Yes

In full-on summer here, suddenly. I love the way a yard smells mid-afternoon in the heat.

We drank a dry white Portuguese wine with dinner -- tongue-dancing!

My scented geranium bloomed, finally.

All is right with the world.

(Or, all is right in my particular universe, at least.)

Hung Out to Dry

Not sure exactly what dredged up this memory except perhaps for this sudden spike of mercury, but in '05 I took my two teenaged sons to Italy and France for a three-week trip. (One adult + two teens in 95 degree heat in non-English speaking countries = chaos.) Anyway, we rented an apartment for a week in Venice, up several very steep flights of stone stairs. One of the bedroom windows opened up to a small courtyard, which was frequented by fellow tourists as they tried to negotiate the maze that is Venice. We were blessed with a washing machine (which my 16-year-old son repaired) and I hung our washing out on some lines strung just outside the second-story window. As I was attaching the clothespins, a group of tourists spied me, pointed me out to their companions, and started snapping photos: "Lookee here! Authentic Italian washmaid hanging her business out in public!!" I waved, smiled, and went about my chore. I like to think that somewhere on the planet, I'm featured in someone's vacation photos as "that woman in Venice doing her wash".

Heat

After much patience, summer has at last arrived here in the Pacific Northwest -- but I won't hold my breath because it could just as easily vanish. I awoke today to sun in the Japanese maple, and danced my way down to coffee and breakfast. And now, hours later, glass of wine in hand, I listen to the neighbor girl practice Mozart on her piano, a particular joy now that the windows are all flung wide: open song. We are creatures of the earth, and we love the wide blue of a summer sky.

Tuesday Poem: William Butler Yeats

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

---

I bought this dishcloth in Ireland last summer,
and recently pulled it out from a suitcase
where it's sat for the past year.
Before using, I ran it through the wash,
and upon using it, noticed that Yeats appears
to be crying, where the stitching has pulled.
What terrible calamity has befallen us
that has caused the great poet to weep?
Ah yes, "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed"
foretells the gash in the ocean's floor
in the Gulf Coast --
And as poet, I believe that this tear-shedding dishcloth
trumps every single slice of toast bearing the image of Jesus.

 

---

For more Tuesday Poets click here.

Hmmm.....

Sandal-shopping today at the mall,
the choice seemed to be limited to two options:
a. dominatrix
b. slave-girl

Guess which one I chose?!!
Not these --

What I had hoped to discover in my tiger lily glen:

Midsummer Eve Fairies, by Edward Robert Hughes.

Lily

Always, in June, there were two or three tiger lilies in bloom, in the grassy glade to which no path led, in the woods beyond the barnyard. I like to believe no one knew of their existence save me, and maybe I was right, but the hubris of a ten-year-old, that confidence that soars before adolescence sets in, can be inflated. Few flowers bloomed here, and so these lilies took on mythical proportion beside the plebian Scotch broom, the dandelion. Their light seemed to not just glow but to also breathe its own air. And I breathed the same air, for the week or two that they sent forth their dusty pollen into the second-growth forest, in the shadow of alders and big-leaf maples. I imagined myself a fawn, invisible and unknown in the larger world, safe in my thicket, in the rampant growth of fiddlehead ferns at the edge of the universe.

I want, I want.

I just opened this week's New Yorker
and saw this:

"The Dress Lamp Tree, England", Tim Walker, 2002.

I want these.
To hang in my Japanese maple.

Tuesday Poet: Philip Larkin

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

---

The British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985), who graduated from Oxford with honors in 1943, worked for over forty years as a librarian, and published only four slim volumes of poetry, not more than a hundred poems in all.

---

Upon the suicide deaths six months apart by two of my neighbors -- a couple, one of whom was suffering from terminal lung disease -- I typed this poem up, encased it in a plastic sheet cover, and tacked it to a fenceboard in their beautiful front garden adjacent to the sidewalk on our urban street. It flapped in the wind, was rained upon, grew moldy inside its sheer sheath. It stood sentry before their vacant house for most of a year. I don't know what happened to it in the end, but it served as a reminder to all of us of the fragility of life, and of love.

