When the sun comes...

...and hangs around a while, then I will be happy. Oh February, what a tease you are.

I am steadily revising what feels like everything I have ever written, so there is not much new to give you. Here's a first draft that I keep meaning to chop up and make better, but you can have it raw:

Some Elegy

You stand separate from the crowd,

and still I cannot find you

in this place packed tight with bodies—

I never asked to breathe these smells.

So you find me, and weave,

more feline than thread,

through the rest.

At your approach, my first thought:

Who wants a woman with stick legs and a round face?

We were beautiful children,

we moved in light, in circles,

embraced the awkward and the lithe;

we smelled of snow.

Here you hold yourself so still,

not statue-still, not stone.

Yours is the stillness of bones

that have given up on flesh.

You used to refuse all skirts,

borrowed blue jeans from your brothers.

I remember you rosy and dirt-faced,

your weak spots so well-hidden

I believed you had none.

You have embellished yourself with shadows: 

long hair that hangs down,

kohl, the illusion of cheekbones,

clavicle and wingbones

more prominent than what they hold.

I don’t believe now that you ever were a girl.

But I like to imagine you on a bicycle,

or putting in order feathers, small stones and shells.

Determination would suit you better than pallor

if you still possessed a will.

With those hands,

the gardens you could plant!

This wan waifishness

disturbs my sense of you

who used to be a finer creature: 

glossy, wellfed, wily and soft.

The way you slipped between trees,

evaded every thorn and wayward root—

you had talent then, native and untamed. 

You are smug and fragrant now

in the most mundane of ways:

talcum powder and rotting fruit.

I would like to see you with apple in your mouth,

red skin like blood on snow.

I have no hope that you will ever taste

the world’s blood now, that dulcet mineral.

You do not give.

You are not strong.

Every promise spoken comes to you in foreign tongue.

I think you used to sing.

Nothing I give you can draw your eye

or breach your skin, all pale fickle flash,

one long impenetrable grin.

I have for you no name.

You crave color for your hair eyes lips and fingertips.

You have no color of your own.

A collector of longings,

No pulse ever stirs your surfaces.

You stretch like a cat, and yawn.

No different, you say, than any other.

But you hide your sorrow better,

dress your sickness warm and rough and well.

You could get away with a corset or a veil.

Rhetoric and rules, historical traces do not apply to you.

I used to think of oceans when I watched you,

of riverbanks overrun.

You stretch the limits of proper, of beautiful:

nothing normal about the ability to appear so ill

and so at ease in these skins that suit no one—

the way you shrink yourself, then swell.

Remember, there was wholeness in your every gesture;

your vocabulary was your limbs.

Your body a tool you are learning to use

with the coldest precision,

a locked box you’re learning to pick.

I hope you don’t give yourself.

I hope you don’t freeze.

I hope I forget you.

I hope that you don’t.

I cannot care any longer

for your words, for your limbs.

Don’t put stones in your pockets.

I taught you to swim.

Another month slips by.

This one full of snow... drifts up over my head!

Here's something:
 
 

A Reminder

You were busy making masks

for no body in particular to wear

and the walls were staring at you,

all unblinking fixtures, while I

contemplated how to change my hair,

change it like so many clothes.

(I don’t like being a girl like this;

it happens only when I am bored.)

I was wearing a shirt of yours,

flannel and down to my knees.

The stove glowed with persistence

and for once we were warm together—

as if breaking a promise

we embraced the comfort of fire,

watched it leap and gambol

as if another living creature

we have taken on, taken in,

though really, it possesses us,

like your many faces possess you

and create you. What it means

to be what are widely called artists:

We belong to each other

only briefly and breathlessly:

The erasure of solitude surprises us.

Cheeks flushed, we tend one another

like fires, eyes drawn inexorably

toward the other’s movements,

the flickers and signals

speaking those most intimate of truths,

indecipherable to those who would look on. 

Your masks are more transparent,

their rage, delight, surprise more pure

than day-to-day shadows

cast by day-to-day flames,

more pure than my words—

forever circling all that you capture so quick. 

Who lives deeper in the heart of the real?

And why must I keep asking?

Comparisons strip away the meat,

suck out the marrow and leave us

like paper, flat, dried, and partial,

awaiting the fire—our only hope

of completion is in the ashes, the dust,

the return to the unshifting forms.

I hope to speak less, but hope

wastes the heart, makes it brittle

and bitter, a shell of itself,

with no core. Breath comes in sighs,

sings its frustration with words

that will never speak true.

You go on tracing and trimming,

you embrace approximation,

while I add layer upon layer

and line upon line, feeling some

shiver of need to brace myself,

to insulate. Watching you,

I feel my own art stifle and pale,

I feel it move farther and farther away.

If I could be more fleeting,

relearn the brief and breathless,

quit drifting into theory, into form—

My body might know, if I let it,

how to be, how to set itself warm.

 

Yer Sercret Larnguage.

Daily has devolved into monthly. Or perhaps its evolved. I could make some philosophical argument for outgrowing the need for verbal communication. But I'll save that for when I bother to upload some cute photos of the new kitty, eh?

Before I do anything else, I am going to plug National Public Radio, with which I admittedly have a rather tumultuous relationship. However, my love for North Carolina Public Radio's "The Story" is unadulterated. It's a romance of convenience; it happens to air at 2:00 pm weekdays on VPR, which is when I drive to Bellows Falls Middle School for the afterschool program. It's not a long commute, so I never catch a whole episode, although sometimes I'll sit in the car once I've parked it to see a segment all the way through. One such segment was January 3rd's "Time for a Change," which featured farmer and writer Shannon Hayes. Never has the media so eloquently addressed the (not necessarily conflicting) pulls of the intellectual life and the agricultural life. Y'all should go listen to this show. It is, dare I say it, inspirational.


