Metaphor & Memory

2012-01-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

Beautifully reminded today that the pen is mightier than the sword. Justice will prevail...

What Comes with Silence

2011-12-25T20:49:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure if was the tick of the fan,

Making the sound of a rattler

Next to my bed, or my own voice

Hovering over my body, euphoric and listening

To what had to be said. Are you there?

It’s midnight and I’m awake,

Leafing through the books of poetry I left

Out for you. I find the ribbons

That wrapped around 1936,

A book of Victorian poetry

I gave you only a week ago. And, so, I wait

On the deck outside with a fervent solitude

Oblivious to an end or beginning,

Only knowing of the moon, and how

It has shifted its weight across the sky.

Changed

2011-10-15T21:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we wait for something and we’re not sure what it is, but we know in the center of our soul that we must believe, have blind faith, pursue on for the sake of love, especially when it seems like years have turned into decades, because sometimes they do…but truth takes time and the real story needs a chance to surface.

Then you graduate from a place you would be a stranger, if you chose to go back.

Collective Confessions on Love & Flight

2011-10-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

Recently, I came across a final exam paper for the poetry theory class I had taken in graduate school, titled, "Confirmation of the Uncertainties." Walking on the treadmill in the garage, I came across a reference from Robert Bly who once said that in order to write good poetry we have to be able to shift inward and outward. Years later, long after the poetry theory final paper, I have to ask myself, where are you, Pilar? Someone mentioned to me, only today, that I could potentially be in a holding pattern. I took it literal. I saw the bird. It's possible she's simply taking a break; everything has become about so much of nothing, like distance and speed; that's not where the heart of life lies. I think she's learning the patterns of wind, again. When we grow, we stay within the reach of our most familiar branch.

I wrote halfway through the paper: "I've had to condition myself to sit in the presence of being uncomfortable in order to reach a hint towards my pleading confirmation that lends itself towards even a halfway conclusions that I absorb daily." I go on to say, "I can't deny this, I believe poetry is often times a measure in which we weigh out the trials and celebrations of life. Poetry becomes the confirmation of uncertainties we must attain to." It's this shift, the translation of both worlds, the spoken and the written and hearing the voices, or becoming the voice, whether big or small.

Perhaps poets move through life in measure. The poet, Muriel Rukeyser, said in her book, "The Life of Poetry: Form, Line Tension," said "exchange is creation." Poetry is merely an exchange for one thing for the next. The voice for longing, the sigh of time, the heartbeat of desire. And if human energy was transferred (or transpired) from the poet to the reader, then how about for the person the poem was intended for? Do all these strands weave together across the skies in some cosmic fashion that allows an exchange occur, that would have otherwise been impossible, say due to distance between the two people?

It's true, most people seek understanding and community to some degree or another. I seek truth, and poetry has been my primary tool in capturing the unsaid. Truth does more than set one free, it's the most essential component towards entering (and staying on) the path of living an authentic life. An authentic life..it's been the topic of conversation all week. The opposite of fear is trust. In order to overcome fear, you don't try and understand fear, you simply hang onto to trust. Trust and authenticity come from the same bloodline. They simply couldn't exist without the other. This is where poetry can save the soul. If you're not writing it, then read it. Keep the heart soft. Stay vulnerable. Never pass up an opportunity to love. Writing new poetry can be distilled from collective experiences, our memory.

Just like love, poetry is a conversation of the senses.

Estranged

2011-08-21T10:26:00.001-07:00

It’s the stories

Someone had to write,

The scars, and how they stretch

Between us, and we may have

Missed it,

The moments

For a chance,

The unlived narratives,

You know…the ones

Neatly placed by God,

The ones we saw all along

From our corner eyes?

Instead, we say, family?

And, I think of my father,

I am nine. I remember her,

She’s systematic, too,

Like the way father separates us

From the boat,

And how we drift,

Until we become undone

From the dock,

Like my words,

Pools of scribbles,

Never spoken, traveling

Between two oceans, the poetics.

My sister, four, is next to me.

It’s the last time we’re equals, shipmates

From the same wreck.

We wear swimsuits, and

Choose our stories,

Losing one another

After being taken captive by the wild.

In the Way of Poetic Craft: Marilyn Chin & W.S. Merwin

2011-02-21T20:46:00.000-08:00

*This interview was conducted in 2005. I had the honor of meeting and interviewing Marilyn Chin when she came as a guest speaker to Fresno, California. -- Pilar Graham

In the Way of Poetic Craft: Marilyn Chin & W.S. Merwin

There are two poets whose craft in poetry stand out for me: Marilyn China and W.S. Merwin. Their approach towards their work is inherently different. Chin once said, “today’s poets have become too monolithic, static.” Chin also has stated that she speaks for the minority. Merwin, when a young poet visited Ezra Pound, who advised him to “read the seeds, not the twigs, of poetry” (Merwin, 810). Perhaps the poet’s experience can affect the manner in which craft in a poem takes.

Chin admitted that her main goal in writing poetry is to stir up the muse. She believes that form and content should work together. In speaking for the minority, Chin has also said that she had made several references to African-American aesthetics, since they have suffered in history, as did the Chinese American. Yet, Chin’s subject matter has included: God, the devil, the death of Jews, racism, Hitler; people and deities often become the metaphors in her poetry.

Chin pays tribute to the African-American experience with this poem where she has incorporated lyrical blues in her poem Blues on Yellow (#2) (Chin; Rhapsody, 67):

Twilight casts a blue pall on the green grass

The moon hangs herself on the sticky date palm near the garage

Song birds assault a bare jacaranda, then boogy toward Arizona

They are few this year than last

Chin’s ability to break away from traditional poetic structures creates a more powerful voice behind her poems. Although her poems are technically structured on a sophisticated level, there is a certain degree of experimentalism and unpredictability that reflects the nature or behavior of the emotion of anger. I believe it is the anger, which she uses sometimes as a collective voice, or the voice of other, that she gains a sense of freedom within the poetic structure, thus creating new avenues of expression.

One variation of her stylistic features can be found in the poem, Where We Live Now (Vol. 3, #4) (Chin; Rhapsody, 63):

When / my / mother / painted / bamboo /

She / saw / bamboo / and / not / herself /

When I asked Chin what the forward slashes represented in this poem she said they represented bamboo. What stands out with Chin’s work is her ability to take advantage of the page and position them where she sees fit. Furthermore, her creative positioning creates white space around her poems, which create an even more dramatic effect. Here is only one of several examples where Chin takes advantage where she positions the words on the page and changing the font size to create a disappearing or softening affect; shown again here in her poem, Where We Live Now (Vol. 3, #4) (Chin; Rhapsody, 63):

zenfully

gunrack rattling

blue void

gun rack

blue

void

Chin uses a combination of segmentation, changing the size and appearance of the fonts, places the words around the page at her free will. Often times Chin is attempting to make her point, not only through the subject matter in the poem, but how it appears visually. In most cases, I find Chin’s approach liberating while other times it can be a distraction. I believe the content in Chin’s poems are rich enough to stand on their own without manipulating their visual appearance or the structure of the poem, which in some cases work against the subject matter in the poems. Nonetheless, I find Chin’s work to be compelling and inviting.

Chin is very tactful in her word choice, which is an instrument in the craft of poetry. She best illustrates it here in her poem, Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44) (Chin; Rhapsody, 24). Here is speaks about the relationship between her mother and father, and the mother’s hysterectomy:

The worm has entered the ear

And out the nose of my father

Cleaned the pelvis of my mother

And ringed around her fingerbone

Other approaches to Chin’s craft are tied to her subject matter, thus in the case of bringing in traditional Chinese beliefs, which are commonly weaved into her poems. One example of this is in the poem, Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44) (Chin; Rhapsody, 26) this is the last stanza:

Discs of jade for her eyelids

A lozenge of pearl for her throat

Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils

They will rob her again and again

In this poem, Chin does not use any punctuation and does this in several other poems. This may be a style derived from E.E. Cummings, but today in contemporary poetry it is frowned upon as a gimmick and the proper punctuation and grammatical rules are instead encouraged. In any case, I don’t feel that the lack of punctuation hurts the poem and still find it to be one of her stronger pieces.

Chin’s work is revolutionary in several aspects: she honors the fundamental ethics of creativity and the production of art. Chin can be found, time and time again, surrendering, as she becomes the vessel in which the art is funneled. Surrendering to her “muse” as she says, fuels the way she produces poetry, masters her craft. Chin is the mouthpiece for what should have been said, moments that would have otherwise been lost between two worlds (East and West). She said that she is even aware that the reader’s eye moves from left to right, left to right. She takes notes of the tiny details that might be a more comprehensive approach in reaching her audience.

W.S. Merwin is the author of more than fifty books of poetry and translations. To study the craft of Merwin would account for several volumes to bring to light his craft techniques, even how his writing has changed through the decades. Eventually in Merwin’s poetic career he took measures to avoid the formal or traditional conventions to move towards a ‘spoken language’. In the preface—which Merwin wrote—in the book The Second of Four Books of Poems, he says: “From the beginning they are less obviously formal—it might be more to the point to say that whatever may provide their form is less apparent. By the end of the poems in The Moving Target [1963] I had relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions, a move that evolved from my growing sense that punctuation alluded to and assumed an allegiance to the rational protocol of written language, and of prose in particular. I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page. Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in” (Merwin, Preface I).

By 1960’s Merwin was ready to change his style, and when The Moving Target published in 1963 he had abandoned the formalities of his previous poet works; thus, changing the style of his craft. When The Lice appeared in 1967 Merwin’s tone and content had been changed due to a historical context of what was happening around him: the new world—full of contradictions in the sixties, war, changes, which Merwin believes still haunts many. As for poetry, Merwin says, “Poems are written in moments of history, and their circumstances bear upon their language and tone and subject and feeling whether the authors are conscious of that happening, or not, but it is hard to conceive of a poem being written only out of historic occasion” (Merwin; Preface 2). In knowing this, how does it affect Merwin’s craft? And what stands Merwin out from other predecessors?

To fully understand how Merwin uses craft we must turn to his poetry. Much of Merwin’s poetry are segmented in nature, including one-line stanzas, the absence of punctuation, and extremely short poems, such in the case with his poem, Sanvonarola that is only two lines, to poems that go on for pages. Is this considered a craft in poetry? Yes. Merwin, for I believe, is very conscious of his word choice; therefore, I cannot be swayed into thinking if the poem is only two lines that it doesn’t bear the weight of one that is twenty lines.

One of the several things that stand out in Merwin’s work is his ability to personify the natural world around him. He brings simple things in the every day and adds a slant of emotion. For example, in his poem, December Night (Merwin, 108) he says:

The cold slope is standing in darkness

But the south of the trees is dry to the touch

Merwin brings the cold slope to life by letting the reader know it’s standing in darkness. Another example of where he does this in the poem, December Among the Vanished (Merwin, 109):

The old snow gets up and moves taking its

Birds with it

Another facet of craft with Merwin is his naturalness in line breaks and when to make the next line into a new stanza, all in a way that simply flows. This poem, like many, does not contain punctuation, which is not my personal preference; yet, I didn’t feel it hinder the poem or the meaning behind the poem. In his poem, Habits (Merwin, 242) the line breaks don’t feel forced and move with Merwin’s voice and rhythm:

Even in the middle of the night

they go on handing me around

but it’s dark and they drop more of me

and for longer

then they hang onto my memory

thinking its theirs

even when I’m asleep they take

one or two of my eyes for their sockets

and look around believing

that the place is home

when I wake and can feel the black lungs

flying deeper into the century

carrying me

even then they borrow

most of my tongues to tell me

that they’re me

and lend me most of my ears to hear them

Other poems by Merwin are heavily segmented. Merwin uses numbers and lines between each stanza to make it clearly separated. Other styles in craft include repetition and center justifying a poem. What I find interesting is that Merwin gets away with it each time, whereas contemporary poets in college are often discouraged to stay away from manipulating the format of their poem. Furthermore, if today’s poets do choose to do to take on unconventional methods in their poetry (no punctuation, font size and positioning on the page) they are often warned that it must add to the poem, not distract the reader and/or the poem. I agree with this.