Artopia

P. and I spent the afternoon at Artopia in Georgetown -- great event: food, music, art -- very offbeat and very Georgetown. I walked into Two Tartes for the first time in five (gasp!) years and it was all good. But why -- why -- do Seattlites wear so little color? Maybe this is the post-grunge look, all very grey, khaki & black. (And there I was, a visual siren in my multiple purples.)

When Two Tartes opened its doors nearly a decade ago, Airport Way was gritty and shuttered. It's still gritty, but numerous galleries, antique stores, studios, restaurants and bars now line the west side of the street across from what's left of the Rainier Cold Storage building. Back then we talked about a summer arts event but no one had the time & energy to organize it. Seeing it in full-blossom today was like seeing a child having newly entered adulthood. We pushed our way through crowds -- yes, crowds! -- of people. All the eating establishments had lines out the doors, and bands performed at numerous locations around the Airport Way strip. Booths sold everything from make-your-own-spin-art to jewelry incorporating vintage typewriter keys (P. bought me a 'T' on a chain) to apples and recycled/resewn cashmere clothing. The side streets are still dangerously pot-holed, yet there's an explosion of fennel which seems to have started in an empty lot and has now claimed bare earth nearly everywhere. Life flowed, overflowed, spilled from every doorway. Cops directed traffic as Artopia-goers roamed from side to side of the street. Planes taking off from Boeing Field periodically made the ground shake and the ears ring. A bit crazy, loud, festive, exhilarating and ultimately heady afternoon.

(Nonetheless, it was a relief to cross the lake to Redmond and our quiet forested retreat where the air always smells like camping instead of vehicle exhaust.)

Memento Vita

I ended up writing a letter-poem to Carol
for her memorial:

Dear Carol,
Just to let you know
there’s a party tonight at the end of the street,
and we’re going to eat pie and drink wine.
Lots of both, I’d guess.
And this time, no one’s going to ask you to bring a salad.
There’s a rumor of music, I wouldn’t rule out dancing,
and we certainly expect rain.

But the truth is, we’re going to talk about you –
thought you’d want to know. I intend to tell
how we shared a single electric mixer
which traveled back and forth between houses for years
for want of either of us shelling out $15 for our own.
That you always offered to iron tablecloths when I had a party.
That you not once let me do the dishes at your house.
And I’m certain I still owe you at least one cup each of flour, sugar, milk.

How the two of us had an agreement
to call each other in the event of a rainbow.
That, one warm summer twilight you called
to say that your cat was leaping vertically
at insects on the lawn across the street.
How you loved my mom’s recipe for yellow cake.

I might mention that Nora once wrote
“Happy St. Mother’s Day” in chalk on the sidewalk
and that I’ve always coveted the opal earrings
Devin gave you one year for Christmas.
I know I’ll mention that you were a second mother to my sons.
That you and Tom were the best couple I’ve known,
and an inspiration in my own second chance.

You believed in the magic of everyday things:
a walk around Seward Park, a glass of pinot noir,
a single blossom cut from the rose bush in your yard.

Dear Carol, we miss you here on Brandon Street.
We’re doing the best we can, all things considered.
I really wanted to run this all by you before I read it,
wanted to call you, to talk things over –
an inclination I know will not diminish any time soon.
But because that is no longer possible,
I decided instead to read aloud the following quote
which I keep coming back to when I think of you
and the good cheer, wit & joy you offered to everyone in your life:

Rules One and Two, by Brendan Gill, from The New Yorker

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible. Since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time, and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule."

Carol, here’s to you, your family, your friends,
and to as many good times as possible.

With love.