Cold Comfort
or, Taking Notes

The cows stand
exactly where you left them.
The jersey's purple slug tongue
reaches for your hand.
Only the whitetailed does move,
browsing fogflung groves
and bolting at your footfall,
at your breath.

Not a bird calls. January.
The sun, when it comes,
hits at odd gaunt angles.
Your projects are no longer yours.
You've shuffled and shunted your belongings
so many times, you've learned
to keep the important stuff
well-hidden, salient chaos,
delicious morass.

Come night, the wind
will clear the fog out.
Wind does not look back.

Someday you will go
to the forlorn brown field
and build a fire there of brush
and cherrywood and birch.

For now, watch chimneys breathe
heat rippling against bare hills.
The road raises clouds
you believe to be fog--
it's dustier than January should be.

An owl slaloms through spruces.
Black dog at the mailbox ambles home.
The everpresent hum of man too much to bear.
Ash and dust gather on sparse snow.

Someday you will find
a ledge grown over
with juniper and vetch.
Into it you'll build
an earthen house
and keep your fire there.


PS:  Just for fun, try adding an "rr" sound to as many vowels as possible when you speak.

disculpame.

Nigh on one month; my apologies. More poemish things coming, but I'm pretty offline at the moment. I am in the midst of vacating my apartment and have entered a sort of bardo. Working hard to relinquish material attachments, while simultaneously staving off enlightenment by making cute christmas-y things (photos of cookies and other gifties to come). I can't seem to stop reading books by various child-of-the-earth-american-intellectual-adventurer-Buddhists. Finished two books by Gretel Ehrlich, courtesy of Annie: The Solace of Open Spaces and A Match to the Heart. Now I'm onto The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiesen. Funny how some books make so clear the imperative to be present and still, here and now, yet leave me gripped by the need to move, to push into the new, to see and do and plan and make.

Go, if you must, and see.
But remember to breathe.

A good writer pulls at once inward and outward.

Un(en)titled.

Rather lax about this "every day" endeavor, eh? Here's another off the cuff thing that really needs more work.


In the thick of it:
apple crates filling and emptying,
clatter of pie pans inside
and steam on the windows.
Brittle smell of frost soon gathering
on pumpkins and mums,
Old dog in the gravel drive,
his oily fur smell mingles
with the barrels full of
rotting cores and rinds.

At seventeen, you've received minimal direction.
You crave the strain, the structure, waking sore.
No substitute, no drug as pure as sheer exhaustion.
Your windbitten fingertips, your bootnumb toes
all day long crave that dreamless sleep,
so thick no light can penetrate.

Seventeen years of fretful thought tossed sleep
and only now are you learning the way of it:
how to work yourself til sore, til empty,
how to pour yourself through sawdust,
gravel, compost, dead leaves, dish upon
dirty dish, until you're clean entirely.

Before it turned you loose,
your first long autumn taught you this:
scrub out a rough perfection for yourself.
Live every moment. Do not dwell.

RECOVERY!

Guess what I'm doing. I am rescuing the writing that everyone kept trying to tell me was gone for good! For those of you actually interested in the techie details, here's a run-down. As you probably know, my MacBook was stolen in September and resold in October. However, the thief/salesman didn't bother wiping my hard drive clean (because he could only do that if he had a copy of a Mac OS on CD with which to reboot); he just put all of my folders in the Trash and deleted them. Since retrieving my computer about a month ago, I have been shopping around for data recovery freeware that shows some promise of finding my files. And here it is:  http://www.tech-pro.net/file-recovery-mac.html

It's a program called File Recovery for Mac, and the developer happens to offer a free trial which allows you to search for deleted files and recover any files that are less than 100 KB each. Word files, particularly poems, hardly ever run over 100 KB. So I am sorting, by hand, some 700 word files to figure out which ones are actually things I need to save, and moving them, by hand, onto a flash drive where I can store them until I'm done with the recovery process (I can't save them on the MacBook's hard drive without potentially overwriting the very data I'm trying to recover).

So there's the breaking news. To the service rep at Small Dog Electronics, who said retrieving my files would cost thousands of dollars and I would have to send my machine away for someone else to tinker with it without any guarantee that all the tinkering would work, HAH!

In celebration, here's one of the poems I thought was gone for good:



DEAD TREE

The north wants you.

The west wants you.

The east wants you.

You hunger for here—

this southernmost of islands

in the smallest of counties,

this pettiest of skirmishes

in the thorniest of families.

All you asked was raspberry

and wave,

rock decked with fossils.

All they gave—

a patch, a hesitation,

low snarl, fire doused—

a hiss.

So you leave the smoke behind you,

trailing, bittering the air.

Your difference is this:

let go, sink noiseless,

tap the silence,

simmer,

boil it.

Your sweetness is

a longdrawn labor,

comes but once a year.

Unsure of roots,

eternity,

you drag your feet

through sand and ask

what to do

where to go

whether to go

and what the weather—

What do you bring?

And how do you leave

the cold

                  the dry

                                    the tumbledown

behind?

Lost among promise and conspiracy,

lost without love,

you are lost,

the only map the series

of tactical maneuvers

it takes to live here,

to survive.

Hum like the sky,

electric, hesitant,

unleash yourself at last

and split the trunk,

dive deeper than the roots,

forget the difference

between trees

                  and water.

Forge yourself,

thunder’s daughter.

This is kindling.

This your fire.

Feed something  other than your wounds

with something other than your tears.

None can outwait miracles. 

Few can outwit stars—

first maps—

dying waves, impossible shores.

Strange wakes, to stretch so far. 

Promise yourself you will not marry

                  your future

                                    or your past.

If you must wed,

                  wed not the moment

                                    nor the idea of the moment,

but movement itself,

                  and only if you must.

Marry fury,

marry the taste

of salt and iron

in your blood.

