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| Gray Self at 25 |
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Degas: Lost Oeuvre
He cannot see the lift and fall of their limbs,
the slow adagio turning their wrists,
cupping shadow, then light.
The inverted palms,
and elbows following,
one by one,
like white lilies
tilting in the wind.
Losing sight is a slow process.
First the colors dim,
then the lines that hold the colors in.
And then all things dissolve
into a sameness
that is neither day nor night--
no edge to this shrinking circle,
this inexorable fading light.
The notes still come
one upon the other,
canvases of sound erupting
on the edge of his vision
sketches of pink, russet, a band of mustard-yellow--
their exhausted beauty
molding now in the damp spring rain,
curling frightfully,
like an old man in a beaten coat
leaning on his cane.
In dreams he can see again.
Three notes stagger out of the darkness;
shoes tracing arcs in dry chalk.
A shuttered cross-hatch of tulle netting.
And legs, firm stalks
to hold them,
ribboned round and round,
as they turn to him, and turn to him, and turn
offering their throats,
their lovely white arms,
circling,
as they lift at his hand,
once more,
into the light.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Sound Sketches
Here's the link to a few "sound sketches" I posted as One Hand Clapping on Soundcloud. I'm a cellist, not a guitarist, and some of these were captured waaaaay back in the 1980's, but it's fun to write songs and sing them, so I do! https://soundcloud.com/onehandclapping
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Shoe
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| Image uploaded by Pinterest user Cindi Bruni |
I see a shoe down there. In the dry leaves by the back door, a black party shoe with a bow. I know it is mine, but I can’t reach, not even with a stick. It’s wedged between some windows. Maybe with a bigger stick; but it is too heavy. There is a mouse trap too, and some pieces of cloth which make me think of my doll Ginger, but it is not Ginger, because Ginger is in the car.
“Dad,” I call, “I want my shoe!” And when he doesn’t hear me, again, “Dad!!” The cows are still here, right by the house, and the cow’s skull is on the post where it always was, showing the black holes of its eyes, and the apple trees are still here too-- but not apples yet, only teeny green ones. I look back at my shoe, then down at my feet. My shoes are bigger than that party one; I can see that. Bigger, but I bet it will still go on. My fingers remember the leather strap, and the poky metal buckle which I can’t do yet, and the little holes in a row, and which to choose?
“Dad! Daddy, I need you!” And then my dad is there--my dad comes--and puts his big, warm hand on my hair. I can hear him breathing.
“My shoe’s down there.”
“What?” My dad is looking at my feet like he doesn’t understand.
“My party one. Look!” and I point to where it is.
My dad bends down by the broken storm windows and the foundation stones of our white house—our used to be house; we don’t live here now--and he says, “Oh,” and we can both see it, a shiny wedge of black patent leather.
“I want it,” I say.
“It won’t fit, Punkin. It’s an old one.”
“Please, I want it.”
My dad uses his hands and his shoulders to hold the windows apart, leaning them, one by one against himself until he can reach in sideways and tweeze the shoe up with his fingers. It feels like I can’t wait, watching him. But I have to wait, so I do a little bounce on my toes and remember a piece of black velvet ribbon that I used to have and can’t find, and I think how my shoe is like a treasure I forgot or a secret I remember.
When my dad gets the shoe out, he pushes the windows back against the house with his stomach. Then he bends over holding the heel of the shoe, and he knocks the spiders out. Then he hands it to me.
I grab his baggy pants leg for balance and pull my foot out of my red puddle boots. I put my toes in the opening and I push. Only my toes go in. I think of Cinderella and her step sisters. I tug up my sock and try again.
“It won’t go,” says Dad, “You’ve grown.”
But I want it to. I remember how these shoes felt on my feet, flat and thin on the bottom, and the clicky sound they made on the floor, and the swirly dress I got them to go with—it has a bow in the back and yellow polka-dots on it and blue flowers.
But now the shoe won’t fit. How could I have ever fit in there? I was a littler me and now I am a bigger me. I see my dad’s shoes, so big. He was a baby that grew, and now he is huge man; he is a daddy, but he used to be a boy. And I don’t like to think of that at all. He has to be HIM: Daddy. Always just the same. I want the smell of him like this, and his red hooded sweatshirt with a long pocket for my hands to meet each other in, and his bristly face, and his daddy nose poking out, and his high shoulders to ride on and his hair on my face when I lean to see him, and his ears to hold onto up there.
