know the rhythm They bounce like be-bop, They give it all up For the slow, syncopated, jive notes Of brassy horns – With faces full cheeked, like Gillespie Or pointing downward at the ground, like Miles And you think how they blow, Man! How they blow! Daffodils cannot tell you what spring is about, You have to feel it, when you listen to them. You have to feel them slide and glide; You have to know the fronds Are like outstretched palms asking You to slap them five – “Can you dig it?” they whisper to you, With a sawdust voice; The xylem of each stem Transports the smoothest water like smoky Kentucky bourbon. Daffodils hold and bend and stretch Each note, like memory or pain. Daffodils cannot tell you what spring is about, You have to feel it, when you listen to them. Then, after all this talk about rebirth is done, Go grab a hyacinth And hold her tight, real tight – And close your eyes and just sway To the Daffodil’s music Because, man, the only song he’s playing Is that change is just another kind of Death. M C Biegner 5/6/2005

in memory of Judy Richman

2005-04-23T13:54:00.000-04:00

And, but, or, nor, for, so, yet. Coordinating conjunctions. When two independent clauses are joined by a coordinating conjunction, you need to put a comma before the coordinating conjunction. She made us recite them sing-song until they were ingrained in our minds. And but or nor for so yet. Andbutornorforsoyet? Andbutornorforsoyet. This was our last chance to learn grammar, she would tell us. And she was the woman for the job. It was our senior year of high school, and none of us really understood all of the comma rules. I was familiar with the vocabulary of it all, words like coordinating and subordinating and parenthetical from 7^th grade English class in Catholic school, but I surely didn’t remember what it all meant. And my classmates looked completely overwhelmed when Ms. Richman matter-of-factly answered their comma questions by employing grammar language. Of course, she expected they would be overwhelmed, but she never passed up the opportunity to cackle at the lost expressions on people’s faces. Ms. Richman’s cackle was a signature trait, and never cold or mean as the word might imply. There isn’t another word I would use to describe it. It was playful and friendly and warm, but cackle it was.

I was sitting in a computer lab, reciting the coordinating conjunctions to myself, not really thinking about why I know them in that order, and trying to decide whether or not a comma was needed. (Ms. Richman used to recite that Oscar Wilde quote to us all the time: “I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.” She loved Oscar Wilde. We read The Importance of Being Earnest in her class that year, and she insisted on reading the role of Lady Bracknell. She had played the role in a community theater production a few years earlier, and that summer she let my friend and I watch the video tape of the production.) I allowed myself to be distracted by paper writing and rule for comma usage for a few minutes while I checked my email. There was an email from a friend from high school with a subject line that read: really sad news. I opened the email immediately, not really allowing myself to imagine what the sad news could be, and soon learned that Judy Richman was seriously ill and was not expected to make it through the night. I quickly signed off the computer, stuffed my books into my bag and left the computer lab.

Outside it was appropriately dark and misty, and I sat and sobbed. I tried to remember all of the books and plays and poetry we read that year. All of the lessons and questions and contradictions. The Awakening, King Lear, Six Degrees of Separation, Waiting for Godot…Heart of Darkness and the Madwoman of Chaillot. “Warning: When I am an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple.” And she did. I thought about her grammar lessons, how she was in the newspaper for being committed to teaching grammar, how she even gave grammar lessons to the younger teachers in the department who hadn’t learned all the rules.

And but or nor for so yet. Words that connect two independent clauses. Andbutornorforsoyet. I thought about all of the expectation and promise held in those tiny words. That night the comma between Ms. Richman’s life and death. I closed my eyes and recited coordinating conjunctions like prayers.

Licking the Beach

2005-04-20T08:15:00.000-04:00

The ocean has a million eyes, each one shining at me as I sit here on this cool beach day in April during spring break. The beach is infested with children, a veritable sea of diminutive humanity as vast and enormous as the desert of ocean that lies flat before me. The flatness of the water is highlighted by the sparkles of light: here, I think, is where the stars go during the day; here is where they sleep, as if dropped into a great palm spread out wide and petulant. All around me are a billion worlds too. One mother tries to launch a unicorn kite but does not move from her spot on the beach chair. From her vantage point, she barks instructions to the girls but there is little wind today and the kite remains as earthbound as the children’s spirits when they cannot get it in the air. No matter. There are other forms of distraction. The kite family sits and eats lunch – Mother handing each of them the latest in designer prepackaged lunchables and sippy juice boxes replete with napkins. Then it’s off to the wet sand, where all the real magic happens. I am reminded that I was born and raised on an island. Our dinners were usually luke warm meatball hero sandwiches wrapped in foil. We usually ate as much sand with the meatball as sandwich. I recall how the hollow monotonous call of the curlicue wave, almost waving for us to come into the water, would lull me to sleep on the beach. It reminded me of our own mythologies we created: how certain flat shells were the fingernails of mermaids, and how dead and defunct horseshoe crabs washed up on to the shore would inspire fear since its prodigious stinger could tear away flesh if one touched it. The kite sisters now go down to the frigid water where they play a game we used to call “lava” - I’m certain they don’t cal it that. The objective of the game was to get as close to the swelling water as possible then run away as fast as you could never letting the water touch you. In my time, we imagined the water to be lava and we had to avoid it or else risk being burned alive. The kite sisters shriek each time the water nearly touches them. It is a pitch that is so shrill that it is nearly only audible by dogs, if any were around, though I suspect there might be some dolphins in the water who are wondering what all the fuss is about. On the horizon I watch the ghostly movement of a tanker as it hangs onto the thin line that separates water from sky. It glides by without calling attention to itself. It measures time in the way it slowly crosses my line of sight. I cannot take my eyes off of it but no one else seems to even notice it. One of the kite sisters – what appears to be a three year old – with olive skin and a face covered with her lunch has the charm of one of those street urchins you see in third world countries. Her name is Isabella. I know this because her Mother – the same woman who moments ago tried to orchestrate the kite raising from her beach chair – repeats the name like some sort of maternal mantra. “Isabella, not so close!” “Isabella, not so far!” “Isabella, put that down!” “Isabella, pick that up!” Isabella was wild; this much could be seen in her wild hair and dark, rabid, penetrating eyes. All three year olds are wild. She wanders the beach like a drunk, carrying pale and shovel in tow, alternating between pulling her lime green bathing suit off and then vainly trying to put it back on. “Oh, Izzy!” the sitting Mother says. She barks out more instructions her voice being stuffed right back into her mouth by the roar of the ocean. Suddenly, I hear the sitting Mother’s voice ring out right through husky ocean voice like a razor. “Izzy! NO!” It’s too late. Izzy has licked the beach. The look on her face is one of utmost calm. I can’t even imagine what she thought the sand would taste like – clearly she does not like it – because she mindfully walks over to sitting Mother whose nose by now is all wrinkled up in disgust. Sounds emanate from her as though she was going to cough up a hairball. Isabella, meanwhile, just waits, with her tongue covered in sand, for sitting Mother to find a clean towel with which to wipe off the sand. I startle at how long I notice her tongue is and how she just waits, looking around at the other kids playing and just sighs. Soon the saliva just runs down her tongue and she is drooling like a panting dog. What made her think this was a good idea? I learn later that this is actually a behavior of hyperactive or autistic kids who have mineral deficiencies. I read later that about 25% to 30% of kids have this condition known as pica. But I don’t imagine Isabella to be one of these. She is wild I tell you. I begin to think of this action in a larger scope. Maybe she thinks the sand looks like cookie dough or maybe she thinks the sand is sugar. Maybe it’s her way of exploring. What beach have I licked lately? What spontaneous act of nonsense have I engaged in recently that didn’t involve that part of my brain that said “no” to everything? That part of Isabella’s brain clearly is not developed. Was there ever a time when I would let the curious things of the world rule me this way? Surely, I know better now. I know that licking sand will taste like… like what? I don’t know that I have ever licked a beach or if I had, it was so long ago as to be a repressed memory by now. I know this sounds crazy but we all do things that we know we hate out of some sense of duty or responsibility. How can licking a beach to see how it tastes be any more crazy? Watching Isabella lick that beach and then simply deal with the consequences with no crying, no fuss – just a look of mini-enlightenment, at least in the area of how beaches taste. So here I am well into my middle life with my own children and yes, I have traveled the world a bit and have gone to college. I’ve worked at numerous places learned many things. But here before me this three year old, this Isabella, this tabla rosa knows what a beach tastes like while I do not. I do not believe it is fear that keeps me from licking the beach – well, maybe not the fear of what it might taste like – but rather the fear of how I would look. Soon the thought dawns on me that the real reason this distresses me is that I would never in a million years ever have the idea to lick the beach. Suddenly I feel sad. I know what it is like to have all the doors of perception closed tight, locked and the key tossed away for good measure. Isabella’s doors are wide open. I wonder about Isabella. I wonder if as she grows she will keep some of those portals to the imagination open. Maybe she will be a great painter some day, painting landscapes of beaches. Maybe the colors she uses in her palette are a direct though unseen reflection of her licking the beach today. What will happen in her life that will start to close these doors in her life? What has happened in my life that has caused these pathways to creativity to close down to me? How many other ideas whiz past my head at dizzying speeds daily, hourly, even by the minute, that I am so willfully blind to? It’s a special thing when I learn from those who seem to know less than I. I learn for one thing, how little I really do know. Today is a special classroom, a special schooling for which there are no diplomas or life credits to be earned. Maybe next time I find myself at the shore, I will try to lick the beach though really, I know this is Isabella’s thing now and not mine. Thoughts don’t always come with copyrights. Maybe they should. Who knows where they come from and who know where they go? Maybe I will top off my beach with some M&M’s though to be sure. Creativity is a great thing, but chocolate- well, that is quite another. M C Biegner 4/23/2004

What We Bury Today: The Death Of John Paul II and What It Means To Me

2005-04-11T20:49:00.000-04:00

Okay, I’ve let enough time lapse. When I first heard the news of the passing of Pope John Paul II, I had mixed feelings. I mean I really believe it’s not a good thing to speak ill of the dead, no matter what their political leanings are or what you thought of that person. I just think that invokes bad karma or something. I feel it lessens me. So how do I sum up what I am feeling in an intelligible manner in a way so that I can disabuse the world of this papalmania (the only word I can think of) for a man who was the leader of every Roman Catholic in the world? I am a Roman Catholic, so this is a tricky thing. See, although I firmly believe in the element of ecstasy in spirituality, generally, watching large groups of people taking the death of a man few of them have met and who was in essence a Catholic celebrity, just...(how shall I put this?) scares me ... a little. We need to understand that the Papacy occupies a most interesting political/moral leadership position in the world. The Vatican mystique is part political, part spiritual and part historical. The world no longer looks to it for any sort of political guidance as it once did. But it is not like the good old days when the pope actually determined who sat on the thrones of countries, had a standing army that could kick some serious booty and was a true force in the secular political world of its day. The church had a strange role as a power broker in being both secular AND spiritual. As for being an ethical beacon, the Vatican certainly has its place. Generally, Vatican opinions on all sorts of topics are duly noted by other foreign leaders who then weigh the political expediency of their own political realities and make their decisions accordinly. In short, other countries treat the Vatican much like American Catholics seem to: they listen to the teachings, and ultimately, decide what is right for themselves. Oh, some leaders make the pretense of listening, such as a certain president of a certain country that still executes its citizens. This president may (and I emphasize “may”) call the pope for guidance – oh, wait, that was a West Wing episode wasn’t it? Sometimes reality and fantasy are tough to tell apart. But the Vatican is a human organization and as such is subject to human criticism. How do we separate the pope as a man versus the pope as the leader of an institution that has sometimes lost its way? For the record, I am not here to give any credence to conspiracy theorists who suggest that Pope John Paul II was part of some plot to murder Pope John Paul I because his views of things did not fit a particular conservative agenda. I do not even intend to talk about the various historical abominations which place the Vatican Bank in league with the Mafia, or that John Paul II worked in concert with the CIA in the fight against communism or that past popes had conceived illegitimate children, or even those accusations that the Vatican conspired with the Nazis during World War II. (Hell, so did IBM, but you don’t see anyone asking for a boycott of IBM equipment these days. It seems we like our spiritual institutions pure, but our business institutions can just have at it.) All of these things may be true, or none of them may be true. I come to bury, Caesar, dear friends, not praise him!The last time I recall giving this much thought to the Papacy of my Church, was during the heady days of liberation theology in the ‘70’s. I know there aren’t many today who would think those grand days, but I recall them as being so full of potential. This is the climate in which John Paul II ascended to the papacy. The cold war was in full swing, and the dilemma of how priests in Latin America should serve the poor was the hot button being discussed. People of Latin America were suffering mightily at the hands of brutal dictatorships - dictatorships, I hasten to point out, which were often supported by this same Church over which John Paul II ruled. Does anyone remember the rebuke John Paul gave Ernesto Cardinale, then a priest in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, during his visit? Cardinale, awkwardly kneeling, nearly falling over as he rose to the Pope’s admonishment, wagging a disapproving finger – all on film for the world to see. This was a time, after the Paul VI died, and before the first John Paul died, that I really believed the Church was in for some change, that perhaps women could be included; that maybe the Church would speak out on more human rights issues; that maybe the Church could update it policy about artificial birth control.(It was Paul VI who gave us Humanae Vitae. If you want to see what the fuss is about, click the link. This one simply eludes my comprehension. )http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html ) The Catholic Church, to its credit, is a strong opponent to the death penalty, a cause near and dear to my heart. The Church, in following Jesus’ teachings of corporal works of mercy, adheres to a message of social justice for all people, regardless of stage of life.So the Church has that right at least. It is consistent with its stance on preserving life, even if it muddies the waters on some issues. (Now how one goes from that point to not allowing artificial contraception is a leap even the Great Wallendas would have trouble with.) In the end, John Paul II carried on the tradition of Paul VI. He did, in fact, speak to human rights issues. He warned of the potential dehumanizing effects of globalization, against capital punishment, spoke out against the war in Iraq (how many pro-life sign carrying Catholics were aware of that? How many of these protestors stood in lines holding signs not to invade Iraq?) As the Berlin Wall fell, and then, communism, he found himself with only one adversary left in the west: the materialism of the MTV world. That is, at least before the rise of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, when lo and behold, we a brand new crusades just in time for the new millennium was born. It’s really no surprise that his message of social justice rings most true with people of the third world and why the church is growing there while it is shrinking in the countries of Europe and America. It’s really no surprise that the youth of the world loved John Paul II either, since he more closely resembled an old Polish pastor, with a grounded sense of the people around him than some sort of ideological reactionary. The world is in no short supply of charming, charismatic leaders. People – especially young people – need their gods (if you pardon the analogue) to be accessible, and human. They are already affixing the title “The Great” to his name. (I tried this at home, but it didn’t work as well for me, maybe you can try this where you work – send out a memo insisting that everyone from this date forward, add “the great” after your name Let me know how it works for you!) Looking back on his papacy, the Catholic Church of John Paul II has not changed much. In fact, it has gone from the uncertainty of the 70’s with the possibility of a whole new spiritual order, to the same comforting paradigms we grew up with and were terrorized with as kids. John Paul decided social justice was needed in other parts of the world, but not, it seems, for practitioners of the Roman Catholic faith. That is still a puzzle to me. The lack of allowable dissent, the lack of critical thinking, the lack of expression - these are all of great concern to me. Ideas are not things that come from a vacuum. Ideas require the fertilizer of debate, doubt, counter-intuitive thinking to grow. I understand the Catholic Church is not a democratic organization and I am not suggesting it needs to be. It’s just, how can we proclaim the need for human justice when one half of all the humans on the planet are deemed unworthy by this institution to simply consecrate bread and wine at the daily Mass? Verily, I say, what would Jesus do? Frankly, I think He’d be just a tad pissed. As I watched John Paul’s burial, I got a little teary eyed, I admit. I mean, the pomp, the ritual, the splendor of the event and the waves of humanity are impressive. Who doesn’t like a grand show? I suspect that he was really a man of peace; he sought to bring life to the forefront of all human endeavors. He found himself on both sides of the political spectrum when it came to important issues, (abortion, death penalty, stem cell research, contraception, ordination of women) and you have to respect a man who makes decisions based on his own informed conscience. And isn't that all anyone can ask of each of us - that we act in accordance to what we believe? Does all this make John Paul II a bad guy? Should we not honor this man? I don’t know. Maybe he’s misguided; maybe he’s malevolent. I only pray he has found the freedom in his death that his Church seems to refuse the rest of us here on earth. I pray that his quest for peace and for creating a culture for life includes most importantly, the quality of tolerance. There is so little of that these days, and the world is in such short supply. I just hope that someday my Church can feel less threatened by new ideas. I pray that She can learn that one can adhere to tradition and still allow growth. I hope that She learns that being tolerant does not mean abandoning core doctrine. The challenge for any Christian church today is to bring the living message of a gospel that is thousands of years old forward, while leaving behind the chaff of the old cultural baggage. I only hope that a belief in God’s goodness prevails. Let’s hope that this goodness, which He imbues in each of us, has not been buried with John Paul. M C Biegner4/2005