Leave behind time,

its passage your wake,

stare into the sun, forsake

all that refuses to vanish.

Choose distance.

Choose the smallest and lightest

                  of kindnesses.

Abandon even language.

The ridgeline, the road:

                  the only home.

Hold what’s farthest,

                  hold it close.

 

Not on time...

Well, I'm behind  Not on writing, but on typing. I'll blame it on the holiday. Yesterday was devoted to baking vegan, almost gluten-free sweet potato-kuri squash pie, making a big batch of wild rice pilaf, whipping out my gravy making skills, etc. (Note that I hadn't even planned on doing anything for T-Gives.) And Tuesday? Well, Tuesday I was busy helping a bunch of youngsters create their very own zombie-vampire-werewolf-apocalypse theater production. To be continued next week!

Here's a rough sketch of a poem that isn't near done, but getting there:

LATE MIGRATION

This is the town where you used to try to feel at home.

And here, this is the street where you lived.

Empty. It's early. A Sunday, November.

Cars and bodies still tucked away,

everyone holding something in.

You see only a man, bicycling, white beard from chin to belly.

All the factories are collapsing, all the workers gone,

every warehouse left for squatters.

Own kid took off the moment she'd saved up enough to buy a car.

You left once you were sure she wouldn't come back.

Sky is slate today— no— steel. You can taste it.

Blood, iron, and ozone; there's ice on the way,

no immediate sun, but a light, diffuse—

more a property than an entity.

Where have the silences gone?

All hums energy captive,

   taut. The crumbled sidewalks vibrate

like great rough strings. You look up,

   for an overpass? Somewhere to place the blame

for your trembling.

This perfect purity,

   this glistening grey,

this industrial— or once industrial—

   mask of a day

is more— or less—

   than you can stomach.

Your saliva is stale bread

   inside the cavity of your mouth,

catches between teeth,

   you can't rub it out

with your tongue.

   From some corner

windfalls wash in,

   fill your nose, how strange

this wind! 

   Sudden living stench of applerot,

worms, vinegar, soft brown.

   Nutmeg in your mouth,

phantom of holidays that happened here once—

   broken bread and the blood of the Lord,

kettles and skillets, cast iron,

   mulled something,

fire long doused,

   the smoke and steam mingling,

chill warmth, this memory.

  You want to spit it out,

leave the nutmeg and the rot

  of apples and blood and snot

on this sidewalk collapsing

  into gravel and sand.

You want to walk, to bolt out

and forget outright all you brought back with you,

all you fought so hard, all you chalked up as lost,

but you can't run, you can't outrun it,

when it is inside you,

not carved in the pavement

or stenciled on boarded-up warehouses,

the ones where he used to work shifts, eight hours,

stagger back to you, midnight or so,

his breath whiskied, dinner cold.

You gave up waiting,

let him bang around downstairs alone.

He never once hit you

but a chair did, the one he threw, and coffee mugs, 

and felt-tip pens, and utterances cold as stone.

You are here now, not sure why.

Someone has died, not him, he's long gone,

a friend of his, someone whose name struck you,

flashed briefly, now burnt out— a satellite,

signal cut short, still out there, circling and dark.

Only good memories lose their grip.

Perhaps you lose your grip on them.

You reach the apple tree, leafless,

the corner of Wheeler and Frost. Draw closer.

The perfume fades. The branches:

grey upon grey. You want to run,

but not away. A whole life spent homeless.

The bicycle man. A chill in your fingers.

Leaves stir at your feet. They know as well as you

where one is supposed to go this time of year.

On Time.

WAIT TO RISE

Truly an act of inspiration, this waking.

You take every measure—

the right light,

sheer curtains draped just so,

a minimum of bells and whistles,

just warm enough to appreciate

that you are not cold—

to ensure a certain grace.

You don't want a trace of hesitation,

dragging feet. Not for you

the wry crumpled face,

still crusted with dreams and sand.

You demand a clean break.

A definitive beginning to the day's tale.

The sun must rise: you wait

as for the velvet curtain to go up.

The applause of birds— perfection.

You have been dreaming of this breakfast.

A careful affair, a concoction, a confection,

ponder your reflection— this,

your brush with resurrection.

Dear, bright morning star,

still far to travel, break your fast

but break it gingerly,

or tenderly. You've many hours

still to ravel round that skein of yours.

Only the beginning,

only the next beginning,

only the finest beginning so far,

this wan and winsome morn.

DEAD ZONE

I work in a dead zone.

Signals don't just go silent,

they evaporate.

Not by choice, not my idea

to spend hours here, wondering

whose voice today

intent on penetrating void.

All I can do, keep time, keep time—

who wants it?

The extra tic, hollow and frenetic,

clinging to hip, to wrist,

eyes drawn upward by its circling,

hidden gears pull strong as tides.

Time and tide:

Whither and whence 

this interference?

Clock-punchers, half-hour lunchers,

sterility of 40 hour weeks.

Our square sprawling bodies,

directions quadrant:

weak before the circle

we drew ourselves in sand

that asks us nothing.

It was the nervous tic

of our own hands

that gave us this:

I'll never find your voice

in all the signal chaos mist

but by the grace of satellite

and microchip, my surety

rests alert and tender in 16:56.

 

Mo Pomes.

Canine theme. Two very different efforts.

AMORES PERROS

Sure, I like dogs.

But what I like best

is a dog with his very own

little old lady or little old man.

When I spot one from across the street,

or headed straight toward me on the pavement,

I start to bat my eyelashes,

smear a big gooey grin

all over my face,

and if they stop,

I squat,

hands out,

like I'm the one

begging some attention.

You'd think I'm lonely or something

craving a little softness in my life: soft

pomeranian – cockapoo – lab puppy – fur, soft

little old lady hands with rings permanently embedded, soft

old man cashmere sweater hazed with decades' worth

of pre-war cologne. Little olds and little dogs

walk in special clouds, their own

protective forcefields.