I hug his legs very tight, one sock foot on his shoe.
“Come up,” he says, “Punkin.’” And he swings me to his shoulders--the “uppest place”-- for a ride, bending over for my boot, holding my legs, while I, for the littlest bit of time, swing out sideways, tipping into space. Then we are off into the milkweed with the sun on our heads and the clouds wheeling over us.
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| Dad Robert C. Cares 11/19/1930--9/19/2015 |
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Makeup: a nested, ordered pair.
I was 16, and she was 41, the day my mother got her first, and only, tiny pimple. She came to me
pointing next to her nose, asking me what it was. I had to look hard to see it. “A pimple,” I said, rolling my
eyes.
She washes her face with water, and soap if she’s showering--she's done it all her life. She has never used a moisturizer, ever. She owns one lipstick which she bought for my wedding, 29 years ago, and the tube is almost full. She is 81 and her hair is heavy, and thick, and still mostly black. They want to thin it when she goes to get it cut.
Makeup: my mother calls it “war paint”; my mother has perfect skin.
* * * * * * * *
My grandmother’s lipsticks stood on her dresser in a brown plastic rack which was swirled to look like tortoise shell. They stood between a crackle-glass perfume atomizer with a strange, golden, pod-like bulb, and a hinged, pink, satin box in which she kept her pin-curl clips and metal rollers.
In the lipstick rack, each tube had its own little place where it fit standing up--a circle into which I dropped it after uncapping and twisting the tube to see what color emerged: Persimmon, and True Red, and Poppy, and Coral; Cinnamon, Sea Shell, Nude and Frost-Pink. I stood them there like soldiers at attention, ready to serve, waiting for her to go out.
My grandmother had perfect skin, too--white and soft, and smelling of roses. She washed each day with cold-cream--never with soap—spreading it on gently and removing it, always, with an upward stroke. She patted her face dry afterward. “Never scrub,” she told me, “Gravity doesn’t need help. Your mother, you know, is ruining her skin.”
I loved to watch her do her face: first the cold-cream, then a face lotion for wrinkles, then liquid foundation, then rouge for her cheeks-- “Ever so little,” she said. I sat on the tub handing her things from a plaid, vinyl-lined, cosmetics pouch. It had a zipper with a leather tassel and when I pulled it open all her pencils and pots were in there. She had a brown eye-brow pencil stamped Hollywood Arts, and black eye-liner which I loved to twist out, and out, to its very end, and a rosy-pink pencil for her lips with almost all the gold lettering rubbed off. For her eye-lids there were tiny pats of silky shadow: blue and green and gold and brown, but my favorite was a pot of shimmering white shadow cream which she smoothed along her brows and dotted at the corners of her eyes to “open them up and make them wide.” Finally, came loose powder: a soft, beige puff for her face, and a cardboard box into which she dipped it. The powder was nearly white and smelled like her.
My grandmother’s stockings came in slim, flat boxes. They came folded into tissue paper, perfectly creased, light as butterfly wings. Lifted out they held the shape of a woman’s leg—ankle, calf and thigh. Cocoa
* * * * * * * *
It’s dinner time; I can smell pork chops cooking. I can smell corn. I can smell the wet iron smell of the radiator and hear it clunk and hiss. I hear Willie and Charlie playing Zorro on his horsey, circling round and round on the braided rug downstairs. I can hear my father talking.
I am kneeling on the sink looking into the mirror. My new eye-brows are very black. My new mouth is very red. I am a new me looking back at the old me. I am six years old and someone I know, and someone I do not know well. The Halloween face paints are itchy on my skin. They smell like wax, but I don’t care; I am beautiful--I am princess beautiful--and I have never been beautiful before.
When my mother calls me for dinner, I walk downstairs slowly, my hand on the rail. I enter like Cinderella, late for the ball, everyone is already there. I take my seat and say--wearing my face, proudly, like a choice, mind made up,--“This is how I want to look when I am big.”
“Who knows,” my mother says, spooning out peas, “Maybe you will.”