I've been short of words for a while now. Saturday afternoon I finally came up with something for my friend Carol's memorial, and read it with a microphone down at the dead-end of Brandon Street to about 150 people on the first day of summer and no rain, no rain, except if you count tears, which were plentiful. A woman I know by name, enough to say "hello" to but that's all, came up and told me she had to tell me something. She said, "towards the end, I asked Carol what it was that inspired her to keep going, and Carol thought for a minute and said 'T.'s blog.'" Although I treasure and accept this incredible gift-compliment, I give credit to Carol herself -- truly an extraordinary woman, and to her dear, dear husband, and two children, and her amazingly loving sister who nursed her through the last weeks. The memorial was a peak experience -- I'm still trying to take it all in. The emotional weight of it has kicked me in the back of the knees, but has also lifted my spirit in ways I didn't think possible. More to come.

Father's Day

Limits of Spectacle Lake

--in memory of my father

When the sun had slipped behind the hills

I said, let’s go back. Forget this business of lures and lines

and casting so far the eye could hardly follow the thread

out to snag a rainbow’s lip. Afraid we’d lose our way

and soon our boat would spin and sink.

There we’d sit eye to eye with a million trout.

When I was eight I caught my limit. But not before my father

turned the boat to shore and let out one last line

for luck. I held that rod for all the hope left

reeling in the wake. I pulled those fish

from tangled, churning light slipping underhand.

Six rainbow trout.

I don’t know who was more the spectacle that night --

the lake, me, or my father gently guiding the pole

between my unbelieving hands. Somehow he trusted

in the end of all filtering light. When he died

the next winter, I remembered six fish

laid out stiff on a plank of wood.

Eye to eye with the dead, in the wake

of the boat, I learned the limits,

the last ripple of life in a dying fish.

--T. Clear

(A poem from my youth: this dates back to 1980.)

Slugs did away with several of my pumpkin sprouts and I don't feel like going out tonight for bait so I've covered them with glass bowls. It's looking a little decorative out there. And pink.

Gardening is a lot like mothering. I dote and tickle a lot.

A long time ago, one of my older sisters mowed over my gourd garden, asserting that she didn't see it. Sheared every plant off at the base. It felt as if my first-born children had been sacrificed to the god of shorn shrubs. I was maybe twelve. She atoned for it years later when she grew gourds herself and brought me a basketful. This same sister payed the Avon lady with my coin collection. Again, claimed that she didn't know that there was anything special about a box of painstakingly-packed coins & bills stashed in the bottom drawer of my dresser. A 1935 mint-condition Silver Certificate dollar bill for a tube of Mocha Madness! Lipstick!

Takin' Care of Business

There is an ongoing discussion at work about just what it is we do when the boss steps out for a minute or an hour. This should answer that question:

Love

I stopped after work at Holly Park Greenhouse for some kiwi (male and female) plants and basil. Alas, P. took the camera with him to D.C., so no snaps of the ferns growing between the aisles, the signs in multiple languages ("if you pick a leaf you pay $1"). It's one of my favorite Seattle places, and was glad to see that the light rail construction didn't put them out of business. In a residential neighborhood, in an iffy area: it's like walking into someone's subconscious. I've not decided -- in the 20+ years I've been a customer -- if it matters if they sell anything. It's a muddled jumble of pots, seed potatoes, exotic cacti, orange trees, hand-packed seeds marked in a language I don't speak, water lilies, Thai basil, pumpkin starts, petunias, grape vines -- I could go on for paragraphs. Often from year to year things seem not to move a centimeter. A black and white fluffy cat yowls as it struts by. This is the kind of place where things grow out of other things which are planted within yet other things -- a twist, a zigzag, an immensely appealing snarl of life.

When I asked the nursery-man how far apart to plant the kiwi, he said (in a heavy Asian accent) "Oh, ten feet, more. They will find each other." Knowing that kiwi won't fruit unless a male and female plant are within pollination-distance, I was quietly pleased at his confidence that the two plants will indeed make contact. The imperative to reproduce is paramount, I suppose, but I prefer the idea that these two kiwi starts -- twigs at best -- were meant for each other.