When I think about Merwin’s strongest aspect in his craft I believe it to be his word choice. The fat, so to speak, is trimmed from his poems leaving them rich with meaning. Take a look at the first line of the poem and representing itself as a one-line stanza, Before That (Merwin, 56):

It was never there and already it’s vanishing

Both W.S. Merwin and Marilyn Chin display not only bold, but also sophisticated approaches in their poetry. Both use the page like a blank canvas in which to paint their words. Neither of them appear to be hindered by the possibilities of the power of the word, metaphors, similes, or appearance/format of their poems. For me, observing Merwin and Chin’s craft at a closer perspective offers encouragement to me as a poet to branch out. One example is to follow some of Merwin’s techniques of one-line stanzas, or force me to consider the word choice, or language, in my poems. The greatest gift I could receive in continuing to study their work is to turn to my own writing and ask myself, how could I make this a better poem?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Works Cited

Chin, Marilyn. CSU Fresno – Visiting Writer Series; Q&A. 24. Feb. 2005

Chin, Marilyn. Email to the author, 22, Mar. 2005

Chin, Marilyn. Rhapsody In Plain Yellow. WW Norton: New York, 2002

Chua, C.L. Rhapsody In Plain Yellow. Magill’s Literary Annual (2003): 670-671; 668-669

Gioia, David, David Manson, and Meg Schoerke. Twentieth-Century American Poetry. McGraw

Hill: New York, 2004

Graham, Pilar. Personal Interview: Marilyn Chin. 1. Feb. 2005

Merwin, W.S. The Second of Four Books of Poems. Copper Canyon Press: Washington

Dark Hope

2010-01-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

(An excerpt from unpublished manuscript, "Homesick")

I tend to be optimistic in emergencies.

I’m in the living room, sitting in a chair I never use, trying to collect the last of the day’s light. There’s been a blackout. My neighbor tells me in the courtyard it could be hours before we see light, and on record, it’s the hottest day of the year, so until now, the neighborhood has been working to stay cool in the suffocation of the day of one hundred and eleven degrees. I think about how I must find new ways to keep my mind busy—all without thinking about my marriage to electricity.

The sun has begun to set and I don’t own a flashlight. Even though I was raised to always have one in case of emergencies, I never remember to buy batteries.

There’s something about the whole flashlight thing that silently disturbs me: an eye of light, a limit in perception, and the vulnerability of moving amongst the dark.

We’ve been out of power for only a half an hour and my dog, Max, is panting; there’s a heat wave hysteria building up in the house. He circles the living room with doubt and suspicion. It’s still too hot to open the doors, even at eight thirty in the evening. I open more blinds to bring in the last of the summer light. It’s the most my neighbors have seen of me inside my house, since I keep my blinds tightly closed to reduce the heat of living in central California. I’ve learned the less Max sees on the outside, the less likely he will bark while I’m at work. From the standpoint of the living room, he’s been reduced only to sound. The sound of the rod iron gate squeaking, the mailman who slams the rows of mailboxes back into the stucco wall, the City of Fresno emptying the recycling or garbage bins, the beeping of a delivery truck as it inches its way out of the six-unit complex where I live. I light the candles on the mantle. It’s been months since I’ve taken the time to do this. When I lived in San Francisco I didn’t feel “home” until I lit a candle in the window. I always said a prayer or a wish and imagined the wishes traveling over the city. Maybe it was the act of intention. Hope recognized.

The power flickers on. The refrigerator growls. The air conditioner clicks on. My house becomes bright, and then everything shuts downs, dies. Sometimes hope works that way. Unrepentantly it will arrive, only to recede, and if we’re lucky, the process repeats itself. I think about how sometimes months, even years, can drag by, where all feels lost. Maybe hope is overlooked, never lost. I carry the candlesticks and travel towards my windowless bathroom—a dungeon with a built-in fan in the ceiling, a box that sucks air and sends it…well, somewhere. It took me weeks after I first moved here to get used to the noise. I couldn’t put my eyeliner on straight with all its humming, the blades gnawing at the air.

Beautiful amber rays flicker from the candles back on the mantle. Illuminations of a dance scatter themselves down the tiny hallway of the apartment. Each movement has intent, and relies on the darkness for its beauty. I wonder if this is how hope works.

I return to the chair by the window. Darkness sinks into the center of the room, a purple-black haze through the room. My eyes are beginning to adjust to the dark. I’m forced to be left alone with silence until I am seduced by song. I am guessing it’s a sparrow on the other side of the glass. I don’t know the names of birds who sing or the ones who don’t. Since childhood when my fascination with birds began, I have never stopped to ask if there are bird species that didn’t sing. My neighbor tells me, when we simultaneously step outside into the shared courtyard to get fresh air, that it was most likely a mocking bird. “A mockingbird…of course.” I say, stunned that a bird, with such a beautiful name, might have been on my rooftop, serenading into the stillness of the early evening. This bird has captured my heart. I admire his patience and his melody as he continues to sing to find love and once again, I feel sick with hope.

Passing Time

2009-09-15T10:34:00.000-07:00

Stones and Sand

I stand at an unnamed river— or at least I don’t see a sign. Later, I’ll find out I was on the official Blossom Trail in Fresno County. I should have known by the blankets of flowers covering the mountains . I watch my dog Max cool his paws in the river and slowly walk to the center of the river on his thirty-foot leash. He pauses when the river reaches his belly. Long swirls of fur are beneath him as his little dog-like fingers grip against stones and sand. This is the best I can I do. I wish I could let you run off leash, but I may never see you again. I’m not sure you’ll come back to me if I set you free. All these tests with love. Sometimes, you come off like a grumpy old man and can’t hear me when I call out your name--my words getting stuck in your long golden brown goatee. I from above this underwater world; it's safe here amongst the silent diligence of the river's microorganisms circling and bouncing off my feet.

The nature of hope, which includes the act of loving and letting go, is of the same. We become conditioned to either engage or avoid the conversations of the heart. You are a grown man who told me I was "...all he ever wanted, so it’s was best to let me go." I think about you working at your desk in Fresno, your back humped over, broken, and wonder if you can feel me think about you. I imagine that enough time passes you may forget about me, and like Max, your memory will soften and you'll become foreign to how freedom feels inside the heart.

I see a woman in a tree. She’s across the river standing on the largest branch. I envy and fear her at the same time. She’s leaning against the trunk of the tree; the rest of the tree hangs over the rapids. In her arms, she has a baby swaddled in a white blanket. A dangerous aerialist with rapids hissing below her. A man comes out of the brush carrying an armful of branches and logs. Everyone is doing what they need to in order to survive. What are you doing?

Water moves over the river rocks the size of heads of cabbage. I stare at the sparkles across the water until I don’t feel anything anymore, my vision turns to a muted white haze. This is how we’re supposed to feel when we pass time. Hours later, I rise from my couch to relive the tea pot from its hysteria. Max sleeps. His body, round, like a salamander.

Eros Love

2009-09-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked if I was familiar with the three types of Greek love, in particular, eros love. This is what I found:

* Agape is the highest form of love, Godly love. This love is totally sacrificial and committed to the well-being of another. It's the fruit of the spirit that indwells us.

* Phileo is the a brotherly kind of love. It needs to be watched over and cultivated, or it will diminish.

* Eros is a sensual or sexual love. God invented eros love for the most intimate part of marriage.

Tea Tags

2009-09-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

I set the air conditioning down to sixty-nine degrees when I receive the call that you're on your way over. I stop. I hold my breath…one…two…three. I let out a sigh. It worked, I think? My dog, Max barks. You’re at my gate. My senses return to overload. I bite my upper lip. I’m smiling too hard; I’ll give it away as to how much I’ve missed you.

We read our tea tag fortunes. Mine is about how wisdom comes with experience, and yours in about opening yourself up to love. I am thrilled you got the love tag. I pour water to the rim and our steamy bags float to the surface. I am suddenly hot again and look at you and smile. You ask if I want to kiss you. I flirt with "maybe." We talk about the temperature of the tea, it'll be twenty minutes later you'll confess you're afraid of relationships. The word trust cartwheels out of my mouth, but it is foreign to you and means nothing. It will take years for me to accept that the ears of your heart have fallen deaf--years before we even met. I write poems in the air.

Waiting for our tea to cool, I give you a tour of my new apartment. We’re in the hallway, between the bathroom and the bedroom. I close the bathroom door and turn to lead you into my bedroom. You gently pull on my arm. I cannot move. You have that smile that lures me closer; you lips and eyes work harmoniously together.

This will be the last of the memories I evict from my heart. I come alive. With life comes fragility, as does the opening of any forest flower.

Plans for a Rosary

2009-08-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Everyone dies differently. For my father, Breck, it’s drinking two brandies in front of the television with his bones locking up from hours on the recliner.

I watch him make his way down the long hallway when it’s time for him to retire for the evening. Tonight there is something different about him—he doesn't smile when I stand at the doorway, instead he's sitting at the edge of the bed, exhausted, his body broken from all the sales calls—on the road meeting clients, the cocktail parties, fishing trips; the decades before are with us. Even the sea has crushed him: the scuba dives, and being on his knees, praying to the wooden boards of a boat with all the prying, fitting, nailing, sanding, and painting. Eventually, when he couldn’t make the trip from the central valley to Bay Area, he allowed the San Francisco Bay Area Sea Scouts to pillage through his seventy-six foot boat. They took with them brass fittings, fishing poles, tackle boxes, generators, a dingy boat, life vests, just to name a few. In the months that followed, water began to seep inside the abandoned boat, and as the strength of the sea’s tongue pressed the boat to the sludge that had always lived underneath.

My hair smells like the fish (something I've grown up with). I watch my mother balance between the stove. Her voice punches its way through the grating scream of the exhaust fan that is unable to inhale the plumes of fish smoke and the burnt peas. I love you for trying. Her body is soft in her faded cotton sweats, her toes, always beautifully painted; her feet are two bouquets, just short from a dozen pink roses. She looks at me and says, I’m through with shopping and all she wants for her birthday is a rosary.

What We Leave Behind

2009-07-13T11:51:00.001-07:00

It’s true—the bigger the space, the more one will accumulate. It'll be in one of Fresno's wealthiest neighborhoods that I'll attend my first estate sale. When my mother and I enter the mansion I smell urine, perhaps death.

People are strewing amongst the pockets of the house, lingering around the baby grand piano, in the closets inside the bedrooms; any one of these people leaning against the kitchen counter could be the owner this house, but the owner is dead. I become agitated by their ease, the way they lift their glasses of ice tea to their lips, casually engaged in conversation, the glass picture of tea at the edge of the counter.

I’m told most everything in the house is for sale and when I find something, make an offer. It's difficult to focus on one thing when ribbons of people are streaming from one room to the next. Should I follow the pack of women to the bedroom where the king-size bed is adorned with handbags and belts or to the living room that's off the kitchen where framed artwork is stacked against the walls like playing cards? Something of great value hides amongst us.

In the bedroom women try on fur coats while others pull at the stacks of sweaters, priced at ten dollars. I can’t wear a dead woman’s sweater, can I? I move from room to room, trying to ignore that my skin is beginning to feel sticky. I head towards the kitchen again where I find more people, new people, drinking ice tea and carrying on conversation. On the shelf behind two shutter doors a row of cookbooks has collapsed. Somebody has already picked through what was once an immaculate collection. I identify a worn copy of “The Joy of Cooking” with its red and white thatch-style design. I imagine the woman of the house cooking recipes for her family. Now she’s dead. Her cooking days are over. My mother joins me in the kitchen. My mother is naturally stimulated by the entire sale. I expect her to sniff out the cashmere the others overlooked, or the gold bangles in a box marked, “Everything $5.” My mother slinks around like a cat, barely disturbing a thing, and over to a of row glass and stoneware. She flips items over to read inscriptions and signatures. She’s no beginner at this. I stand frozen, as if I just got caught breaking into someone’s home.

“I feel like this woman is going to come home from shopping and say, ‘What the hell is everyone doing in my house! Who the hell are all you people?’”

My mother thinks I’m being humorous, and maybe I am. I can’t tell right now. I follow her back to the master bedroom. I stand as my mother holds up sweaters to her body. I talk my mother out of the green sweater.

“But I like the color.” She smiles and holds it up in front of her.

I tell her she doesn’t have to buy something, just because we’re here. I point out how there’s a small tear near the neckline. I force the sweater out of her hand and back onto the sloppy rainbow-colored stack of sweaters. We decide to take one last look in the living room. The hums of voices begin to accelerate with the great flux of newcomers and there’s a great stir at the makeshift cashier area in the dining room, adjacent to the living room. By unexplained forces, we end up there.

My mother shows me a gold watch. I strain to see it in the dark living room. Why won’t they turn on any lights in here? Within seconds, she’s struggling to fasten the clasp, mind you, in the dark and shadowy living room. She decides to get it, even though they can’t seem to put it on. They tell her, “All watches are knock-offs and ten dollars.” She hands the woman sitting in front of the cash box at the card table a ten-dollar bill. Finally, we leave.

In the car, my mother hands me the watch. The sunlight is shinning on it now. The chunky-and-link-styled watch is actually quite beautiful. “Flip it over, Pilar. Inside there is an inscription, read it to me. I think it says 14K.” At that moment, once I realized the weight of the watch, my mother had found herself a deal.