The Definition of Insanity is Repeating the Same Behavior Over and Over and Expecting Different Results

2005-04-09T08:16:00.000-04:00

Steely legs grind sausage asphalt like meat Turn! Turn! Turn the crank over. My breath is a lullaby for the street Churn! Churn! Churn the breath over Speed drips out of me through orbiting feet Turn! Turn! Turn the crank over. Gravity grabs me with kisses so sweet Churn! Churn! Churn the force over. Then gracefully tears out my lungs complete, Burn! Burn! Burn the lungs over. When a mountain’s flexing muscles I greet, Turn! Turn! Turn the land over. With switchbacks and grades I fear in my sleep, Turn! Turn! Turn the crank over. Now into the smaller ring I creep, Turn! Turn! Turn the crank over. My breath is mediation, hard and deep, Churn! Churn! Churn the breath over. Alive through pain from endorphins I weep, Turn! Turn! Turn the pain over. Then, Finally, At the top, Ready to pop, Wanting with all my wanting to stop, Momentum so sloppy I very nearly flop, I start to descend, Uncoil and unbend, Begin to start the commencement of end. Over and over The air smells like clover, Over and over Let this man-machine marriage of pain cross over This crown Down, Down, Post crown, Toward the most grounded of ground From sky bluest blue To the earthiest brown, I hear the humming of the hum, Like a blood rush of the head, a beating drum, A tumbling crumb, No longer gravity’s bum. Muscles that ache, Now get a break, These limbs that gave now take, take, take take, I tear the wind with an effortless break, A piece of cake! Returning, returning legs and heart once a great campfire, now are embers burning. With each microsecond of speed I’m learning That what goes up with the greatest of pain Drops without awareness like rain, So though you think me insane, There, ahead, before me, over the smiling plain, Another mountain! So I do it again. M C Biegner 4/2005

Three Things

2005-04-02T07:25:00.000-05:00

I The pink plastic flamingos gather in a pat outside an oversized contemporary house in the rural woods, leaning and a-flame, gathering as if at tea, conversing at the mouth of the driveway. Perhaps they are there to welcome. Stoic, still, blushing with no sense of coolness, landmarks of kitsch or misunderstood highbrow art – take your pick – like a piece of Warhol art, a parody, iconic; or perhaps just really, really bad taste or really, really good taste. Perhaps those who live in this house promote an artist life style, with the faux fowl signs that art is larger than the commonness of everyday; that perhaps a Cristo of the lunatic finge art world lives here and perhaps there are conspiracies of art just like there are conspiracies of everything else. Perhaps right now someone in this house is contemplating a plan to put these birds everywhere through the New York Botanical Gardens, or throughout the Cloisters of the Bronx – pink flamingos – a pat of them everywhere. “Their meaning?” people would ask. “What is their purpose?” I roll by the house slowly, for I do brake for cultural anomalies. I look in my rear view mirror and see the birds at an angle, slanted, almost animated with conversation, suggesting a certain kind of exotica that is unknowable here in this snowy New England climate. (Flamingos have been known to travel with Garden Gnomes. The Gnomes love to race them, being so small and all, they are natural jockeys.) But this a) stain of human taste or b) cool parodic high art – pick one – is all there is, it seems. Goodbye flamingos. Perhaps they are returned from the south in some migratory urging; perhaps they are part of a resurgence of flaming, plastic pink flamingos, up here to mate and bring us a revival of pop, cult art. II We have sat around this table many times and have often recited lines from our favorite movies. One of our favorite moments is when one of us repeats in his worst (or best) Austrian accents a line from an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie: “It’s not a tumor.” You have to say it just right. It is definitely in the telling: “It’s not a tumor.” Drop the voice and close the back of the throat as you say it. Try it when a friend complains of a headache. “It’s not a tumor.” The only thing is though, this time it is a tumor. It is an anaplastic astrocytoma, a brain tumor. It is a brain tumor in a fifteen year old girl. It was discovered after this girl fought for years with a form of lymphoma. They had hoped it was in remission, but it spread. The headaches, the dizziness – she thought it might be nutritionally based, since for a while she was concerned about losing weight and wanted to be really thin as she progressed through high school. She wanted to be thin, and so she thought that was the reason for the dizziness. It was spread throughout her cortex, radiating fingers, defying true measurement like most cancers, cells that grow out of control, without a plan. Who would have thought that growth could kill? It is the flip side of everything, it seems, that always gets you. A fifteen year old with anaplastic astrocytoma. Now it’s more procedures, more waiting, more experimentation – it is a race to kill off this pat of cells, pink, like a pat of flaming pink plastic flamingos leaning, having a simple conversation, and multiplying, the ultimate of tastelessness in a disease. The rapaciousness, the voraciousness and wantonness of the disease is alarming. “It’s not a tumor,” I say, trying not to invoke Arnold’s voice, but I can’t help it. It makes us laugh. It is a tumor and it is not as funny. It sits in her head waiting but there is a wasteland in this waiting. “You need support groups,” “You need to visualize the disease,” “You need to personalize it,” “You need to vocalize what you are feeling,” “Try journaling,” we all tell her. “Need?” she thinks. The concept of need is a million miles away. She is only fifteen. Have I said that already? She has already gone through chemotherapy; she has had lymph nodes removed. She knows the sickness brought on by the poison they pump into her. Every cell of her body has a memory and remembers this. She knows the tiredness like the dimensions of her bed, like every single square inch of her bed that she will now know even better. She knows boundaries. She will gather her strength and muster up enough saliva to spit. She will live. She will live. “It’s not a tumor,” she says to me in the best Arnold voice ever. She is lying of course, but we love her so much that we laugh anyway. III During these early days of spring I drive to work very early in the morning. In part, this is to get a jump on the day, to begin my day with a regimen of exercise, but mostly because I love to open the day in the same manner that I love to close it: alone. This does not make me anti-social or a-social. It is not because I dislike people though the thought does cross my mind, but rather it is because the diffused sunlight as it rises and sets creates for me a sort of confessional. It creates a place where I must account for everything in me to myself and to do so, I must do it alone. Have you ever noticed the flat stillness of the sky in the evening as the sun begins to set? It is small and delicate like the nape of a woman’s neck. It begs for relating to – the purple dripping clouds, like paint that had not dried, like fantasy artwork. It creates all around me a space that is much like a confessional. The rest of the day – the fat middle where everything happens at lightning pace, the part that unfolds billowing like a flag – that is yours. Mine is the start of daylight and its dissolution – grand tutors of temporality. They are mine alone and are my gods and truth be told, sustain me. This winter is a cancer to us all – overgrowth of dearth. Overgrown despair, overgrown bleakness crowding out everything. This has the tendency to make waking life so much more stony, like flaking shale, coming apart in your hands. It seems so much more geologic than it needs to be, I think to myself. M C Biegner 4/1/2005

Spring 2005

2005-03-24T21:03:00.000-05:00

Spring bares her breasts in that careless and gradual way, Pulling back her snowy dressy top With the shyest movement; Hiking up her skirt of grass so green as to convey motion, Just a few inches above those luscious knees, Just enough to be awkward, Just enough to make me do a double take in disbelief – Playing this game of hide and seek With sunlight’s strong and gentle fingers, Lime green oozing everywhere Slapping together a patch of earth that is my lust – She is beautiful when she Hides in the cesura of the season - This one day in Spring – In this dis-remembering of a winter that egged us on. Just like the moment between breaths Just like the stillness that happens between heartbeats – Life infused with new hope Of things not revealed. Proving the existence of God Confirming that I really don’t matter at all – Basking in that joyful confirmation that I don’t matter at all! M C Biegner

under exposure

2005-03-22T14:08:00.000-05:00

In this one we’re like any teenage snapshot couple, drunk with careless infatuation. I proudly wear my “Century of Women on Top” tee shirt; you wear your shy smile. We’re holding the old Polaroid camera out in front of us, and your cheek, complete with the dimples you always tried to hide, is pressed next to mine. This is the photo I’d scan and email to my friends back home, my mom. This print’s fuzzy brightness doesn’t reveal a few hours earlier when we would have been found in the emergency room after the police were called to the scene of one of your theatrical suicide threats, nor does it have any recollection of that shrill terror that by something miraculous pushed up through my throat and echoed off the side of that old brick building when I thought I had lost you. It doesn’t show the part when I was crying and tried to call out to that man across the street for help, or when you wouldn’t even look at me as you manipulated words into blameful incantations and continued on at that frighteningly determined pace. It doesn’t know about the bruise that will develop on my arm the next morning where you had grabbed me and pushed me away from you when I was desperately trying to chase after you, to save you. I only ever wanted to save you. This Polaroid doesn’t understand that I would even willingly forget my own name for a time in order to try to teach you the hope hidden inside the spelling of yours. And neither the film nor flash know about the hot shower we shared after the whole ordeal was over that night, how your shivering body melted into my arms as heavy beads of water pounded on our skin, and how I forgot about the deadly dominance you had cast over me as I sensed the powerlessness in your pulse.

The Boneyard Romance

2005-03-22T10:27:00.000-05:00

Rutherford arrived at the Boneyard, the lone suit and tie in a sea of undershirts and dirty suspenders, wondering why he was there. He still had a sermon to write. He looked at Jackie, who was shaking hands, grinning ear to ear, the way a father did when his first son was born. There was no such grin for an uncle, Rutherford thought, there was only a polite smile, which he decided to wear, striding coolly to the bar and ordering a glass of water. “Water? Man, get your ass outta here,” the bartender said. Rutherford slid a dollar bill across the counter and received a dirty glass full of lukewarm water. The musicians had taken a break, but it seemed that they were about to reconvene. The alto sax player was in the face of his woman, yelling into her like she was an inanimate object. Rutherford watched her face, frozen except for her eyes, which moved back and forth, barely blinking. When he finished his tirade, the sax played rounded up the band. Instead of storming off the stage, as Rutherford expected, the woman strode to the microphone. She snapped her thick fingers slow and even, so that the anticipation between each snap brought the din of the bar down to a murmur by the fourth snap. Instead of a fifth snap, the band began to play. The singer made eye contact with him for a split second, Rutherford thought, and then moved her eyes around the room. After the band had played a few bars, she began to sing. “Yes, I got a Daddy, and no, he don’t treat me right…” “Who is that?” Rutherford felt himself say, after deciding not to say it. “That’s the mystery. Quiet Lily’s a mystery,” the bartender answered. Rutherford slid another dollar across the bar and the bartender continued. “Whiskey,” he said, “Every Saturday night, for like 2 years, see? Then one day she said her name was Lily, occurred to me that’s the only thing I ever heard her say, besides whiskey. Then one day she get up and ask J.J. could she sit in? He was drunk, so he let her. Turn out, she ain’t half bad.” The bartender spoke to him between nodding and pouring shots for Jackie’s friends. Rutherford turned his attention back to Lily. Her song was in its closing bars. “Yes, I got a Daddy, and no, no, no, he don’t treat me right…” Applause and catcalls peppered the air that was dense with tobacco smoke, and Lily descended the stage. She sat down at a table with what Rutherford assumed was her customary glass of whiskey. He stood up from his barstool and crossed the room to her table. “Mind if I sit?” he asked. Lily shrugged. “What’s that song you were singing?” he asked. “Yes and No.” “I don’t believe I’ve heard that before. Who’s it by?” he asked. Lily swallowed and met his eye. “Me,” she said, keeping his gaze. “You really got a Daddy don’t treat you right?” Lily shrugged. “Have you been saved?” he asked, out of habit. Lily looked down at her glass, met his eyes again, then threw back her head and downed her remaining whiskey. She slowly stood up and began walking toward the exit. “Only reason I ask, ma’am,” he began. She shot an icy glance back at him, “Ma’am, miss… Lily… is that I’m the pastor at First Baptist Church in Three Oaks.” She was gaining distance on him after exiting the Boneyard. “We have services Sundays at 10. I’d love for you to sing in our choir,” he said. She stopped, turned around, and set her arms akimbo. “You gonna follow me home?” she asked. “No, just I… hope to see you some Sunday. Maybe even tomorrow, or,” he said, fumbling with the chain on his watch, “later today. Here,” he said, producing another dollar bill, “In case you need to be taking the bus into town.” He waited for her to take her hands off of her hips, but she wouldn’t. She had a pocket in her skirts, he could see, and he slid the dollar bill in, lingering for just a moment on her hip. She put her hand in her pocket, and pushed the bill back at him, hard against his chest. It fluttered to the dirt. “Take that,” she said, quiet and even, “ and buy yourself some more faith.” She turned around. “You can’t buy faith,” he called after her, “But you sure can rent it!” He watched her disappear into the night, then went inside to find Jackie and tell him it was time to go home. *** Lily remembered that first Sunday morning she spent on the bus to Three Oaks as the last day she ever felt uncertain. It was crowded in the back of the bus, and it seemed that all the other passengers were older and better dressed than she was. She’d turned to the man standing next to her and asked, “First Baptist?” “You can follow me,” he said. When they exited the bus, she followed the man, and most of the crowd East for five blocks, then South for three. The sign for First Baptist Church bore carefully painted letters that read, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH of THREE OAKS WHERE JESUS SAVES, HEALS, AND DELIVERS! Rev. Rutherford James Payson, Pastor Lily entered the church and sat in the back row of wooden chairs, waiting for the service to begin. Other folks were talking, laughing, shaking hands. A few of them approached her, called her, “my sister.” She smiled back as best she could. Rutherford emerged as the choir sang an upbeat, tambourine-driven, yet otherwise a capella version of “Amazing Grace.” He shone in his purple and gold robe, radiating more charm, Lily thought, than a pastor probably should. Just as the hymn ended, Rutherford spoke, booming without shouting, “My brothers and sisters in Jesus,” he began, “I would like to take a moment to welcome any worshippers that are new to our congregation this morning. I invite you to hear the word,” he paused for murmurs of agreement, “I invite you to lift your voice!” a woman shouted and the tambourine joined in, “I invite you to experience the love of the Almighty God and Jesus Christ, Our Savior!” his voice lifted to a fever pitch. “Take your hands, “ he said, “raise them up, and FEEL the power that is given to you from Heaven! Use this power to spread the word! Use this power to praise his name! Use this power to SAVE YOUR SOUL!” The tambourine played rolled into another hymn. Lily was too awestruck to sing along. She just watched Rutherford, singing with his jaw dropped as far as possible, and his eyes closed. After the hymn, Rutherford stepped to the pulpit. “Our reading today is as follows,” he cleared his throat for emphasis, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace! When there is hatred,” he paused, “Let me sow love.” There were scattered affirmations from the congregation. “When there is doubt, sow FAITH!” he pounded on the pulpit, “When there is sadness,” he paused, and a woman began to weep loudly, and Rutherford lowered his voice slightly, “let me sow joy. When there is DARKNESS, LET ME SOW LIGHT!” the congregation became uproarious, “LORD!” Rutherford cried. Lily could see the sweat pouring down from his face from the back row, “MAKE ME AN INSTRUMENT OF THY PEACE!” Lily sat silent in her chair through the remainder of the service, and afterward, she stood at the end of the line to greet the Reverend. “Miss Lily,” he said when he saw her, “I was hoping you’d come by.” She nodded. “Wonderful service,” was all she could muster. “I’d like to invite you to Sunday dinner with my family, if you have no other obligation,” he said. She took a breath. “That would be nice.” “I intend to make a church-going woman out of you, yet!” he said. The remaining parishioners chuckled as they exited the church. He came to her side, and leaned in close to her. She could feel his warm breath and his lips graze her ear. “I also intend to marry you,” he whispered. She looked him in the eye and raised her hand up, sliding it down his forearm and squeezing his palm as they walked around the corner to the rectory. *** Lily didn’t hear from J.J. all week, which she thought was just as well. If he wanted to break it off with her, she thought, it would save her the trouble of doing it herself. She only worried, just a little bit, that he’d ban her from sitting in with the band. She knew, though, that Quentin, Alley, March, and Jesse would go to bat for her. Still, she hated the thought of them fighting, just cause of her. It was quiet that Saturday night when she arrived at the Boneyard. Willie didn’t look at her as she ordered her whiskey. There was no sign of J.J. so far. “Where’s J.J. at?” she asked Willie. “Hm?” “J.J…. Where’s he at?” she asked again. “March!” Willie called to the end of the bar, gesturing at Lily. As March crossed toward her, she knew. She wouldn’t have to break it off with J.J. He’d died, just the way she’d imagined he would- close to his saxophone, with his eyes rolled back in his head and a needle in his arm. “J.J.’s gone on,” March said. Lily nodded. “I just knew he’d get himself messed with that,” March continued, “He was a good player.” “He was,” she said. “My little cousin Millard’s gonna sit in on sax tonight. Kinda an audition for him, see?” March said. “Mm, hm,” she said. “Listen, Lily… if you don’t feel like it tonight, we all understand, but… it sure is nice when we have you here,” March said. “I’ll sing. I always sing,” she said, “But just one.” March nodded. When they called her to the stage, Lily dedicated J.J.’s favorite, “Knock-Down-Drag-Out Blues” to his memory, then exited the stage, sat down at her table, and breathed deep for a moment into her glass of whiskey before taking a sip. *** The next day, Lily took the bus to Three Oaks, having promised Rutherford that they’d go for a walk after church and Sunday dinner. “J.J. died,” she said as they rounded the corner from the rectory. “How?” he asked. “The needle,” she said. “Mm hm… I am sorry,” Rutherford said, not being able to use the standard, ‘He’s with Jesus now.’ “I’m not,” she said, “He loved shooting up more than anything. Even the blues. That ain’t right.” “Well, you don’t love anything more than the blues?” “No,” she said. “No? Not your mama? Not nothing? Not Jesus?” he asked, fingering the ring in his pocket. “My mama wasn’t a thing. Jesus ain’t a thing. It’s different.” “If we,” he paused, “If we were married, would you give up performing?” “No,” she said, “Would you?” “I don’t perform,” he said. She looked at him and raised her eyebrow. “I would never,” she said, “Never cause you such pain as that would cause me.” He stopped in his tracks and caught her hand. She turned toward him. “Lily, I won’t ask you to do anything but marry me,” he said. “Yes, you will,” she said, “But I accept anyways.” “I feel too old to get on bended knee,” he said, smiling. “Me too,” she said, “So let’s just walk.”