It seems misdirected to be so meteorology-focused, but apparently it can't be helped, especially when it's mid-June and raining like the depths of November. My tomato plants are just managing to stay alive, anemic as they are. P. insists on wearing short sleeves and refuses to put on a coat. Fool! (But he's my fool.) Joannie at Poe-Query insists that it's like this every year and that we all suffer from insufficient memories. She may have a point, but I would like to assert that this year we are enduring a greater volume of vertical H2O than usual.

The yard maintenance men raked out all my nasturtium seedlings on the edges of the rose bed. Grrrr & hiss.

A neighbor commented that his dog likes to chase my rabbits. My rabbits? Those adorable scrawny feral scruffs would make a nice stew if perhaps I fed them more of my Italian parsley or grew, oh, maybe some carrots and lettuces just for them. Isn't this why I garden?

Tuesday Poem: Cake with Flute

Clang of pan

against lilt of Mozart.

Flour, scoop, and measure, measure.

Buttercream vibrato, vanilla harmony.

Egg whip. Trill.

Three, four.

Three fourths cup of milk

to whisk. And soda,

powder. Rising,

rising, up the scale. Note

the heat now. Allegro,

hotter. One quick breath

and mix with grace

notes. Honey that milk

for all it's worth.

--for Nelson, at ten

©T. Clear

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Waterworks

I went all teary this morning listening to this:

We were at Key Arena, for my step-son's Seattle University graduation. I always cry when I hear this -- surrounded by joyful people. Endings/beginnings. I'm a sentimental fool.

Pink

An early memory: being lifted by my father so that I could reach down to touch the blossoms of a pink flowering almond in his garden. (Any pink flower still puts me in a swoon, I admit.) My father -- a Bostonian transplanted to the "wilds" of the Pacific Northwest -- passed on to me his love of gardening, and my entire gardening life has been spent attempting to replicate his flower garden, which I hold in memory as the ideal place, my own flowering Eden. And although memory is an unreliable and often a product of imaginative invention, what I recall are flower beds with not a single bare spot -- a continuum of color and blossom which took root in my three-year-old consciousness and has continued to grow and flourish for decades. I possess a hazy, black-and-white photograph of him pushing his tiller in his vegetable patch, but none that show off the abundance of his flowers. Upon his death in 1966, I vowed -- at the ripe age of nine years -- to continue his legacy, beginning with assisting my brother in the upkeep of the half-acre yard, and a few years later, with my own patch of vegetables and flowers, seeds ordered from the ubiquitous Burpee Seed Catalog, which arrived inevitably in the midst of our single annual snowstorm. That early garden makes itself known at least once a month in a dream, and with it comes the urge to break new ground, once again.

And still, the muse is absent. Who is the Muse of Bloggers? Whatever her name, she's out partying with Cleo, Euterpe and Thalia. Or maybe I've just run out of things to say.

There's been a winter's-load of rain these past few weeks, and there's a rumor that summer starts in a little over a week. I don't believe it. My nasturtiums finally popped their heads from the soil, and I'd become so impatient with the pumpkins that this morning I dug down a little, to discover a seed with a little arrow of a sprout poking from it. So that means they haven't gone rotten in all the wet wet wet.

I've a hankering for hearty soups and butter-dripped slices of homemade bread. And cobblers and crisps.

(And I suppose I should offer some apologies for the flitty/flighty color-changes I've been doing lately. Can't seem to settle on anything.)

Tuesday Poets: The Absent Muse

The Muses: Clio, Euterpe and Thalia

One of the frustrating things about being a poet -- other than the nearly complete absence of remuneration -- is waiting for the poem to choose me. Rarely do I sit down and decided to write a poem about a particular subject. Nearly always, a poem creeps in at the edges of consciousness, teases, perhaps throws me a line or two. And if I'm lucky and have a free moment at that exact time, I'm able to attend to the demands of the poem. It's often not the case: I'm driving, or at work, or it's the middle of the night and even the presence of a notebook and pen at the side of the bed can't entice the my slumbering body to stir enough to scribble a line or two. And then that elusive shred of inspiration evanesces, and when I'm finally in the right (write!) place to receive the muse's proffered gift, it's all but gone.