It's a super power,

being cute.

Am I wrong to want

to charm my way into

the inner circle of the elderly

and their surrogate children, so much sweeter

than the first batch, sweeter even than the grandkids?

Third time really is the charm. Good things do come to those who wait.

But I'm impatient, want it now, block the sidewalk,

bold bodily beseeching: Love me, please!

If I had a tail I'd wag it.

I'd roll over—

rub my belly, please!—

I'll lick your hand, take whatever

you want to give me. To hold, to be held,

collar, leash, and all; lilac, bay rum, laundry soap;

let your smells wash over me, security of all familiar

rituals and gestures. Oh, let me be your puppy!

I understand now, what hope there is

lies in knowing that someday

we will all be old,

and some of us

will walk with dogs

to love us and to love.

 

THE MOTIONS

1.

The leaves have gone from yellow,

slick like paper maché still wet,

to brown and alive,

parched leather skittering the pavement:

small animals we only dream to be.

2.

The little red fox was still there,

on the white line that keeps cars

on the Interstate: stretched

and motionless, pelt of flame

unscathed and emptying.

Tempting me today,

as the morning before,

to pull over, stop and gather him,

curl him someplace warm, something says,

He shouldn't be out in the wind and the rain,

he shouldn't be out in the wind and the rain—

But I am not one to tell how bodies ought to leave.

I want not to take him

but to stay

for just a moment

by his side

and breathe his fur,

his flame,

linger in the last

of musk,

against the traffic,

shield his body

from the rush.

To stay.

To have that strength

instead of looking back,

whisking onward,

north, away.

 

Tea Poems

enjoy...

FORECAST: HEADLONG WITH PATCHY HAZE

It's one of those days

where you eat two bagels

and a stack of pancakes

and hope everything

turns all right without

you doing anything

about it.

You think about doing the dishes.

You think about taking off.

You think about money

and continue signifying nothing.

Line up animal crackers:

count how many headless,

how many whole.

Was waking ill-advised?

Or adventurous, this cruel catching of the tiger

by its own cruel tail?

At least it's not the tongue you've got.

It's one of those days

where the tiger turns out

to be all tail, no teeth.

You pity it, briefly,

then breathe. Thank whatever stars

or starlike beings you see fit to thank.

Root idly among the counter rubbish

to see if there's a bagel number three.

There isn't.

Make tea.

 

TEA SONG

If only I could brew a tea

strong enough to empty me

of every fear and self-rebuke,

leave me steeped

in passion, will, and truth.

If only I were strong enough

my tears might turn to steam

and set me shining, dew-draped, free.

O, to simmer myself

a bolder smile,

a warmer room,

and quieter miles

to go before I sleep.

IT LIVES.

Welcome to the resuscitation of this half-dead blog!

I decided last week to write a poem a day, with some help from the fine prompts at  http://poetry.poewar.com/ and the fact that Gabriel is house-sitting, leaving me with many long silent evening hours to fill with whatever I choose (no bad sci-fi VHS tapes in the background!).

I am going to post two a day to catch myself up, and then things will peter off to one a day, in theory. My hope is that I will be able to avoid all but a minimum of commentary. Let me start things off by warning you that I am not posting these in their true chronological order, but in a sequence with a better sense of narrative. Also, I play fast and loose with prompts so don't expect anything to line up nice and neat. These poems sound somehow... different than my writing from months past? I want terribly to know what the world thinks. So there. So much for a minimum of commentary.

On Loss: First Meditation

You enter the woods with a vision

of the clear path stretched out before you.

The way is soft with loam and leaves.

Light seeps in, its angle sharper, sharper,

sharpening toward evening.

Branches filter out cloud, let gold sluice down.

You walk on.

The path you thought belonged to you dissolves.

Coarse grain, dark and spreading outward, an embrace.

The path is moss, is dead leaves, is earth.

The path is roots and rises upward into trees,

exhales itself into sky.

You belong to it now:

lightless body engulfed by lightless path.

It spreads you out, stretches your limbs compass-like; a rose.

You belong to the four corners and beyond.

Your every breath becomes the sky,

a promise in leaves, and coursing just below the skin.

Owl cry; rough oily engine whine; rustle of small paws; a fire—

all is faraway and at your throat

and in you, smoldering.

You enter the woods as clay, unshapen and soft.

You leave it twisted serpentines, hollows that howl,

etched as if with frost.

Rooted and aloft, you leave the woods but do not part from it.

Walking gentle into golden dawn,

you are the path you thought you'd lost.

Second Meditation on Loss

My words leave me as leaves—

prematurely. I cannot blame the frost.

I wake with sweat wooling my pores,

toss, roll, inescapable animal

fecundity sharp musk.

Precious concentrate, thought:

once honeythick, raw viscous and alive,

now weightless frass I cannot hold,

torn from me by gestures not so strong, even,

as the wind.

I pass a bumper sticker asking,

GOT TODAY?

and think, not really.

Caught suffocating on the past,

its rags—

choked arid dead grass

fills my nostrils

wads behind my teeth—

I stumble drunk on future

into brickstone stodgy promises

rest my head—the pressure!

Choketongued, gaghearted,

bound with jute and lead,

rounding corners invisible,

swept by breath that isn't wind,

fearing the pop of chance bullet,

stray knife, window shatter,

first my limps go wrist.

Static crackles like thunder—

O unfetttered, onslaughtered,

the radio waves! I ride.

Thought rides upon thought—

words not lost,

all breath static, phlegm stymies—

speech my parasite and I, its host,

perpetual standoff,

can't back from the brink—

Dare you to tell!

Not words I've lost

but something hid too well,

strung taught as an arrow

and never launched.