Wine

2005-03-20T14:10:00.000-05:00

After Night has had its way; After all the dismantling; When I am alone with muffled calm; When I am done with handling All of the self inflicted doubt --- I am wine that sits decanting Made giddy with the thought of flight As I face one more replanting Splash me recklessly on the ground So I may fill the cracked dry dirt Drink me full with the hardest lust I am free of wounds but not the hurt – Healed at the altar of our art, Cauterized by this grateful heart. M C Biegner 3/2005

Confessions of a Closet Fiction Writer

2005-03-20T13:31:00.000-05:00

Today something dreadful happened. Today, without so much as an inkling, I very nearly wrote fiction! I don’t know how it happened. I really don’t! I wasn’t paying attention. I normally don’t do things like this. It happened one evening after dinner when I settled down to that quiet place – you know – that place inside where it gets real still and you can hear everything inside you that is going on; the place where all my poetry comes from. Then it happened. I can’t imagine how! I was writing when suddenly I noticed what looked like two eyes and a prominent nose pressed up against the clear plastic of my BIC plastic ballpoint. I was surprised. I mean, I was not accustomed to people in my pen where ink was supposed to be. As I wrote an even stranger thing happened. This person or whatever it was that was trapped inside the barrel of my pen, squeezed himself out through the tip of the pen and before I could say, “Great Walt Whitman preserve us”, there before me was a character: a real honest to goodness fictional character. It was a middle-aged man with balding head who wore the look of desperation like a wrinkled and ill-fitted suit. He smelled of cigarettes with just a trace scent of some morning shot – drambuie or kalhua – something that in the shadowy lamplight of my room smelled like last night. This character just sat there on the snowy white page, blinking, first left, then right as if he did not know where he was. There was an awkward silence. I couldn’t say a word I was so stunned! I knew I was miles away from that place where I grew my poetry, but where was I? I started to write some more hoping though not really believing, that this was just an anomaly. I held this deep fear that this portended some sort of gravitational pull toward the absurd and that I was powerless to stop it. Then just as before, my eye was caught by another set of eyes looking at me from the barrel of the pen. I panicked this time. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Let us go then you and / When the evening is spread out against the spreading sky”. I opened one eye, but the eyes in the pen just glared up at me. I quickly snapped my one eye closed and continued: “Like a patient etherized on a table…” Surely if there was anyone who could bring me back to someplace devoid of personality, it would be Eliot, I thought. But it was no use. I opened my eyes and there they were: frantic eyes, bloodshot eyes, eyes that spoke to a different part of my artistic brain. Why I could almost hear the other neurons snapping the way a heater that has not been used for a long time clicks when it is turned on for the very first time of the heating season. I took the pen in both hands and rolled it fiercely back and forth hoping it would shake free whatever demons possessed it. It was no use though The eyes were still there only now they were dizzy and crossed from all the spinning. I wrote again anyway. I would not let this dementia prevent my sweet, gentle poetry from bubbling up. Where had my poetry gone I wondered? Had someone absconded with it? Or maybe I just misplaced it, being as I am so busy lately. Perhaps my poetry just got fed up and left. Maybe, I thought, I was simply engaging in some sort of shared consciousness flashback of experiences I never had? I mean, I never did hallucinogens but people I know have. LSD, I’ve learned, is actually trapped in the human spinal chord for many years after the person stops taking it. Maybe, if this idea of a shared collective consciousness is true, maybe I am experiencing someone else’s flashback. The thought though amusing, didn’t really comfort me much. As I continued writing, another character slid out on to the page. This time it was a woman. She had frizzy, stringy hair and large overblown blotchy red face. She wore much more lipstick than she should have ever been allowed to. Her eyes were angry and while she didn’t say a word, I could tell she was reproaching me. But something about her was familiar. I could not put my finger on it, but there was a quality, something I could not articulate that made me feel this woman and I knew each other. I pondered this when it shot through my head like a lightning bolt. This was my ex-wife. She did not really look like my ex-wife (well, except for the lipstick: that woman found shades of lipstick that would make hookers blush!) but still, I somehow knew it was her. “Odd,” I thought to myself. “I didn’t know that I was still carrying around all this anger for her after all these years.” I made a note to bring this up with my therapist at my next session. Yes, it was my ex-wife all right, couched craftily amid some cosmetic changes of dress and body shape and hair. It was the eyes that gave her away, always the eyes. “My God”, I thought, “I am starting to think like a fiction writer!” So my “ex” has been in there all this time and I had no idea! I didn’t know what to make of that: first the middle-aged man, then this. What was next? I was afraid to think who else might be in there, thinking it was all coming from the pen but all the while, really knowing better. Over the course of the next few hours several more characters were extruded through the tip of my pen and onto the page: there was a young girl with skinned knees wearing a party dress, a black blind blues singer with a strong heroin addiction, a sexy movie star who was tired of being type cast as a sex kitten and longed to be a real theater actor. All of these people squeezed themselves out onto the paper and each one had whole histories with which I became intimately familiar. They were born from something in my past and I tried to match the personality up with something in my past, but I could not do it completely. Before long, I had half a journal written filled with these characters and their traits, their foibles and character flaws, their habits and idiosyncracies: I had captured them all as character studies in writing. Finally, the character who was my ex-wife broke the silence and spoke. “Well?” she said in that sharp tire screeching sort of voice I remember (I think I even winced in a Pavlovian response). “Well what?” I said. “Well, what do we do?” “Do?” I was sure I was crazy now. In the back of my mind I so wanted my poetry back. Never has a poem so much as spoken to me. Not once. “You got us here – now what do we do?” she said. “Well…” I drew the response out hoping to buy some time. “Truth is, see, I don’t write fiction. This is just some sort of mistake.” My ex-wife’s eyes grew even angrier. “See, I can’t write plot lines,” I explained in a vain attempt to explain away my fiction writing shortcomings. “I think up these great characters and then, I don’t know what to do with them.” My ex-wife’s face changed. The contours of her cheeks actually went into a near smile. “You know, dearie,” she began sweetly. “ That construction worker over there that you dreamed up? The one with no shirt on and really short shorts? You could write a part for him and me if you like. He’s kinda cute.” I looked over at the Herculean Adonis of a construction worker I had created, with broad shoulders and tight washboard abs, and long flowing hair. “Yeah,” I said, “ I need to talk to my therapist about him too.” I explained for an hour how I could not write plots; how I was sorry but maybe I could integrate some of these characters into poems – if only my poetry would come back. She didn’t like that at all. None of them did. They didn’t want to be part of no stinking poem. They were going to look for a writer with some cojones, a real writer’s writer they said. Not one of these foo-foo, woo-woo, new age, pot-smoking, aging hippy types. "Where was Hemmingway when you need him?" they said, hard drinking, womanizing misogynistic S.O.B that he was. “Great. Just great. Now I have my own characters questioning my masculinity,” I thought. They left in a huff, all of them, and I was sitting alone. Over the next few weeks I played with story lines. I even took out some books from the library and attended workshops about how to write fiction. I read once that sometimes a writer had to do something mean to a character even a beloved character, so I did. I did something really mean to a character that I loved most of all. I was in bed for a week with depression. This fiction thing? I get way too invested emotionally. It’s hard on my body and my soul. I don’t know how people do it. My poetry eventually returned after being on brief hiatus. She told me she was hobnobbing with some musicians in the Bahamas. ( Incidentally, it really is better in the Bahamas, she told me.) Soon, my poetry and I were making and speaking the language of the unseen universe just as before. But someday, someday I just might look up one of those characters again and start in earnest to write fiction for real. Someday. M C Biegner 3/2005

In the Pressed Sweet Grass

2005-03-12T08:01:00.000-05:00

When I looked for you In the pressed sweet grass, The outline of your body was all I found; In a circle that formed on the ground Where we wrote our history Using heaping mounds of Faith. How did I expect this to end? What did I think would happen? Can I refute what faith whispers to my heart, What science inscribes into DNA? Did I believe that I would be spared, That God loved me - His most favorite of all - so much That I should not drink from this cup? I always imagined starkness without you, In the luxury of your touch, But it was never as bare as the truth. Now the value of one more moment With you, rises like breath: My love, You are the heat my body produces, You are the tempo of my beating pulse, You are my very own desire for what is good. Gone – before the promise is kept; Gone – before the map of our world could be explored; Gone – leaving just pressed sweet grass To tell me you are not here, That you have moved on, Gone ahead, without me – To someplace we’d always known, Leaving me with this limp: Forever friendless, Forever moonless, Forever alone. M C Biegner 3/2005

Islam's Flower

2005-02-26T20:33:00.000-05:00

The Taliban has beaten me and left me for dead But I am stronger then they know, There is no burka that can cover me so Or hide what I think or un-say what I’ve said, Allah be praised for He made the bed From which I give these men life to grow, to Live, to breathe, and blaspheme God so – They've killed my husband, now send me off to strangers to wed. The Taliban has beaten me and left me for dead But I have more power than they know. This burka of fear will be shed From God's true mercy, I am Islam's true flower still to grow! M C Biegner

When

2005-02-25T20:36:00.000-05:00

When When twilight When twilight stretches out like a yawn Through clouds The ones that separate heaven and earth When twilight reaches down from sky, Like the arm of Michael the Archangel – Willing Willing to Willing to pull me up – Willing to do battle When Twilight kisses me – When Twilight transfigures – When Twilight tickles me – I am I am made I am made weak When When I am When I am made weak I know I know neither up nor down as up or down But I know boundless possibilities. When When I know When I know I am made weak When I know I am made weak, Then freedom’s grasp is what I seek, When I know I am made weak, Freedom lies spilled white like milk that’s leaked, I know it puddles at the feet of the meek. M C Biegner 2/23/2005

Welcome to AT&T Worldnet Service

2005-02-18T20:27:00.000-05:00

Welcome to AT&T Worldnet Service

The Pen

2005-02-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

Ink drips downward, And obeys a muscular gravity, Races to the point Like it has time to spare, With no place to go; Like a stretched B.B. King note. This point, this needle, this focus of ink scratches at paper With snake-like sexiness As curly-cue round as a Rubens. Then, strings of the heart start to unroll, Pressed flat like a buffet, for you to absorb. And Through eyes like straws You suck up the meaning of ink; You suck up what it means to be lonely; You suck up being shut away from joy; And yes, you even suck up death. Burdened with the plenum of what it is to be human Filling the tube of inky wash that is you All the while Emptying the tube of inky wash that is me. M C Biegner 2/2005