But it's confounding, to say the least. I wonder how many cotyledons of poems have shriveled while I merged/sped/toiled/snored. Books-ful, I venture to say. (Or, more modestly, files-ful.) There was a time when the months of May and June promised an onslaught of poems -- as the dormant landscape burgeoned, so did inspiration. Ensuing years have spread out the process so that I'm not quite so dependent on the late-spring/early-summer season for my annual output. But here I sit, in fully-leafed, lush and newly-mossed June, with a deadline for a poem creeping up on me, and the muse refuses to make her presence known.

(For more Tuesday Poems click here.)

Digression

Paul and I drove over to Eastern Washington Friday, staying the night in Ellensburg to take in the opening of a group show featuring two pieces by his friend Helen Gamble. One was composed of several hundred cardboard tags containing handwritten "memories of home", each by a different person. Many had been dipped in beeswax; all were strung from the ceiling on delicate wires:


This morning we got in the car and headed the thirty+ miles to Yakima, crossing the Umtanum Ridge Crest on I-82: scrubby sage on rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Driving through landscape such as this, devoid of trees, unpeopled, I always feel an unfurling of the heart, an opening out, a release. The muscled backbones of the hills stretch and elongate, as if the earth has engaged in yoga. I feel the connection of all living things, from a skeletonized leaf with visible remnants of its vascular system, to the hip-curves of every valley and the sinews of each basalt ridge. It's a little bit religious, I suppose, this experience, minus the dogma.


My brother and his wife retired in the middle of a Yakima apple orchard -- I can never remember exactly how many acres, but it's somewhere around sixteen, which is a paltry number, considering the size of many surrounding acreages, but to me it's sixteen perfect acres. We walked the rows while brother J., who bubbles with information, kept up a steady patter about frost, pollination, blossoms, smudge-pots, helicopters (whose downdrafts can help dry the water from cherries), apple varieties, hail damage, on and on.

Between the rows:


Walking the perimeter:


Retired smudge-pots:


Infant honey-crisps:


I intend to return at harvest-time, to attempt to fathom the weight of a single laden tree.

Silence inhabits me like perpetual rain.

Tuesday Poem

To be alive
by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but…

If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

---

Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.

He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize; and Gathering the Bones Together (1975).

He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), which was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books the year, and three books of essays, including Poetry As Survival (2002) and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985).

He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse. Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines. Some of the poems that deal explicitly with these incidents include "A Litany," "A Moment," and "Gathering the Bones Together," in which he declares: "I was twelve when I killed him; / I felt my own bones wrench from my body." In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive."

In a review of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved from the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ted Genoways writes: "Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It's an experience usually reserved for reading the ancients, and clearly that was partly Orr's inspiration."

Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry.

He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
--From poets.org

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Memorial Day

My friend Tom has asked me to read something in honor of his wife, my friend, Carol, at her memorial on the solstice. It seems fitting that I write some lines for this, for her. In some ways, I've been composing these in my head since she was first diagnosed with breast cancer, some seventeen years ago. That's a long time to contemplate, to let an idea simmer on way-low-low-low, barely any flame until now. And what do I have, so far? Oh, so very little.

How does one define a life, a friendship, in two or three minutes? I wrote her a poem years ago, post-mastectomy, about gathering all the rain-sodden delphiniums in my garden and carrying them to her door. Today at Trader Joe's, in this late-May downpour, there were foil-wrapped pots of river-blue delphiniums for sale at the entrance.

My inclination is to revisit other deaths, to reside there for just a bit. Forgive me for what I expect to be a continued melancholy, here. At least until I can get this worked out.

Loss

I wanted the blankets in which he wrapped himself

each night, sleeping wound in soft plaid fleece;

but a helpful sister, in need of a task

amid the hubbub of new death

had gathered every loose thread

and set them to rinse & spin.

I didn't need one then, I don't need one now....

Tuesday Poem

Collapsed Catholic

Not catechism, but a free press.
Not First Holy Communion, but at least one meal a day.

Not sin, but a human condition.
Not confession, but truth.

Not a hair shirt, but cashmere.
Not a martyr, but The Fool.