What have I been doing with myself?

Two months?  TWO MONTHS and then some?  WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING WITH MYSELF?  Here's a synopsis for the curious:

September was an odd conglomeration of responsibilities and the lack thereof:  sunny carless days, a long weekend along the northerly stretch of the Long Trail, kicking up my heels but dragging my feet at the prospect of regular employment, so I began picking grapes.  The vineyard is only two miles south of my house, the easiest commute I’ve ever had; it’s a good job when the weather is good and earns me next to no money.  I've learned lots of little things I never would have otherwise:  the difference between good rot and bad rot, how certain varieties can be trained to grow higher up than others, that too much water in the ground drastically reduces yields, that red grapes are far easier to harvest than white ones because the white ones camouflage themselves among the leaves, and that frogs, mice, birds, and snakes all like to make their homes in the vines.  I've also come to the conclusion that I'd rather get paid less to work outdoors and close to where I live than get paid slightly more to commute and work indoors. 

The grapes are just about done now, so I’m supplementing as best I can by substitute teaching every now and then.  Subbing is peculiar since it means going back to my old elementary school, the school I ditched at age twelve in pursuit of a more "progressive" and "rigorous" education.  Being back there now, a decade later, makes me realize how much of a bedroom community this town has become.  These kids feel infinitely more urbanized, or at least suburbanized, than the kids with whom I started school.  Maybe that's just the nature of our ever more technologically homogenized world:  everyone carrying the latest ipod and a glitzier cellphone than I will ever own.

But they're still kids:  they make noise in the hallways, fall off their chairs, draw on their hands with markers, beg for ten minutes of free choice at the end of French class so they can build houses out of playing cards.  Let me just say, the stuff kids draw on their hands is WAY more creative than the coloring worksheets we give them.  You should have seen the little finger-puppets the kindergarteners were drawing onto themselves last week!  And any kid who asks me if she can have a blank piece of paper instead of a coloring sheet gets a definite YES.  And stacking cards?  The skills those sixth-grade boys are exercising when they build card-houses (coordination, fine motor, spatial reasoning) are at least as important as whatever skills they would gain from actually playing Milles Bornes or French Uno (now if I can just get them practicing their French while they stack!).

In other news, I have a peck of Northern Spy apples just begging to be made into something delicious.  (Did I mention I've developed a localvore vegan apple crisp recipe?  It converts pretty easily into an apple tart, too, and involves cornmeal.  If I ever bother figuring out the measurements, I'll post it.)  I also have a whole pile of red cabbages (gleaned from my uncle's abandoned garden) that should get turned into kimchi and sauerkraut; I wonder where my mason jars are...

Meet Magda!

Several weeks ago, a posting on craigslist appeared ad- vertising a "stylish baby blue grease- beater benz."  We're talking a 1978 Mercedes Benz 240-D (that's diesel) with a professional Greasecar conversion so that she runs on regular diesel or waste veggie oil (the kind you can get for free from fast-food joints and other restaurants that fry things).  Hot, no?

I replied to the post, and toyed with going down to and making an offer, but the $700 asking price seemed a bit too much.  So I put it out of my mind.  Then, last week, an email showed up in my box.  Apparently, the Benz was still without a home, and the owner needed it off her hands by the end of the weekend.  "First offer takes it!"  Saturday, I made the hour-long trek in my grandmother's dinky Mazda, through torrential rains and gusting winds, to Waitsfield to check out this beast.  The test-drive was a blast; since it was pouring I got to experience first hand the leaky trunk (she comes with a complimentary bilge pump!), the hole in the passenger-side floor (to accommodate the grease system), and the overall awesomeness of this vehicle.  The driver-side seat belt buckle doesn't really work.  "I never bother with it," the former owner told me, "but you could just use the passenger buckle."  It takes a bit of coaxing to get her started, especially if she's cold from sitting still, and sometimes she prefers starting in neutral instead of in park.  So, I put the Benz through her paces, convinced her to haul us up a steep gravelly hill, and got her going 55 on Route 17.  I was beginning to understand why no one had made an offer, and I was in love.  

The girl selling the Benz was headed down to work on a farm in Costa Rica on Monday, so she was about the most motivated (read: desperate) seller one could ever hope to find.  "If you don't take it," she admitted, "I'm bringing it to the scrap yard."  So I gave her $200 and told her I'd be back to pick up my new baby blue beater as soon as my boyfriend had a day off.  Gabe and I planned on going down Sunday before Magda's former owner took off for warmer climes.  When I tried to call her to figure out where to meet, her phone told me it had been disconnected.  Hmm.  I started to envision myself wandering around Waitsfield like a private eye, going up to locals and saying, "Have you seen this vehicle?"  Or else I'd end up on Judge Judy with this chick, being all like, "I gave her $200 for this car, and then the bitch took it to the junkyard anyway!"  But none of that was to be.  She called me back the next day, and promised to leave the car at Full Circle, the auto place in Waitsfield that specializes in WVO conversions.

Gabe and I drove down after work on Monday afternoon and had to cruise up and down Main Street for a while figuring out just where Full Circle is.  Found the greasebeater, sat for ten minutes or so warming up the glow plugs (and finding the e-brake), and we were off!  Right now, she's running on regular diesel until I put in a new Fleetguard filter for the veggie. For a car that's eight years older than I am, Magda drives impressively.  She is a true German tank, heavier, I think, than my Audi wagon was--you can feel it when she barrels down hills.  She's inspected through next June, and the only real issue that might keep her from passing is the rust. Her previous owner gave me the contact of the shop she'd been going to for inspection:  "He doesn't really care as long as all your lights work.  Also, the rear bumper is a 4-by-4.  He told me, 'That's not really legal; you might want to spray paint it black.'"  So that's the plan:  Bondo the rust and spray paint the bumper (and probably the rest of the car while I'm at it).

