shells and flowers
pilar timpane
the stories of my life sometimes are
a shell i carry on my back.
other times, these same stories
are flowers i pick from a fine bouquet
and balance on my fingertip
to hand out to the crowd.
i offer this to you:
unharried dawn, we traipsed the new
light down over to the lake
amidst a beating harmonic host
of beetles, bugs, life awake
who gathered quietly around
to watch us go.birds whetted their beaks,
the town slept and we were bare-footed
with clown-faced happiness.
perched on the slate face of rocks
our eyes dipped as the lapping
lipping tongue of the dark gray water
gave our toes a light lick,
mirroring the golden apple of a moon
ripe enough for us to pick
washed our feet with its kiss
and pushed back again into the ebb.
another i may hand you goes:
in san francisco, there are miracles
late night, when cows caress the moon
and fog awaits in hidden chambers
found in cleave ‘tween yellow mountain peaks
(those mounds like wheat on the horizon).
stays at bay, rubs shoulders with ships and gulls.
it lays low near the earth and sneaks in
on eden’s high red pillars, trunks that
cap the world and, while the moon is high,
are still reaching, while the moon is yet high,
cows ride by while fog curls up in hiding,
and they are reaching still.
my shells are hard, i will keep them (mostly) to myself:
hard, the basement floors and tables crowded
with my arms and adolescing
sprawled about like octopus, the mean jab of
a hard jaw crunching on the yellow moon.
i give you these or keep them to myself
if you give me your flowers, i will listen to them.
i have heard each person has these stories
i have heard that some are shells,
and others are bouquets.
a good radical
this is very important:
This June, lots was happening. July sort of feels like the after-effects of June. Here are some pictures (and captions) of what went down.
First of all, both my parents turned the double nickel (55), two days apart. Aren't they cuties?
My brother rarely is caught smiling on camera, so I have to put this one up.
That same week, my dad had a surprise birthday party. I came home and went immediately out to Whole Foods, claiming coffee needs, and returned with several platters of hors d'oeuvre. We moved all the platters into our next door neighbor's refrigerator while my dad messed around with a porch umbrella.
Then their friends started filing in, bringing champagne and little gifts. My parents' friend Viola came over and brought my dad some laurels.
Here's some of the pictures from that afternoon complete with my dad dressed as Bachus or some kind of Greek senator.
I think for at least the first few days that the Perch was open for business, it was grand central station, and that was even before we had any real furniture. It's lots of fun.
The last week of June, I went down to Washington D.C. to visit our friend Rebecca and see "Antony and Cleopatra." We also stopped in the portrait gallery.
The next day, Rebekah from Valle de Chalco came to town! She is up on a furlough, so she stopped in to talk with people going on the mission trip to Mexico this August, and I took her around New York City. She brought me a whole bunch of donations for the library, pencils, paper, coloring books, etc. We're going to bring them down in big old bags to Mexico. We had a good time going to the Top of the Rock (at Rockefeller Center), and sneaking around the Waldorf-Astoria for free.
Anyone ever traveling to New York City should see these views.
Rebekah and I had a lot to catch up on. She told me all about our friends in Mexico, the goings-on of the church life down there. Later when we were home again we actually called (thank God for Skype) and talked with some of my old neighbors.
On August 2, thanks to many donations of funds and time, a group of 9 of us from the Point will be going down to help Rebekah out for a week with the kids, as well as do some construction work. I'm very excited to see how it all turns out.
Going into the Waldorf-Astoria hotel is much like being in an art-deco museum where a lot of contemporarily dressed tourists seem to be out of place milling around. I half-expected to see Lena Horne in a great white fur or Humphrey Bogart in a suit and hat walk through the lobby.
It was a fun little reunion.
Last week, I got this e-mail from my pastor, Kevin Pounds. We've been talking about Genesis, creation, the force of life itself behind what is.
I didn't have a lot of time to write this out, but I'm thinking right now that I might just like to. So here goes. Kevin's questions are in italics.
As I've read and prayed through Genesis
1:26-27 and 2:7, I believe there is a clear implication of artistic
contemplation as God approaches making and forming man (and woman). I have a
few artistic questions:
1) Is there a contemplative process you go through before you begin working
on a piece of art whether painting, writing, sculpting, etc.? If so, share
some of how it works for you.
It's funny that I don't quite know how to answer this. I think the process is saying "right now I will write." If there is a process, it is the process of shutting off other things in my head and saying, "now I will write." It takes more contemplating of why actually writing today is a good idea.