Not the Eucharist, but devil’s food cake.
Not his blood, but a ’59 Chateau Margaux

Not abstinence, but a condom.
Not Immaculate Conception, but contraception.

Not a priest, but a lover.
Not a nun, but a lover.

Not a sacred heart, but a stem cell.
Not a pope, but a popular singer/songwriter.

Not a crucifix, but an old growth forest.
Not a rosary, but good luck.

Perhaps a soul.
And a saint, always.

© T. Clear

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The Sunday story. Hermitage? Read more by clicking below....
Mrs second-cousin saw at once that a well trodden path went from the shed to a hole in the overgrown hedge; someone had definitely been going in and out.

Today was a good day. Yes.

My son's car died today, at my house. Parked in front. He limped it over here and declared it unsafe for travel. Hrrmph. Guess who's going to arrange for towing Monday morning!

Determined to still enjoy the afternoon, we decided to cook some fish for dinner, so we headed off to Uwajimaya to peruse the scaly offerings, but detoured to Mayuri, an Indian grocery store not far from my house. Within minutes of inhaling the curry, the garam masala, the cardamom and cinnamon, we switched to an Indian-themed dinner, and walked out with long thin hot green chillis, a hunk of ginger, a bag of black onion seeds (I bet there are 500,000 seeds in the bag) and an opo squash. Hungry! And still no fish.

Next stop was a store called simply Asian Market -- Uwajimaya somehow became lost to us. We pushed past the scads of late-afternoon Saturday shoppers, all the way to the back where the fish counter displayed a low, ice-packed table upon which sat at least a dozen varieties of whole fish: tillapia, mackerel, drum, catfish, bass, croaker, ribbonfish, carp -- the drill was to grab a plastic bag to cover your fingers, grab your fish, then hand it off to a fishmonger for cleaning/de-heading/de-tailing/weighing/pricing. So many languages everywhere around us! My son gave me a lesson on fish-selection, and we ended up with one very fresh rainbow trout.

Dinner was a feast -- a symphony for the senses. The fish, which Reilly broiled after rubbing it with an oil and spice concoction, made me weep.

So far, so good, all things considered. But I still had to drive R. back to Seattle (38 miles round-trip), and thunder was rattling the windows and it had begun to monsoon outside. And I desired only to crawl under the covers with a book and the cats.

But we set out, the fuel gauge flickering close to Empty. And, amazingly, we had one of those conversations that you can't plan -- the kind where you dig below the surface, get down to the nitty gritty, the truth of The Big Things: death -- both recent and familiar, as well as our fragile hopes, and dreaded fears. And the rain kept up its lashing, and we pushed on through the dark May night which rightfully should have been on the verge of balminess and scented with lovely blooming May things but instead smelled of the defroster on High. (Smelled like winter.)

I dropped him off, wished him well at his job-interview tomorrow (thankful for Light Rail), and headed back, listening to the Cuban-born father-and-son duet of Bebo and Chucho Valdes on piano. The rain eased; traffic was sparse at such a late hour, and I settled into a meditative state for the journey home.

Nearing my house, wisps of fog hung close to the ground, swirled and eddied into the night. Suddenly I wasn't ready for this day to end! I wanted to drive on with Bebo and Chucho, let the conversation with my son sink in and settle. But I gave in to a sensible instinct, and turned into my driveway. But sat there, in my car, long enough for this piece to finish:


Existing in this moment, with this music that is all about love (how can it be about anything else?), I would say that today was not a good day, but a perfect one.

I'm at a loss for words.

Oops....

Recently, while with my 21-year-old son in a grocery store, I ran into a man I had dated six years ago. We did the usual "how are you's", and when he asked me what was new, I flashed my wedding ring. "Oh!" he said, then leaned in to my son to congratulate him! Ha! My son quickly put up his hands in a blocking gesture and began to shake his head and say "NO NO NO!" I couldn't help but burst out laughing, and in between guffaws, explained that the young handsome man at my side was not my husband. (My son, needless to say, was mortified.)