“Yes, mom, it says 14K!” I hand her the watch, trying to fight back jealousy.

“I knew it!” Then, right there, appeared the glow. I’ve seen this particular glow several times in my lifetime now, typically when a new piece of jewelry touches her body. Silver does the trick, and for a while, she went through a pearl phase, but she’ll always melt for gold. She stops the car and asks me to help her put it on. We watch it shine on her left wrist, as she turns right to take us out of the neighborhood. “Now that’s a real estate sale! A lot of people say, ESTATE SALE, on their signs, but that’s just to lure them in. I begin to cry.

“I don’t ever want to go to another estate sale again!” I say, weeping even louder.

“Look at all that stuff she had…died of kidney failure…none of her wealth could save her…she left all this behind. Why do we have to accumulate so much stuff?” I don’t know where I’m going with all of this. I am spitting out strange sentences between my sobbing.

“I think the estate sale forced you to come to terms with your mortality,” my mother says.

My mother likes to stay on the surface of things. This seems like a profound and deep statement. I have no response for her. I continue crying.

We talk about the value of things…faith and how the real investments are the ones that are not often seen. The gold watch catches the sun, everywhere, I see sparkles.

The Truth of it All

2009-06-10T23:16:00.000-07:00

I am standing in the center of truth. And, it is true: the truth will set you free.

I suppose I waited three, maybe four years, for this evening with you to reach this center of the unexpected. This language is not of this world; its wisdom was born from the concept of what it really means to love someone and expect nothing in return. Love does not seek it's own. Yes, I know, but we're not always prepared for the response, a reaction that is so profound, especially with those whose hearts have already hardened.

Finding My Way Through Creative Nonfiction

2009-05-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

I’m lost. I have to surrender because I don’t always know where I am going. I have no map as to how I must address memory or story. What I do know is that in order to tell a good story I need to think small. The larger pieces have a better chance to find their place in the story. In order to think small I have to slow down long enough to evaluate the whole truth. What creative nonfiction form should I use: memoir, personal essay, prose, literary journalism, nature essay etc.? With poetry as my first language, I know I must rely on what feels like a metaphoric journey, with the gift of being more fluid than water itself. It’s this watery past—often referred to as a “moving image” that must be slowed down long enough to catch a glimpse of what it wants me to see—even if they arrive fragmented and bias. Regardless of which creative nonfiction form I choose (or surrender to) I still must decide what it to focus on, and what to leave out. It’s a matter of remembering and forgetting. I am, in turn, celebrating something that would have otherwise been forgotten, and in the act of writing, I am no less, confirming, perhaps even celebrating the experience. This much I know to be true. Before I take on any creative nonfiction task, I remind myself that it’s the incidents or the situations that create story and this is point I go small and weave myself into my translation of the story. These situations presents the context or circumstances, often times the hidden plot.

As I became seduced into the world of creative nonfiction writing, it was in nature writing that found my true calling; here in this solace place of pace, I found an array of writers who posed bigger questions in their writing, like Walt Whitman—not just his foundational poetry, but the records of eloquent and insightful prose; Annie Dillard, Lisa Knopp, Robert Root, Scott Russell Sanders, and Kim Barnes—to name of few, and all of whom have impacted not only the way I see the world, but how I respond to it.

The attempt of the nature essay is to pose bigger questions about the world around the writer. The goal of the essay is not to describe in detail about what the writer is observing, but to open up the channels on larger subjects, make connections, and make note between the worlds within the world they are observing. One must be excellent observer.

[1]

“No one ever gets tired of the moon. Goddess that she is by dower of her eternal beauty, she is a true woman by tact—knows the charm of being seldom seen, of coming by surprise and staying but a little while; never wears the same dress two nights running, nor all night the same way; commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands; lends herself to every symbolism and to every emblem; is Diana’s bow and Venus’s mirror and Mary’s throne; is a sickle, a scarf, an eyebrow, his face or her face, as look’d at by her or him; is the madman’s hell, the poets heaven, the baby’s toy, the philosopher’s study; and while her admires follow her footsteps, and hang on her lovely looks, she knows how to keep her woman’s secret—her other side—unguess’d and unguessable,” (Whitman, Walt. “Whitman: Poetry and Prose.” Specimen Days. Library of America College Editions, 1996. 851-852).

Perhaps Whitman’s keen account of the world around him (displayed through his poetry, prose, and essays) set the pace and influenced some of the world’s highly recognized essays not only on nature, but in the courageous act of finding one’s way through creative nonfiction.

[1] Annie Dillard in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek refers in her book to Stewart Edward White having said, “I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out fine debris fleeing high in the air.” Dillard referred to White having been an “excellent observer.”

Shifting

2009-05-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

Staring at a blank piece of paper is no different than the hours I’ve spent staring at the eggshell-colored walls in my house. If I could only sleep, then, I’ll know things would work out, and traces of what I’m thinking about won’t show up between my brows: exclamation points, two of them squeezed together.

There’s that beginning, even the end, of every story that goes around and around in your mind—it’s the middle part I’m still stuck in, the part that won’t release me. I become intoxicated—even bored, without the slightest stir in a positive direction. Sometimes, you simply have to find a new font.

House of Ash

2009-04-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

We’re driving from Coarsegold to Yosemite where my father had wanted his ashes spread. It’s an early spring day in February and still amongst the remnants of another winter. We are untouchable, like the patches of snow that are drawn high over the earth; sheets of white perfection coat the hillside. Our car winds across the floor of the forest and over the creeks as we make a steady climb in elevation. The sun is breaking through the branches of the sequoias; a confetti of sun specks begin to shimmer through the car window. We, I think, are still alive. I wonder how many of us there really are in the car?

The first month after my father’s death, his ashes were returned in a standard plastic box and sat disguised by a wiry candelabra on the fireplace mantle. One day at my mother’s house over lunch, she told me she couldn’t handle having the ashes in the same room anymore. “He’s in my dresser,” she said, looking down, taking a bite of salad. There he was, sitting in the bottom drawer of the dresser, his essence comingling in the dark with her bras and underwear, only three drawers above. Maybe there’s no place he’d rather be—surrounded by the sweetness of my mother, the softness of her cashmere sweaters tucked around him with traces of her Prada perfume slowly intoxicating his new world—a silence of place, where he’d see how love can be found in small and patient spaces—a place, where nothing could take away this newfound reassurance, as strong as the spiritual, or timeless when you know your god. This is the kind of love we look for our whole lives. This is what it’s really about—these quiet moments, just the two of them, undisturbed by bills, not the sliding stock market, no rotting wooden boats, the NASCAR wheels silent from whining from the television, even cancer.

There’s something so final about spreading ashes. Something, someone, is slipping from your hands, spilling all over the place. A piece of you becomes separated while you watch it return to the earth, and you know you’ll never really get it back, you know things will never quite be the same. And, now, almost a year and half later, I’ll learn one of the most common phrases after the loss of a loved one is: If I could just see them one more time. Clichés around death are foreign to me; yet, there is a bit of sanctity in knowing there are rituals to fall back on. I only learn this after having entered the house of ash. I’m no stranger to grief, so they had no choice, but to let me in.

* * *
I’ve grown so envious of my memories. They carry all the weight, and have taken on a spastic-like personality. They nudge me to remember and remind me of the years past with something so simple, like when I inhale rosemary or thyme. The memories of the last seven years living in the central valley have moved in on me. I have my mother stop the car so I can take a picture of a moss-covered rock wall with a tide pool at the bottom. I know there’s life in there and that’s when I become crowned by nostalgia. She shows me images of myself. I don’t have a chance to be human, to tell you that I don’t like what I see, or what I would have changed, instead, I begin to finally see: I am swimming in the emerald waters of Bass Lake; all around me are the people I love and the conversations I cannot hear inside the boats with their lips parting for another beer; the hawks circling the sun; and the waves of summer finally beginning to feel so near.

Sometimes, we have to believe in the unseen. Today, I’m hoping closure will take form and tell me that everything is alright. That’s all I ever really want to hear. Sometimes, I have to ask the people I love the most to say it to me. I always believe them. Today, I’m not prepared for the memory-linked diversions, like discovering how much I miss the high sierras, a place grown absent in my life after leaving my ex-boyfriend four years ago. But, this is not a sinkhole…only a boxcar of memories that are traveling parallel with us. I think about all the years we shared here—the boating, snow skiing, coffee at the Ahwahnee Hotel and their gift shop, my hands traveling over homemade soaps, malachite bears, crystal bouquets, and how the rose quartz earrings looked held to one of my ears. I begin to snap over forty photographs in the car on the way to the vista point my mother has in mind for the ashes. I don’t want to lose the present tense, so I keep snapping. My ex-boyfriend sneaks in again and floods my senses with the smell of wood and pine, reminding me of the scents I could find at his neck. I find his face in the designs of the bark; everything blurs passed me, now, including you, goodbye, my ex, goodbye. Maybe the pictures I’m taking will provide answers. It’s as if I’m trying to remember something I have forgotten about myself. Maybe closure is another cliché in life we allow ourselves to become easily attached to.

* * *
At the first vista point, handfuls of tourists pose for pictures at the wall’s edge. I guess the greatest compliment you could give Half Dome is to have your back to it. How are we going to spread three-pounds of ashes with all these people around? I’m not going to be able to handle anyone asking, “Whose ashes are those? We’re sorry.” So, we stand there, the bag of ashes in my mother’s left hand, and wait. Eventually, the tourists began to thin out so we make our way to the center of the vista point in direct view of Half Dome. My mother begins to shake my father out of the bag; her arms are outstretched and above her head and gently moving them up and down. She looks like a bird preparing to take flight. Don’t leave me here without you, mom. I can’t do this without you.

“There’s no wind! This isn’t what I wanted for him,” My mother says, turning around and facing at me. Splotches of ash have been riveted to my mother’s hands and wrists, and have smeared down the front of her white parka vest. We lean over the wall and see my father on a dirt ledge; he’s been reduced to a small ant hill of ash. My mother tosses fistfuls of ash into the air in an attempt to get what little wind there is to catch my father and carry him at a greater distance into the canyon below. Meanwhile, I’m snapping pictures, one right after another. Frustrated my camera doesn’t have a motor drive, I try to capture every phase thick ash might go through—from the moment it leaves the bag, to dissolving into the air. Death is a heavy resin and it seems predictable, but it’s not. We can’t talk about it; we might have to face our own mortality. But here, I’m almost convinced that there’s an element of flight after death, or at least there should be. It’s the ones we leave behind who have to become the wings for the silent. It’s almost an insult to the dead if we can’t offer them the opportunity to fly. Even with no wind, we’ve become embraced by ash. My father, now reduced to color of grayish black, is under my mother’s fingernails and twisting out beneath her wedding ring. I stand back and watch, lick my lips, and taste ash.

We decide to find another vista point. I have no idea how my father would have felt changing locations. He might have argued, telling us there’s plenty of wind and to just get it over with. Maybe, unintentionally, this ash ritual is being dragged out. After my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer I watched the fire, an anger that lived in the pit of his belly begin to smolder out and his approach to fatherhood became radically compromised and like two friends catching up, our conversations became mutually interactive while we waited for dinner. I can still see the image of my mother standing behind the flumes of smoke that rose from her skillets, the exhaust fan chewing at the air, and the three of us screaming across the room in efforts to communicate over the blare of the television, exhaust fan, and the fish sizzling itself into an oblivion. But, it’s this constant chaotic oblivion that allowed us to survive, making us a lucky family. We could escape death. Sizzle, sizzle, I say, to the fish!

Sometimes, survival requires one to find the necessary distractions. It became easier to live when the shock wore off when my father was initially diagnosed with only three months to live. He’d go on to live ten more years; together, we dodged his tumors, bone scans, and blood tests revealing a high cancer cell counts. Sometimes the cancer cell count went down and he’d sit in his den and map out trips, sanding and painting the motor home he’d never use. I believed we were tricking death, out-smarting ourselves, giving us time to catch our breath, and relax in the comfort of another subject—anything to distract us from what we really knew lie ahead.

We’re the only ones at the second vista point. My mother leans over the rock wall and pours more of my father over the edge. I sit in the car this time, watching my mother, snapping only a few shots this time. She returns to the car, covered in ash. The smell of my father floods the cabin of the car. My mother asks if I want to spread the remaining of his ashes. I take the bag and pour the last of his ashes over the edge.