Now, I know I said I wasn't going to own a car again anytime soon, but you know what?  I feel better, from an ethical perspective, owning the hottest veggie-beater on the East Coast than I did bumming other people's cars on a regular basis.  Also, my car insurance is now cheaper than it was as just "named-insured" driver insurance, so Progressive is actually sending me money!  Ah, the joys of a car worth nothing.  Did I mention the tax and registration cost me more than the car itself did? 

A note on naming:  I believe in naming.  Rather, I believe in naming everything that shares a large part of one's life.  I had planned on not getting too excited about this car, but the pride I feel toward this vehicle borders on parental.  My first Audi, the first car I ever really loved, came with the name Veronica.  In keeping with the tradition, I named my second Audi Archie.  I toyed with calling the Benz Betty, but there are enough real-life human Bettys in my life that it would be a little weird.  I also wanted the name to have the letter G in it.  I don't know why.  Gabe was pushing for Gunter, but as soon as you get behind the wheel it's clear that the beater is a girl:  stubborn and finicky and way too sexy to be a male automobile.  Naming is not a democratic process.  The name imposes itself and there is no way to refuse it.  Personally, I was leaning toward something very period, very 70s, like Donna or Aretha.  I really liked the sound of Jackie O.  But Magda kept pushing, so Magda it is.  It's got a good German ring, which is important for a German car.  And it's strong.  "It's a strong name," just happens to be my mother's justification for naming me Kate.  I never bought that argument, but here I am.  I guess Magda and I will just have to be strong together.  With our powers combined...

Limping Along, Figuratively

A lame dog, an old friend in the hospital, oh-so-marginally employed, and staring down the barrel of four months of student teaching (that’s an UNPAID full-time internship), but on the rosy side, I’m in love. My writing has dried up the past month or so. Writing has devolved into that purely utilitarian act of putting down on paper what is necessary to complete this particular phase: emails, resumes, applications, a four-inch-thick portfolio to prove I’m ready for student teaching. (No matter that no amount of reading or writing prepares one for even a day in a classroom.) There is no poetry in any of this. I’m leaning on poems from six months ago like a crutch, my words these days are so stilted and stocky, so ho-hum and hokey. So lame. Worry about everything perpetually and experience ends up muffled. I live through a scarf wrapped around my senses, a thick dull blanket. I can’t breathe as deep as I’d like to. I’m crippling myself with worry—not walking nearly as much as I’d like. The mountains feel far away. The days are only getting shorter. It’s one thing to do absolutely nothing in the summer; the sun and swelter are justification enough. But September is long gone and everyone is buckling down, battening down, or just down. If I could, I would hibernate through the next six months.

So why am I writing? Why now? Why not a month ago, two months ago? The obvious answer would be release, relief: things have gotten too heavy, and I’m here to lighten my load. But I’m too much of a Brechtian to believe wholeheartedly in catharsis. In fact, I sincerely hope I don’t spend every subsequent post unburdening myself to the virtual public. What I want to do here is write about anything I don’t have room for in my school papers. Blame it, ironically, on writer’s block: I’ve been sitting in front of my computer on and off all weekend, struggling to write about curriculum design for high school English classes, and I keep getting stuck. I get up, I make tea, I bake, I walk, I chip away at what needs to be done in the garden before winter sets in for real, and all the while wisps and scraps of poems push themselves up through the rubble. I want to give those scraps a space. My paper journal has been given over to notes on books, important phone numbers, and infinite to-do lists. I’ve stopped bothering to write about the first frost, new music, the comings and goings of people, of migratory birds, how the lake is getting lower, what I had for breakfast. These things go unrecorded and my life fades out of my own consciousness. The details of the past weeks are more or less lost. I’d like to correct this tendency before the weeks become years. So I’m going to write. Whatever it takes. That’s why I’m back. This is an attempt to exercise some discipline, some authority. I have to remind myself that I matter. I have to bring myself back from the margins of my own writing, push myself back to the center. I’m not letting any more words go to waste.

Taizé in Retrospect

Two posts in one evening! A record! I promised myself that as soon as I’d collected myself and composed my thoughts, I would take the time to write something to try to explain the Taizé community before it slips from my memory. There is lots of practical and historical information at their website, http://www.taize.fr/, so I won’t dwell on those details. Suffice it to say: the community was established in the 1940s by Brother Roger, a Swiss man who came (by bicycle!) to settle among the hills of Burgundy. He offered refuge to those fleeing Nazi persecution. He opened his door to people of faith from around the world. And from there, the order grew. Today, people by the thousands to participate in services, speak with brothers and sisters, and to find a bit of respite from the world at large.

Having heard other folks speak of the peace and tranquility they find at Taizé, I was truly overwhelmed when I arrived by the immense human bustle of the place: crowded-dirty-cold showers; a sea of tents; mealtimes evocative of summer camp or the Marlboro College dining hall—only outdoors and with about ten times as many people (no tables, just wooden benches, but not enough to accommodate everybody, so every semi-level surface is occupied with diners). After two days of train-hopping, I could do nothing with myself but pitch my tent in the quietest corner I could find, take a cold shower (don’t expect to ever get a truly hot one), and collapse. I didn’t get up until the church bells summoned me to prayer the next morning.