Them

2005-01-30T19:33:00.000-05:00

If you took a cross section slice out of my time, there is a good chance that you might just cut into a moment of me on the trail. I am a hiker, biker, and XC skier. I follow blue blazes and rails to trails through meadows, over mountains, and by meandering brooks. Without a grand elaboration, I do it because it feels right and it helps me, I believe, be right. I like the movement, the beauty, and the quiet. There are many of us who find well being in the outdoors. And it is a good thing, I so decree! However, we do not all move our way down these trails in similar manners. I prefer to park my car at the trailhead and try to move through nature creating as little disturbance as possible. I carefully chose to leave most of my noise and stink behind. Not so for some of those who ride ATV’s. You’ve seen them. You’ve heard them. You’ve smelled them: Four big knobby dirt digging wheels, ear-shattering whine, two-cycle oil rich exhaust. They are a bane on the land, and an affliction on our sensibilities. And they are also very popular, and they are not going away. I have campaigned, complained, and have physically tried to restrain them from riding on trails, where they are, by law, not permitted. Are you surprised that those who uphold such laws have better things to do, and very little time to do anything about my concerns? So I basically grit my teeth, complain some to my friends, and try to co-exist. In darker moments, it seems just another small example of a much bigger problem. The ship is slowly sinking. There are big holes and we have small buckets. Some bail while others water ski. Hmm. So it was on this most recent snowy Wednesday that I was cross-country skiing on a lovely piece of land in my town managed by the local land trust and the Nature Conservancy. It has meadows, woodland, ponds, wildlife, and a beautiful river. And it has trails, set aside for hiking, skiing, and ATV’s with handicapped permits. It was not more than 20 minutes or so into my visit when turning a corner in the laurels appeared two ATV’s. I had seen them earlier this winter on a nearby trail, that time there were five of them. I complained to my friend Karen then, questioning whether they all had permits. So as they approached I gritted my teeth and stepped out of my hard-earned ski tracks, trying not to seem too irritated. I was looking down when the first guy yelled, "That’s OK, we’ll pull over." My head spun, as it was clear that we were about to chat. Hmm. Could I keep a civil tongue? Could I not look too obviously for some kind of handicapped permit? "Beautiful day," we both offered, as simultaneously we started with a safe neutral remark. This was followed by a long silence, which was followed by a large ham-like hand offered as a true greeting with the introduction, "My name is Charlie Johnson, I live up on Hagan Rd." I pulled of my glove and stammered a brief self-introduction. "I’ve got to ride this, he went on, pointing to his machine, since I lost my leg, pointing to an empty jeans leg." I looked and I must have blushed with embarrassment, mortified for not only looking, but by the fact that my attitude clearly spoke saying "I don’t like your ATV and I wonder why you are riding it. Explain yourself." It got worse. He went on to explain, in a very friendly, pleasant manner, that he had explored and roamed these woods for the past fifty years, and that currently, he was helping do what he could to keep the trails open, clearing downed trees, branches, and the like. We talked a little more, sharing small stories about deer, "fisher cats", the weather, and the beauty and enjoyment we got from being on the trail in this lovely forest. Another silence, this one much less awkward, set us both on our ways. As I skied on, and he and his partner slowly drove of in the opposite direction, I couldn’t help but notice that his ATV actually ran quietly, and didn’t smell at all. Hmm. As I skied away, I noticed that my ski tracks fit quite well in the space between the tracks made by their ATV’s. I slid down a short hill, then stopped in a clearing, and thought about the lesson that had come to me. I thought about Charlie’s friendly manner, and realized that he was a bit like my father, Ernie; always quick with a handshake and a pleasant word. I thought how I had met one of "them" and learned a lot. I also had come to hear my own words speaking. I have often said that our enemies have much more in common with us than we might at first realize, making them not our enemies at all, but our kin. They work hard, suffer some, love their families, hope for a better future, and love the time that they can find to spend on a peaceful trail on a cold Connecticut afternoon. Thanks Charlie. Hope I see you again.

Levantate

2005-01-25T11:26:00.000-05:00

In December of 2004, Judge Juan Guzman nudged the collective Chilean conscience a step closer to what some might see as closure, but what I interpret as the nature of justice. With the statement: “Pinochet has been declared mentally fit to undergo criminal investigation” it seems that karma is as slow as New York traffic during the holidays, has finally started to come around on that wheel. It was thirty-one years ago, September 11th , when the democratically elected government of Salvadore Allende was overthrown by forces led by General Augusto Pinochet with CIA backing. Chileans have long memories and the clock is running out on seeking justice for a nation against the man who has come to represent the suffering and horror of that time. They are hoping to catch him on tax evasion, the same crime they locked up Al Capone on. Still, the country’s leaders exercise due process, not like in 1973 when it was believed the Chilean judiciary was complicit in illegal detentions, torture and disappearances. One would think there would consensus about this man in Chile. One would think the issue of national psychic healing would be a monolithic fait accompli, but this is not the case. When I was there visiting in 1986, I started an argument, trying to evade some very difficult political questions some locals were asking me. It was in a social setting, and I was visiting the poblacion (barrio) of La Victoria. One thing I will say is that even among the poorest of the poor in Chile, everyone seems to have an interest and a knack for global international politics. No discussions were off base. I found the Chilean people more knowledgeable about U.S. foreign policy than most Americans. I derailed the discussion by asking one of my guests what he thought of the Pinochet government, still in direct power at that time, before the plebescite in 1989 that ostensibly removed him from power. That started vigorous discussion among my guests. My point being, that even here, in La Victoria, a plot of land that was originally created by what the locals called a “toma!” - a land take by the poor of government property - there was no consensus. Why should there be now? To its credit, the current military has acknowledged its part in the suffering. An average compensation of $190 per victim claim is the suggested financial remuneration. Yes, it’s laughable by U.S. standards, but that is not the point. “Justice is the principal method of reparation,” Pedro Matta, a survivor of the Villa Grimaldi torture camp insists. But how justice? When justice? Commander in Chief Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre has taken the difficult and almost unheard of task of forging through the guilt and complicity of his military during this dark period of Chilean history. When I was there, I went by the National Stadium. I was driven by friends, speeding through the streets of Santiago in open-air jeeps, probably in the same the same manner that many of the victims who were taken by the police; in the dark of night, the frenetic speed and blackness ahead, I saw it all lit up. The light cast cavernous shadows and its history made it seem sinister, even some 15 years after the events. After the detention and torture of 5,000 men; after the madness that turned this place from a sporting area, to some collective neurons of pain for a whole nation, this place seemed nightmarish dressed in its shadowy face. Folk singer Victor Jara was one of the 5,000 brought here, tortured and then executed. My brother who lived in Santiago for years, later bought me a “genuine Chilean guitar” and the chords and lyrics and a tape so I could listen to his songs and learn them. “Plegaria a Un Labrador” – was the only song I attempted. Levantate, y mira la Montana – Rise up, and look at the mountain! and then finally he sings: Levantate, y mirate las manos – rise and look at your hands. The first supplication asks us to look at the power of the mountains, the land, nature as a force and then he asks us as farmers, workers, as tenders of the land, and makers of things to look at our hands which unlock the power of objects around us, of the land and ultimately of our own destiny. The first line was as far as I got. Somehow, I didn’t feel worthy of singing these songs, or playing this guitar, or even sharing in any way in the misery or hope of these people. It was sort of like white guys singing the blues, or rap. I didn’t seem to have the “props” to pull off such humanity. Still, there is denial by some segments of Chilean society. And even among those like Cheyre who want to make some sort of accounting and begin the healing process, no one is talking about accountability. Everyone involved is waiting for that other shoe to drop, and the thoughts of human rights trials, years after the events has everyone nervous. But can there be justice if some of those who committed these abuses are still in office? Pinochet is 89 and is approaching the end of his life. They say for the last few years he has been a pariah within his own country and even abroad. Still, that is hardly consolation for the suffering this man – and others – has caused. Not that I would like to see anyone executed, but it seems to me, if you are a nation of laws, and if a law has been broken, there should be some consequence beyond the civil restitution of a few pesos in some poor victim’s pocket. If Pinochet only spends one day in jail, and then dies, it will have sent a message to tyrants everywhere (are you listening George W.?) that no matter how much time passes, there is no statute of limitations for human rights. But the accountability issue – who will be punished after all these years – is likely to stir up some debate. As much as I want accountability, what is the likelihood that the evidence to ensure fair trials is preserved and can be unbiased after all this time? Can witness’s testimony be trusted after all this time? How do we keep this from becoming a witch hunt and does this, in the final analysis, create healing? Still, these goons perpetrated enough of the abuses on such a wide cross section of the population surely some of the testimony can be corroborated. And here’s the thing: if justice implies necessary accountability, are the victims of this regime comfortable knowing that some will never be held accountable? If they can imprison a percentage of those responsible, using due process and rules of evidence that are tried and true in democracies everywhere, will that be enough? Ironically, we share September 11th with Chile as a date of infamy. This was the same date it seems that democracy here was pitched over the side for the security of a Patriot Act in this country. And also ironically this country, has been engaging in all sorts of revisionist thinking, (think, “we never lost Vietnam, we were just never really in it all the way and oh by the way, here is Iraq, which we will do right”). There are some here who are reconsidering the CIA’s role in the September 11th overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected president. I refer you to Kenneth Maxwell, Senior fellow at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin Studies, now well documented dispute with the editors of a December issue of Foreign Affairs, who says that his claims about Kissinger’s role in the overthrow inflamed some statesman close him. He says that Kissinger himself exerted pressure on the editors of Foreign Affairs not to publish Maxwell's studies. The editors of course denies this. Kissinger, true to form, says nothing. Here are the links for specifics. http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/uploads/images/104/maxwell_working_paper.pdf http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/8919.html Clearly, the intellectual ground is fertile enough in this country now to start planting those seeds, what with terrorism and Iraq occupying the greater portion of most people’s frontal lobes. But while we in this country struggle with moral amnesia and a case of seeing a naked emperor who we swear wears the most expensive Armani hand tailored suits, those in Chile hold on to memories of loved ones. Photographs and the hope of justice, whatever that means, are all that sustain them. That, and that if Pinochet dies, we hope there will some sort of cosmic justice for him. Sometimes that’s all we have to go on. M C Biegner Jan 2005

The Lady In the Boat

2005-01-21T17:14:00.000-05:00

The Lady in the Boat I glanced over my shoulder. At first, it looked like a dark spot hovering over the murky riverbed in fog as dense as a burial shroud, a curtain that quieted the landscape, even the crickets and loons, and left my footfall alone to accompany the tune that keep circling around in my head, something from Mozart I think. I had the feeling that something important was about to happen, a feeling I have often experienced, sometimes for reason but more often, not. Perhaps it was the eerie feel of it all and I was late. I placed my rucksack a little higher on my back and continued my journey along the river bank, no time to linger here thinking about impossible impressions, and focused my attention on the smell of smoke from someone’s fire as it mixed with the fog. Apple wood? Yellow birch? No time to dwell on silly thoughts. As the day closed, I had many miles of my journey ahead. I tried to shake off the feeling and continue. It’s narrow bow poked at me like an arrow as it pierced the dense cloud. Brilliant lacquered red and deepest ebony, its slick approach was silent and startling. Overpowered, I hesitated. Slowly, like the drops of mist that floated around us, it consumed my gaze, and though I wanted to look away, I was mesmerized by the site of the glistening paint, the sleekness of the vessel, as an eel gliding through the water without sound, ready to strike. And then, as I looked up, the figure appeared, sitting in the middle, eyes straight ahead, guiding the boat. I turned away, not wanting to be rude, not wanting to stare, and wishing only to continue my journey, light growing short after all, and this, no business of mine. But my gaze returned to the traveler. At first, I couldn’t tell, but soon realized it was a woman who, with delicate hands, held her oar high in the water and looked almost like a conductor ready to guide a symphony. The long braid of her hair curled up at the end and was fastened with a golden clip, like a musical clef at the beginning of a staff, and I laughed to myself that in one sheltered glance I would see music in her very being, since music had been playing in my head from the start of my journey, though I don’t know why, not being particularly inclined myself. She too carried a pack on her back, and I wondered what was inside. Notes to a song, perhaps, I thought, laughing again to myself, but maybe, more likely, notes to a lover, and then her eyes caught mine . I lowered my gaze and hurried along, muttering a quick “Good evening.” “A beautiful night for a journey,” she said, her voice lilting and engaging, one who could sing like an angel, I’m sure. “Yes,” I said. “although you cannot see far ahead.” The boat bobbed up and down gently, as the water splashed in rhythm against the rocks on the bank. I found that comforting, although the fog continued to give me distress and I needed to continue on. “No, not far ahead, but as far as you need,” she said, almost in song. She turned her head and smiled, and for the first time I saw the face of a young woman, one who looked familiar, although I could not place her. Perhaps a distant relative, I thought. Her eyes were clear, bright, intense in their gaze, and her hair glowed with streaks of light as it streamed down her slender back. He skin was as translucent as the mist, and I found myself wondering if I had ever seen a more beautiful woman. Her dress was a vivid red silk with purple and gold trim, and her feet were bare. “You would like to travel with me, yes?” How strange a question, I thought, but she seemed foreign, and perhaps this language was not her own. “I am confident with my journey here on land. I have places to go. But thank you for your offer,” I turned away, made my step a little faster along the path, but then tripped on the moss. “So silly, I am forgetting the new darkness it seems.” I silently cursed my own lack of agility, and blamed my age for taking away some of my sharpness. “The darkness is not to be forgotten, it is to be embraced,” she said, waving the oar over her head and placing it silently in the water again. “We move with so much effort, but the water continues with ease on its own deliberate course, do you see that?” “I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said, not wishing to startle this stranger, but needing to explain my own annoyance. “I tripped. That is all. But I am fine and must continue on my way.” I righted my sack, and my stance, took a deep breath and started out. But barely had I moved when she sang again, calling me back. “What do you carry?” The boat now stopped, her oar in the water planted firmly in the thick mud of the river bottom while her body swayed gently from side to side, embracing the oar as it moved, keeping time with the challenge of the water, like a pendulum. She is hypnotizing me, I thought; I watched her rhythmic movement, side to side, feeling both intrigued and also tired of this encounter. What did I carry? I carried much, but was not sure I wanted to get into the minor details of my life with one I did not know. I decided I needed to go on, and leave her with her questions. I forced myself to blink and look away. “I carry nothing of substance,” I said and excused myself, turning about, checking my footing on the moss-covered path. “That is good, and your journey?” she asked. I hesitated, looking from her to the path ahead. “I am not sure where I am going, but I’m searching, a wanderer I guess,” I said, wondering at the sudden ease of my tongue with this stranger. I was annoyed at myself for letting her engage me, and yet speaking to her was comfortable. “But time being what it is, I would like to continue on, it is already dark and I know I have far to go. And it grows cold.” I shivered, then looked into her eyes again unable to break our communion. “By the way, what is it you carry?” “All my earthly loves,” she said, without hesitation, “All my earthly claims.” “That sounds like quite a large burden,” I said, noticing the fog was clearing a bit and the crickets were starting to sing, everything was swirling around me again, and I had hope of moving about. “Oh no! The load is light,” she said. She looked at me, smiled with what I can only describe as enchantment, then cast her eyes downward and started to hum, so softly at first that I didn’t realize what I heard was her voice, more a vibration like a violin that is touched in the gentle way of a master producing a sound so low it seems to come from the ground or the air or the sky. She seemed in a trance, her sounds, guttural, primal, with the rhythm of the waves as it grew louder. Her voice released a captivating melody in time with the loons and with everything around us, even the silent mist, and the rolling fog, and the clouds and the river moving by us, and I realized it was a lullaby, my first and only lullaby and it pulled me and it tormented me and it coaxed me and it left me stunned. I could not move. “You will come with me now.” She crooned, both arms open. “No, I wish to continue.” I said, but even as the words spilled from my mouth, I dropped my rucksack and turned toward her, empty of hand. She nodded, continued to hum and I absorbed the sound of her delicate, floating notes and the sound of the crickets and the sound of a leaf falling hard against a tree stump and the sound of my lazy heartbeat vibrating in my chest. I watched my foot move in slow motion toward her, and then my unsure hand grab the side of the boat as I slipped in beside her, feeling light as the night air, lighter than I’d felt since a child running in the fields by my home, as light as a silver beam from the moon as it hands itself to the magic of night. The silk slap of the waves swirled around the boat and then grew quiet, and the smell of the earth and the leaves and the trees and the smoke and the moss filled my nostrils, and I inhaled the glorious perfume, let it overpower me, let it go; the sweet taste of the mist, and the salt of my tears, more flavorful than any wine placed on my lips, and it too was done. I glanced back at the riverbank as the world dissolved into the luscious velvet of the fog and mist, its scents and tastes and sounds and textures, all left to settle on the deep water, as she and the loons and the crickets sang me to delicious sleep. Dot Read

