With/Without

My generous friends in whose duplex I'm camping are out of town for the week (having skirted one of the many tornadoes that have been devastating the southern U.S.), and I'm caring for their three cats -- a mother kitty and her two boy cats. All three many years past kittenhood, but svelte, lithe creatures -- all three. When I enter their kitchen each morning, they swirl about my ankles with incredible grace and gentleness. I feel as if I'm stepping into a slow-flowing and soft stream that swirls and flickers with each step, stripes of black & grey and mottled tortoiseshell, a balm against my skin.

Yesterday, in the startling presence of morning sun, I decided to lure them outside for the day by carrying their bowls across the backyard to the picnic table, and once they figured out where I was headed, they leapt up to the table in nearly a single fluid motion. Clearly these animals are of the same filial unit, and have moved through their existence instinctually aware of each other's every heartbeat.

What does this speak of those with whom we share our most intimate selves? All of us are but pieces of a larger living, breathing organism. We move about each day with our exits, our entrances, our conversations, our patient silences, our trusting shared slumbers. Blind, perhaps, to the possibility of termination. If we did allow this notion to enter into consciousness, the ensuing despair could quite possibly be our doom.

Or one could just shut down, shut out, turn off. No emotion, no empathy. No life worth living.

I choose the life worth living.
This life, right here, right now.

And now it's time to feed those cats.

Two Things

Something beautiful (some of the new work). (I want to live inside this piece.):

Melinda's new line knocks my socks off -- and apparently also everyone else's socks, because the reactions to the first sets of orders shipped have been incredible. For me, these pieces capture the hazy heat of an August afternoon somewhere deep inside a forest, a hidden glade, a sanctuary. We're still waiting for the pro photos, alas. Any day!

And now this....
The other day, I was painting, and made some kind of movement which caused a paintbrush to flip up nearly to the ceiling and land about five feet behind me, tucked neatly behind the wing of a (decorative) crow:


This moment of flight & subsequent landing seemed like an omen, or something holy -- we have yet to remove the paintbrush.

What is the symbolism here? The metaphor?

Not sure if my brain is ready to receive this message, but perhaps the universe is calling out to me.....

I picked up my cat from the kitty hospital yesterday after an eight-day in-patient stay. Most of her tummy is shaved, as well as parts of her legs; there are four tubes -- plastic straws -- protruding from her belly. And from these tubes leaks fluid. MERDE. They come out on Monday, so I'm hopeful this flood will cease.

Papers served yesterday.

Today's vocabulary words (just two):

irretrievably

broken

---

Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, Is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, Utters another. --Homer

I am in possession of many secrets.

Slán a fhágáil ag duine....

A year ago, my sisters and I had a crazy idea: let's all go to Ireland together and stay in the Carrowholly house. When I put out the suggestion, I expected to be answered with "not possible" -- between us there were so many schedules to coordinate, and so many variables to account for: lack of funds, unemployment, a foreclosure already in the process, illnesses in our families -- and yet miraculously we all not only figured out a way to make this happen, we all managed to get on the same flights. It took months of planning, with ultimate disappointment the expectation, but finally, the first week of January, we scheduled it.

The joy of anticipation was as good as the anticipation of Christmas from a child's perspective. Our paternal grandfather emigrated from New Ross, Ireland, in (I believe) 1912, and only one sister other than me has visited the country of our ancestors. I'm fortunate to possess dual citizenship. For this last Christmas, in anticipation of this journey, I created for my sisters a hand-bound, hand-sewn ten-copy edition of a chapbook, Fiddlehead, Heron: Notes from Carrowholly. It contains photographs from one of the most magical places on earth -- a place wherein resides a large portion of my heart -- as well as journal notes from my many visits there.

An excerpt:

I wished for a blue-speckled eggshell

to place at the feet of Our Lady of Flotsam.

The previous June, in a hazelnut copse I’d found one,

but it’d disappeared since our last visit here.

And I hadn't a clue where I'd find another;

So this afternoon, when Paul called out,
There's an eggshell on the patio,
I answered,
No! It's a snail shell!
(Thinking it was the leftover bits
from a sparrow’s treat.)
And Paul:
T., I know a bird shell from a snail shell!

He was right:

not an apparition
but a perfect half-shell, blue & speckled,

amidst scattered seed.

Not fallen from a tree,
because there is no tree in the yard.
It's as if a bird was doing an exchange:
shell for seed.

The universe was granting my request—

Not a miracle, but a gift.

---

Upon the shattering news I received three weeks ago, this trip fell apart. No longer staying in the property owned by my husband, two sisters were forced to cancel. I can no longer afford to take time off from work. Two other sisters are still going, but on a very different itinerary. This trip of a lifetime -- five sisters stepping back in time to embrace a long-sought heritage -- is off.