Today, for example, I wrote for many hours. Funnily, I decided early on that it would be a day for contemplation, and it was mostly that. By contemplation in this sense I mean contemplating God, and He was here with me, and there were many prayers and good passing minutes of Him and only fully Him. Lately, to my chagrin, these times are few and far between where I can just sit for a good long while and conversate personally and thoughtfully for as long as I need to (even hours, even a day) with the Holy Ghost. But, as anyone knows who's tried it, to talk openly and unabashedly with God comes naturally for His very creatures. It is something like talking to dearest friends and family, something like dancing. At first you need to warm up a little, test out those muscles you haven't used in a while, but then you are moving with the music, easily into that groove.
Some time after that, it occurred to me (most likely because when your heart is revealed the most, you are able to know what's best for you) that I should try and do some writing. I have had the idea, and have been working pretty steadily, on writing spiritual memoirs. It started with a bible study I'm working on asking a few questions about your spiritual life since birth, and the questions are provoking, but the study only gave a few lines to write responses. I realized immediately that a few lines would not suffice. I would need a notebook. I've been writing about Catholic school and Monsignors and plenty more than that. So, in this case, a lot of the thought process for what I have been writing has been these questions, these prompts, which are useful to anyone trying to write something specific. It's also been sensing that it might actually be time to write these stories down, now while I have them fresh in mind, now while I believe the relevance of restoration to faith is on many people's minds.
Today, I started writing a song, most of all because I was filled with a kind of inspired love from all that praying. So I wanted to write a song to frame that love.
When I write poems it is because only poetry unfolds the subject it is looking at. I could write description and analysis, but only poetry will smooth out the corners. Poetry is saying what cannot be said in any other way. Like this
your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
for example, by e.e. cummings. The poet is talking about opening up to someone he loves, but only this metaphor of a closed fist and opening flower will suffice to explain how his love, like Spring, has this effect on him.
Inspiration means being spurred to create, moved to activity. It is also another word for divine guidance. The root of the word is "to be breathed onto or into." It is love, it isn't something you can buy at the store, it's free. Free to come and go. I guess when it comes, it comes. But when it does, it is clearly a gift.
2) Do you have a clear picture in your mind of what you want to create?
I have an idea of what it might look like, and I know what the main point I was going for was, but for the most part, I just sit down and let words talk to me. God knows, really.
There's a concept of the "premise" - that is, the core idea of what the rest of will hang on, the "vision" so to speak. That might be one character and one event that happens in his/her life. That might be one verse that seems to ring in the mind throughout the day, rattle in the heart until it comes out on paper. It might be one image that you work a painting around.
It's said that an admirer of the statue "David" asked: "How do you take a
rough stone and make such beauty from it?"
Michelangelo is said to have responded, "I just carve away anything that
isn't art." Sometimes, the author of beautiful things sees them inside what appears to normal eyes to just be rock, a piece of paper, or a canvas. Behind those materials is something greater waiting to be freed.
What gives the freedom to be creative is actually having a basis for creation. So once the main idea is decided on, there's more freedom to make changes, to edit and expand the idea. A song may have a simple chorus and a melody emerges, but then later there is a bridge, and maybe a harmony comes in. Creative projects are work just like anything is work, and often it is labor. Hours and hours go into pieces of art, there is hard work behind every product and in making art it is often emotional, time-consuming, mental work. But it is great fun as well.
3) Does your creation ever take on a life of its on? (does that even make
sense?)
That makes good sense. Any thing created has life, life was wrapped up in its making. It lives and is alive because it was made. Obviously we're not making people, although we do at some point make people through being moms and dads. Babymakers. Anyway, yes, all work makes its own choices and leads and directs the artist. Each sentence leads to the next. Not to say we don't have any control, because we have plenty. But it is shaping, rendering, producing that we do. God is He who gives life, and who breathes into the dead clay to make it live.
Only once or twice have I woken up in the middle of the night and knew right then and there what song I was going to write in its entirety or what poem. And even then, even when specific lines and chords seem to make themselves appear in good order, I made changes and altered where I thought it appropriate.
In writing stories, the greatest changeling is the character. He may start out with one idea and finish on a completely new one. He might have his heart broken or he might break hearts; none of that can be said at the opening. Sometimes, I feel like I get to know my characters, and they are telling me who they are. The author Frederich Buechner once wrote about one of his characters, an old man, who "unexpectedly" cried. There is a sense that characters come to a life of their own, and are born even before you begin to write them down.
I love Psalm 139, because it says "Even before a word is on my tongue, LORD, you know it all." This is good to hear. Writing memoirs is revealing the past in a new light, especially since the memoirs are spiritually focused, the collection of thoughts and moments from so long ago are being connected by this force, God's hand, that I never gave privilege to fully until now. To be aware that "I have hemmed you in," means He is always here, I AM always is, these are a few things coming to life through writing memoirs.