The Type

2005-01-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

The Type I know your type (But not your font) And I am casting about To see past the hair And the clothes And the age And gender, Because I am lonely too, And I want to fall Into your love. You are the one Working your way Through school, Slicing one too many bagels Trying to really smile At the next person in line, While at the same time Attempting to live with a dignity Somewhere beyond "Have a nice day!" Did we just make eye contact? And flash for a second On each other in a way That moved a step beyond Judge and jury? And moved perhaps, Beyond this life And circled round To recognize And humanize this moment? Maybe you were the one Who drew the peace symbol In the hallway By the bathrooms? I know that type…

Arise My Love

2005-01-17T21:16:00.000-05:00

Arise My Love Sometimes his whole day was spent walking by the river, his one strong leg leading the way for its weaker counterpart. His limping way was measured and slow on the stones of the path – strong foot planted firmly – weak foot moving in a sudden burst to catch up. The weak foot never passed the strong foot. It needed it there, always in its sight, always ahead as a guide and never behind. With each step, the strong foot showed the weak foot what to do so that the weak foot didn’t need to remember. It could put all of its bit of strength into each movement, always in the present moment, always living in the struggle of now. The man lived in a hut set back from the river path. He woke each morning to the sunlight pouring over the distant hills and dancing across the river until it reached his shore and finally his door. Once he had risen for the day the man never yawned. He was busy every moment from the sun’s bright hello to the calming blue of the evening sky. First he had to dress himself. He wore slacks and a tunic made of linen that seemed to hang about him without actually touching his body. When he walked, it was as if he were moving through the clothes and the clothes just happened to be moving in the same direction at the same time. After dressing, the man ate a simple breakfast. Next he combed any errant crumbs from his beard as he peered into the small mirror that hung above his little table. The sight of the mirror hanging on the yellowing wall always brought a smile to the man’s weathered face. It was all he had of her. It was delicate like she had been, with graceful lines – pretty but not showy – and like her, it spent its life as an offering for others. Before stepping outside into the day the man would take his peaked cap from the hook by the door and place it precisely on his head. On this day the man’s hat was lying on the floor just inside the door. The man did not think twice before steadying himself on his strong leg and bending it slowly, bit by bit, letting his weak leg slide out to the side. Once he was down - strong leg bent - weak leg extended – he reached slowly for the hat and placed it on his head before attempting to rise. The act of picking up his hat meant that he might not reach the village today. Each day it seemed that he had just enough in him to make his way down the river and just enough time to sit and rest in the village square before making the journey home. Any extra expense of strength, any moments spent on an irregular task, and he might not have enough strength or time to complete his daily journey and that journey was his life. What was he if not the man who limped and sat in the village square and limped home again? Each moment lived knowing what he was to do and doing it. The man set out this day a little later than usual and a little more spent. He made his way down the river path – strong foot planted firmly – weak foot following behind. He could not try to go faster. He always moved in the fullness of his present capabilities. Strong foot – weak foot – strong foot – weak foot. Something did not feel right in the man’s back and he bent his arms behind him, palms resting on either side of his spine, as if to push himself along. Strong foot – weak foot – strong foot – weak foot. A light breeze blew off of the river and wrapped the man in the scent of sweet white blossoms that stirred over his head. He was usually acutely aware of his surroundings, only they were always just what they were, nothing else… but today, this smell, this softness, the sweetness… it had to be her perfume carried to him by an obliging wind. The man stopped on the path. He had never thought of her on his walks before. He always left her safe with his reflection in the mirror. Now he had brought her out into the world and the world was not her friend. He had not gone far. Perhaps he would return home. Strong foot – weak foot. As the man turned, the weak foot gave way beneath him and he crumpled to the ground. As he lay on the path, dust in his eyelashes - a stone beneath his cheek, he heard a bird burst in joyful song and it reminded him of her voice. His eyes fluttered, spilling dust, and the bird song grew stronger. The bird must be coming his way. The man managed to raise his head from the path. Just coming into sight on the river was the pointed bow of a boat hovering over the water. It moved swiftly, softly, until the boat’s passenger came into view. The man felt no surprise. He was not shocked to see her gliding on the water dressed in purple and holding a dove in her lap. Somewhere in the quiet corners of his heart he had expected her. This must be why he walked along the river every day. He had known that she would come for him, of course he did. She used no paddle or rudder to steer the boat. It slid like a sliver of the moon over the water and right to the shore. As she rose, the folds of her purple velvet fell like water down her body and she stood straight and tall. The dove flew easily to her shoulder where it perched and continued to sing. She walked along the boat and stepped softly to the shore. She was everything he remembered and everything he knew she had become. She moved like the boat, seeming to skim the surface of the land. She knelt before him and he lay his weary head in the velvet nest of her lap. She began to sing with the bird and it seemed to the man that their voices were one and different at the same time. He could not understand her words, but he knew what she said. “Arise my love and walk with me on silver water and frosted seas. Arise above the stones of earth, be born of light and give it birth. Arise my dear one, come now arise.” Then lightly, gently they stood together – the woman – the man – on the path by the riverside. She took his hand and led him to the doorway of his hut. The man lay on his bed, the woman seated at his side. She smoothed his brow with her delicate hand and the man watched her steadily. There was no disbelief in his gaze, rather his eyes showed contentment and his mouth peace. As he drifted off to sleep she brought her lips close to his ear and whispered “It will not be much longer. Soon we shall be together my love….” When he awoke with the dawn she had gone. That next day the man did not rise from his bed. On the second day he did. Once he had dressed himself in linen he moved towards a long undisturbed corner of his hut. Strong foot – weak foot – strong foot – weak foot. He bent himself to open the wooden chest that was hidden in the shadows. Reaching in, the man drew out a roll of heavy fabric and a bundle that was wrapped in paper and tied up with string. He closed the chest and brought his treasures to the table. First he unrolled the fabric and turned it so that it curved over the edges of the table. He set his bowl on one end and his cup on the other to keep it flat. Next he untied the package with the string. Out spilled an assortment of brushes and blocks of pigment that were dry and cracking in some places. The man glanced up at the mirror on his wall and smiled. He stood and, taking the wooden bowl in his hand, he made his way to the river. After drawing water, the man moved slowly back to his table. Strong foot – weak foot – strong foot – weak foot. Once he was seated again the man began to paint. It had been years, but he was an old friend of the way the colors moved through the water on the canvas. Just as with any task, the man painted with economy, purpose and skill. On the third day a small crowd from the village arrived looking for the man. They had missed him in the village square and they came to see if all was well. Once the bravest among them had peeked in through the window and assured the others that the man was alive and seated at his table, the crowd pushed through the doorway and then craned their necks around each other to see the painting with which the man was occupied. The crowd praised the man’s talent. The canvas showed a series of pictures flowing in and out of each other. In each picture there was a woman dressed in purple. Along her journey she was joined by a man in a peaked cap. The last bit, that the man was still finishing, showed the woman in purple holding a dove on her lap. She was seated in the middle of a delicate and ancient boat that seemed to hover over the water of a river. Just from looking at the painting the crowd felt that they knew this woman and her history intimately. The man knew that before long he would be with his loved one but that first he had a job to do. When he had lost her, he locked her memory up inside himself and in the mirror on his wall and in the chest in the corner. The world had taken her away and so the world could not be trusted with her. But now that he had seen her, he understood. She was beyond the pain of this world and they could do her no harm. The floodgates he had so carefully constructed were now flung wide. There was so much to say. There were stories to be told, paintings to be made, tears to be cried and smiles to be shared. Bit by bit the man opened himself and shared the story of the woman he loved with all who would listen. And all who chose to listen were blessed. -Alia Williams

Why I Miss George

2005-01-17T09:53:00.000-05:00

I finally watched the Concert for George on DVD last night, having received it for Christmas and it jogged my memory that he died on November 29th. My wife reminded me that Carey Grant also died on that date. She also reminded me this was her mother’s birthday. I wondered if there are there zodiac signs for the deceased? I mean we attribute personality characteristics to the living predicated on what month they are born. Are there characteristics of the dead, predicated on what month they died? Do the dead exchange clichéd lines at post mortem bars, “Hey, what’s your after life sign?” And what of those who are one sign during life, but a contradictory sign after life? What if you are an Aries or Leo in life (fire signs) but say a Cancer or Scorpio in death (clearly, water signs). Do we need to make any adjustments to such a change? After watching the DVD I am awash in a grave sense of loss, years after the event. His music reminds me of what we have lost. I miss George Harrison. Terribly. And the funny thing is, I am not entirely certain that I can put into words why. As I listened to his music and watched these people who clearly loved him singing his words I was comforted. Certainly, seeing his son Dhani onstage looking like his very clone was both comforting and spooky at the same time. You could still see the grief in the back of Eric Clapton’s eyes – even on the DVD. He was the musical coordinator of this concert, and as he wrote in the liner notes for the DVD, this was something he needed to do to facilitate the grieving process. Clapton knows grief. George as the “quiet” Beatle, was anything but, it turns out. He had a lot to say, and by God, much of it had depth, girth and weight. Where John Lennon spent years running away from the pressures of being a Beatle, George embraced a view of the world that at once removed him from these pressures and also engaged him in the world. Where McCartney ran to wealth and a comfortable country family life (himself, struggling with the loss of his wife Linda to cancer), George made music extolling the spiritual life. Before benefit concerts were chic, does anyone recall that George raised money for those struggling in Bangladesh as they were dealing with the worst imaginable drought? But this was not out of a sense of “responding from privilege” as we get from many rock stars today. George did this, I surmise, because it rose from his sense of the spiritual. I listen to Ringo sing “Photograph” – a song he co-wrote with George – and am frozen by the eerie prophetic lyrics. Ev'ry time i see your face It reminds me of the places we used to go. But all i got is a photograph And i realise you're not coming back anymore. I can't get used to living here, While my heart is broke, my tears i cried for you. I want you here to have and hold, As the years go by and we grow old and grey. Now you're expecting me to live without you, But that's not something that i'm looking forward to. I can't get used to living here, While my heart is broke, my tears i cried for you. I want you here to have and hold, As the years go by and we grow old and grey. Ev'ry time i see your face, It reminds me of the places we used to go. But all i got is a photograph And i realise you're not coming back anymore. Sad and creepy. I was impressed when Ringo announced to the crowd, "I loved George and George loved me." It was that type of bold imperative statement that seems unshakeable. It doesn't equivocate. It was the statement a brother and only a brother could make. That sort of certainty put me at ease. Remember when George went off to study with the Maharishi, how we’d all thought he’d flipped? And that was in the sixties when things like this were normally considered cool. Seems he was right all along, doesn’t it? Seek spiritual growth, and the rest will follow I guess. I remember watching a Beatle tribute not too long ago on TV and Paul made the comment about all of their songs in some way being about love. How much did George’s world view about love influence Paul and John to write about this subject? How much of George’s peaceful and spiritual demeanor was the oil that lubricated the friction between John and Paul during those tumultuous years? It’s speculative at best. But it is conceivable that in his “quiet” way, in his humble way, he brought the kind of energy the “Beatles” as a group needed to write such life affirming songs. You won’t see his name on the songs but I believe his influence was there anyway, in typical George style, underplayed, undervalued, and unseen. I suppose it is somewhat telling that his favorite chords on the guitar, and ones he loved to use most in his music, were diminished chords. George’s sense of the diminished self, of seeking truth over ego permeated the man wherever he went, and you can see that in the friends that showed up at this concert. You could even feel that in the audience, yes, even through the DVD. Yet George wrote lyrics like: “Beware of sadness, it can hit you, it can hurt you, Make you sore and what is more, That is not what you are here for.” These lines illustrate that he knew what it was to be in the world but he puts it into context: you are meant for greater things. It’s this sense of the transcendent in the guise of this seemingly diminished soul that I think resonates with me, and perhaps, this is why I miss him and his music so much. We need this today, more than ever. In an industry that exalts the self, and wealth, and faux artistry, this man joined art and spirit with the gentle passion of his own spirituality. He didn’t force anyone to listen; he didn’t push his ideas down. They bubbled up from his integration of spirit with body, in humility. This intensity may not have translated into many top 10 songs during his solo career (though he did have quite a few) and many in my time felt his “Indian” slant to music was hard to listen to, he did what all the greats do and he ran to himself. He honored his own vision of his art, and people saw this and flocked to his message. Thank God, is all I can say! They felt his gentleness. They felt his commitment to peace. Like me, years after his death listening to his music, these feelings reverberate in all of us, affirming what it is we all really want. George embodied this in his living and in his art. This is what makes him genuine. Maybe this is why I feel like I am missing a friend for in a real sense, though we have never met, I am. His songs were uplifting in the most subtle sort of way, and that is what friends do for each other. This is how we take in the most critical information that we assimilate to our very core. This is how we learn to become spiritual.