* * * * * * * * * *
“Where are you going?” I ask her. My mother is leaning into the sink, peering at herself in the mirror with her lips in a tight, wide, oval putting on lipstick. It is very red. She finishes the bottom lip, turning her head a fraction of an inch as she presses her lips together making the color even.
“Hand me a tissue,” she says, still looking into the glass and reaching behind her towards me as if her image in the mirror might disappear before she like an eyelash if she looks away, or blinks. I hand her the tissue, and she blots, kissing the white Kleenex then handing me back the print of her lips.
I sit on the toilet seat, pleating her kiss. “Where will you be?” I ask her again, needing to know how far from here to there; how far I will have to run to get to her; how loud I will need to yell for her to hear me. She is putting on her bracelet now, a silver one with jet black stones.
“We’ll be at the Heishen’s. Just down the street.” She is doing the clasp of the bracelet, turning her white wrist to the light. I kick my foot against the radiator -- clang, clang, clang.
“Mrs. Ofterheidi is coming to stay with you,” she says. Then she looks at me, and her eyes say: don’t make a fuss. I want her to just stay here in the bathroom talking to me and not go out. I make a face.
“You can stay up an hour later,” she adds, as if making a bargain.
I am trying to be a big girl; but my throat feels like it wants to cry: she is going away from me. She frowns, leans over, kissing my hair where she won’t leave a mark. And then she stands up in her pointy, clickity shoes and turns away. She is already almost in the hall.
“Mama!” I say it quick; I run to her, “I need a hug before you go!” I know I sound like Willie; I am whining. I want to be Willie, so little he can hold on tight, and cry, and not let go, and nobody minds it. But I did that once—held on to her so she couldn’t stand up—and how mad she got, and my dad too, and how I couldn’t put any of it back the way it was before; I couldn’t put it back inside me.
She turns back again--leans over, hugging me. She is warm. She smells like lily of the valley. I love the smell of it. It comes from an aqua bottle with a golden cap. The bottle is shaped like a tower, and it’s cool and powdery on the outside when I hold it. You can’t see through the bottle, even though it’s glass. “Careful,” she always says. Tonight when she sprayed it on, she rubbed her wrists together then rubbed them onto me so that now, when she stands up, moving through the door and away from me, pulling on her coat, I can still smell her on my skin when I press my own arm up against me face, when I press my arm to my nose to help the tears stay in.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Objects of Childhood
Slinky
Bright spring of silver
I push my hand through.
Cast of metal-
bracelet,
gauntlet,
glove.
Pull it off
of itself--
each ring coming away
from the next,
separating out
from the whole.
Slow skein of alive tension that cuts the sky
into segments of blue.
I lie on my back looking up
through the broken world.
Slinky, like a chest expanding , a breath pulled in,
and then let go.
All of it collapsing into itself with a sudden
ching!
Or a slower shush--
if you let it go on a carpet,
one end snaking toward the other one,
coils kissing coils,
coming home.
Put it on a step
and watch it find its way,
end over end,
in a slow balletic tumble.
And when it stumbles,
the frantic rolling, springing, crash
as it rushes down the stairs.
That could be you.
And the smell of it
like pennies on your skin.
The smell of it, like the taste of blood in your mouth--
The metal of your body,
and the ridges there on the edge of things
where you could cut your tongue.
Spirograph
with it's teeth, teeth, teeth
and its tight little circle of holes.
The way your eyes go all hazy,
sleepy like a dream,
waiting for the whole of it
to come round again.
A mandala of green.
Or blue.
Or red.
Or black.
And then another smaller disk, after,
to make another smaller world
inside the other.
Snowflakes of ink,
like the symbol of the atom, spinning.
Or a flower.
Sometimes, though, the pen-tip was too short.
Or the ink ran out.
Or the teeth came out of the other ones
and it was ruined--
the pen off track--
marking the place where you forgot
to push into the paper, forgot
to push back into the world, forgot
you were part
of making the magic
of it happen,
after all.
Etch-A-sketch
Lines that show the places
where I trace and peel the silver back
from the world's eye.
The mirror of this
negating
what I will not see,
replacing what is there
with what I imagine it
to be.
Two hands twisting the tongue of things
to say a line
that shakes
and will not go
where I ask it to
unless I run it straight
to the edge
and out of room.
Circle back
to make a nose,
then back again
for the mustache with its bristling comb-like hairs
because you can only go over straight--
all things connected,
no thing coming out of nowhere,
everything showing
what came before.