I like very much the way Sufjan Stevens works this thought out in Vito's Ordination Song, I'll leave you with his words:
and when you write a poem
i know the words
i know the sounds
before you write it down
only wear your clothes
i wear them too
i wear your shoes
and your jacket too
i always knew you
Faces break
the wild silence
secrets fall
riddles strong from
envelopes sealed in skin
upon her face.
See her face, say to yourself
I have seen it!
and run through the fields
in the back of her mind.
In the early years
she danced on tip toe
flirted, started, covered up
filled her hands with
women's work, kneaded corn,
bent over the waist,
nurtured babes.
Slanted eyes, the oaky
autochtonous copper cream
complexion, no one told her
this great secret hushed
the whisper of beauty
never hidden from my eyes.
Life lived in knee-length skirts
braided rope of lustrous hair,
black down a smooth back,
curving onyx tails loop in the small
of her spine.
Once, she leaned against a tree
caught in the path, a pain
to show her smile,
all these suitors making roses
on her cheeks.
Averted glances, exploring
stopping
pushing back the rise
her heart,
her skin a threat,
all this sober gritting of the teeth,
and now discreet and solitary woman
this frowning girl
for years.
All these now become women
how the long cotton skirt, the nun shoe
drapes her in its shroud.
Under the memorabilia of dust,
I can still see her.
Wrinkles resemblance loneliness,
I can still see her laughing.
I can still see when the coffee fruit
was ripe in her eyes.
All these now become men
early ripened in the sun, with knowledge
of the earth knocking on their doors,
the morning, noon, and night,
work and man, carrying, selling in the street,
following fathers, drinking to beat the heat.
A true Adam to his Eve,
he blames all things on her.
His muddy stares say
"She is why, Trabajo, Trabajo
Calor. I always wanted more."
What could buy your freedom, Amorcita?
Your eyes grow dim in their damp caves.
Novia, you married out of one cage,
and into another.
Now, the grey wisps
feathers around her temples
she could not hold on to that dance
(her youth that stood up
and walked away
while she was scrubbing
some man's tile.)
Skirt to her shins, chest covered,
arms wrapped to the wrist,
convenience smothered,
she braids her hair without thinking,
lets her unshaved legs
frown in old opaque tights,
winds herself in age and shawls,
pressed lips, bitter, modestly.
But she cannot hide her beauty from me!
Not unplucked eyebrows, not
unlucky expression, not
the way she looks away
from every eye that seeks her out
to see her.
I tell everyone.
You will see,
remember too
how every light
catches in her face,
the golden crease
reflects the glist
a tired star
she flickers lightly
see her now
or you may miss her.
When she laughs with me,
she strains to hide her mouth
with quivering lips,
a quick laundered hand,
reveals a life of joy
without perfect teeth.
Her que haceres, kitchen, children
left arm and right, they call her "Ma,"
or baby strapped across her chest,
prepares and serves, watches all eat.
A vest of grace, drops herbs in soup,
every hour a fine one for Mother of All
the long hours close
she asks the Mother of God
to come close.
So, poverty
so, poverty
some days you are the smell
we can’t stand up to
everyone backs away from you the
holed out shoes scales on hands legs lips you lay
out on the subway car we step
over you to get to our seats and
other nights you are the red knees
little faces hide behind them peaking
swollen eyes their mothers on the line but
in the morning you are a child with a gun
deserted blood lands the avalanche of sandy
mean boy-men with birching sneers
all your fathers gone to winds
away from nation city town river
to find the fat smoke midnight oils burning
progress musts them far away
this turbulence
our masterless desire
Spring Song
“Every life a word the wind turns to say.”
- Tim Seibles
Wheels along, the sprite of the Sun
the noon-time eyesore day, our spirits
part and run, the nicks and cuts,
the chrome lids close us in, our spirits.
Giving up like this takes too much, says the Cold.
Will you not fall on your knees for me?
Waiting too long takes too much.
I will not come again.
That’s the whole reason you are alive!
The summers end! The earth’s tilt!
You make it what it is: the dear day
clearly, the earth’s faulty tilt.
All of this: the sunshine, the day,
all of it, the yellow cresting springness.
The sunlight unafraid; why should we be
afraid when the earth is bounding springness?
I am not the cruelest month! says April.
Sweet growth, the slightest precipitation!
I am your favorite lover, the one who comes
and goes, without an invitation.
If only I had no will! things might be much simpler,
my eyelids lighter, lashes standing
quiet, my howl more appropriate, every eye
brow less attentive, the heart handled,
every thing much simpler.