Once again, I felt wholly overwhelmed: the church is a big barn of a thing, with garage doors inside to expand the space depending on the size of the congregation that day. The space is gently lit with small candles in red glass votives and a few soft overhead lights and small stained-glass windows. Everyone sits on the floor: sturdy institutional carpeting, walkways demarcated with masking tape, and there are wooden benches along the walls for those who need them. A good number bring their own prayer benches. Though itb looks nothing like the centuries-old cathedrals I spent the month of July walking through, the acoustics in the Taizé church are amazing—and this of course is the building’s raison d’être. At a Taizé service, there is no “sermon” and no “choir.” The brothers lead chants in every language imaginable, from Latin to Polish to French to English, read a short psalm (short enough to be repeated in numerous translations), hold a five-minute silence (which is never purely silent, thanks to the cooing and muttering babies, and the coughing and sneezing that are inevitable when you have hundreds of people living in close quarters), and close with more songs. Everyone is given a songbook , and everyone sings. Whether or not you are familiar with Taizé services, whether or not you can read music, whether or not you speak any language other than your own, after a few days of repetition the songs begin to make sense. They get easier (even the intimidating Slavic ones!). There are lots of Taizé recordings available, and places all over the world hold Taizé-style services, some more regularly than others. If this has caught the interest of anyone in or near Vermont, the Benedictine monks of Weston Priory, http://www.westonpriory.org/, hold beautiful prayer services, or so I’ve been told… At the heart of these prayers is their participatory nature, the sense of community they inspire, the feeling of hundreds of voices becoming one voice and filling the air. That first morning, the ringing harmonies bowled me over—and I was already sitting down.

The rest of the day, everyone is expected to assist in chores (serving meals, washing dishes, changing trash bags) and attend at least one Bible-study session (I most skipped Bible-study; chalk it up to my Quaker roots, but sitting around with a bunch of other 17 to 29 year olds and talking about God—just doesn’t feel right). And the rest of the time? Walk, sit in the sun, read, sing… There is constant singing in a multitude of languages, accompanied by guitars, hand drums, flutes, recorders, even a trumpet and a saxophone showed up. I can’t tell you how many times, over the past weeks, I have heard renditions of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” nor in how different accents.

The monks at Taizé are also incredible artisans, producing gorgeous woodcuts and pottery. I spent hours drooling over the claywork, the rainbow of glazes, and finally succumbed to the temptation to buy something souvenir-ish—the first time the whole trip! It should also be noted that Taizé is very close to Cluny, a lovely town and home to the ruins of another monastery mucho older than Taizé. (Of course, for me, the name Cluny just evokes memories of the villain in the first Redwall book—anyone follow?) My second day, feeling claustrophobic at Taizé (and miserably underwhelmed by the food—more on that in a moment), I bussed it to Cluny and spent the afternoon wandering, gloriously pack-free for once! There was also an equestrian even going on at the town’s hippodrome so I got to watch so absolutely gorgeous dressage horses and hunter-jumpers. They made me long for the days when I rode…

For those in need of deeper reflection, looking for a challenge or just a little extra peace and space and solitude, Taizé offers the option of spending a week or a weekend in silence. After a couple of days of the exhausting summer-camp atmosphere, I leapt eagerly at the chance and undertook two-plus days (Friday through Sunday morning) in silence. There were already about a dozen women spending the entire week in silence at “Cerisier,” the Silent House in the village of Ameugny, a short 1.5 km walk from Taizé. We three dozen or so joining in for the weekend kept our sleeping arrangements on the main campus due to space constraints (which was fine, since my tent was already strategically pitched in the “Silent Area”—a relative term), but took meals at Cerisier and were welcome to spend our days in the house and its garden or wherever else we chose. Our daily schedule consisted of prayers and meals, the rest up to us—how liberating! I felt like I was returning to my natural state, and the whole experience took on a new light. I felt better about everything. Not to mention the infinitely better food—and by “infinitely” I simply mean real, fresh baguettes in the morning, and an electric kettle to make real hot tea whenever we wanted.

I guess I need to spend a few lines explaining Taizé dining. Now, I’ve always said that I could pretty much live on bread and chocolate, which is just what they serve every morning for breakfast. However, the bread is nowhere near what one hopes for when one is spending a week in France: dry, day-old slices of those pale par-baked baguettes, the likes of which can be found “fresh-baked” at any supermarket in the United States, tasting heavily (to my palate) of commercial yeast and preservatives. To add insult to injury, there is the matter of “tea”: although called tea, what gets served at breakfast is in fact hot instant tea, a la Nestea, artificially lemony and impossibly sweet. I took a bowlful my first morning, took a sip, and my little heart sunk right down into my toes. I suddenly recalled that Gabe, a coworker of mine from Healthy Living who just so happened to make a trip last September almost identical to mine, had warned me about this “tea,” but of course I’d forgotten. In any case, as soon as I began breakfasting at the Silent House, I spent my days drinking endless cups of English Breakfast tea, eating hunks of crisp-crusty baguette, and collecting windfall plums in the churchyard of Ameugny’s beautiful church. A not on plums: Already in Spain, plums had become something of a symbol… I’m still trying to figure out what of. Generosity, I suppose: generosity of the earth and of the human community. In Spain, the ground in July is littered with little golden ciruelas, and at many albergues we pilgrims would be greeted by a basket or a bowl full of them. It is so touching to be offered fruit fresh from the tree, to be told, it’s okay to eat these—don’t feel like you have to sneak around collecting windfalls while no one is looking. Burgundy has those same yellow ones, but the tree in Ameugny was special: deep purple plums just like the ones in Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, green-gold inside, the size and shape of dates and nearly as soft and sweet. Suffice it to say, I was in love. From Friday on, I visited my plum tree every day. By the end of the week, I felt almost at home on the road between Ameugny and Taizé, felt almost the way I do walking up and down the West Shore of South Hero. Of course, there are many more pedestrians and cyclists at Taizé (if you can believe it) than in South Hero. It’s pretty much impossible to walk alone.