I can’t remember what I was looking at as the ashes skipped down the side of the mountain. I remember my dog, Max, who began whimpering in the back seat of the car. It’s as if he could sense my father was near. We were silent once we climbed back into the car and headed home. I don’t know what I was supposed to feel with the ashes gone. What do most people feel after they spread ashes of someone they love. I hear it’s a sense of closure, but I’m nowhere near this. It wasn’t like the way they show it in the movies: the lack of wind, ash on our clothes, face, lips, a crying dog in the back seat, an ex-boyfriend, and old memories floating to the surface. Instead, I feel empty, and I wait for a new emotion to come, and it does. I begin to cry, cry for everything. I’m homesick for something that I’ve lost within myself. I stare at the trees and watch them became smaller and smaller as our car winds down the highway, the elevation dropping by the thousands. On the backseat of my mother’s car, a plastic bag sits, empty with dust.

At This Distance

2009-03-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

At this Distance

There’s something methodical about you. I watch the way you parallel park the red truck with an eighteen-foot boat attached. You move back and forth across the dirt with perfection alongside a mammoth Ponderosa Pine. Keeping my distance, I watch you inch forward one more time, and then straighten the wheel. Too impatient for this process, I wait outside the truck.

However, as many times as I’ve seen this from the outside, it won’t grow tired to me. I admire your quiet patience and your large tan hands and how they can grip the steering wheel with such trained accuracy. You’re a captain at his helm. With my arms crossed at my chest I can sense that my face looks angry, for no reason. I will admit, a sweet admiration is beginning to wash over me. Maybe this is my soft side? Maybe this is what I must tell myself because I’m not sure how long this relationship is really going to last, and I should just be happy. I’m already flashing back to you parking and they way you had glanced at me from beneath the bill of your baseball cap. And even with this distance, I know your eyes have already deepened into an indigo blue, the way the sky becomes saturated as it begins to fold itself into evening. Even at this distance, I know your eyelashes have already begun to curl from a day of swimming and sweating on the lake. And now, I’m wondering what you see when you look at me, how I must appear through the windshield: A girl standing in a white skirt and flip-flops, and her hair a lake-tangled mess. I can almost taste the salt on your skin. This is part of our silence.

As the years passed, we learned we don’t always have to speak to one another. We’ve learned to make love and fight—all in a single glance. Right now, I see you under the light of the man that you are: Strong and focused, even with the contradictions you live with, your silent dilemmas, of being with a woman who you’re not in love with. I’ve become a companion and take care of you in ways you’ve come to rely on. I learn to love a man who finds purpose in life by measuring the rain and watching the first days of spring unfold. I observe how you rally towards the “unofficial competitions” between you and your neighbor as to who will do a better job at mowing their half-acre of property. I watch you from the kitchen window. I get glimpses of what it must feel like to be a wife, and I stare at my left hand, gloved in suds, knowing I’m not even wearing a promise ring. You tell me you love me, and I believe it. And I ask myself, isn’t that enough?

Anything important bears a critical distance. I watch you lock the truck and walk around the back of the boat, poking your head between the boat and the tree. You make your way to me. Hand-in-hand, we walk up the hill in the dark to the lakefront restaurant to order our favorite burgers. I don’t like red meat, but I make you uncomfortable when I have too many questions for the waitress about the menu. Tonight, I’ll keep things simple and say, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

* * *

These are the memories, the pauses I take in our relationship that will eventually become ingrained in me, not so much about what our conversations were as we ate our burgers at the counter, in fact, I can’t seem to recall a single subject. Sometimes, I think about how, when we first met, our dinners became disregarded, and how, two grown people could become so content to nibble—the light from the refrigerator illuminating our naked bodies. And I think of the shadows that followed, dancing with us, all the way down the long hallway back to the bedroom. It’s interesting how new love must appear to the other rooms, the ones hardly used, inside the house.

Food was always a subject with us. When we first started dating, you used to take pictures of the meals I made for you: roasted chicken and potatoes, with the smell of fresh thyme traveling through your house. The thyme came from a garden that only measured about seven feet across, growing only thyme. It was those years I lived in the house with you I remember the aromatic waves finding its way into the house and into almost every dish we made together. But, eventually, we began to fight over food. You tried to convince me it was healthy to skip meals. I explained to you the university dietitian told me that when people fast the body stores its next meal into fat. Not knowing who was right, we both finally gave up. Eventually, I learned how to open the cupboard and sneak almonds from the bag, without making a noise, to curb my hunger. Eventually, I began fooling you as to why I was not so hungry at table. Today, I wonder if the woman you married uses fresh thyme when she cooks? Do you photograph her dinners, too?

* * *

Life always moves slower after a burger. We take our time going home, accepting the silence in the cab of the truck. It seems dark inside the cab, like the house we’re coming home to. Sometimes when we do speak on the windy way home, our conversations include what it must be like to live on the lake. You talk about selling your house. I wait for you to ask me what I think. I want to support you, but I’m still young and selfish. I think you can tell that I haven’t a clue about real estate. I smile and say, “That would be great.” When really I’m thinking about how we’ve been together for five years, and I’ve never even asked you for a ring. It seems forced, I say to myself. I remember once at Sam’s Club I asked you to look at a diamond ring in the jewelry case, but you waved your arms in your yellow plastic sailor parka and said, “We didn’t come to Sam’s to look at rings!” Embarrassed, I lost myself, one last time, at a ring in the shape of a flower, its petals saying, sorry, to me. It wasn’t even an engagement ring. Where did you go? I find you, perplexed over what brand of paper towels to buy. You put a twenty-pound bag of rice in the cart and tell me we’re going to make more meals with rice. I nod in agreement. Rice is high in calories, but I say nothing.

I tell you I had too much Diet Coke at the restaurant. You pick up speed with the truck and the boat seems frantic as it bounces over the road. It’s all business now. Our dreams of living at the lake blur past us as we talk about what we still need to do to get ready for Monday. We’re almost home. We’re on the last stretch of the highway now. We’re traveling, like so many times before, and making a gradual climb towards the southern Yosemite foothills. The wind outside my window is warm. I extend my arm out; I’m flying, flying away towards something that I don’t have the words for. I sense you’re looking at me. I pin my soul to the skyline, my whole body feels as if it’s running alongside the truck and I’m no longer with you, and then, I feel your hand reach out for me. We hold hands for the last twenty minutes home. I can tell by strength in the way you hold my hand that I will sleep soundly in your arms tonight. The smell of Irish Spring from the shower you’ll take when we get home will still be sticky sweet when you climb into bed. I imagine my head buried into your damp chest, fresh from the shower. Exhausted, we will interlock and speak using only our feet.

The Way Things Were

2009-03-01T08:51:00.000-08:00

The Way Things Were

Coming Home

I arrived from San Francisco to Coarsegold one of the many California gold rush towns that took root between 1848 and 1855, after having lived most of my life in the Bay Area. Coarsegold, originally, “Coarse-Gold Gulch” produced approximately 1.5 million dollars worth of gold during its day. Through the years, and as gold became more difficult to find, the prospectors turned to a more thriving industry of raising livestock and ranching. Very little has changed—almost one hundred and sixty years later, at least the locals would like to think so.

The lifespan of shoes are shortened living in the country. Having not grown up in Coarsegold, the mannerisms of the country life are foreign to me. And it has been years since I have lived under the warmth of the sun. No longer do I need to climb up and down the sparkly steep sidewalks of a city chronically hidden under a canopy of gray. Now I walk across gravel driveways—my high heels being gnawed away by stone teeth. My former San Francisco streets, like Montgomery, Sutter, and California, have been replaced with streets like Long Hollow, Corral, and Wild Stallion.

I’m not used to my new landscape. My car inflates dust clouds as it bounces across uneven dirt roads riddled with stones. A few miles north in elevation, tribes of Ponderosa Pines stretch like silent grandfathers towards the highest point of an aquamarine sky. I am jealous of their beauty. The mountains and sky encase me. I am a dot amongst the fragrant expansiveness: Peaks and valleys hold my memories. Life, as I know it, can never be experienced from a car. I am learning to be still. My survival is no longer dependent on having my time occupied. I point to the clumps of smoky-green mistletoe that drip from the heavy arms of the scrub oaks. What is used to provoke kissing I learn is actually a parasite. In the country, the lines at the local gas station snake out the door so the cashier can catch up with the customers. Squirrels dart from behind the brush and granite boulders, running along side the road and missing my wheels by a thumb’s length. My new neighbors include white egrets that walk ladylike amongst the tall grass beside the still pond. This is the year I discover blue herons. They travel by tiptoe, like thieves, along the unfenced acres of my backyard; they shift the landscape one frame at a time. I want to touch them. I cannot unlock our stares to make the first move. They put a spell on me, and so I write poems about them. Here, the evenings hang thick, hooked with the howling coyotes—their cries growing louder, perhaps to stage an injury and draw their prey closer. By morning, the Yosemite foothills are outlined in frost. The world here waits for the sun.

The Backside of Prayer

Hummingbirds tread air around me. I admire how they can hold their position in space. They watch me for little-bird seconds before sipping from the passionflower I’ve trained to climb up the back porch. Their microcosmic fluorescent bodies bend and transcend towards a grace I’ve only dreamed about, right before they dart behind a velvet curtain of air and disappear.

I’m struggling with what it means to be an urban cowgirl. Now that I live with you, I partake in your seasonal rituals. Dry pine needles stick to the bottom of my socks when I hang the laundry on the line to dry. We agree that clothes smell better with the sun and the wind on them. I remind myself of this by sniffing everything I pull off the line. Your real reason for using the clothesline is to save money.

Timing is everything when it comes to rituals. Even though the nights have grown cold, I am only allowed to bring out the down comforter on the top shelf of your closet on a certain day in November. I can never remember the actual day, and by October, I’m already asking you if we can make an allowance. You tell me to wait, so I put a hat on before going to bed and snuggle into the curve of your back. Your snoring keeps me up. I think I hear a bear at the window. I wake you, but you say, “There are no bears around here.” Still, I hear what sounds like something pawing at the screen to the sliding glass door of the bedroom. I hear the crack of leaves from the footsteps that I suspect are those of the wild animals that only come out at night. I fall asleep with my eyes open and afraid I’ll die in a frozen house.

There are other things I must learn if I want to live in the country, like cooking with your cast iron skillet. I clean the skillet without soap, evicting the water and thoroughly drying it before adding a coin-sized amount of olive oil to keep it well “seasoned.” In the years to come, I repeat this process—exactly the way you had showed me—a year before I moved into your house.

You are twelve years older than I. We are from different generations. People tell us that we make a handsome couple. It makes up for knowing that you’re not in love with me. I look to the patterns we’ve established, and how we’ve weaved them into our life. I use the patterns to predict whether or not we have couple longevity.

I heal from rituals and come to rely on them. With every ritual of yours I join, I wonder if I am closer in making you love me more. Is this even possible? Can rituals create a real bond between people? Does ritual strengthen what already exists between two people? Is your love reinforced through routine? I wonder if I have become unconscious to your ritual courtship. I could have been in the kitchen scrubbing a pot and staring at a cautious deer making its way across the property, or reading poetry to myself in the spare bedroom, where I memorized stanzas about how real love is spontaneous and passionate, while you were trying to court me. What I do know is there’s an unsatisfying hunger, an uncontrollable fire deep inside my belly. I wash out the ash, daily, with Gain detergent, and hang myself on the line to dry. I breathe in the sweet smells, which distract me from the ugliness I encounter in the world, and from the contrast of both the city and the country trying to live inside me.

I plan our dinners, sometimes days in advance. You say I focus too much on food as I rinse the dirt out from of a piece of celery cupped by its body. I say nothing as you tell me I should learn to skip meals once in a while, and how it would be healthy for me. I take the knife and slice the celery down the middle, cutting it in evenly sized pieces and add it to the stockpot for homemade soup. Through time, I learn to ignore your comments, your heart, and how it lives half open. I experiment with new meals and feed you homemade meatloaf with fresh sprigs of thyme cut from the garden. Later, I’ll serve you green tea—this is our peace offering, even if we’re not fighting. I beg you to build a fire, mostly so I can watch.

Your fires start with the sound of the axe splitting wood in the garage. Only a man who’s in love with me would build me a fire. I admire your wintered masculinity, the leather gloves you wear as you carry the bundles of split wood into the house, the focus of fire pressed deep into your eyes, the scent of cold ash that escapes from the open glass door of the wood stove, and the splinters that stick like lint to your sweatshirt. With every fire, you kneel before the wood stove with your back to me: I see the backside of prayer.

In my absurd secrecy, I tell myself to be content, but it will only work for a few years. In the early afternoons, I read my poems aloud to the ancient oak in the back yard—the one with the tree house you built ten years ago. It looks more like a plywood of playing cards, which has forced its branches to grow heavy and unusually low to the ground. Its barky tentacles will spend a lifespan watching its leaves fall, like torn, curled bits of a letter—traveling only inches before settling on the ground.