Demanding nothing,
even my thumbnail still
reflects the light:
a sign of God still riding the lines
between us,
coaching our bones
to form well
in their places, pro-
tecting even the smallest
berry that hangs
on the vine.
as long as it does,
all that I’m saying
is you should trust people.
When Winter is on retreat trust
precious daylight without measure gives
herself to us, should we not haste
to do the same?
What kind of love is un-
conditional?
:
the end-less grace,
the will-
less earth.
Backyard Princess
And in the days ago when,
as the onion grass began to start again,
the whole green began again in the yard, the
Spring began on the floor of the world,
(came out of hiding, out of nowhere!)
on the new buds of old trees,
I ran on and on with bare feet.
All the Spring months, all season my birthday,
all of a day and a yard all to myself:
my whole life.
I swung over the lawn through the Spring;
the swing and my feet flapped like a
bird wing while the fullness of my ratty mane
flowed against and with the air, the cool
current I created, there was no guard
to stop my fall, only the gravity, only the push
and pull.
And my girl-thoughts, “I will remember this moment for-
ever” (I had decided I could take pictures
with my whirling mind – if I blinked hard enough the
pictures of time would last and I remember
those days, even now:)
The blooming dogwood dreaming
of its own death, (I watched it die years later;
they chopped it down), there were green
vines wrapping wooden fences up in their long arms,
fine daffodils like yellow purséd lips,
forsythia bushes bursting forth,
the earth’s
golden frizz, a buzz of bees,
and a lone rose tangle near the
rotting shed
(that’s gone
now too);
The whole of the yard, my palace, my life;
the dogwood branch, a throne
I perched upon and surveyed the wild
Kingdom of the Yard, for just a short time
ruling over the lawn, for a short while
in charge of everything that moved or grew.
I'm working on a ghazal, (pronounced "ghuzzle" in English), which is:
- a poem of 5 to 12 couplets.
- each line must maintain the same amount of syllables (give or take one or two if you're being creative :), they share the same meter.
- there are no enjambments between couplets. sometimes, although there is a theme necessarily with the use of the refrain, the couplets should be complete poems in themselves able to be set apart.
"Each couplet must be a precious stone that can shine even when plucked from the necklace, though it certainly has greater lustre in its setting." (Agha Shahid Ali in "Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English")
- like a Psalm, the second line compliments or answers the first. there can be a turn, a volta, but line 1 and 2 should not run into each other. the use of questions and exclamations is common.
- only the first couplet must rhyme, and the end of the second rhyme must be the end of the second line for every other couplet. this repeated rhyme is called the refrain.
example of a first couplet from Kelly le Fave's "Ghazal":
"Each syllable unwinds its shy request in time.
Speak slowly, show me what it means to rest in time."so in the case of this ghazal, "in time" becomes the refrain, used at the end of the second line of each couplet. another couplet in this poem goes:
"Whole nights run as fingers, counting out the palm;
hands pressed beneath what passes unexpressed time."in this case, the poet has opted not to use the words as a refrain, but the rhyme as the refrain. time is repeated, and expressed and rest are rhymed.
- the last couplet is usually a "signature" couplet where the poet uses his/her name in the first, second or third person.
- certain forms of the ghazal employ different structural rules, but these are the basics i think.
I'm finding writing the ghazal to be an interesting task because it's not my favorite thing to write in a metric style or have this kind of glass to pour words into, which is the way I consider this form of writing happens -starting with structure, painting inside the lines, straining out words, extra syllables that can't be used or are unnecessary, shaving back the big idea to find the right polished words and meter. I am enjoying it because I can write as many couplets as I want, and figure out their order later, whereas in some kind of a free verse, narrative-type poem, there is a sequence that lines usually fit themselves into. In the ghazal, the sequence doesn't matter so much as each couplet's own little story, and the refrain tells the same story in different ways at the end of each line.
My experience so far with this style is that the refrain requires a lot of creativity with the words that surround it. A refrain I am using is "in the station," and the ghazal has this theme of waiting for something, which is not unintentional, but the station begins to mean many different things. The station is the train station, the station is just the place, the station is the Cross, the station is the season. My professor had us write down a number of ideas surrounding our refrain. Here are mine:
IN THE STATION
IN THE SEASON
WAITING FOR THE TRAIN
A TIME TO WAIT
A TIME FOR LOVE
A TIME FOR HATE
PATIENCE WITH FATE
PATIENCE IN THE SEASONS
I also get the feeling that although the couplets stand alone, there is a story in them that somehow is weaving its way through, and the refrain unites them all anyway, even if they weren't otherwise meant to be side by side. This poetic form began to be used in the 6th century and literally means "speaking with women." (wiki). It was used by Persian mystic poets, and there is a mystical sense about the unity of these untied couplets by the refrain.
Here's another.