Black Moon Rising

Tonight, September 30,  is the 2nd new moon
in September---a rare Black Moon,
which only occurs every 32
months...

It's the threshold/doorway into Autumn,
the dark time of the year, a time for
staying in and going inward.
Contemplation, reflection, resting,
and reverie are on the menu.

Even nature rests in Fall
and Winter, going dormant,
quiescent:  living, yet appearing barren.

Nature is our mirror,
our teacher and muse
telling us to slow down now,
collect her gifts of
seeds, then
ponder our own gifts.

Black Moon rising,
new moon ruling.
Fearlessly enter your darkness---
explore the shadow side
of your life---and of nature.

Disentangle your
knotted, twisted thoughts
and prepare to grow
in the spring...

like a brazen, hot pink Zinnia
bursting from the soil.

9/30/16

Advice to Myself & Grief by Louise Erdrich

Wish that younger me could have read this---

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Advice to Myself
By Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

~From: "Original Fire: New and Selected Poems", page 149

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

GriefBy Louise Erdrich

Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling
home over twisted ice.

Whiteness drifts over your house.
A page of warm light
falls steady from the open door.

Here is your bed, folded open.
Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.

At Burt Lake by Tom Andrews & Bardo (excerpt) by Suzanne Paolo

No coolness yet, but I can smell it coming...Time to awake now and begin again.  xo



At Burt Lake
By Tom Andrews

To disappear into the right words
and to be their meanings. . .

October dusk.
Pink scraps of clouds, a plum-colored sky.
The sycamore tree spills a few leaves.
The cold focuses like a lens. . .

 Now night falls, its hair
caught in the lake's eye.

 Such clarity of things. Already
I've said too much. . .

                                  Lord,

language must happen to you
the way this black pane of water,
chipped and blistered with stars,
happens to me. 

From:  "The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle" by Tom Andrews, page 13.  (Winner of  'The Iowa Poetry Prize')

*************************************

Mistaking Opiates for the Clear Light
By Suzanne Paola

There's always been this confusion with white things---
hospitals, cold, moonlight.
They seemed to embody the will
paralyzed into peaceful acceptance.
Blank paper consecrate
to the end of words:  I love that,
secretly, more than this.
Quaaludes in my palm, rowers, eucharistic form.
Clear bag of heroin.
Stuff, we called it.  Too foundational to define.

*

In a clear bowl, a pear & a pomegranate wizen
into color.  Almost
alive, skins rucking
in on themselves.  Cheeks
sunk, russet
& carmine, seeming
almost to care about this...
Each a countenance
too private for a face, collapsing
in the hard gravity of color.

I was their opposite, pale girl, not living
or dying.  They were
what I feared.

*

I trust in the bardo wisdom:  how the gods,
with their soft white light, draw us in, convince us
their stuporous world is all there is.

I've seen them, slumping
forward, burning themselves with cigarettes.

How grand they were for a while:  their leathers, their etched
            bodies, a stalled
writhing eagle on each arm.
And their nectars, their secret foods, that gave
an easy kind of sensate order.

Though a god's world finally
suffers itself away from him, braille of the tracks
of a thousand needles, transgressions of red
under the skin---

From:  "Bardo" by Suzanne Paola, pages 6, 7 (Winner of "The Brittingham Prize in Poetry")

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Bardo (from Wikipedia):  "Used loosely, the term "bardo" refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions. 

For the prepared and appropriately trained individuals the bardo offers a state of great opportunity for liberation, since transcendental insight may arise with the direct experience of reality, while for others it can become a place of danger as the karmically created hallucinations can impel one into a less than desirable rebirth."

PAIN By Linda Pastan

Smile, even when you feel like crying...

PAIN
By Linda Pastan, from "Waiting For My Life"

More faithful
than lover or husband
it cleaves to you,
calling itself by your name
as if there had been a ceremony.

At night, you turn and turn
searching for the one
bearable position,
but though you may finally sleep
it wakens ahead of you.

How heavy it is,
displacing with its volume
your very breath.
Before, you seemed to weigh nothing,
your arms might have been wings.

Now each finger adds its measure;
you are pulled down by the weight
of your own hair.

And if your life should disappear ahead of you
you would not run after it.

===============================

Pain is with me 24/7, 365.  Nobody can see it, so few believe it.  It feels like I should be bleeding profusely, covered in bruises...but I'm not.  Autoimmune disorders, say the doctors...no known cause, no cure...just pain that affects mostly women...go figure.  To those in pain...I wish you relief.  xo

What We Want by Linda Pastan

Moonlady by Marion---

What We Want

By Linda Pastan

What we want

is never simple.

We move among the things

we thought we wanted:

a face, a room, an open book

and these things bear our names---

now they want us.

But what we want appears

in dreams, wearing disguises.

We fall past,

holding out our arms

and in the morning

our arms ache.

We don't remember the dream,

but the dream remembers us.

It is there all day

as an animal is there

under the table,

as the stars are there

even in full sun.

^^^^^^^^^^

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ― W.H. Auden

^^^^^^^^^^

Love

The Hymn of a Fat Woman By Joyce Huff

The Hymn of a Fat Woman

By Joyce Huff

All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words “deity” and “diet” must have come from the same
Latin root.
Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones
or shards of stained
glass or Christ carved
on his cross.
Hard
as pew seats. Brittle
as hair shirts. Women
made from bone, like the ribs that protrude from his wasted
wooden chest. Women consumed
by fervor.

They must have been able to walk three or four abreast
down that straight and oh-so-narrow path.
They must have slipped with ease through the eye
of the needle, leaving the weighty
camels stranded at the city gate.
Within that spare city’s walls,
I do not think I would find anyone like me.
I imagine I will find my kind outside
lolling in the garden
munching on the apples. 

-------------------------------

Summer Haiku

Charms of Hummingbirds

taking summer's heat with them

on green, shining wings.

9/10/15 - MarionL

A face so happy

It makes you dream in yellow---

Bees kiss you with joy.

9/9/16 - MarionL

Clear Night by Charles Wright

Last year's lunar eclipse moon...the magical clouds parted...

CLEAR NIGHT

By Charles Wright

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky. 

Moon-fingers lay down their same routine 

On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys. 

Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls. 

I want to be bruised by God. 

I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. 

I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.   

I want to be entered and picked clean. 

And the wind says “What?” to me. 

And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me. 

And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.   

And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

Charles Wright, “Clear Night” from Country Music: Selected Early Poems. 

The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje

I've always had a nose for scents---quite like a bloodhound I've been told.  I could smell beer on my mother's breath the second she walked in the door...from the time I was born until I was 15...She quit drinking (and smoking, temporarily) when she got pregnant with my little brother when I was 15 years old. (To this day I wonder why she could get herself sober for him, but not for me and my sisters...) I was horrified to have a pregnant mother at that age.  Ah, those teen years.

I also grew up in a chronic fog/cloud of Pall Mall filterless and Virginia Slim cigarettes.  I guess there is no such thing as a perfect childhood, right?  For sure.  We all do the best we can... But I'm way off track now...  

Back to scents:  this amazingly fragrant poem always delights my senses supremely.  Can't you just smell the cinnamon?  Enjoy!

The Cinnamon Peeler

By Michael Ondaatje

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner's daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in an act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller

                     Monet's "Houses of Parliament" from his series of this painting.

Monet Refuses The Operation by Lisa Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, 
to soften and blur and finally banish 
the edges you regret I don't see, 
to learn that the line I called the horizon 
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see 
Rouen cathedral is built 
of parallel shafts of sun, 
and now you want to restore 
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe 
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world 
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight 
so quickly to one another 
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals, 
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands 
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.