A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Tag: inspirational

May 5, 2014

Love is Ever a Fickle Friend

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he brings me pretty threads to lend
then points to me the broken seam.
My rosy cheeks aflame, I teem
with shame. Please forgive me Love,
I meant to wear the other glove
but somehow slipped into the stack
those panties from a while back –
I could not resist another wear
But why indeed, Love, do you care?
They graced your body time before,
old hems you once stitched and more.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he traces circles with a pen
on inked skin he sketches dark trace
then quits the draw, deserts the space.
Body penned with strange design –
Love once here leaves me behind.
My figure cold in deserts deep,
upon my form your mark does keep
everlasting grief – Please go soft
the needle’s prick bears me aloft.
Though up on barren hillsides dwell
the unrequited love you quell.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he offers tattered cards to send
of all the tangled cities known,
desolate streets we walked alone.
I hand them out for all to see
for Love reminds me nothing’s free.
To love but one or many more
costs forever the familiar shore.
To love many or just a few
we abandon option to renew
and by the crumbled ramparts stroll,
city obscured by love’s cruel toll.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he gives me reason to pretend
that all along I played charade.
And now subtle memories fade
into the shade of moonlight cast.
Love – you always moved too fast
I caught you only with a glance
the timeless twirling of lost dance
or twilight on horizon’s cut
my dreams astir in instinct’s gut
but earthly bound as humans, we
can’t know you, Love, eternally.

Love is ever a fickle friend –
he clangs the church bells to no end
In rose-hued nave we say ‘I do’
then to the disco crash the few
bearing testament this dim hour,
flee the witnesses grown sour.
But on the floor stay Love and I,
feet shuffle to a tempo shy
one million years to eternity
as I shall not forever be.
Yet ever young, Love shall reside
alone without me by his side.

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May 4, 2014

A Solitary Thing

At first,
it was foreign.

The better part of a year
it took to become part of us

and we became accustomed.

We plotted:
what medications
to bring to the bedside,
what broth,
what puree.

We measured:
steps down the hall,
sunlight,
temperature.

We found a fragile balance
in this no man’s land

and while it slipped into
the clicks and clangs,
we rested in the forgetting.

But eventually it became more than us;

more than our imagined credentials,
more than the pats and hurrahs
we gave ourselves,

more than the sympathy we were
bestowed for fighting a battle
not our own.

It became foreign again.

And we lamented the years
spent forgetting
and getting on with things.

Though the system kept running,
the broths and purees,
the tray with its colored days,
the blankets and slippers,

we took to whispered tones.

It was no longer ours,
but his alone –

a strange solitary thing.

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April 11, 2014

Lucky Stones

As a young adult, I wore a boxy Liz claiborne purse, gray or light tan with a thin leather cross-over strap, filled with pencils, erasers, flavored lipgloss and a few lucky rocks. I had collected a gray skipping tone, the size of a big grape, and a smooth hematite. I was shy and when I felt challenged, my fingers would turn over the stones in my bag, infusing me with providence and power.I was an animist; my stones had souls. I cannot quite remember when I grew out of them but it was not an obvious transition. In high school, I shoplifted crystals from nature stores at the mall. In college, I collected frogs.

Finally I abandoned the needs of childhood to ground myself with physical objects and instead retreated to the colorful recesses of my mind, where fantasies trumped the day. For years now, I have hedged on reality. Even when two beautiful children have presented me with magic beyond human imagination, I have maintained my own dream life, a foot-out-the-door of this world, a vague morass of happiness and drama where no decisions need ever be made, just possibilities, endless possibilities.

I have my own versions of lucky rocks, ideas that help me get through it all: moving to Los Angeles or even better, Bali, irrational crushes, careers I could never pursue, hobbies that remain out of reach and things I have no intention of acquiring. At my wedding, I felt terrorized by my own uncertainty not so much because I lacked in love but more because I lacked the ability to live within the compass of regularity. Happiness was something for people that understood what this game of life was about, I reasoned.

Yet as I pursue mindfulness,I must let go of the notion that something outside of myself, be it a rock or a distant dream, fulfills me. And for a dreamer like me, this is bittersweet.

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March 18, 2014

Freedom is Bought With

I was twenty-three years old when I broke up with a long term boyfriend in Cairns, Australia. Six years together, I felt dead, suffocated, spit up and rehashed. On the great Australian expanse, I was walking in a cage. I thought it was him.

After the cataclysmic breakup, I travelled south, alone and against the advice of my family. Previously vegan, I started smoking cigarettes and living off ice cream and beer. I lost weight. I tanned brown. Somewhere along the Gold Coast, I hitched a ride out of some crappy backpacker town. It was a long road to wherever we were going next, maybe a day’s drive. The driver’s name was Pip. He had red hair and was kind. I cannot remember the others but the station wagon was full. Pip drove through a straggled eucalyptus landscape, a pale orange earth, snakes sunning on the strip. Sometime after dark, we pulled into a rest stop. It was dangerous to drive through the bush at night, animals on the road, kangaroos smashing fenders, cars in ditches, no ambulances for miles and miles. Pip fixed up a hammock above the picnic bench. Underneath, I rolled out my sleeping bag, a feeling of giddiness in my heart.