I will miss the country in ways I never thought possible. A year later, after I’ve left you and the house, I will grieve—thirty-five miles south in Fresno—as if there has been a death; it’s the death of myself. I think about the creek behind the bedroom where we used to sleep. Do you hear the colonies of frogs that inhabit the creek? Do their trance-like songs have the ability to reach your heart amongst your badly balled flannel sheets?

When Things Were Good

You initiate me into the domain of your heart using the natural world. I become intoxicated in this atmosphere from all the fresh air. The days go on, for what seem like forever as I play the piano at my computer keyboard, creating poetry that I let you read. In the graduate poetry workshop, I read my poems about love aloud. My colleagues say “the speaker” in poems appears to be in a strained, or in a sad relationship. Is that what I want to communicate? I am not supposed to talk when being critiqued in the poetry workshop, so I chew the inside of my cheek and stare down, going back and forth between my notebook and the design of simulated wood at the table where we sit. If these love poems were written using sight, then what’s blocking my line of vision? Maybe I should learn to speak. I move my palm away from my mouth, because the class just asked me if I have any questions about their comments. I tell them, no, and smile. It’s just easier this way.

I see hope in the sunrise this morning. We decide to take a drive. You want to show me what you’ve discovered since you’ve lived in the southern Sierra, eleven years prior to me. In secret, I pretend we’re married. No one can see my bare left hand from the road. We travel across forgotten backgrounds: A century-old barn with a broken back, a rusted plow next to Dough Boy pool, miles of barbwire fence, horses, cows, an angry dog that runs the length of a cyclone fence, and a sea of rolling hills impregnated with granite. Finally, we reach the whispering town of Ahwahnee.

Of the many indigenous people to the Yosemite Valley there were the Yosemite Miwoks, or Ahwahneechee, dwellers of Ahwahnee, who settled in the valley approximately 3,500 years ago. The name Ahwahnee means “valley that looks like a gaping mouth.” The creeks in the valley trickle, moving as silent as blood.

In 1848, James Marshall and John Sutter discovered gold along the banks of the American River. Soon, the Sierra Mountains and surrounding areas were overrun with prospectors in pursuit of unclaimed gold. Something had to be compromised. Much of the native landscape and ecosystem was impacted for a gamble at wealth. Eventually the Ahwahneechee, and their Chief Tenaya, were captured and relocated to the Fresno River Reservation. The rest of the Ahwahneechee dispersed throughout the Sierra, even as far as Nevada, becoming a displaced culture in the years that followed.

I sip the coffee you made for our drive. I stare out the window at the clumps of weed that shake their unkempt heads of hair as our truck brushes past. I swallow slowly, allowing the coffee to warm the back of my throat. I want to speak, maybe open my heart or listen to yours, but I say nothing and continue to look out the window. I think about how when a man loves a woman he will do anything to show his love, even groom her. I try to remember the last time you brushed my hair, probably after one of the long days of boating on the lake last summer. Winter is blindsided. I raise the tips of shoes to feel the heat that’s streaming at the floorboard inside the truck. I am content to just be with you right now. I want to preserve this feeling, but I know I can’t. I look at you and smile. You reach for my hand and smile back. Your strong, thick hand covers mine. I feel safe. I wonder if there’s a connection between safety and love. I remind myself that you take care of me, and how only this morning, you brought me a steamy cappuccino in bed. And with my eyes half shut, I smiled and inhaled the vapors of your woodsy good morning kiss with a swirl of sheets and quilts around me. Later, I’d write a poem about your persistence, the way you handed me a cappuccino, every morning, for years. Eventually, my cappuccino poem will be published in a local literary journal. When you read the poem in the journal you say nothing about what you think it means, instead, you say, “it’s nice.” I never tell you that the foam is a metaphor, or that below the surface, feelings of disconnection reside. Generosity from others can trigger one’s own isolation in love.

At the bend in the road we reach a white schoolhouse. I listen to you talk about the history of the town of Ahwahnee and its original schoolhouse. For a Nevadan, you know a lot about California history. You fascinate me with your stories. In the years to come, when we pass the same historical spots, you’ll repeat the stories as if you’re telling me for the first time.

I’m always listening, even when you think I’m not.

The Gertrude School, built in 1913, is one of California’s oldest one-room schoolhouses. Originally the schoolhouse provided an education for the children of the gold miners, who came to the tiny town of Gertrude along the Fresno River in search of gold. The school was named after the wife of a man who ran the Gertrude Mine in the area. Only one year after the schoolhouse was built, America would be launched into The First World War in Europe. Triggered by the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, Sophie Maria Josephine Albina Chotek, millions of deaths would follow in the efforts to modernize the world. My attention shifts back to Gertrude. Who was she? Her husband had to be in love with her if he named a school and a gold mine after her. It wasn’t uncommon for the early Californians to name cities or their ships after the women who had captured their hearts. Did the early men of California know their courtship would fall short of serving as examples to future generations? History is in everything. When did the art of love or courtship become distressed, antiqued? Where’s my voice?

The Gertrude School, built the same year the American silent film, How It Happened was released, consisting of one reel, and directed by William Duncan. It would be fourteen years later, in1927, before the voice would replace the titles, better known as the “talkies.” The first voice heard through the silver screen would be Al Jolson, in the groundbreaking movie, The Jazz Singer. I’ll never take a music history class in graduate school. Instead, I will attempt to decipher what love is and what love is not.

Miss Jeanie Nichols was the first teacher at Gertrude School. I wonder if Miss Nichols had read John Dewey’s article in 1901 about the importance of toys promoting the psychological needs of the child. What are the psychological needs of the adult, or a writer? A lover? Perhaps the adults, including Miss Nichols, were too busy in their leisure time reading Jack London’s book, The Valley of the Moon. Does the novel bring forth the voice we have not the courage to speak? If I am to distinguish the author’s words, it must begin, not with the eyes, but the ear. Before I can have a voice, I must learn to listen. What if I don’t like what I hear?

I need to break the silence. I open my door and hop out of the truck and trample the across weeds. I need to touch the schoolhouse. I am certain my voice will break the spell of solitude on the schoolhouse. “Hello, schoolhouse,” I sigh.

In 1914, a year after the schoolhouse opened, hundreds of thousands of people lined Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to watch the women, five to eight thousand of them, mostly wearing white, walk together in efforts to turn the world’s attention towards their cause: women’s rights. Alice Paul and Lacy Burns lead the organization and deliberately planned the event with Woodrow Wilson’s arrival, who was expecting to be met by crowds of people welcoming him for his inauguration as the United States President the following day.

I press my nose against the dusty screen and look inside the main room of the schoolhouse. I imagine the children facing forward with the war on their backs. I envision the rise and fall of Miss Nichols wrist at the blackboard—the simplicity of education scratched with chalk, until the schoolhouse closed in 1968. The soggy front steps have been used as a meeting place for the local artist chapter since 1979. I want to escape into the past, but I can’t, so I settle for feeling the cool wood against the palm of my hand. I am harmless and the schoolhouse knows it. Her frozen stare surrenders to those who visit and simply wonder. I think about the decades of hands that have touched the same spot. Her white petticoat is scratchy and worn, coming apart at the seams. I leave no imprint of my hand and after today, and no one will remember that I’ve stood in this spot, ever.

On our way home we stop at the Black Kid Memorial, a California historical marker to note where a famous bandit robbed several trains and wagons only a hundred yards ahead. Our last stop is Grub Gulch. Here, there used to be saloons, restaurants, and a grocery store. The entire town burned to the ground and nothing is left now but a flattened pulse of red mud. After spinning circles in four-wheel drive the truck climbs back onto the paved road.

The original town members of Grub Gulch were part of the pack who came in search of gold during the California Gold Rush. I think about the depressed wagons that traveled across the same roads we are on today. The original dirt paths are now covered with tar and asphalt, and rubber tires replaced the hoofs. A lot has changed from a hundred years ago, a year ago, even from last week. I see the world split open up and share its memories and catch the light like the center of a geode.

Luna

2009-02-22T07:08:00.000-08:00

(An excerpt of this essay has been published in Poetry Midwest.)

Midlife is the old age of youth and the youth of old age. – Proverb.

Our eyes are the last of our senses to evolve. How long does it take for our hearts to form? My younger sister, Krisey, will tell me a year later, during the fifth week of her second pregnancy that her baby is the size of a sesame seed, still a cluster of cells, and it’s during this stage of development the heart will divide into chambers and begin to pump blood. I wondered, in that critical week, if the emotional connections to the heart can be stunted, or if that’s purely an adult thing. I thought about this cluster of cells, a pinpoint of life pushing against the walls of the cell, and what strength and endurance the cells had to have in order to grow, expand—all of who will acquire the ability to store desire and memory in a blind darkness. A pounding coordination had begun in the body, for a body. But that’s not what I am thinking about, as I climb onto the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle for the first time.

My fingers are linked and locked through the belt loops of your jeans—a secure place my hands have discovered after holding on to you too tight and accidentally tickling you out of your motorcycle concentration.

The winged parts of the hipbones, the iliac, expand outward, like a butterfly. This pelvic cavity is designed like a cave to protect the potential life that sleeps deep inside. This winged amphitheatre of bone is one of the six major cavities in the human body. Resting between the expansions of this bone, fallopian flowers still bud in a dark field of my muscle.

My hips hook my pants in place. I touch my stomach and imagine the flatness I know is just beneath a layer of fat, then and rest my hands back on my hips. I am made from an outline of ash and bone, but my mind has the power to be in all places of my body at once. I’m not as robotic as I feel sometimes in this modern world. A robot has neither a heart nor hipbones.

Hipbones are often overlooked and hardly a topic of conversation, unless you become one of the people who’ve become dependent on a walker or cane after a fracture. I read recently that medical experts predict a future epidemic of hip fractures due to the aging U.S. population—what an onslaught of broken butterfly wings!
A thin, faux rawhide braid, no more in width than a pencil, frayed from cheapness and clashes against my new white pants, now, a size too big. I like wearing these pants, especially when I am near you. Suddenly, I am a long-legged exotic bird. My feathers ruffle with the midsummer winds. We stand together in front of your chilled butter colored house. I’ve spent most of my life waiting for this moment…to live carelessly in the grass. You hand me a helmet and tell me it’s expensive. I am afraid I might ruin it, but how, by crashing? Earlier I confessed, motorcycles make me nervous, and now, as you hand me my helmet, I think about how I could damage the whole evening by leaning too hard on a turn and tipping the bike over us. I know it’s possible to lean too far into excitement and pay the price with your life. When I was sixteen, my father told me how to ride on the back of motorcycles. The part I remember most: how passengers on a bike should take curves or turns, “Don’t lean to far or force it. Just relax…follow the bike, Pilar.”

I focus on your smile as you gently adjust the strap so it fits comfortably under my chin. Your fingers are flirting with my neck. I let out a little laugh.

“I trust you Richard with the bike,” I say, awkward in my nervousness, not anymore about riding, but being in kissing distance from you, You reassure me the helmet is European and it’s the best in its class. Suddenly, I can hardly contain my happiness. My fear of riding a motorcycle surrenders to our bodies against one another. There are diamonds, naked to the eye, floating behind the veils that hang above us in the early evening sky.

I ask you, if at forty-one years old, you’ve had a midlife crisis. The older I become, the more I hear about this crisis: divorces, affairs, dating younger people, growing beards or shaving them off, depression, recession, losing hair, getting hair, face lifts, tummy tucks, and random purchases. You say you’ve already had one, the crisis, which happened shortly after your divorce and that’s when you purchased a Harley and BMW cruising bike. You say the only color for a motorcycle is black. Five years later, riding is still important to you, so maybe it wasn’t a phase or crisis, but a germ that outgrew the greenhouse. I need to pay attention to people; I tend to shrivel in a crisis. I wonder what my midlife crisis will be, or if I’ve already it. My heart turned inside out and flattened itself against the earth, listening for anything in my efforts trying to define what love is and what love isn’t for my thesis. I had to live it to understand it. Is there any other way to really understand something? At the time, I would have rather died than lived with my ears and eyes turned away from the truth. I think about the book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wished I had read it—with the rest of the class—years ago at the junior college. I think it’s a book on morals. I wondered if it has helped anyone through a midlife crisis. Now, at the end of my thirties, maybe it’s not too late, just in case the real midlife crisis is around the corner. What I remember most about my English classes in junior college was that I couldn’t keep up with the reading assignments, so I faked it. Everything distracted me off the page, even the sound of my breath. I’d sit in class for weeks, three chapters behind. I didn’t have a clue as to what was being said. A lot can be said for nodding your head while making eye contact with the teacher; it can make a difference in a grade. A year later, I met a teacher, Mr. Farve, at the junior college, who changed my life. “Write in your textbooks. Learn to be an active reader!” He’d passionately shout, sweat rolling down his forehead, as he punched his fist through academic clouds. As soon as I began writing in my textbooks my G.P.A. began to climb towards the honor roll. Suddenly, I love to read again.