Prostrate Before the Holy Virgin

2005-01-10T09:47:00.000-05:00

“God works in mysterious ways. You think you have a plan, but God has His own plan.” It was the weekend and time for my theology lesson from my mother, the patron saint of finding something good out of the deepest, darkest pile of shit life has a way of throwing at you. After a million years as her son I was used to it. Still, I could tell something was different in her voice that made her proselytizing different, more urgent than before. “Want to tell God a good joke?” she said over the phone. “Tell him you have plans.” “Yeah, ma, yeah.” I was barely listening still there was something in her voice that was different. I could not put my finger on it – it was just a feeling. I was having a hard time of it lately, and she knew it, though I don’t know how she knew it. “Ma, I really do believe everything works out in the end. I know I need to keep believing, but can’t you let me keep faith in my own way?” I could hear her deflate over the phone. “He knows what’s best for you,” she said, “even if you don’t. Oh I know you and your brother laugh at me and how you used to laugh whenever your Father and I took you to church.” This was somewhat true. My mother was a Catholic witch, and we did laugh at her adherence to the rituals, spells, incantations and the patriarchy, but I could not tell her this. “Your Father is turning over in his grave,” she said. “When did we make fun of you?” I complained. I heard the defensiveness in my own voice going into the handset of the phone. “Oh you know, laughing at the priests and the people who attended mass, you always laughed at the readings. Then as you got older you brought all that godless literature into the house, Nietzsche and Marx. Would it have killed you to read some Thomas Aquinas? Some St. Augustine? How about some Papal Encyclicals?” In point of fact, I had read some Aquinas and some Augustine and the all Vatican Council II documents but I was in no mood to argue. I thought of my Dad. “Well, I’m sorry, Ma. Kids should never treat their parents that way – especially mothers. You know how you held us together. You know, especially after Dad died.” “Oh, I know,” she consoled “You were just kids. What did you know?” But I could still feel the sting in her voice. It never occurred to me until just then how painful parenting could be. I knew it was fraught with perils and dilemmas and all sorts of trade offs, but no one ever talks about the pain of parenting. “You’ll come back to God, just you wait. You are still young.” “Yeah, I know, there are no atheists in foxholes and on deathbeds.” “That’s right, dear, and even if you never go back to Him, I had you baptized you are His whether you like it or not.” I felt like I was part of a cult; like I was part of some X-files episode where the alien ships would return and claim what was theirs and I would be among them. I heard the loon clock go off in the background over the phone. I always hated that clock, but my Dad had bought it for my Mom. “Still got that Loon clock, huh?” I asked her. “Isn’t it wonderful? You father bought that for me the year before he died.” I interrupted her. “Yeah Mom, I know, you’ve told me before.” “It’s such a sad sound, don’t you think?” she said after a slight pause. “I know how much you boys hated it – still your Father and…” I stopped her there. I didn’t want her to finish the thought. “I know, Ma, I know.” “Still”, her voice rebounded as though she had been asleep and was suddenly awakened, “that reminds me – it’s almost time for Mass. Do you want to make an old lady happy and come take me to Mass? There is a Mass over at Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt and Father Donally is saying the Mass. You remember him, don’t you? If we get there early we can get a good seat and be the first to receive communion.” I stifled a chuckle. She didn’t realize what she had said. “Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt?” I asked. “No, I meant Peace – what did I say?” “You said ‘Guilt’ – you said ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt.” I was laughing now and I felt the same way as when my brother and I would make fun of people in Church, and the priests and even the statues. Like the time someone broke off Jesus’ first finger while cleaning the statue. His right hand was held up to his heart with the first two fingers extended, only with the broken pointer finger it looked like Jesus was flipping us the bird. This kept my brother and me laughing for months until they fixed it. “You know what I meant,” she said, “Don’t be a weisenheimer!” Weisenheimer? That was something my Dad used to call us. I never understood where he got that expression. My Dad was a strict German Lutheran with family from upstate New York. How did words like “weisenheimer” creep into his vocabulary? “Did Dad really believe in all this, Ma? I mean the religion and all,” I asked her out of the blue. It caught her square and unready and she flailed for a response. “Oh, why, I suppose – you know he converted to Catholicism, don’t you?” “Yeah, I knew that,” I responded. This always made me think of my Father in a different way – sort of a romantic way – a man willing to forgo his own Lutheran faith for the love of a woman. Still, this was not a great leap of faith, was it? I mean he converted from being a Lutheran to becoming a Catholic. It was not quite like him needing to get circumcised or anything. I had to change the subject. All this talk about “Our Lady of whatever” made me think of our trip down to Santiago de Chile, years ago, when I took my mother to visit my brother. My brother had been living in one of the worst barrios in Santiago with Maryknoll Missioners and I went with her to visit him. “Remember the time we were in Santiago, and we went to visit the Lady of Santiago?” The Lady of Santiago was this huge statue in the center of Santiago that tourists flocked to from all over. It was not quite as large as the famous statue of Jesus that overlooked Rio de Janerio, but it was still pretty big and just as imposing. “You know, if you ask Mary to bring things to Jesus she will. She will intercede for you.” My mother was still teaching. “Yes, Ma, I know that. Do you remember when we went there and you were so busy looking up at the statue, you fell over in a small ditch?” She started to laugh and it made me feel it was okay to start laughing as well. “Yes, yes, I was laid prostrate before the Holy Virgin,” she tried to get out between huffs of laughter. That is what we told people. We were made prostrate before the Holy Virgin. It was our own personal, private miracle though it was less of a miracle and more of just an act of clumsiness. Still we thought it was pretty funny. I thought of how she raised eight children, and supported five of them alone without her husband after my Dad died with no income. I thought of those Christmas evenings, the house decorated as best as she could, and how we never went without during that whole time growing up –I remember those times when she sat there with the lights out in the dark, crying and me, playing Christmas carols on my guitar as a teenager, incapable of even reckoning such grief and loneliness let alone being able to do anything about it. It was at this moment that my faith crystallized. I don’t know if Mary was a Virgin or if God was one person in three. I don’t know if I believed in a first coming or a second coming. But I did believe in the strength of the woman on the other end of this line. I did believe in that sort of resiliency and bounce to life’s misery. I did believe that this is the power that moves the world, no matter what the cynics say and if this is faith, then yes, I believe. And it didn’t matter how I expressed it, but, as in my Mother’s case, all that mattered is that I lived it. We talked some more about that trip to Santiago, and I glanced up at the clock. “Ma, let me hang,” I said. “Let me come over and pick you up and we can go to Mass together.” I heard an audible gasp on the other end of the phone, then silence. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect she was crying. “God does work in mysterious ways,” she said. “Just think of it as just another soul made prostrate before the Holy Virgin,” I said to her. I heard her giggle, and for the very first time that I can ever recall, she sounded like a little girl.

Resolution

2005-01-09T11:07:00.000-05:00

The day has an edge like a ruler and is as inviting As an open clearing in the woods. I have resolved to walk among these shy hills New Year’s Day; I seek resolution in the roads that push and pull me . There is order and beauty in everything - Even in the litter that lines the roads – Orphaned cigarette packs, flattened juice boxes Beer pack rings, all the dullness of road salt. I follow the Sacred Silence into the New Year. Winter’s voice is a series of wind chimes When I am greeted by disembodied voices Carried on the wind like insects – “It’s so nice out!” and without seeing anyone I make human contact. A pair of ponies and chestnut brown mare Turn their heads and want to know what I am about. How do I answer them? Still, I follow the rock path, Upward, like Ezekiel in his chariot of fire, Into the hills. Into the Sacred Silence of the New Year. The jays have marked their territory With darting, nervous eyes – They flit just above the brown grasses feathered by the Wind. Ashen cedar bat boxes line the barbed wire That protects a local reclamation project – These are the legacy of an ex-brother-in-law Who loved the environment of earth But could not reclaim the environment of his own heart And soon, left his wife and the area. But I am not here to judge today. Today, I march upward over lazy, slothful oaks; I count rings in trunks that seem like open faces and try to relive the life of a Tree. Can anyone do that? Speckled green and white lichen decorate mortally wounded trees, Resting with ears pressed against the soft Brown autumn carpet. I see bare blueberry bushes, Denuded and frozen in hardened sunlight Purple in the quiet and stillness, They suggest a New Years Eve Celebration – When the ball has dropped And the champagne is popped And confetti flies – Limbs flagrant and spontaneous, Locked into positions, Calling me; Waiting for me to pass by and take notice. The thickness of wrinkled tree bark, Bent and splintered, twisted and gray Is like some Civil War battlefield, Evoking ghosts of something wild, Some bravado of nature at her very worst; “Something courageous has happened here,” I think. There, up ahead, an Irish Setter the size of a small bear chases a tennis ball tumbles down the path to greet me – the dog’s owners descend As I ascend, and we meet To discuss the plight of wounded deer in the woods And trapped, injured animals And writing and poetry – They tell me to be on the look out for an owl With a heart shaped face – So I watch My breathing stills So that I may see such a creature – My heart is lifted When we part, And a newer, larger nearly yellow dog approaches - I am his brother. I do not stare at him directly, For I do not want to challenge him – This land is his and I am the stranger; I intrude with every breath. Still, I look for the owl With the heart shaped face, But do not see her. There is now a boastful wind among the Pines That stand so erect, With no idea of correction; The dull waving of evergreen Announces the wind like royalty. For the wind, too, is my brother And I do not want to look into its eyes either; I stand by broken pine and the wood Mourns soulfully; The wind coaxes sad songs From the pine: “I am broken and used”. And the sad melody moves me With the compassion of a mystic. Crows as dark as pitch Wrap cold air around themselves And slide down among the shadows, Expanding the distance of the demur rolling hills. Apple trees with rickety twisted arms Sneer and make fun of me As if holding their hands to their ears And taunting me the way children do. Playful streams Full of meandering spirit, Are stopped dead On their backs, flat and serpentine Willy-nilly, like kids playing freeze tag – Like Lot’s wife, turned to salt – These are turned to Ice With a single glare of Winter’s stare. Suddenly, there is the embrace of stillness. The flaxen grasses unfold before Mt. Tom’s head held upright Aloof and does not care a whit what goes on below. I pass the tired Oldsmobile hubcap And wonder if it will be missed – Does anyone know it sits here at all? Even the trash seems so sad now. The downhill road now spills me out Like a giant black tongue Back down to where I started. As I pass an angry red “POSTED” sign Which warns: “Keep out!” “You don’t belong” “No Hunting” I hunt only Beauty. Surely I do not need my hunter’s orange cap for this. But I hunt beauty in reverse. I let Beauty stalk me quietly, I let her kill me And make me into a holiday dinner – A feast for everyone, The way I am changed when I walk among these hills The bragging wind shrieks around a telephone wire – And asks me what is it I seek in all this emptiness And I respond, “Yes! That is it! That is it!” I have made a New Year’s Resolution That I should walk these shy hills On the first day of each New Year. I have not asked you to walk with me, But perhaps you will. For though we are men, Today we are gods. There is much yet to suffer, I will be courageous; There is much yet to build, I will be industrious; There is much to forgive, I will be gracious; For it would be a shameful thing to pass another year Without making something new for my children. It would be shameful to die Without leaving something behind. Jan 2005

Miraculous

2004-12-25T19:43:00.000-05:00

The music in the car on the way to the hospital was interesting. First, Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds”: “don’t worry/about a thing/cuz every little thing/ gonna be alright”. That was followed by Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”. I have to admit I was feeling it, if just a little. But when we got to the O.R. prep room, they piped in music and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” wafted through the quasi private beds in the prep room. This was my Dad’s favorite song. I was only a week away from the 30th anniversary of his death. There are no coincidences. I was not alone and I really wasn’t nervous, just anxious to get it done with, get it over. In the prep room the nurse asked me questions and had me get into a paper flimsy Johnny. “Can I leave the skivvies on?” wincing at the word “skivvies” – no one calls underwear skivvies these days. Bonehead. “Nice try!” the nurse responds, and I go commando tightening the Johnny around as tight as I could for some sort of privacy. Steve and Chris came after that and kept me company. It was great having them there, especially Steve. I know how much he hates hospitals but I also know how much it meant to Chris to have him there. Soon after that, Chris’ sister, Judy arrived and yes, we were now officially a “scene”. Can you imagine if my out of state family had driven up as they warned they might? I’d have been blacklisted from the hospital for sure. Across from me was a frail looking elderly woman, with blue-white hair. Her bony body was covered up beneath the blanket but I could see how the Johnny hung off her making her arms look like the clapper of a bell, flailing with all the space and the large roominess the Johnny provides. I think about the things we are taught as kids about modesty and propriety, and how this all disappears in a hospital. The old woman is chatting nervously but causally with an older middle aged man, presumably her son. I could almost see her trying to sell me chances to the next St. Anthony’s festival for her local church parish. She wore an oversized blue cap which clashed with her wrinkled alabaster skin. Next to her was a larger man who was being prepped for open heart surgery. He was extraordinarily hairy and since they were cracking his chest, they had to shave him. They pulled the privacy curtain around him and began. The droning continued for what had to be 15 minutes. Steve looked over to me and muffled a laugh. I knew what he was thinking. After a while, after we had all grown immune to the bee-like hum of the surgical razor, I heard the man being shaved exclaim in a dark, mocha baritone, “I think we’re starting a small brush fire here!” The whole O.R. prep room broke up with laughter. Steve almost lost it and I laughed out loud. My nurse also shook her head with a grin that scooped across her face. At least there would be laughter going into this. It occurred to me then how the lot that was assembled in this room were the beneficiaries of today’s magic. These men and women – doctors and nurses – were going to be lopping off organs, cracking open ribs, dipping their hands into the deepest innermost regions of human beings. I wondered if any of my soul would be lost, allowed to escape into the ether as I lay there inside out to the airborne world. I thought about how years ago, these same men and women would be tried for witchcraft, and magic and all sorts of savagery. Gathered in this room was the pinnacle of human medical need and medical technology and know how. Flying was once an interface of the unknown: it took a special sort of courage to fly across the continent. We now board flights hourly across the world with little more concern than whether or not our luggage will reach our planned destination. Likewise, these surgeons require a different sort of courage, but again, so much has been made mundane: it is the routine that belies the “hardness” of it. Maybe, I think, it is just another form of ritual that glides our way in the modern world. Soon the anesthesiologist stops by: he is a square man with a round shiny head, and seems incapable of wearing a smile. His job was to administer the epidural which took him two attempts after lots of pricking and having my shoulders and upper body held back by a smaller more pleasing appearing black man named Josh. I didn’t mind the square smile-less doctor missing the mark, though I have to say, he reached new levels of pain with each prick of the needles. I did mind that the guy never cracked a smile. Maybe he was new. Maybe he was nervous. I’d heard most anesthesiologists were hoots! Comes from the fact that maybe they’d partaken of some of the nitrous they seemed to be able to get their licensed hands on. No, a sense of humor makes us better at what we do, I believe and even if it doesn’t? it helps us fake it until we make it much smoother. It was smart, however, to get the epidural in correctly right from the start. This was my instinct, as I figured this was going to control the pain – along with every other bodily function below my waist for the next few days – it had to be right. The prep room was a flurry of activity. I saw Dr.”C” only once, dressed smartly in a black turtleneck and black pea coat. I remember his outfit because the dark colored outfit contrasted brilliantly with his sliver hair and white, taut trim beard. He came in to crack a few jokes (“The left kidney right?” – it was the right he was too remove – to which I responded, “okay, is that MY right or YOUR right?” He autographed my RIGHT flank, to indicate where he would cut, and then he disappeared to get dressed for surgery. Soon they wheeled me in. I gave Chris and Judy and Steve hugs and kisses and I just saw hands moving all around me. No one even acknowledged my presence in the room. Then, out of nowhere, a clear mask came over my nose and mouth and I was gone. I slept a dreamless sleep. It was like a moonless, starless night. Nothing. I was hoping for some good dreams. My first vision was the clock and I was trying to do the math in my head. I knew I had gone in sometime after noon and I was trying to read the clock, then compute the math. Was it done? Or did I horribly and accidentally wake up in the middle of the operation? Dr. “C” was standing in front of me shouting, “IT WAS CANCER! WE GOT IT” and me feebly giving him the thumbs up, then in my typically idiosyncratically way, thinking, “Do you suppose he thought I meant the “thumbs up” as though I was saying, ‘Yay, Cancer!’?” Even with allthat anesthesia, my mind just wouldn’t cut me any slack. I swear, I’m hopeless. I stopped worrying what Dr. “C” might think about my “political stance on cancer”, and fell back to sleep but not before asking for my family. I was at least conscious enough to ask that correctly. The procedure took a little longer than anticipated, but only because they had misplaced the film (which I had actually brought with me to prevent this very thing from happening). Also, the cancer was deeper than he had estimated from the film. He went back twice to scoop out more and more kidney until he could be sure he was dealing with clean tissue. He did frozen sections on each scoop until he had what he felt was a clean section – about 1/3 of my right kidney altogether. The cancer was gone and I felt like packed cotton: tight, bound, and really no pain. There was an IV in my right arm. All that kept playing through my head was: “The cancer is gone! The Cancer is gone!” But for how long? I am reminded of that Lakota Sioux line: “Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while I am being carried on great wings across the sky.” That’s what I feel like right now. At this moment, I am just one small idiot not blessed, but acutely aware that I am at one point of a cycle that can sometimes be not so forgiving, and not seem so “spiritual”. Will I feel as grateful and humble when the other side of that wheel comes around? I have done nothing to either deserve getting this cancer, nor have I done a thing that warranted its random finding and eventual cure. I am a fool if I think otherwise. I grip the ropes tighter, enjoy the now, and am aware of the wheel making its way around. Give me the grace to bear with that, when it comes, as abundantly as I have been given this grace, here today. That is all I ask. Einstein once said: “There are two ways to view the world: as if everything in it is a miracle, or as if everything is not a miracle.” I have chosen the former. And even if this cancer comes back, and I am fighting again, won’t that be miraculous? And when I am asked to face the struggle that is the condition of mankind, won’t that be wonderous? God, please just give me the strength to remember this. And if you are my friends, I expect nothing else but for you to remind me of this.