No one knew where I was. Not my family, not my friends. I was thousands of miles from the last memory of me and for the first time in my entire life, all the expectations, all the stories and lies disappeared. I was relieved of myself. Under the southern hemisphere sky ablaze with stars, a feeling of total freedom crystallized and with it, concurrent, at the exact same moment, I suffered the loneliest feeling of my life.

The following morning Pip took me aside and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Why?”

“You have barely spoken since we left town. But last night, you were so happy sleeping on the bench. You even smiled.”

“I just broke up with my boyfriend of six years,” I told the half truth and he seemed satisfied. Truth was, it was not the boyfriend that was breaking my heart. It was life with its gaping mouth and awful truths: freedom is bought with self. The freedom we crave is the freedom of little deaths. We pay with pieces of ourselves – the triumphs and failures, the dreams and delusions, even our loved ones, even our names. And without me, what else is there? Freedom is a feeling best left for the gods.

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October 20, 2013

My Mother is an Extinct Bird

My mother is an extinct bird
sketched in children’s books,
surviving in imaginations
grand and small.

The old mantelpiece man
narrates this flight of auburn fiction,
his pipe alit by the tale’s wind.

How can I follow her
when she is a vellum-bound kite,
tracing pinpoint crescents across the sky?

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October 14, 2013

A French Summer

The plane landed at Roissy onto a tarmac that mirrored the drab June sky. Always the day of her arrival was unseasonable weather. The French shook their heads and said the same thing “Ah! Ce temps.”  55 degrees and overcast with a ninety percent chance of rain, a hundred percent chance of gray. Summer by no standard.

France was its most insufferably French during the first hours spent escaping Charles de Gaulle airport: the interminable wait for the bags, the queue of dusty taxis to ship her off on highways flanked by concrete bunkers and sloppy graffiti. The scenic roads of France. Supermarkets housed in lego-blocks with chipper names like Conforama and Bricolorama, factories resembling Ikea versions of corrugated tin shanties, barely alive plants peaking above plastic coverings.  Further inland they drove, past the white-tiled tunnels with their overhead yellow-lit rectangles, past the wastelands of suburban brick flickering offside the highway barriers like images from a moving train. Resting her head against the taxi window, listening to the haggle on the radio, she felt acute disappointment. 

And the countryside did not seem quite right either. It was more crooked and wobbly than she remembered. They passed cigarette-stained towns with peeling shutters and windowsill doilies, old ladies in black orthopedics and knee-length skirts, mending handkerchiefs and knitting stiff wool. France had let weeds grow along her roads, in her gardens, up her trellis; the bristly stalks of unknown plants had taken over the clean corners. 

She was reminded of her grandmother and this made her more depressed. 

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October 14, 2013

One Hundred Years Past

It was a long way she trod from
second one till a hundred past.

Paris bombed!
The wars did come and go.

From the windowsill, she sewed rag to rag
and watched them all. She tied her
things up in boxes stacked a century ago,
mended clothes pressed flat in a Norman cupboard.

She died in a modern hospital room
that resembled nothing the year she was born,
the early century – 1908.
She was just a child when all those boys died.

And then she bore her own in the second war.

Paris liberated!
Flags waved, firecrackers burned.

Years later, they fought.
My father left.

For decades, she was old.
We sat her at a table once a year
and smiled when she was gone.
She smelled like musty things.

How little we notice until they die,

then we try on their heavy shoes,
we unpack their boxes, flip
scalloped pictures, yellow and gray.

We touch their things as if
we knew how to cradle a hungry child
and yearn the taste of milk.

How little we build from souvenirs,
how little we cared to ask when
she sat old by the windowsill.

Life is long – but the same length for all,
the same second one till years gone past.
And the pain it takes to remember,
we soon forget.

She lived to a hundred and three,
and we shall soon forget.

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October 5, 2013

The Belle Glade Culture

Along the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee built up on the sugar cane flats is a dump of a city. As you drive through en route to the placid gulf waters, you lock the door, remembering to fuel the car in Clewiston, and pity those that endure these baked Central Florida streets. In the 1980s, Belle Glade was crack central; it had the highest per capita AIDS rate in the country, a case study for STDs which were shown in sex-ed to horrified middle schoolers all over the state. In 2010, the average violent crime rate in Belle Glade was over four hundred percent higher than the national average. Institutional poverty runs along clear racial divides with a third of the population living under the poverty line. It’s Muck City, the Florida that intellectuals mock with blogs entitled “Florida Man.” It is a sugar cane migrant farmer gang wasteland.

It is with this impression in mind that I was recently floored by an archeological exhibit of artifacts from the Belle Glade Culture, a culture that existed from 1000 BC till 1700. The Mayaimi people were centered around Lake Okeechobee until Spanish raids all but obliterated them (the few survivors evacuated to Cuba).  As a Floridian, I knew the basics about local tribes, essentially those that existed just prior to the arrival of Ponce de Leon. But the Belle Glade Culture was 2700 years old before it was decimated.

There were native Floridians in 1000 BC. Not the ‘natives’ that came down when Flagler built the railroad, not the ‘natives’ that live here year round watching the flux of seasonal Northerners, not even the natives that run gaming enterprises and sell cigarettes on their Seminole reservations. Under the defunct Glades Correctional Institution may be burial mounds, shards of pottery and sculpture, arrowheads from violent battles, canoes for fishing, two millennia of hunters and gatherers, laughing, crying, having babies and lovers. And for some reason, this brightens my perspective – this melancholic palimpsest of forgotten history.

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