I'm not seeking sympathy here -- my trips to Eire have been numerous and replete with generosity. But the cruelty in this decisive blow on the part of one person, the capability to throw what seems like a single stone into a pond, and create a tidal wave of consequences -- is profoundly disturbing.

I don't know what else to say except that my heart -- that 300 gram muscle pumping life through this human husk -- continues to shatter.

More from Fiddlehead, Heron:

I wonder, when it rains hard here

and all the low bogland and shallow fields

fill with water, if suddenly on ordnance maps

there appears additional evidence of lakes and ponds?
Over-spilling, and everywhere the constantly

changing sky reflected on the surface of the earth.

There is a beach several coves away
where broken pottery washes up—nothing
particularly special—cheap plates flung to bits.
Beautiful in their disarray, every year more,
and I gather pocketsful and place them
on my kitchen sill. But flung from where,
and by whom? A deceived wife in splintered rage?
Fallen from a boat in a move from island to mainland?
Out of fashion teacups cast-off to sea?

My neighbor Pat tells of an elderly island man

whose body was strapped to a door

and towed to town behind a dingy when he died.

(There are 365 islands in Clew Bay,
some as big as a wink.)

These shards remain a mystery.

---

I've put my requests out to the universe, which, though not without its gifts, remains ever a mystery.

Tuesday Poem: Volume of Grief

Volume of Grief

How many cubic units must grief occupy?

And how to measure?

I'd suffer an umbral shadow

in a lunar eclipse, my aura rimmed

with a blistering bruise.

In cotton bales, I'd lumber

under kilo after kilo, mouth dry

as a foolscap-quad of paper sheets.

In hat sizes twenty gallon.

On the Glasgow Coma Scale:

complete gibberish.

If grief is measurable,

then it should be disposable,

like a broken bed, or a newspaper.

Burnable like a cord of wood,

expendable like wattage. Frittered away

like minutes and hours.

Walked away from, like the bad job.

Downed by the pint.

Shed like a pound.

Subtracted from, divided by.

Deleted.

© T. Clear

This Necessary Silence

No words these past days.

The vortex continues its all-consuming grip-- my cat has been at the vet for a week, and I don't know if she'll come home. And now my son just informed me tonight he needs surgery. Cat: surgery. Son: surgery. Too much, is what I say.

My question: if I go to the Southern Hemisphere, where centrifugal force moves in a direction opposite to that here in the Northern Hemisphere, can I possibly slow things down enough to enable me to step away from this ever-compounding chaos?

It's certainly worth a try.

---

Meanwhile the world spins on.

Spring is ridiculously hesitant in Seattle this year, weeks behind the expected relief of flowers in bloom. Morning dawns with a winter chill, and the rain just seems to go on forever. I hunch into the wind on my walk to work, a leopard-print umbrella offering meager protection.

---

I love my job.

We are hustling orders out the door,
and reorders trickle in steadily.
I crack the whip whenever there's a pause in production.

And yet.

This afternoon while we painted, we listened -- on YouTube -- to Wanda Sykes and George Carlin. How can one fail to find cheer and optimism in laughter?

The brain is easily distracted, and for that I am grateful.

This Single Day

Dancing at work while making photomasks, eating chocolate and drinking plum vodka. (Thursday Happy Hour.)

And damn, did we hustle.

It's not all bad.

But it's not all good either.

Mostly, it's not good.
It's a minute-at-a-time slog.

It's anger, betrayal, rage.

It's a loss of faith and trust.
Fragile, tender things, those.
Elusive things.

---

May you show kindness to everyone you meet,
and may they extend that kindness in return.

Erasure

1. On Sunday, Bank of A. refused me access to any of my account information, necessary for completing my tax info due the following day.

2. On Monday, I changed my email password, and Comcast promptly blocked access to me from even their site -- I could log onto any other internet site except Comcast.

3. On Wednesday, I called Rite-Aid to have my Rx transferred, and upon giving my name and birthdate, was told that they have no record in their computer system of my ever having purchased a prescription from them. (Despite the fact that I was holding one of my Rx bottles in my hand, with Rite Aid printed clearly across the top.)

4. My computer died, and when I finally pulled my warranty out of one of the many boxes I hastily packed upon vacating my home, saw that the warranty had expired the day before. When I called Apple and gave them my name and warranty #, I was told that there was no such warranty or name in their system.

The good news is that I'm the squeakiest of squeaky wheels, and after an hour on the tech support line with B of A, I convinced them to release my -- my!-- records.

After an hour and a half on the phone with Comcast, we/they managed to allow me access to their site and my account, for which I pay honest $$ every month.