I want to know more of you. I do know you’re a romantic: You snap photographs of the world and capture what your hands cannot collect or bring back. You display your travels: photo albums, four-colored pictures framed on your living room walls, smooth river rocks housed in glass boxes from a sidewalk vendor in Mexico. All of it makes me forget where we are. I feel absorbed in the colors of your travels. I have forgotten we’re sitting on your leather couch in a suburban town in California, branded by country-western traditions nestled in the Central Valley. You show me one photo album after album, visually courting my heart. It works. You have the ability to hold my attention, instantly. You store sunsets in your mind I have yet to discover. The bird in me returns. I resume in a V-formation and take the lead; I never look back. I am either a poor leader, or one who knows exactly what she wants. In these windows of flight, my wings rattle open, like quills fresh from a pot of ink.

The stoplight blinks from green to yellow. We ease our way to reach a complete stop. The light flashes to red. The engine from the motorcycle rumbles beneath my body—all other noise is filtered out. We wait. I could hug you from behind forever. My body remains frozen, as not to move the bike, creating a shaky start once the light turns green. With a helmet head, and my peripheral vision now cumbersome, I try to keep my eyes fixed straight ahead.

My helmet bumps against yours when you shift gears. Click! You become so attractive to me by the way your hand moves in coordination to shifting gears. There is something so masculine about this coordination for speed. I apologize into the rushing wind about letting our helmets click, “Sorry.” Sorry, I was hypnotized by your right hand. I think you know what I said, but at the next red light you nicely tell me not to let the helmets hit against each other. Each time you shift gears my neck tenses as I try not to let our helmets touch, or stare too long at your hand. I must stay alert. My eyes peek behind my right shoulder and down at the asphalt blasting past us. We make our way off the city streets and onto a freeway. I forget to tell you that I don’t do freeways on motorcycles. Nothing shields me, except my helmet and your backside. One wrong move and I could be flung like a rag doll, tumbling into mid air, scuff my skin off and face down in a pool of spit and gravel.

We finally exit the freeway and travel through unassigned and sleepy county roads I’ve never been on. We roll to another stop sign. There are no cars in sight, but you still come to a complete stop and look left and right, twice, before we take off. On the road in front of us is a pile of trash: illegal dumping. Someone has set it on fire: a couch, bags of garbage, a headless tree, plastic chairs. It’s a post-domestic bonfire. You tell me whoever set the fire might be watching us from behind the trees. I pretend I am whispering into the curves of your ear, my words slipping, letter by letter drifting forever into your canal, instead I’m trying to speak through the layers of plastic and foam of your helmet, “Let’s get out here.” We leave the burning mess and zigzag up a small mountain in the distance. At the top, we pause to watch the early-evening sky: Blue begins to shift into black and the stars haven’t yet floated to the surface. I think this is how love is supposed to feel. My body is still vibrating from the bike; I can’t tell if it’s a rush or a sense of exhaustion that I feel. The last time I felt this I was standing in Manhattan for the first time. My knees want to buckle. I shift my attention to the five variations of blue in front of us, all of them transforming into new shades the longer we stand before the sky. If this is love, I’m in the center of it, and I wonder, if you’d catch me if I lost my balance and fell backwards into this backdrop of blue.

You point out the moon, saying you take as many photographs of it as you can, sometimes with a tripod. I see worship in your eyes. I want to ask you, do you love what you cannot touch, but I don’t say a word. I wonder if you feel the same way about women. I look at you and smile. I don’t want to scare you by probing into your heart. I can only pay attention to your fascinations…this is what new love likes to do. I wonder if it’s the reflection of the moon that draws you. Do you see the male or female images across the forehead of the moon? There’s a tribe, somewhere in southwestern Africa, who are closely related to the Bushmen that worship the luna, or moon. The word “lunatic” comes from the word luna, aligned with the myth that if someone stared at the moon long enough it would drive them mad. For centuries the moon (and sun) has: held poets and philosophers captive; created superstition; aided in love; worked on the behalf of shapeshifting; aided the weak with the willpower to make life-changing decisions; marriage proposal; influenced the planting and harvesting crops; set chain of reactions amongst individuals to rebel against their virtues, only to blame it on a full moon.

You are luna to me. In the week we’ve been dating, you’ve had the power to hold my attention—all with a simple look. I move from your eyes to your mouth, which always appears to be on the verge of a smile. I soak up your side profile in the remaining light—your forehead, the bridge of your nose, your lips, the way the corners of your smile curl in. You’re a mountainous outline; your rivers are dry, beds of sand outlined with billowy sweet sage. I can almost smell the salt wafting through the air.

I never tell you that we have the same nose, but it’s true. Our nose is neither too big nor small for our face, and when we kiss, passion comfortably secures into place. You turn to me as if you’re about to say something to me—you must have felt me staring at you. Your eyes always seem to hold sweet skepticism. Later I take this behavior as proof that you are really listening to me when I talk. But this time, neither of us are talking; instead, you give me a quick kiss on the lips and turn to walk towards the bike. It’s time for us to go.
We head down the mountain on the bike. By now, we’ve been riding for over an hour and I convince myself that I’m getting used to the bike. But in reality, I am exhausted from having to be so still and alert. My hips are sore and I can’t wait to lie down, decompress. At a stoplight, you reach your left arm back for my shin. You gently squeeze it, as if to tell me I did great on the back of the Harley. I see you smile in your left handlebar mirror. I smile, tugging on your belt loops where my fingers are still looped and locked.

On the way back to your house I think about how I trust you at every intersection, stoplight, pothole, and patch of sand the bike’s wheels roll over. I think about how you were a paramedic for many years, and how today you teach paramedics and emergency medical technicians about safety and updated procedures. You’re a quality assurance manager; you tell me you work for our local ambulance company for over ten years, now at a desk job, which you seem content. So I know if there’s an emergency, I couldn’t be with a better person. And here I am with a delayed response that I agreed to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Could I be a Harley girlfriend? Is this me? I’m not officially your girlfriend. I guess that part has to come first.
Once we arrive to your house we pop off our helmets. Our bodies are alive with vibration. We are sticky and itchy with anticipation for our first beer. Our mouths, clever like serpents, have the power to fold air, as we draw closer, kissing one another’s ear. I find an electric silence with your kiss, until you struggle for breath, and then, I know you’ve lost yourself to the floral garden I’ve planted in my hair.

2009-02-01T20:05:00.000-08:00

There is nothing I can say to you now.

Years have passed, we live in separate worlds. You were the boyfriend of five years, the one who explained what I was seeing in the natural world.

Today, I could hear your voice along Highway 41, even before we passed our Mexican restaurant, before the elevation changed as I got closer to Yosemite--where Scrub Oaks begin to morph into Ponderosa Pines--the wild bark wanting to be touched.

As I passed Fish Camp, I remember how you said, this was the spot where the Native American Indians came to clean their fish, a true trading post of the past. Badger Ski Resort is off to the left, only five miles, but the car continues towards Yosemite Village; my mother and me are looking for something, we're not sure, maybe it's just a turn style so we can get on the main road and look for the vista points she remembers.

We pass racing creek beds, swirling with memories, and the lodge where we used to get coffee and eat our sandwiches from the cooler inside your big red truck. These are the days when we opted to kick around, versus skiing.

I realized: If this is compassion I'm feeling then, it might mean I'm finding a way to forgive you. If I forgave you (and myself) it might mean that I'd have to let you go.

As we passed Bridal Falls, I remember your hand leading me to the base of the waterfall, love still young, everywhere the taste of mist.

Sweet Remembrance

2009-02-01T19:43:00.000-08:00

Today, I was reminded how short our lives are on earth. Maybe it was my father's ashes on the back seat, or my mother hiding behind big dark sunglasses who drove us to Yosemite to find the vista point where we'd scatter his ashes. I've always admired her strength.

I wrote down a verse I heard in church today which seemed appropriate to read at our destination:

There is no death,

Just sweet remembrance

of greater glory

that's on the way!

At the vista point, I forced the words through my lips--neither of us could understand I was trying to say. I don't know if it was the tourists on each side of us, the pressure to get the ashes to take flight with little wind, or the ash that was collecting on my mother's hands, arms, coat. Half dome loomed in the background. It's majestic power was patient; we are the awkward ones--the ones feeling as if we need to speak. A mountain of sheer perfection, something outside an earthly realm, had begun its role for us to take note.

Metaphase

2009-01-19T12:14:00.000-08:00

Metaphase: n.; The stage of mitosis during which the chromosomes are aligned the equator of the mitotic spindle.

In metaphase, the chromosomes align in the middle of the cell.

Crickets

2009-01-19T12:07:00.000-08:00

Most singing insects are a symbol of Autumn since they die in the winter. Crickets, singing ones, have been associated with loneliness, sadness, pity for the fate of mankind and often found in Chinese poems.

The earliest Chinese poems and songs relating to insects, mainly the singing insect, or cricket, dates back to 1100-600 B.C.

Traditionally, to the Chinese, crickets represent interesting life cycles and since they can lay hundreds of eggs the Chinese considered the most important ingredient to success in life is to have as many children as possible.

The Voice of Memory

2009-01-14T11:57:00.000-08:00

(An excerpt from unpublished manuscript, "Homesick")

It’s been two years since I’ve seen my father. I want him to tell me stories, so I can bridge the gap and connect the pieces of his life. I’m prepared, as usual: fresh batteries, new tape, and a microcassette player.

We’re traveling to Roswell, New Mexico, mainly because I’ve never been there. Roswell sits about an hour and half from my father’s house. In Carlsbad where my father lives, even the locals ask if I’m going to Roswell on my visit. What is there to see? I wonder. They tell me I’ll have to go there to see for myself, maybe catch some UFO activity. Maybe Roswell is one of those places that most people want to say they’ve been to, like Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite National Park. I know only of fragments of this story—Roswell aliens and the involvement of the U.S. Government who supposedly captured alien(s) and performed top-secret tests, probing for answers, perhaps looking for any similarities they could assimilate between our two worlds. According to Wikipedia on the Internet, it says: “Roswell is most popularly known for having its name attached to what is now called the 1947 Roswell UFO incident, even though the actual crash site was some seventy-five miles from Roswell and closer to Corona. However, the investigation and debris recovery was handled by the local Roswell Army Air Field.”

At Roswell, I find tired buildings—most of them advertising an alien in their windows: Alien T-shirts; alien lunch specials; alien artifacts; get your picture taken with an alien. The heart of the city includes dusty museum halls with black and white photographs—an “Alien Hall of Fame,” with tourists filing in and out. Various photographs of a “flying disc,” are adhered to poster boards, spotlighted with incandescent lights inside Plexiglas boxes; the possibility of life outside of earth illuminates. We are no different than their mystery. We carry our own unanswered questions. I watch my father, who’s ahead of me, already in the adjoining room peering in close reading a series of letters posted on the wall, testimonies by farmers who saw the big light in the sky, heard the crash, or found items of the spacecraft in their fields. He appears anxious—shifting from one foot to the other as he reads, pulling back, then closer to read a bit more. I sense he’s already ready to leave and we’ve only been here ten minutes.

I wonder if the locals have grown tired of the stories, or even if they believe Roswell’s history. It’s possible they’ve grown impatient waiting for the next flying saucer, some of them finding it better to ignore their social responsibility in keeping the local legends alive, keeping South Washington Avenue drawing in economic revenue. This is the road we’re traveling. The desert sun becomes lost to a sea of silver that stretches across the sky. I’m the alien. I want to break the silence in the car. I look for the red light to know it’s my cue. Placing the microcassette player between us, I ask my father to share a story with me.

“Put that away.” He turns his face, as if the cassette player might snap his picture, show his age. All I want to do is capture his voice, hear the story first from him—hear his version, any version. As my father has grown older, his stories have become thinned out, almost to the point that I can see through them. I watch the distance grow between us, even with two feet from each other in the truck.

“Why not, dad? I want to record your stories. Please…?” But, I’ve already clicked the STOP button with my thumb, the cassette player cradled in my left hand. I stare at the black lettering SONY and begin trying to scratch the S off using the edge of my thumb nail. The letter won’t budge. It’s as if I want to erase something, anything, so I can start over—get it right. I put the cassette player on the floor of the truck floor and look to my father whose concentrating even harder on the road. I’m not sure if he knows this may be last visit, like any visit we have one another.

“Because, I don’t want you to. Okay. I don’t want to be recorded. Understand?” He cracks the window a couple inches, like the way he did to when he used to smoke. I wonder if he’s thinking about a cigarette and if he will always think of one every time when wind brushes up against his left ear.