There is this tension,
and the skin of it
like a skater on a blade,
a wobbling beginner who can't stand
where the thin edge of things
once made will take her.
So break it.
Shake it.
Begin again.
Popsicle
White paper that sticks
to the frost on top
of the smooth twin tongs
of a Popsicle.
The tongue depressor handles
that will taste of grape and wood
when you get done,
and the way you break it
down the center,
give half of it away
like friendship bracelets,
then suck the edges smooth.
Frozen finger of ice.
Tongue against the cold of it, the burn of it,
drawing out the sweet from the center,
and how it fills your mouth with colored juice--
grape, or orange, or green whatever-it-is . . .
lime?
Warm spit on your achy-cold teeth.
and the sun on your face
and your arms,
sitting on he curb
on the corner
in the brand new summer air--
the rest of June, and all of July,
and then August after that
in front of you, and
"Look at my tongue!" you say,
"It's purple."
And you feel it,
fat and numb in your mouth,
and strange,
like you just arrived on this earth in a body,
or it just showed up like that, suddenly,
this odd new lump of meat
you can talk and taste
and touch with.
Friday, July 19, 2013
What’s in a Name?
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| Virgin |
My name is Elizabeth, but I grew up as Lisa (a common name at the time due to the popularity of actress Lisa Gaye). At any rate, some folks spell Elizabeth, "Elisabeth," so I was Lisa . . . and MAN were there a lot of us. In one of my high school English classes there were six Lisa's, and in college, there were even more! Finally I got tired of it. I was tired of being part of a crowd.
I didn't really feel like a Lisa, either. I liked the name all right; it’s a pretty name. But I thought of Lisa's as "sweet" and "good", and at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in either one of those things. I wanted to grow up--not worry so much about other people, be more straight-forward, embrace my edgier self, figure out who I really was (I’m still working on it). So I “changed” my name.
I didn't really feel like a Lisa, either. I liked the name all right; it’s a pretty name. But I thought of Lisa's as "sweet" and "good", and at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in either one of those things. I wanted to grow up--not worry so much about other people, be more straight-forward, embrace my edgier self, figure out who I really was (I’m still working on it). So I “changed” my name.
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| Lover |
For years I’ve been Liz: Liz graduated college; Liz got married; Liz bore children; Liz went to graduate school, got a job, bought a house, paid bills; Liz is going gray.
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| Mother |
But what happened to Lisa? Where did she go, that little girl, that adolescent, that young woman I once was, for so many years? I still answer to the name; I still look up when I hear someone say “Lisa” in a crowd. And when my aunt and uncle--those living links to the long-ago "me"--call me by that name, it’s sweet. It touches me. I’m still her to them . . . and to myself in that moment. How odd! And even more surprisingly, when I hear my old name coming from the people I love, and they mean me, and something in me answers them--something long-ago and real and deep--I feel a bit sad, maybe regretful even, that I just dumped Lisa off on a street corner somewhere in Ann Arbor and said, “Don’t wait for me.” Didn’t I have some responsibility for her? Shouldn’t I have given her a little warning?
But, well, Liz wasn’t as nice as Lisa, right? Not as thoughtful? She didn't care more about other people than about herself like Lisa did. At least she didn’t want to. Liz wanted to be free: to be a writer, a poet, an artist, a wanderer, a lover, a singer, a seeker, a seer. Liz was trying to leave Lisa behind.
We can’t, though, can we? We can’t leave ourselves behind, not
any part of us. We are who we are because of all that we have been. And my parents were smart. They gave me a name that could be a hundred selves--Bess and Betsy, Els and Elspeth, Betty and Beth; Eliza and Ellie, Bet and Tibby, Lisa and Liz. And this is good thing for a restless chameleon like me, somebody who enjoys trying on all the perspectives, writing all the characters, listening to everyone’s stories, leaving nothing out. Being a million shades of me.
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| Queen |
I was speaking with an old friend on the phone the other day. He asked me how I was. I said I was doing OK, but I was trying to figure out how to “come out of the closet” so to speak, and be who I really am now that I’m middle-aged.
He said, “You’ve been trying to do that for 25 years!” We both laughed; because it’s true.
I added, “Well, It’s a really long closet, and I have to try on every outfit from here to the door to figure which me is going to open it!”