The agriculture is impressive along the short stretch I walked several times daily. Unlike the U.S., it feels like every bit of land in Europe is cultivated. In that 1.5 km, one can see horses and cows, a sunflower field, a cornfield, a vineyard, not to mention apple trees everywhere, plums and blackberries, and small garden plots. That said, I found it terribly irksome that Taizé offers nothing in the way of fresh vegetables to its visitors. For lunch and dinner, we’re talking instant mashed potatoes, frozen peas and corn, pasta with canned sauce. Usually, we got one piece of fresh fruit at lunch—an orange, a pear, a peach, perhaps a banana (the whole time I was in Europe, I got excited whenever offered a banana because I never buy them for myself as they are a very poor choice for backpacking, what with the bruising and the squishing). That piece of fruit was far and away the highlight of each day’s meals, and often it was all that I took.

I know, I know, I’m an ungrateful snob to complain about the food prepared and served by volunteers at an entirely not-for-profit establishment. I’m not angry at Taizé; I understand the difficulty of feeding hoardes of people on a minimal budget. What I’m angry at, I suppose, is a global food system—I realize now how global the problem is, that it isn’t just the U.S. although things may be worse here—that simply is not designed to provide all people with real, whole, fresh food. That said, if I had a monastery, we would most certainly be baking our own bread and growing our own vegetables. At the very least. My first few days at Taizé, I longed bitterly for that good “pollo de la mañana” I ate for dinner with Mapi and Andrés, those big rounds of chewy Galician sourdough and wheels of snowy-white soft fresh farmers cheese. It is awfully hard to be spiritually engaged when presented with food that riles one’s political sensibilities. I felt incredibly guilty about buying fresh bread from the bakery while I was in Cluny, and fresh carrots and cucumbers at the supermarket, when eating together as a community is so important at Taizé, but I had to do something. I was about to throw in the towel and fast for the second half of the week—and then I came to the Silent House, and with real tea and real bread, I can weather any storm.

I don’t want to dwell on the food issue for too long, though it is near and dear to my heart, something of which Taizé reminded me emphatically. However, there were other joys and other challenges outside of meal times. After a month of spending much of each day all by myself, I felt very unsteady—more so than usual—in the midst of a crowd. Moreover, the vast majority of guests at Taizé come with family, friends, or as part of a youth group, so the Taizé experience is, for most, a naturally social one. Being solo, and being the introvert that I am, I knew that the sort of reflection I wanted—needed—to be doing was not going to happen if I spent all my time chatting. The prayers were more valuable than I can express. It was important to me to have that structure each day, to have something to do when I woke up, a place to go. And being together in the church, singing, was the right way of being with other people. Having German teenagers kicking their soccer ball into my tent was not. Listening to British kids play truth-or-dare at midnight (after snorting cocaine!) was not. Waiting for girls to finish putting on their makeup in the bathroom so I could have a turn at the sink to wash my one change of clothes was not. Granted—these are learning experiences. I wouldn’t trade my week at Taizé for anything. But it is a mixed bag.

The most powerful experience I took away with me was the Saturday Easter vigil, held at evening prayer. Everyone receives a candle, and the flame is passed around the room, from person to person. Not being a Catholic, I’d never witnessed—let alone participated in—an Easter vigil. The symbolism of the fire, of turning to one’s neighbor to share the flame, is so ancient and so powerful. I couldn’t help but think of Emerson, that line (I think it’s in “The Poet”) where he tells us we are not merely torch-bearers but “children of the fire.” I thought of Prometheus, of Dante. I thought of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher who believed that fire—change—was the essence of being. And the music! After nearly a week together, we all had a firmer grasp of the words, the harmonies. There was a newfound power in the evening’s prayers. It would be our last evening prayer all together. Most pack up and leave on Sunday morning, and by Sunday evening there is a new wave of guests, so prayers on Sunday evening are once again quiet and tentative as everyone figures out how it’s done. Staying until Monday made me much more aware of the transformation that occurs over the course of one week than I would have been had I left on Sunday with everyone else. It made clear to me how people grow at Taizé. They grow in confidence and in trust, in their ability to listen to one another and to make each voice resonate with all the others. I realized too that the confidence and trust that many discover in themselves at Taizé were exactly what I had been cultivating in myself for the past month on the Camino. Taizé describes its project as “a pilgrimage of trust on earth,” which sums it up so well I don’t have much to add. Pilgrimages take many different forms. What one person finds in four weeks of walking through mountains, another finds while standing in the lunch line.

Jiggity Jog! And a Poem in Six

Home again, home again! Well, to be honest, I've been here since Wednesday morning... But now that the computer is staring me in the face all day everyday, I'm not particularly compelled to use it. I've been putting off this post because I don't know what to say. The first few days back have been an endless session of show-and-tell. Stories come to me at unexpected moments. I'm still unpacking (kind of remarkable considering my bare-bones backpack and my near-refusal to accumulate souvenirs). It's hard to remember what I've said to whom, what I've shown to whom, and what I've completely neglected to share. I'm in the process of transcribing my one hundred-plus pages of handwritten journal onto the computer, so the whole story will eventually come to light. If I can, I'll hunt down a scanner and put up some of my very amateur sketches (a sorry substitute for a camera, although walking without one for the bulk of my time in Spain was, to be honest, quite liberating). For now, to tide us all over, a series of poems written and memorized during my final Camino week--nowhere near a final version, questions and comments are welcome; my poems typically tend toward the verbose so the following is for me uncharted territory:

Huellas

1. Twenty-Five Days

The flies
and the ants
love more than
anything
the sweet salt
blisters
on my feet.

2. What I Carry

Wild mint and sorrel,
dill and chamomile,
a four-leaf trébole,
palabras:
always something
in my mouth.

3. The Most

What I miss
the most:
wild black
raspberries.

4. Hilltop

How quickly the city
turns into the middle
of nowhere! Vice versa.

5. Sense Memory

Mineral savor
of sunscreen,
mineral savor
of sweat.
Everyday
is camphor cream,
coffee, cigarettes.

6. Purity

Clean, unclean:
a matter of degree.