Dear Writing It Up In the Garden Castaways

2004-12-10T08:28:00.000-05:00

We sit here on the cusp of a holiday respite and it is December. Despite what Eliot wrote, April cannot even begin to hold a candle to December in the type of cruelty months can dole out. I am a week away from major surgery and while I am aware this is only a bit riskier than, say, driving without my seat belt - well, okay, maybe it is a bit higher risk than this – my superstitions still get the best of me sometimes. Thirty years ago, nearly to the day, my father died in December, at age 48 – my age. Two years ago – again, very nearly to the day, I suffered a heart attack. And then of course, there is the anniversary of John Lennon’s death, which I am still struggling to come to terms with. I am remembering my father tonight and there are strange spirits moving in the air. I don’t mean to give in to hyperbole or melodrama, but tonight, I just want to say something to the group – something that should be said, because none of us knows what tomorrow may bring. Yes, I called us the “castaways” because it occurred to me how much like castaways we really are. We all started this journey on a 3-hour tour seeking God-only-knows-what and we find ourselves here, deposited on the shores of this airy and warm Victorian home in Northampton, Massachusetts. Driving home from work tonight my mind raced making connections it had no business making. Elizabeth, of course, would be all Mary Ann – she is as sweet as any country Kansas farm girl – real or fictional. But then so would Gail and Nerissa, who also have some decidedly “Professor-like” qualities, being so smart and steadfast. There is no question that we would have Daniel as our “Skipper”. His writing voice commands respect; it demonstrates knowledge of where to go and what to do. Merideth and Tommy are like those cannibals that came from neighboring islands from time to time, banging coconut shell drums to make music and offer to whisk us away, only to have their plans foiled at the last minute when the evening ends and the group must retire for the evening to the “other world”. John, of course, would have to be “Lovey” – not for any real reason except the thought of it is so surreal, it just fits with his writing style. Charette – or as I prefer to think of her, the “Monet of Narrative” – would have to be the glamorous “Ginger”, though I have serious doubts that Ginger could ever push a noun against a verb the way Charette does. And I would dearly like to proclaim Tom Duffy as sweet as any “Marry Ann” though I suspect he might move away from me slightly in the circle. Beside, he has some definite “Professor” tendencies also, Then of course, there is me. I am the hapless “Gilligan”, sitting here week after week in my goofy red cons, hatching plans in my head which believe me, really do make sense in my head, until I verbalize the ideas, and I get these sideways looks, the way the RCA Victor’s dog’s head is tilted listening to his master's voice from an old victrola. No doubt about it, we are Castaways. We are purposefully marooned here each week to feed whatever it is that makes us need to write. Sometimes, when K-Fucked radio is turned up loud in my head, I hate my writing. I think how to the untrained eye we must seem like just a bunch of crazies sitting in a circle, sucking on tea and cookies, engaging in a self delusional form of mass masturbation of the most indulgent nature. This of course, makes me think of that Woody Allen line “don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with the person I love the most.” But it’s not really like that. Not really. That’s just the K-Fucked radio talking. Look at Cody, the dog. You know how he barks when you enter the room? He just wants to be noticed and I find that so honest I have to lean over and just pet him. I mean, he barks just to get attention. Maybe I should start that practice. It’s much simpler than all the Machiavellian plots I devise to accomplish the same goal. And in the end, that’s all writing is about too, isn’t it? We are all born in isolation and living is that expression outward to making contact. We are all here, barking like Cody, to be noticed. And somehow, this is a comforting thought. Good old Cody. When I go back to the “real world”, I realize what a haven we have created here and the partly it’s because none of us really knows how it was done. Oh yes, there are lots of reasons, but like the best things in life, I am finding, these things just are, and we discover them, like stumbling over our shoes under our bed in the night. We don't create them. Just as when the “Gilligan’s Island” castaways found themselves out of place in the real world when they finally did get rescued (do you remember watching that special episode?) I suspect each of us finds ourselves just a bit out of sorts Friday mornings. So what I mean to say is that none of us knows what the tide will wash up on our shores tomorrow, so this is why we keep at it. Tonight I am thinking of my dad, thinking of how much worse it could be, counting my blessings like a farmer counts his harvest in the fall. Still, I find myself sticking my one foot in that door of “but why me?” just a little. Some things just aren’t right, and this is one of them. I’m not afraid of dying, not that I believe I will die (pain is a whole other question however!) I am tyrannically afraid of not telling those around me how important they are in my life It’s something I’ve had to work at, this overwhelming force which prevents what is inside me from filling the four corners of the night sky. So here, with utter abandon, and complete foolishness I want you all to know – those here now and those who have built their little palm huts in the past and have moved on - how privileged I am to share this island with each of you. How your writing and sparkle have made my days pass with less sturm und drang; how, in the words of Peter to Jesus in one of the Gospels during the transfiguration, “it is good to be here.” Verily, I say. And while maybe our writing has not been catalogued with ISBN numbers, nor reviewed by any scholarly rag, and no one has asked me for that book tour quite yet, what we do is important. What we have found is the very thing we all seek in everything we do: we have found family. So how about we give up a hug and split a cocoanut? Authors Note:Thanks to everyone in this group and any others. Happy Season to all! Fah who foraze! Dah who doraze! Welcome, Christmas! Fah who rahmus! Welcome, Christmas! Dah who dahmus Christmas Day, Will always be Just as long, As we have we - Dr. Suess

Loose Ends

2004-12-02T22:31:00.000-05:00

There are the loose ends That are the details of a life Frayed in chaos They are tears that are Really just promises; You watch bewildered one garment Start to unravel. Until You learn how It’s these tattered loose ends Which make the new garment: The sound of a baby, New constellations, Revitalized courage And the strongest kind of love. Dec 2004 For Charrette and her family (To Infinity and Beyond!)

The Market

2004-11-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

At the market walking between the mounds of produce look down to see your palm curled around an oversized mango swelled with ripeness smooth and spotted look across from you where a woman in a faded red dress picks over the table of discounted fruit

while a child, peeking from behind her swelled legs rubs a tattered blanket to his cheek And the smell of fish and dust reaches up to your nose as you watch single claw rise from the fish tank up and up towards the sky you press your thumbs against the ends of avocados until you find one that gives just a little

and then imagine it cut into perfect half moons resting in circles on a bed of greens the centerpiece for the faces around the table tonight And there is the mound of corn still smelling of of rain and soil and sun hauled in at dawn by a man in overalls whose hands touched every ear every single ear. And the store clerk hands you change taking his time looking you in the eyes saying Thanks since its the only word he knows.

unclean

2004-11-19T00:10:00.000-05:00

It’s been three months since he was there-- Since anyone was there, And the smell of my own body still nauseates me. The fingerprints Fading from purple to yellow Were gone after a few weeks, But it’s still here: Filth through my pores Screams in my blood. I’ve tried Load after load, bed sheets and underwear Scalding water My skin.

The Coolness of the Moon

2004-11-18T23:05:00.000-05:00

The moon is pissed. I know because he stopped me outside my house tonight. He hung there like a smile, slung back, low, relaxed and so cool. He wore dark rimmed spectacles, burly mutton chop sideburns, poured low rise, hip hugging black pleather pants, while balancing a cigarette with a tremble on his lips. The smoke swirled past his torn RANCID t-shirt and circled Orion’s belt. “Yo, dude. ‘Sup?” he says to me. Dude? He is cool, there’s no denying that. He is low in the eastern sky, a crescent on his way to a new moon. He would barely get up off the horizon tonight and he was just feeling like a raw scab. He stretches back, draws a few puffs on the cigarette and waits for me to answer. Then he tells me why he’s pissed. He’s tired of the sun being so everything. It rises, it sets. It’s the sun, no changes, no “phases”. He verbally creates air quotes by emphasizing the word “phases”. He’s sick of the sun being the center of everything. Maybe he would just spin off and start his own solar system. When I explain this is not possible, that there are laws of physics, there is inertia to consider, he just spits. He doesn’t care. He knows people. He has friends. Take Saturn, for instance. Some traveling asteroid comes swinging along, knocks her up and before you know it, it’s wham-bam-thankee-maam there are a dozen moons. “She’s such a slut,” he says. “Saturn?” I ask. “Yeah, and she’s always has to show off the bling-bling.” “The rings?” I ask. “Yeah. Still those guys are my buddies. They would so totally follow me.” I try to leave, but the moon will have none of that. He’s so pissed, his color even looks odd. More yellow than white tonight. He rants about the clouds, how they just cover for that slacker sun; how he’s often off chasing rainbows or things, and no one even knows. And all he does is give people cancer and start forest fires, destroy crops and create droughts. Still, everyone “ooohs” and “aahhhhs” whenever the sun enters or leaves the day. If the moon had arms, I am certain he would be waving them about now. He’s tired of depending on sunlight for his presence. On some days of the month, he hides to show up that big show off, but it’s hard to hide, so he has to show his face again. “And look at this face!” the moon says exasperated. “Tell me if I don’t look like a thirteen year old in a chocolate factory!” It is the marks. It’s not easy getting dates with a face like this, he tells me. I know. I can relate. I tell him some things that I hate about the sun: how you can never really look at it. How it's always too bright and it always gets in the way when driving – especially east and west. The moon takes a deep breath and seems at ease. He tells me to stay cool and have fun at the party. He is heading to a bodacious game of cranium with the Seven Sisters who really know how to party. He tells me about how when they drink too much they always try to start up a round of “strip-twister”. He tells me to get moving, I’ll be late. I thank him and leave. The moon is coolness personified. The sun is a pretentious metrosexual always flaunting his knowledge of wines and the most gauche places to shop. But the moon drinks his beer with no glass and no twist off top either. The moon would never be caught drinking a Lite beer. The sun gets all the press, but the moon is where everything happens; where the hidden comes out, only to be chased away again by the sun’s daylight brashness. The moon is pissed tonight. Better stay clear if you see him. I’m off to my party, but man, is he ever cool. M C Biegner 2004

Group Card

2004-11-16T10:43:00.000-05:00

NEWLY IN LOVE

2004-11-14T12:32:00.000-05:00

God has so carefully washed the sky violet tonight, the cut down corn stalks still stick up a sharp ochre, trees a fine black, spindly branches without their leaves. My wheels on the road are a high pitched hum past fields and gas stations with red, orange, blue signs glowing against the rubbed out moon. I know that the scale that measures loneliness must be at one of those gas stations where people keep pulling in, filling tanks, moving on, solitary, innocuous and I drive past afraid that the heft of my own cannot be lessened by the helium of new love, afraid that the sadness I woke up, held, then cast back down deeper than she was sleeping would be grotesquely illuminated under those soft neon lights, their whiteness humiliatingly honest. Driving keeps the plum clouds tumbling over themselves, racing from having to balance the paper-light weight of being newly in love against the responsibility of having been loved before.

PLUM SLOPE

2004-11-14T12:24:00.000-05:00

Fruit does not heal once a dull bruise, soft spot, fall from hand has made its flesh mealy.

On bad days I would find that my mother had packed my yellow lunchbox full of plums. On good days there would also be a thermos of juice. I came home after one bad day to find her in the kitchen, told her I had learned about cells, that I could see my own, see them in the skins of the plums. She looked at me terrified and left me alone so that in the thicket of our backyard I found our missing cat, dead and knitted to the slope of the hillside with no one there to be her witness except me and I had yet to learn what grief was for.

dear josh

2004-11-12T20:17:00.000-05:00

dear josh, your absence has outlasted your presence in my life. what i remember now is only the space, the silence. love is a memory i re-enact because there's nothing else to say anymore, and i have to account somehow for the marks the love left behind. i wonder where you are sometimes, even though i like to think i've stopped being interested in the answer, i guess because some long-silent part of me still expects the knowledge to rise up from somewhere secret. i wonder where you are even though i can't really imagine it--i only ever see you in the places that you've been before, even though it's been years since you've seen them. i wonder what there is to miss anymore, since you faded so gradually that it took a while to notice you were leaving, since there was enough left to put my heart into--your writing on the back of a photo, that hat you used to wear, those letters that never told me anything but meant everything. i wonder when these things stopped being you. i wonder what you'd be like if you'd stayed. i wonder what i'd be like if you'd never left, what i am like since you have. what i miss doesn't even exist anymore, probably couldn't, but the absence stays with me, like a scar my body grew into, like a line carved into a doorframe at the height i used to be. i wonder what would happen if we started to say your name again, if we stood for a while in the absence instead of turning from it, a door no one meant to open, a feeling no one meant to have. i wonder what would happen if i let go of the regret. i wonder if it's even possible, if it's even mine. i wonder if the regret is really yours, something you left behind for me to find and carry around in case you ever wanted it back. i wonder if i will be faithful when there's no faith left. i wonder if the hope is for you or for me, if the grief is for what i might have been without this pain, rather than for its source. i wonder if you miss me. i wonder if you will. i wonder if i love you, i wonder if goodbye.

things i've done in churches

2004-11-12T20:16:00.000-05:00

i. inside it is nothing like new york in august. the sounds of traffic are turned away at the vestibule like false penitents, the heat and air and light made chaste with a sprinkling of holy water. the pews are filled with people who want to be there and people who just walked by, people with nowhere else to go and somewhere else to be. without noticing they shed their skins when they walk through the door, letting the pain out to breathe. they will be healed here. at the altar stand the supplicants, turned to face all the closed and open hearts, dwarfed by the room's ascent to ward heaven. the space is too vast, too vacant with god to be filled by their dreaming. the task is impossible, essential. but soon the air begins to swell with the chord change, the heartbreak. it quickens and stirs like a tide just woken. urgent, the strengthening cadence pushes against the limits of the vacancy it's filled, bursts through like a heart broken by too much joy, makes everything that's still come to life, wakens every pain from its secret home. the brokenness and the humanness are what sanctify the sanctuary. when the music stops, so does the silence. ii. the church is open until ten o clock at night and so she goes there looking for an answer, moving alone through the darkness, anointed with cool night air. the church is dark and probably empty, and she tests the knob before pulling the heavy outer door and slipping inside. the space seems still, and in it, her heart loosens, unfolds. she will pray in the darkness, where no one but god will see. but inside the sanctuary, someone is already frozen in grief or in sorrow, kneeling in the godlight that falls on the altar. her face is unfamiliar, but her desperation is not. the small sound of the door falling closed is enough to break the silence, and the girl on the altar wakes up then, turns from the light into the darkness, is gone before she can cover her eyes to keep from seeing her private pain, to apologize for interrupting. she can't pray either, now that the solitude is gone, isn't sure she knew how in the first place. she leaves the demons at the altar and turns toward home. iii. what might also be sacred: the knife seaming the flesh of the mango, its teeth drawing the sticky sweetness toward the wound the foam rising to the top of the coffee brewed in silent early darkness the tremor of the hand in the moment between striking the match and lighting the flame waking up to rest in the space between sleep and consciousness the space between each heartbeat filled with blood and love

13 corners

2004-11-12T16:45:00.000-05:00

13 corners we live in a culture where 13 is an unlucky number but it's always been my grandmother's lucky one and i've always believed more of her superstitions anyway i may not call this luck but i am fortunate and blessed here in this house brimming with the prosperity of this fall harvest with voices giving and receiving with water and life in every room i've rediscovered that 16-year-old poet at home in that palo alto alley watched over by saint michael and all the old souls who had heard and read so much more but never what she brought to that corner there are many more corners more alleys more springs more old and young souls to give and receive by teresa wong, 11.7.04