“Maybe,” he said, “it would be better if we just came in?” And there was a pause, “But then, we might never get out again.”
I think that’s my fear, actually, that the whole of me--Elizabeth, that girl with a raft of possible selves (with all of their ideas and enthusiasms and fears and perspectives and needs)--might gobble you up, you people I love. Better to keep it short: Liz. Better to make it sweet: Lisa.
The people who love me don’t seem to be buying it, though. These days my closest friends are starting to call me “Lizzie.” I’ve noticed it; they’re calling me by the pet name my mother, and father, and grandparents used for me in that long-ago time when my everyday name was Lisa. I don’t know exactly when “Liz” started morphing to “Lizzie”--I didn’t tell anyone to use it--but I guess I can see why. They know me. Lizzie is more vulnerable, less edgy, a bit (can I say it?) sweeter--more (if I’m honest) true of me. Am I really Liz with her razor-sharp “z” pulled at the ready? Am I that straight-ahead sure that I am right? I’m a Liz who keeps her “Z” tucked up within her unless she really needs it, a person who begins with the “L“ of Love--has a temper tantrum of resistance in the middle of things, waving that “Z” around--and ends with the “ie” of “cutie“ and “sweetie” and “sorry” : a Lizzie.
So who’s coming out? I’ll keep my public Liz; she’s the one I introduce myself as. I publish as Elizabeth (it’s a beautiful, classic name, with a great, big closet of possible selves). My aunt and uncle will remind me of the Lisa I still hold inside. And when my friends call me LIzzie, well, I won’t correct them.
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| Me? |
Footnote:
The great and powerful Wikipedia says that “A hypocorism (/haɪˈpɒkərɪzəm/; from Greek ὑποκορίζεσθαι hypokorizesthai, "to use child-talk"[1]) is a shorter or diminutive form of a word or given name, for example, when used in more intimate situations as a nickname or term of endearment. Also known as pet name or calling name. However, shortening of names is certainly not exclusive to terms of affection, indeed in many cases a shortened name can also be attributed to expressions of hatred, it's a grey area.”
Monday, July 15, 2013
Cardinal Truth
(picture source: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology )
As I sat on our little back porch last night conversing with an old friend about love, and loss, and the beautiful and sad world we live in, a brilliant male cardinal swooped underneath the grapevines that have wrapped around the corner there to create a cool, green bower. He landed not more than five feet from away, twitching his brilliant tail, his crest rising and falling as he turned his eye to look at me. What a beauty, with his orange beak and crimson feathers! He took me in; then off he flew.
Not more than a moment later, I saw him with a female in the bushes near to the house. She had the same bright beak, but was a muted, salmon-color, just as lovely but more subtle, and she was shy. The male flew to the porch rail several times, then back to the bushes while the female looked on. Each time he joined her they seemed to confer, though they didn’t make any sound that I could hear, and then suddenly, all at once, they both flew into the vines above me. When I looked up I saw what this was all about: They had built a small nest high up in the grape vines near the roof of the porch. It was right above where I was sitting and I hadn’t seen it! Poor things; there I was, all big and threatening, just where they needed to be. I didn’t go though; I sat still to watch.
Their nest is quite different from the one the robins built at the other end of the porch where earlier in the summer we watched four babies hatch, feed, grow, and fly. This cardinals’ nest is made of stiffer stuff, and it is lacy, so much so that I could see the little bodies of the baby birds (I think there are two) right through the twigs, and even a flash of a pink mouth. For the next 10 minutes I sat there as the parents--red and salmon, bright and subtle--came and went, came and went, tending and feeding their young in a fluster of parental concern, both of them often bending over the nest together.
One of my precious Buddhist teachers, Khenpo Palden Sherab, once said, “The world is always speaking to you in metaphor. But you have to pay attention,” and another great teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, said, “You can even learn the Dharma from nature, from the flight of a bird.” On a day of contemplating death, discovering this unexpected new life above me, hidden in the sheltering leaves, was a small, sweet blessing and a teaching: hidden in joy is suffering, and in suffering joy; hidden in life, death, and in death, life; hidden in samsara is nirvana, and in nirvana, samsara. Actually there is no difference between the two. There is only this world, right here, but it can be experienced in two very different ways.
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