Tuesday Poem

Grief

Kept in a canning jar

disguised as plums or cherries,

spooned sparingly down throats

that could not utter Dad.

Mother boiled water,

set the timer.

Checked for hissing seals.

Nothing leaked.

© T. Clear

Originally appeared in Manzanita Quarterly.

For more Tuesday Poems click here.

Good. Yep.

I'm finding a place in the universe to put everything from these past weeks; there's a tiny flower/herb plot out front that is slowly filling with new life: violas, mint, thyme, sage, parsley, heliotrope, sage, +++. New ferns begin to sprout chartreuse fronds in the shady side-yard, and delicate silvery lamium glints in the dapples of sunlight which find a path through viburnum. A chicadee, an Oregon junco, a pair of Stellar's jays. The racoons make their nightly trek across the deck, and the cats -- inside -- go mad with snarls and hissing, gravelly gutteral growls which bring their own dissonant music to our home.

The fragrance of Indian cuisine scents the kitchen tonight: such olifactory magic in cardamom, cinnamom, garam masala, turmeric, onion, jalapenos, bay leaves, mustard seed. I found some dainty Rex sole at Uwajimaya and I've rubbed them with lemon, chili powder, etc., and they are sizzling under the broiler's fierce coil. The stovetop simmers with basmati rice and dhal; a pinot grigio chills in the refrigerator.

As my son Nelson wrote on facebook:
It's all good. The good, the bad, all of it: it's all good.
(Editing by, ahem, moi.)

Jangled

Not a lot to say here lately; nothing but a persistent jangling in the Brain Department. I testified Wednesday on the negligent management practices of my former business partner. Hard to believe it's been five years since I've suffered her presence, and in the courtroom she wouldn't meet my gaze. Interestingly enough, this was a divorce trial -- and I was a witness for her husband. The plaintiff is seeking big $$$ in addition to that which she's already pilfered, fraudulently, from her husband's bank account. There's more than a fair amount of bona-fide crazy behavior going on here -- crazy in the belongs-at-Western-State-Hospital department. Either that or a nice spartan little cell somewhere far, far away. (I vote for the cell.)

Sitting in the witness stand comes with its own agitation (thus the jangling). The attorney asked me questions on specific matters other than those for which he prepped me, so I had to think fast, and answer fast. And then the cross-examination, which, mercifully, was brief. It was the most I've seen of an actual courtroom outside of Law & Order. Needless to say, I am really glad it's over.

And it's pale comfort that I'm not the only person who fell victim to her 'charms'. I'm reminded by my husband that people like her excel at this type of manipulation. I can only imagine how many others have endured her predations.

---

And then we have my friend Carol, who I miss every day, and she's not even been gone a week. Already there's a list of things I want to discuss with her, tell her about. I want to make her laugh. I want her to make me laugh with her sharp, dry wit. Her take on the world always put everything in perspective, and I never left an encounter with her -- however brief -- without feeling better about something, without having my faith in the universe restored.

---

(This is the place in the blog entry where I emit a sigh: sigh.)

---

Two days in a row now there's been a starling on the wire outside the studio at work, belting out quite the fantastic string of melodies. When I stand out on the side walk and look up at it, the singing stops. Yesterday I made some chirruping sounds in his/her direction, and the bird mimicked them back to me. As disliked as these birds are, I never tire of their persistent chatty conversations. I always think of them as a kind of avian Tower of Babel when they gather in great numbers and shriek, wheeze, whistle, rattle and engage in their usual clickety-clackety brouhaha.

So I just want to say thank-you, starling.

Dylan for Tom

This is for Tom Porter, husband of my friend/honorary-sister Carol who passed away last week:

Tuesday Poem

No Tarte Bakery

Cup is empty, spilled

quarter by eighth

into cake of ashes,

bonedust. Spoon

minus table- and tea-.

Unhinged springform,

amorphous bundt. Sugar

dissolved, rippled

down drain. Powder, soda

whisked away. Praise

cookie no more,

praise nothing.