Rite Aid finally confirmed my existence, but only with a single outdated prescription, and then proceeded to fill it with 2/3 less than the amount I paid for, which required a second trip to the store.

The customer service at Apple, though, was stellar. I pulled out all my saved cards, and allowed the goodwill of the universe to do its work, and they decided to grant me a grace period on the warranty. They not only fixed the technical issues, the also replaced cracked keyboard parts, cleaned it up, and charged me zilch. Apple for life.

My cat is spending night #2 at the vet with a perplexing and unable-to-diagnose condition, and I awoke yesterday morning to blood all over this play-house apartment.

But the piece de resistance in this scenario? It's what I christen the new "F" word: foreclosure. After spending two hours on the phone with a mortgage counselor, I've been informed there is not enough, the ratio is in the deficit, there is less than, it expires soon, etc. etc., and I better start getting ready for the inevitable.

And so the circus side-show that is my life continues.

Women/Art

This is breathtaking....
(It's no wonder that so many men want to possess us.)

Tuesday Poem: Catch

Blue & Wilted

A Way Out

A few things I saw on my walk today:

--a half-built sailboat
--grape hyacinth pressing up between cracks in the sidewalk
--a yellow curvy plastic slide in a front yard
--a Japanese flag in a window
--a man setting forms for concrete steps

This New Life

Day 10: Limbo.

Between, neither, nether, without.

An absence of.
An abscess.

Foreign/fallen/futile.

Final.

---

(No ability whatsoever to respond to your unceasingly generous comments. I am struck dumb with this entirely newfound grief.)

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

--Theodore Roethke

The Door is Bolted

I made a commitment some years back -- after 9/11, I believe -- to approach every single day from a standpoint of love. Not an easy thing to accomplish. Some days all I can manage is the faintest glimmer of an expectation that, when successful, gives depth and meaning to every step, every encounter. It's a "practice", much like yoga is a practice (and, I'm finding out, so is law). Allows us some measure of failure, allows repeated attempts at a measure of success. No surprise then that I'm struggling tremendously with this at the moment, attempting to keep the black beasts of spite/bitterness/betrayal/revulsion well back from the door.



But the betes noires claw at it ceaselessly and howl well past midnight, the bastards.

The cruelty of the world knocks me to the ground.

Be kind, to those you love
and those that you no longer love.

My new phone number is 1-800-ANXIETY.

Give me a ring sometime.

Anytime. Really.

I even deliver.

Ironic, I think, that I changed the photo at the top of the blog just about a month ago.

Perhaps subconsciously setting my heels against the oncoming rumble of these monstrous boulders tumbling against my back.

Descending rapidly into the full chaos. [Thanks to Melinda for that one.]

Tuesday Poem: The Quangle Wangle Quee's Hat

What hoojoob madness is afoot?

The Quangle Wangle's Hat, below,
resides inside my skull at the moment;
and the Blue Baboon, and the Pobble who has no toes,
and the Dong with the luminouse nose and everyone/everything else
in this poem are in there clacking and jangling
and otherwise creating their own hullaballoo
resulting in a condition known as Bedlam of the Brain.

Without further ado:

The Quangle Wangle's Hat
--by Edward Lear

I

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree The Quangle Wangle sat, But his face you could not see, On account of his Beaver Hat. For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide, With ribbons and bibbons on every side And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace, So that nobody ever could see the face Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

II

The Quangle Wangle said To himself on the Crumpetty Tree,-- 'Jam; and jelly; and bread; 'Are the best food for me! 'But the longer I live on this Crumpetty Tree 'The plainer that ever it seems to me 'That very few people come this way 'And that life on the whole is far from gay!' Said the Quangle Wangle Quee.

III

But there came to the Crumpetty Tree, Mr. and Mrs. Canary; And they said, -- 'Did you ever see 'Any spot so charmingly airy? 'May we build a nest on your lovely Hat? Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! 'O please let us come and build a nest 'Of whatever material suits you best, 'Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!'

IV

And besides, to the Crumetty Tree Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl; The Snail, and the Bumble-Bee, The Frog, and the Fimble Fowl; (The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg;) And all of them said, -- We humbly beg, 'We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,-- 'Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that! 'Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!'

V

And the Golden Grouse came there, And the Pobble who has no toes,-- And the small Olympian bear,-- And the Dong with a luminous nose. And the Blue Babboon, who played the flute,-- And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute,-- And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat,-- All came and built on the lovely Hat Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

VI

And the Quangle Wangle said To himself on the Crumpetty Tree,-- 'When all these creatures move 'What a wonderful noise there'll be!' And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon They danced to the flute of the Blue Babboon, On the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree, And all were as happy as happy could be, With the Quangle Wangle Quee.