I say nothing. I’m at a great distance with courage and it may never be found. What I want to say is that since he began to lose his hearing, left California over ten years ago, that he’s not interested in having conversations with me outside of the weather or finances. Both are so unpredictable—nothing will change, while it changes all the time. I want to hear about his stories, like the Korean War and the special assignments for the U.S. Government. I know he’s old and when he dies I’ll regret not attempting to capture his voice—on those same days when I’d do anything to hear him ask me what the temperature is in California and how my job is—and how I’ll respond that I don’t expect a layoff, I’m going to make rent, and how everything is okay. Perhaps my father has already begun to let go would rather live through memory, not by voice. Maybe I’m no different than a scientist trying to understand another being, wanting to know if behind those big eyes there lies a mutual desire to understand one another.

Water Dreams

2009-01-14T10:17:00.000-08:00

I dreamt I was in a speedboat, not just any speedboat, but the Sea Ray me and my ex-boyfriend, M, picked out together—years ago, years before I left him in the Sierras to start over in Fresno. Even in my dreams, the same words repeat: You know the difference now between love and in love.

There is a hurricane. I am driving the speedboat, full throttle, cracking open the waves. I'm crashing into a series of cement walls. The boat surrenders, exhausted at the final impact. We capsize—the worst of boating scenarios; we disappear into an endless froth coughed up by the turbulence. My view is from the lake's floor. Above my head, swirls of bubbles flatten themselves out; a liquid surface, narrows my vision. I become small, non-existent. Light begins to diminish and reduced to the size of my fist. Let him go.

I see my mother. She’s standing on the dock, begging God to bring me back. I step onto the dock, “I came back for you mother. I want to live now.”

For What it's Worth

2009-01-13T12:53:00.000-08:00

I read recently: "Passion is but a prelude to years of gradual unfolding."

Each time I come back to this quote, new scenarios are revealed.

Paying Attention

2008-12-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

"...in the desert there is everything and there is nothing. Stay curious. Know where you are--your biological address. Get to know your neighbors--plants, creatures, who lives there, who died there, who is blessed, cursed, what is absent or in danger or in need of your help. Pay attention to the weather, to what breaks your heart, to what lifts your heart. Write it down."

--Ellen Meloy, November 2004

Immersion

2008-12-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

Must be all the fog in the valley today, but in thinking back to the 'best of the books,' hands down, one of the most pivotal books in my life was/is "Landscape With Figures: The Nonfiction of Place," an anthology of sensitive writers, naturalists, keen observers immersed with the topics of our place in relation to/with landscape, memory, and the self.

Book To Read

2008-12-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

Just stummbled across this book...fiction, but so many themes relating to creative nonfiction (but, isn't falling the best way to get a new perspective?) Here's the description on the book, copy/pasted below:

The Theory of Light and Matter, by Andrew Porter
In the tradition of John Cheever, ten stories that explore the loss and sacrifice in American suburbia

"These ten short stories explore loss and sacrifice in American suburbia. In idyllic suburbs across the country, from Philadelphia to San Francisco, narrators struggle to find meaning or value in their lives because of (or in spite of) something that has happened in their pasts. In "Hole," a young man reconstructs the memory of his childhood friend's deadly fall. In "The Theory of Light and Matter," a woman second-guesses her choice between a soul mate and a comfortable one. Memories erode as Porter's characters struggle to determine what has happened to their loved ones and whether or not they are responsible. Children and teenagers carry heavy burdens in these stories: in "River Dog," the narrator cannot fully remember a drunken party where he suspects his older brother assaulted a classmate; in "Azul," a childless couple, craving the affection of an exchange student, fails to set the boundaries that would keep him safe; and in "Departure," a suburban teenage boy fascinated with the Amish makes a futile attempt to date a girl he can never be close to.

Memory often replaces absence in these stories as characters reconstruct the events of their pasts in an attempt to understand what they have chosen to keep. These struggles lead to an array of secretive and escapist behavior as the characters, united by middle-class social pressures, try to maintain a sense of order in their lives. Drawing on the tradition of John Cheever, these stories recall and revisit the landscape of American suburbia through the lens of a new generation.

Andrew Porter is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has received a variety of fellowships including the 2004 W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts, a Helene Wurlitzer Fellowship, and a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener/Copernicus Society of America. His award-winning fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR's Selected Shorts. "

October 2008
ISBN 0820332097 cloth • $24.95

Just Beneath Me

2008-12-01T13:33:00.000-08:00

(excerpt from unpublished memoir, "Land on Water.")

1.

Winona, Minnesota was first home to a band of Eastern Dakota (Sioux) Native Americans, led by the great Wapasha dynasty. Native Americans first came to settle in Winona, formerly named Montezuma, around 1500-1700 A.D. and resided along the Mississippi River, living in bark-covered lodges in the summer and buffalo hide teepees in the winter.

1976.
Glen Echo Road is the shape of a horseshoe. Our house sits on the upper part of the curve. We live in a typical Midwest neighborhood, securely nailed with tradition, which resides at the base of Sugar Loaf Mountain. My relatives, on my mother’s side, consisting of four generations on my mother’s side, live west of us on the other side of the mountain.

Sugar Loaf is my back yard—the shiny centerpiece of my childhood. I am no more than seven years old and in total awe of the mountain’s presence. Its balding head looms over the neighborhood and the city of Winona, leaving an indelible mark on the memories to come. From any one of the front windows of our house—only a few hundred yards away—the mountain is always present. I will never get the mountain out of me. It will brand me as one of its own; it leaves a subtle beauty mark, often unrecognizable, even to those who think they know me well. I never forget that the mark is there.

The position of the sun guides and fosters my natural instincts on the mountain. I make sundials using sticks and robin egg sized stones, which to me are more valuable than numbers. I am fascinated how each hour in the day possesses two numerological faces: light and dark. Numbers feel distant in the order of things, not as flexible as the shape of letters: You chose Pilar, cursive or print. I wrap my fingers around the fat pencil. Should I slant to the left or right? Decades later I will still ask, today, who are you? I feel defined by my chosen writing style. The teachers place their hand over mine and let me feel the freedom in cursive. I build sentences, then paragraphs, and eventually stories using words. I feel comfortable with words, while numbers are float in their abstract worlds, and limited to their definite straight-faced values. To me, cataloging the world requires words. The explanations I seek can only be built from words. And I know there is a poetic logic in all things, though I don’t know what poetry is, and it’s my role to find it. No time to be tired. Too much to do. Catalog. Document. File. The process repeats itself. I am my greatest resource…this is what I hear growing up. You’re never too young to build a library. I want to be a specialist, though I am too young to really understand the weight of the word: expert.

Sugar Loaf invites me down a portal. I am free to explore the natural world, this secret garden. I carry a three-inch jack knife with a wood inlay and brass trim, not because I am cautious, but because the knife used to belong to my father. I accept his gift. I know there will be a story and a set of circumstances in accepting it. He is giving me responsibility. I am the boy he will never have. Instead, I am the first born of two girls—the only children he’d have from all three of his marriages. I listen to the rules of owning a jackknife: beware of the pointed tip; where to position my fingers to safely snap the blade shut; how to keep it protected and out of the rain. My father makes a full circle; he repeats his earlier warnings and precautions of jackknife ownership. There is a responsibility in owning a jack knife: Your own weapon can be sharply turned against you. I carry my dolls and the jack knife up the mountain, entering the world armed. I am the exception.

You’re never alone on a mountain. I am alive from the moment I enter the trail and climb towards a wooded canopy, my belly sharply puffing in and out, alert blue jay, my senses quick from excitement, survival. The goal is to reach the top of the mountain and locate the sandstone caves. I live by the light. Once I reach the top I breathe in the panoramic views of Winona. My father warns me of snakes, rattlesnakes to be exact, and tells me if one crosses my path to be very still. Neither the rattler, nor myself, may see each other coming if we’re both in a dark cave, so I am to stay out of caves too. I stand at the entrance to a cave as if it were a house where there’s no permission to enter. If I had to, would I kill a snake with my jackknife?

When has relying on our instinct become so unnatural, I wonder. Has the world grown too impatient to wait for their geological, gut-driven navigation to lead them? There are no state or county historical markers serving as direction on Sugar Loaf. The worn trails are wide enough for one person, while other parts of the trail are wider where hikers can walk side by side as they climb the mountain. I come to know the trails on the mountain well and commonly use the short cuts: small openings, like brief sighs between the brush that can take off hours in returning to the base of the mountain. Regardless of the path I take, I stop to identify wildflowers and pick up rocks, especially flat-shaped ones resembling discs, while keeping an eye out for my favorite rocks…the ones that resemble bird eggs. I look to the mountain for clues as to the direction I should take to reach the top, and so, a rock collection spawns after years of my eyes sifting through the caramel colored sand. Stone by stone, the landscape surrenders itself to me, inviting me to survey her private collections. Even with my jackknife, she trusts me and knows I am harmless.

I am always looking for something. When you walk with your eyes fixed to the ground your point of view becomes narrowed. In order to keep great focus a majority of things will be missed, even compromised. And yet, I am no different from the generations of children who have preceded me by climbing the mountain’s bumpy back, season after season, looking for Native American remnants: arrowheads, shards of pottery, beads the color of the deep blue sea, and traces of faded pigment revealing it might be a painting before you near the entrance to one of the caves.

Time softens, becomes nonexistent when you travel on land. I don’t have memories of losing my way on the mountain, only the fear to obey my mother’s single rule: Reach the base of the mountain before dark—regardless of where the shadows fall on my sundial. I race against the sky, my sandals picking up sand as I dart between the trees.

There is an ancestry of ghosts embedded in the layers in Sugar Loaf. Its history runs along the mountain like brail, serving as my instinctual direction, my sparkling motivation. A Native American ghost from the mountain followed my uncle Bruce from Minnesota to Michigan, where I am born, and where we lived for less than a year before we came back to Winona. The ghost, a female Native American Indian, is spotted several times at the historical house next to the lake in Michigan. Family stories say the Indian woman ghost saved my life, saved me from suffocating to death, what they believe was from the hands of a ghost indigenous to the area. A struggle between good and evil with two ghosts occurred. The unhappy, native Michigan male ghost dragged chains across the second floor of the houses, would pause, and then continued to drag the chains. He repeated the chain-dragging process until the day we moved back to Winona.

Story has it my father was at work, and my uncle Bruce was living with us. I was supposed to be upstairs in my bedroom sleeping in my crib where my mother left me. My mother and uncle Bruce were downstairs. Somebody went to check on me and found me sitting on the floor in the center of my bedroom with a thick plastic shopping bag over my head. The corners of the bag had been perfectly cut off. The scissors were in the top drawer of my dresser, where my mother always kept them, so everyone is certain the Sugar Loaf Indian ghost had done the cutting so I could breathe.

Before the bag snipping, life-saving event, Uncle Bruce said the Indian woman was a “good” ghost. She returned with us to Minnesota and lived in my aunt Gloria’s house, upstairs in the crawl space that joined the two bedrooms—the house where my mother, Gloria, and Bruce grew up. It was uncle Bruce who felt connected Sugar Loaf, passed it down to me. It would take thirty years before I’d realized this. I only knew a ghost had saved my life. A struggle between good and evil happened in my baby bedroom. If I had died, what would the ghost with chains gain? This ghost, possibly a prisoner, was no challenge for the Indian ghost woman. This was the topography of my first year alive.

* * *
It isn’t long before I hear the songs of the Native Americans ghosts call from Sugar Loaf. Chants echo, their cries fade in and out. The tips of their feathers brightly paint the turquoise sky. Words climb after falling from their mouths, deep but brief pauses follow when their lips part to take a breath. I breathe in the smoke from the fire; gray ribbons rise from the heart of their camps. They wave at me, inviting me to step inside their circle. They change my name and paint my face. My hands feel the single braid of hair, still like a river dividing the two lands of my back. I know I will never return to the bottom of the mountain; they own a part of me, gave me life. Instead I will remain part of their band, travel the paths by rawhide feet, and spend my afternoons asleep inside buffalo teepees, my fingers and tongue stained from berries. I am caught in a dream—dream their dream, so I am free from where memory ends or where it begins. And when I wake, I am alone. I spend my years next to the mountain wishing at least one member from the tribe would appear.

Back at home I ask my mother why the Indians don’t live on Sugar Loaf anymore. I can’t remember what her response was; instead, I remember climbing the mountain with an inherited faith. I know no other way to climb a mountain. Each time I begin to travel up the mountain I believe I might see one, maybe two of them, stubborn inhabitants who had refused to leave. At the top of the mountain I call out, is anyone there? The high winds whistle into my ear. I can’t decode the answer. I know many, other than myself, have stood in this same desolate spot.