Downtown by Michael Biegner

2004-11-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

Downtown His hands were like broken concrete yet they wrapped the pole of the subway car tightly. It was almost a year ago that the towers fell; when the plume shuttled uptown and the dust tossed itself willy-nilly over lower Manhattan. It was almost a year ago, when shards of paper representing lives flew like souls across the Hudson into Brooklyn, signifying all that was left. McNab took the “F” train downtown every day to get to his job. He got on at Kew Gardens and he always wore his construction helmet backwards. After the collapse, they slapped one of those American flags on the backs of all the guys’ helmets. McNab wore his so the flag faced forward. McNab was a rigger and had been for years. He’d been working downtown since the collapse. He was a slight man, but wore his work belt, heavy boots and thick gloves which gave him monstrous girth. At Jackson Heights the crowds in the train pushed out against the bodies lined up waiting to board; there was a panicked effort to catch the number 7 train to Flushing. McNab pulled back in the car. He never sat. He always preferred to give up his seat. At the Roosevelt Avenue station the train performed its purge and binge of riders. Marisol always stepped on here. Same spot on the platform. Same car. McNab always instinctively turned his head discreetly toward his outstretched arm, trying to catch his own body odor. Marisol was a slight pretty Puerto Rican woman with thick red lips who wore too much makeup. She rode until Rockefeller Center where she always smoothed her pants or skirt, gathered her things, just before she would rise and stand by the train door. As Marisol went by she always brushed against McNab’s gruff toil smeared body. He breathed in her perfume, and marveled at her rich black hair. Marisol always read; her dark almond eyes peered over her newspaper appeared like question marks to McNab. If she ever suspected that McNab watched her, she never let on. These were two dancers among many on all the cars that hurtled through the tunnels under New York. When the train descended under the East River, McNab felt his ears “pop”. The lights would go out momentarily and he could only see the shadow of Marisol’s head against the tunnel lights through the car window. Together they rocked and lurched, evident for that half hour that they were subject to the same laws of physics. When Marisol’s stop arrived, McNab made a deal with himself to follow her out, to talk to her and strike up a conversation. He planned it from Roosevelt Island. When the door opened, he saw himself follow her. He felt his body want to move. As the doors closed, the chimes seemed to berate his lack of initiative. “Tomorrow”, he would mutter and then begin the negotiations all over again. The doors closed, as the great beast dumped McNab off at West 4th Street where he would walk the rest of the way. There was still rubble to clear.

Meredith's Lullabye for the Country

2004-11-11T09:58:00.000-05:00

Come in, close the door tight behind you I can't do much but it's a start I can't promise there's not demons out there But you're safe here inside my heart Let your guard fall down around you I'll give you open hands and dashboard light We'll get up and fight again tomorrow Rest here in my arms tonight I've seen all that they've put up against you But you're not doing this alone Here between the end and the beginning Is the place where I can call you home Let your guard fall down arounnd you I'll give you open hands and dashboard light We'll get up and fight again tomorrow Rest here in my arms tonight I'll smooth your brow with my calloused fingers Untangle all your stomach's knots My arms are stronger than you'd give them credit Let your bruises heal and I'll keep watch Let your guard fall down around you I'll give you open hands and dashboard light We'll get up and fight again tomorrow Rest here in my arms tonight. Meredith Killough

Someday My Apartment

2004-11-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

Okay, you have to picture a Disney character singing this... SOMEDAY MY APARTMENT Someday I'll have an apartment in the shitty part of town I'll see trash and broken bottles whenever I look down There will be lots of locks on the doors Cracks in the floor for the mice In that shitty apartment complex Won't that be nice? I'll eat Ramen three times a day Chef Boyardee straight from the can With a six-pack of generic beer Won't it be grand? Someday I'll have me a boyfriend who I'll meet in a seedy bar He'll make me pay for my own drinks then grope me in his car And maybe we'll have a baby We can't afford to feed Wouldn't it be wonderful? Wouldn't it, indeed. Life would never be boring Even walking down the street Knowing I could see a drive-by shooting I'd feel so complete In that shitty apartment In that crappy neighborhood It hasn't happened yet But I know inside my heart Yes, I know inside my heart it could. Gwynne Watkins

The Sage

2004-11-10T05:01:00.000-05:00

The Sage – Melissa Eva Miller Was the sage left there for me? Tucked in a tight bundle of pungent leaves at the bottom of the basket with the other odds and ends. A little reminder that all is not right with my world; maybe just not completely balanced. Like the way the tea packet marked “joy” refused to open until I bit it hard and forced it to rip. But isn’t that what faith is? A bit of a struggle here and there to help calm the exuberance that threatens to bubble over in the blood and spill out wastefully? “So,” the sage tells me, leaving a velvety residue in the whorls of my fingertips, “That’s the fun of it, baby. And just think, you’ll do this for the rest of your life … just like I have in the hands of the faithful all over the world.” The sage sighs, letting off a tiny plume of omniscience. “Faith is all about figuring it all out and then realizing you left one shoe on a porch somewhere along the way.” “Well,” I tell the sage, “I can take it. Next time I see through something clearly, I won’t be surprised when I blink and the pane is replaced with a wavering piece of hand-made glass that I can’t make heads or tails of.” The sage chuckles a puff of fragrant smoke. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about, baby. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

The Desert

2004-11-10T05:00:00.000-05:00

Desert – Melissa Eva Miller That space lit my desert’s light tries to find a space to sit quietly, say its grace. Dropped in from without could one find a trace that would then overcome the seeker; myself understood. I have faith one such traveler would come back weary, burned with lathe to spin me learned. One such man would write pages about what he discovered, would plan to reveal me uncovered. Would they believe or would they lift fists with jealous fury and conceive these chronicles to bury? Lest my dunes be let out to dust over their minds and runes once quiet suddenly shout. For now dear traveler take heed I wish to keep my desert here within my heart’s seed. My face will hide it well instead of reveal too much or still a brew to quell.

The Captain

2004-11-05T16:58:00.000-05:00

The Captain And the Captain and passengers are dressed to the nines, Ignoring the bells and calls to pull in the lines. With a smile and a nod the Captain waves off the commotion, And we all sail onward through the turbulent ocean. We put on our gowns, tuxedoes and shoes, And stepped up the gangplank for this four year cruise. Over half went willingly and wanted to go, the rest ‘cause we had to and thus it is so. The crew plays cards and passes a bottle of rum. One eye on the helm and one eye on the fun. They don’t notice gas gauges on low and the compass that’s broken, Or the map room on fire, quietly smoking. We fill up our glasses from the champagne fountain. And iceburgs in the distance tower like mountains. We could see the dockworkers if we gave it a chance, But the band calls again to get out and dance. Then another game of shuffleboard needs to be played, And another trip taken to the all night buffet. So there’s no time to stop and feel the ocean, Rolling deep below with discontent motion. And the Captain and passengers are dressed to the nines, Ignoring the bells and calls to pull in the lines With a smile and a nod the Captain waves off the commotion And we all sail onward through the turbulent ocean. Truth my truth my truth don’t be silent now I’m listening finally just for you Before, I admit it I let you hide Knowing you were there quiet, ready, poised to speak And as long as we’re being honest Sometimes I even kicked you deep behind those shapes of fear And there I left you crumpled at the feet of jealosy, envy and my need to be liked that just seemed larger at the time And on my really bad days I boxed you in. The worst abuse really, to have floor, ceiling and walls of what-I-think-I-should-be keeping you from daylight. I don’t blame you for your silence I would be silent too after being treated like that So this is my apology for what it is worth I’m hoping you’ll remember this and rise up anyway my truth my truth By Gayle Huntress

Birding in Babylon

2004-11-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

Birding in Babylon My salvation is beauty’s kiss -- It approaches me like a windy spiral of foppish leaves' dancing denial. It leaves me with wonkish truths Which bolster me with deepened roots. For Mesopotamia, now midnight soot, Has acquiesced beneath the boot; From humankind this snake has grown Hoping to consume its own body, from start to end and head to tail Where human life first burst forth, now it flails. As it was in the beginning, Is now and ever shall be; A world of endless suffering; Saved from pagan idolatry; Carved from empire’s ideology; Inflated by ambition’s puffery. I seek what is invisible Like birding in Babylon, an indivisible faith in delicate things: Feathers and song, and iridescent wings; perched on fetid branches rest these drops of color sporting costumes that dress war’s dolor. It scours me pure like sandstorm grit. It seeps like ink into my vision, I am shorn and weakened like noble Sampson; by a willow warbler’s lyric face Or the fecund insistence of a fruit fly’s grace, These are things that make Peace known, If Wisdom is my head, then beauty is my bone. Michael Biegner 2004

a post-election prayer

2004-11-05T00:50:00.000-05:00

Dear God, Give us the words. May ink spill beauty onto notebooks and napkins everywhere, as blood ceases to be shed. Rather, let our blood reclaim its symbol of Life flowing with passionate fury. Let delicate melodies infiltrate the air hung heavy and hopeless. Let us write a Revolution.

The Death Rattle

2004-10-18T16:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, in the wee hours of Thursday morning, my hard drive crashed. The Death Rattle had begun Sunday night, when Tom and I came home to a horrific noise that sounded not unlike a supernova in its last millennia, I would imagine. We stared at the screen. It was frozen on an AOL news report on George W. Bush, and the little cursor was spinning around in a misleading rainbow circle, which signifies trouble to Mac OS X users. I restarted the computer and nothing happened except the noise got louder. "Oh my God," I said, the way people in the twenty first century do when confronted with this problem. "I haven't backed up The Big Idea in days! Everything I love is on this computer! My life is on this computer! All my emails, all your emails to me! The beginnings of our courtship! The iPhotos I've been taking of Amelia and Emmett and Reese; the photos of us kissing! The photos of the Adirondacks! My mixes!" I gasped. "My Ultimate Bob Dylan mix! I'll never be able to recreate it! Not to mention all my own new songs, which I will be able to recreate, but still. What a pain." Tom rubbed my shoulders empathetically, and I spent a sleepless night thinking about what a fool I was and how now I'd need to buy a new computer and how it could be worse, and people in hurricanes had lost a lot more--it could have been my Martin guitar!-- and people in Iraq had lost even more than the people in hurricanes and I was a rich spoiled brat for even being sad about my lost works of ART! OF ART! I am an artist and these works are like my children! I will never recover from this loss! Once, I wrote a funny story; I was in tenth grade and it was a spoof on the Odyssey, and my English teacher, Barbara Shapiro read it out loud and said I was a genius. I lost it two months later and forgot everything about it expect one line from a song Odysseus wrote at the end, to the Goddess Athena: O, great goddess with gray eyes like the owl Penelope has drenched me, please hand me a towel. That's the worst thing I've ever lost. It's twenty-two years, and I'm still not done grieving that loss. How will I recover from the loss of everything on my hard drive? I won't. Be quiet! No one cares about your stupid works of art! PEOPLE ARE STARVING ALL OVER THE WORLD! GET A REAL JOB!!!!! That's about how it went in my head. Then I got up Monday and turned the computer on and lo! Familiar desktop, familiar everything. The Big Idea restored. All was well. I promptly emailed a copy of it to myself and to Paradise Copies to print out to give to my editor and went on my merry way. Did I back anything up? Why should I? No more death rattle! Until Thursday morning. Tom shook me awake. "Sweetie, your computer's making that sound again." I stumbled into my office and turned off the computer and slept soundly, knowing that Death Rattle does not mean actual death. I was wrong. This time when I tried to boot it up, it flashed an icon of an empty folder and a Picasso like face, moronic in its mockery of me, the lazy non-backer-upper who didn't listen to Patty, Jeff, Sheila, Tom, Katryna, my parents, my high school history teacher and my psychic. I got out my glow in the dark plastic angel and wound it up. Nothing. I took the poor thing to some Mac people in town whom I trust and they kept it all day, performing feats of derring do to no avail. "It's kaput," said Manuel the Mac Guy. "You can send the hard drive to California to this company that might be able to retrieve some of your data, but they'll charge you $800 whether or not they get anything back for you." Fortunately, I had only lost two days of writing: Tuesday and Wednesday. Unfortunately, these were two primo days for The Big Idea: I'd written the scene when Rhodie hits bottom in Alaska after being chased by a red truck a la Deliverance. I'd written the scene where Rita quotes Shakespeare and shakes her head in disapproval over the increasing religiosity of her three children. I'd written the second to last chapter of the novel. And I'd written little tidbits throughout the 427 page ms. that were funny and irretrievable to my memory except that I remember they were funny. I spent yesterday and today mining my memory and rewriting, and I'm sure some of what I recovered the old fashioned way was better and some was worse and mostly it's all fine, and it’s true, this is much better than someone dying or getting sick or people getting divorced or your child being called names by the other kids in school. What I really miss are the photos. Also the emails. Also the sense that all is well in the world. My friend Sheila wrote me that this had happened to her and that she was comforted by the thought that losing things helps us to recognize how little we actually need to be okay, and that sometimes those of us who spend our lives in front of the computer might do well to look up every now and then and recognize there is more to the world than what we have created in our own little worlds. And I HAVE created a world in my computer. I have my comforting, changing screen saver of photos of family, loved ones, scenes from all over the country that make my heart sing and remind me where I've been. I listen to a constant stream of music from my iTunes. I keep in touch with friends, colleagues, writing students, my editors and agents, family through email. And even this, this blog, what is this if not an online, virtual way of performing? Even though it's been suggested that an acoustic guitar might be superior to a computer, I actually maintain that the advent of computers and emails and this virtual community you are a part of --simply because you're reading this-- has increased compassion, awareness and creativity in our world, not decreased it. One more thing: as I was driving around western MA today, admiring the leaves, feeling the same sadness watching them fall as I feel about my lost darlings on the hard drive, I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Good planets are hard to find." And I got to thinking about environmentalists, and environmentalism. It seems obvious to me that humans can create toxic substances that could literally poison the planet. That is, at least, a possibility. One of the most common (conservative) arguments from those opposed to "the environmentalists" is derision: "You all are a bunch of Chicken Littles, running around saying, 'the sky is falling, the sky is falling.' You overreact. You are fearful. Calm down." These same people tend to be the ones who are into Homeland Security, who think the world will be safer from terrorism if we maintain a position of Red Alert in respect to anyone who might seem like a terrorist, namely (these days) people who look like they might come from the Middle East. And to these people, I say, "You are a bunch of Chicken Littles. You are overreacting. Calm down." So most of us have fear, but why is it that we have fear of different things? What makes one kid grow up to fear destruction of the planet at the hands of polluters and another grows up to fear destruction of the planet at the hands of terrorists? Why is it that when Katryna is afraid she procrastinates and wants to curl up and go to sleep, but when I am afraid I want to race around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to do as much as I can to control my situation, throwing money I don't have at computer technicians and thinking that going out for dinner to a really fancy expensive meal will solve all my problems? I don't know. But I do know that I am going to take my digital camera out tomorrow and take pictures of me and Tom and Katryna and Amelia and Dave in the glorious fall foliage before it becomes, as our friend Bill says, “Stick Season.” I am going to make a new Ultimate Bob Dylan mix. I am going to finish a draft of The Big Idea. I am going to back everything up to CDs. And I’m going to try to trust that all these things we lose are replaced in some form or another; that we are meant to grieve our losses-even elections, even baseball games- so we can be compassionate towards others who have lost.