Once pie bubbled

golden with crowns --

not again. Rattle the lock,

lose the key. No taste,

no scent, no

filigree swirl

of icing. Not

a crumb.

© T. Clear

More Tuesday Poems can be found here.

Partings

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

--Theodore Roethke

---

We stood in C.'s kitchen tonight
and toasted her memory with Cognac
and Pino Gris and Amarone: hefty swigs,
yet pale comfort. And then we danced to her favorite
songs, but all I can remember is something by
Van Morrison, alas. Addled with sorrow.

Her dog tried to get into the mortuary van
with the shell of her body, emptied of soul.
And the ancient black-and-white cat (nearing 19?)
stood vigil on the sidewalk. O sweet grief!
This sting of living leaves us gasping.

Pranksters

We're going to be laughing for a long time about the practical joke we played at work last Friday. I started thinking about the term "practical joke" and found this on Wikipedia:

The term "practical" refers to the fact that the joke consists of someone doing something (a practice), instead of a verbal or written joke. A practical joke can be caused by the victim falling for a prank, the victim stumbling into a prank, the prankster forcing a prank on the victim, the prankster causing others to do something to the victim, or even causing the victim to do something to others. Sometimes more than one victim is used.

Hmm...the word victim seems a bit heavy-handed; I prefer recipient or beneficiary.

Here's a great prank, from Improv Everywhere:

Tones/Undertones

I keep forgetting to bring the camera to work. Up to my elbows in color, which requires a particular degree of patience. Water-based oils, rubbed onto sandblasted glass. Colors blended together at the edges, colors becoming one another, becoming to one another, becoming each other. Becoming something else, at times, too. (And yes, I wear gloves.)

Yesterday after work I looked at what I was wearing and saw my colors from the day: cadet blue, sap green, chocolate brown, pane's grey. Trying to keep it neutral but the brights always rally at the back of my brain to Let! Us! In!

So I give in to fuschia or orange or yellow, and then must pull the intensity back down with grey or green or blue or brown. Or purple, which never fails to astound me. Purple! This color-thing does not come naturally to me. I've been for many years a word-handler, not a color-handler. But this workout for the brain feels like weight-lifting, and I grow more adept by the day. At least I think I do...there are days at a time when color fails me, abandons me gasping and confused. What is blue? What is red? What is every shade & hue in-between? I want to know. I want a definition for blue. I want to write it: a 25-line poem, internal rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc., and all that cannot possibly be said and yet, indeed, said about blue.

Close

It's Tuesday, it's May, already.
It's going so fast. The words of my friend C.,
in her waning days.

I stumbled onto a tender scene tonight:
C. lying in her bed, her husband nestled close,
their 23-year-old daughter snuggled next to Dad.
Older son attendant in a chair beside the bed.
I felt the intruder, but they insisted I visit.
C., with translucent skin delicately stretched
over a bone-frame. She was glowing again,
much like she was 17 years ago when she was
released from a month of chemo. I think that
perhaps she was teetering on the edge then,
and now she hesitates on the precipice.
I lingered only a few minutes --
I was robbing this family of fragile time.

Tick tick tick
as the planet makes its certain turn,
and soft curtains of rain drape themselves
over the foothills in the distance
seen through the bedroom window.

Reliable rain.
Last night it pounded fists on the roof:
hear me hear me hear me.
A lullaby for the living.

goodnight
fare well
sweet dreams

Gala

Some details from last night:
--my mother's black evening bag, circa 1940-something,
on its chain handle around my wrist
--black silk Farragamo stiletto heels (ouch!)
--a silver brooch in a Book of Kells pattern
--a fringed silk-burnout shawl with Celtic knots
--shimmery stockings
--LBD.

And that was on the modest side.
I did not, unlike some other women, wear:
--a gown with a train
--cleavage that bubbled-up like a boiling-over pan of cream
--ruffles! ruffles! ruffles!
--rustles and rustles of satin/taffeta
--27 yards of lace.

Oh you men, you have it so easy.

"I can resist everything except temptation. "
--Oscar Wilde