* * *
My mother tells one of the first stories of Sugar Loaf to me. She says a young Indian maiden, Princess Wenonah, had jumped off Sugar Loaf to her death because she couldn’t be with the man she loved. I think of the young maiden when I’m on the mountain. I spend countless times looking down at jagged slopes and imagine her falling, perhaps even flying for a good minute, right before her eyes closed forever. I will believe this story well into adulthood; until I learn the actual bluff the princess jumped off wasn’t Sugar Loaf, but Maiden Rock, north of Winona, up the Mississippi River and in the state of Wisconsin. I share my new findings about the young maiden with my mother, who calls her sister, Gloria, who still lives in Winona. The legend of the maiden’s death has no truth in the city of Winona, and neither my mother nor aunt can remember who told them the story or how it originated. I break the family folklore almost thirty years later.

Throughout childhood I begin to hear stories about how “white men” drove away the Native American Indians. I ask my mother if we descend from the same line of white men? Why do they call them white? I sense shame and a feather-like sensitivity amongst them surfaces when I bring the subject matter up. I can’t follow their conversations, where sighs turn themselves into whispers, and somewhere, the story breaks up and disappears. I bottle up an unfiltered love I have for these native Winona residents. On the mountain I bang a smaller rock on a stone slab by raising my small fist into the air and smashing it down with all my force. Eventually I split the rock down the middle, creating two equal halves. I place them back together; the fit is perfect, seamless. I break more and more rocks open.

I spend unaccounted afternoons traveling the dense, resin-soaked woods that skirted out from the limestone dome of the mountain. Dark outlines of the spirits of who’ve lived and died here have fallen between the trees. Preservation has never looked more beautiful: Their sap-frozen bodies are poised, their fragility illuminating. Crystal, thread-like legs sparkle and stick out from their little black capes. Timeless are the insects.

In the years to follow I hear Sugar Loaf call my name trying to lure me back—even after we move four states away. In the seven years we lived next to the mountain I never found an arrowhead.

* * *
I drop my Baby Alive doll on my front lawn and run to greet my best friend, Kirstin. She’s waving her arms above her head trying to get my attention. Two hairless snakes rise towards the swollen, metallic clouds. Kirstin has captured a frog.

We squat like savages around an empty, turned upside down tuna can. Holding a twig in our small hands, we admire our dominance over nature and tap the top of the can with our twigs: A drum thunders over the frog; the death taps begin to wind up. A hysterical, unsteady rain inside the can begins to fall. The frog’s eardrums and lungs vibrate to the sounds of the child-sick ceremony. Warm specks from the frog’s breath shoot at the darkness. Space never planned to be this way, confined by tin and cement. The nightmare continues to shake and overwhelm. The purpose of any prison is to contain, making the inhabitant face its own humidity-harbored darkness. The body will do anything in efforts to survive, even sting itself in order to feel less alive.

The afternoon drags on and we continue to poke at the edge of the frog’s life using the points of our sticks. No squeaks come from the frog. I lift the edge of the can and peek at the soft blackness it holds in its eyes. What does it see in mine?

I am part of the natural world. My white face will be the last thing the frog will see. And then, all life for the frog will no longer exist. And the frog—indigenous to Sugar Loaf—unknowingly, will tumble into a frog infinity, pushed by the hands of a species that prides themselves on possessing reason and restraint in the animal kingdom.

The details of life arrest me.

My attention is held captive. I move only between mountain and sky. A baby blue ceiling hangs above the green mesh. These two worlds keep me detained as I wait for the winds to arrive. In the late afternoons I know the wind in my neighborhood can be in two places at once. The wind I feel on the mountain will be stronger than what is at the front door of my house. I learn to gauge the distance of an approaching storm by the temperament of the wind. If there is no wind, I know Winona could be under a tornado watch or warning. I also look to the leaves and note the smallest of a stir. With tremendous wind it can also mean a tornado is already approaching, so I check the blackness of the sky in all directions. Sometimes a black sky only means rain. I need no other evidence to support this instinct. Everything appears warranted; this is life on the mountain. I watch it unfold and become three-dimensional. I never carry a raincoat or umbrella up the mountain. Instead I open my mouth and taste the rain, extending out my arms like wings, letting the patchy sun dry my clothes and warm my bones before I return home. I find the accuracy of weather nests high on a mountain, where Fahrenheit was named after a man.

There is no permanence in things. Eventually, everything softens and crumbles back to its most basic components: ashes, dirt, air. An organic, visceral platform then has room to preside, budding with new growth. Hope’s most overlooked characteristic is to be subtle; I watch it leave its impression on the powdery face of rock walls. I hear about the hikers, who’ve come before me and have carved their names into the sandstone walls at the top of the mountain, digging their tools into its bulging and scalped limestone head. I, too, search for something sharp enough to recognize myself and document my presence. I gather pointed, strong rocks and narrowed sticks to carve my initials P.G. where other hikers like myself are limited in reach—into the neck of the mountain. I know my name, like the rest, will soften and be rain-rinsed away. I am briefly captured. I want to remember, be remembered as an inhabitant of the mountain. I know the mountain has a way to shed its skin, shaking the visitors out from its mane.

It won’t be until we move from Minnesota to Florida, the following year after the divorce and forced to leave Sugar Loaf that I begin to look at the world using a slide and a microscope. Introduced to a new set of colors, I look at everything, and for a while, I learn to touch the world using my eyes. No one will notice the transition, except for my mother, who gave it to me as a Christmas present. Frequently, I request samples of my mother’s hair to put on a slide: I see hairs no one knows are split.

2.
Local legend says the eighty-five foot dome on top of Sugar Loaf Mountain was the hat left behind by Chief Wapahsha (Wabasha), which had been transformed into stone. The other explanation is that the early quarrymen carved away at Sugar Loaf and stripped the top of the mountain in the process, leaving behind a limestone dome. The highest point of the mountain overlooks the city of Winona, and historically served as a river’s pilot landmark on the Mississippi River, now Lake Winona.

I divide life into four seasons, the same year I learn to cut out hearts. The mountain reveals a different personality with each cycle. Nothing remains the same for long. I am part of the seasonal pattern, following the beginning, middle, and end. This is what it means to assimilate, not just simply exist. I am learning to navigate on my own. An evolution is occurring: birth, love, and death.

It’s easier to start at the bottom of a heart. I fold a piece of red construction paper in half and snip my scissors upwards until I have cut one entire side of the heart. The paper scraps will be turned into smaller hearts; everything must be saved for the sake of making more hearts. Hearts turn best out when there is no pencil outline for my scissors to follow when I cut. I freehand cut hundreds of folded hearts: the shape is simple. We are the ones who complicate things: Beauty relies on any artist being patient. And after I finish cutting, I open my heart and smooth out the seam that runs down the center. I offer handfuls of hearts to my mother and father, some end up in drawers or become lost in the daily shuffle, while some make it to the refrigerator—fanning starlets, pinned with a letter from my alphabet magnet set.

The beauty of the mountain evolves with each season and impregnates my mind. It becomes an ever-growing presence, dovetailing its mild and mystic manner with life on Glen Echo Road. Shades of green, amber, and sunflower yellow sporadically slip off the mountain. There is always something for me to see, I just need to look for it. And I find, regardless of the seasons that love and loss is simultaneously cradled. There is no way to separate them from one another. The scribble the day’s event in each other’s diaries, and only love knows the right words. A golden globe for a sun sinks in the backdrop. The moonbeams come out early in the summer. We try to catch them outside our house. We stand there with empty jars and lids. You must be quick to trap. Our arms swing together, crashing like cymbals. How long will the light live?

Each autumn I watch the mountain loose its hair. Leaves pile around the army of wooden ankles until the winds begin to sharpen and the light surrenders and slips behind the clouds, sometimes for months. Every year, when I am fast asleep, the will mountain transforms itself into a white sanctuary. I make angels using my body in the snow on my front yard and stare at the thick hat of snow covering the mountain’s limestone head. I think about the caves that pit the side of the mountain, providing shelter for the squirrels, snakes, and deer from the icy winds. The only animal I don’t care for is the earthworm. Perhaps if I could make eye contact with one I’d feel differently. About this time of year the maple, elm, and white birch trees, which go on for miles, have now draped themselves in a forgiving white. Even their colorful, festive fall performance wasn’t as stunning as this; their beauty is staggering as they make their way towards an icy gray sky. With their snowflake glitter, they tremble as they try to adjust to the seasonal change. Their branches remain fixed, absolutely fearless to a frozen ground. Icicles as long as my arm hang from the rooftop of our house. My father tells me over and over never to look straight up at one or try and knock one out of the air and says I can loose an eye. So I avoid the crystal daggers. I turn desire into danger of what winter can bear. The voice of winter still speaks, and under such demands, both the beautiful and weak are required to play by its rules or be subject to die.

Kirstin and I meet the next morning in the same spot where we held the frog captive from the day before. I stare at the rock that’s holding the tuna can in place. I am curious to see if death has changed the form of the frog. Perhaps there is a chance that the frog is still alive. Maybe last night his squeaky songs had penetrated the thin tin walls and he had, indeed, reached the other frogs for help, who when they finally heard him, paused, after days of their frog lovemaking. And so, they stretched their bellies to belch back their brotherhood songs—their helpless chirps wavering towards the dark side of the mountain.

3.
With its location on the Mississippi River, and the arrival of the railroads in the 1860’s, Winona became the wheat and lumber-shipping center of the world. Winona became the USA's fourth largest grain market and one of the nation's richest cities by 1900. A city ordinance was passed in late 1890 specifying stone would only be used in the construction of the sidewalks of Winona. With this request, the name of the mountain was changed from Wapasha’s Cap to Sugar Loaf Mountain. And by the turn of the 20th century, developers were using the precious limestone from Sugar Loaf in the construction of buildings downtown.

“I think we should set it free on the mountain,” I announce. I take the rock off the top of the tuna can and toss it aside. I slowly lift the can. It’s too late. The frog had been burnt alive. Its body is crinkled black. My eyes become fixed on the dried stain encircling its body on the sidewalk. Its right front foot is outstretched, its tiny frog fingers reaching for something—for what? I look at the mountain. Would a lack of oxygen leave a mask of panic on its face? I pick up the frog and examine it in the air, showing it to Kirstin.

The afterthought of freeing the frog travels through me like a slow moving electrical current. Death slinks back from our two-person circle, its bony fingers point at us before they disappear back into its sackcloth sleeve. What’s the role with an afterthought? It could the fetus of reason, which never fully developed, becoming detached from our consciousness—the beginning of becoming ethically frayed.

I sit cross-legged on the sidewalk with my hands folded on my soft cotton dress. I feel chill of the winter’s day through my underwear. My eyes travel between the dead frog and the faded yellow daisies on my dress. I gently pull at a piece of thread at the hem of my dress, unwinding more and more of the stitches. The hem of my dress begins to come undone.

4.
Henry D. Huff bought an interest in the town site in 1853. With the consent of Capt. Smith, Huff erased the name of Montezuma and inserted the name of Winona on the plot, a name derived from the Dakota Indian word We-No-Nah, which means "first-born daughter.” It was around this time the process to relocate the Dakota tribe from their home along the Mississippi River to reservations. It was said that their late night traditions began to bother the European Americans who had settled in the area. By the end of the 1850’s the Dakota’s were entirely removed from what was better known as the Wapasha’s Prairie.

I watch my mother in the kitchen mix tuna in a large glass bowl. I confess to her about my murderous act with the frog. “I don’t know what made me kill,” I tell her. My first detail forces me to derail; all the actions I had carried out begin to spill from my mouth, thick like wet paint. She slams the fork on the kitchen counter. This is it. I begin to shrink. Shame grabs my throat; no words will have the chance to escape now. My eyes are merely sand dunes, soft and secondary to the sea they live by. I am sinking. This is where my mother will scold me, terrified that I have no respect for nature. Will I be forced to spend years in therapy working through my murderous fetishes? No, it will never happen, instead, my mother will strike me with the fear of God.

“You’re the oldest! You should know better and be setting an example for your little sister!”

I say nothing, as to avoid having my mouth washed out with bar of Ivory soap.

My mother and I stand facing each other in same spot, where three weeks prior, I had asked if I could have a glass of vinegar to drink. When she asked why, I told her that I learned in school that vinegar was given to Jesus Christ at the cross when he was thirsty. My mother had given me a half a glass of vinegar, but I could barely get a sip down. The intoxicating fumes blinded my eyes and choked out my experiment on suffering.

The three current generations have been passing their sins through Father Joseph. A few days later, mother took me to confession. On the other side of Sugar Loaf, I sat in a confession booth with my head down, waiting for the tiny wood door to slide open, for the breathe holes to appear—alleviating the stuffy darkness. When the door finally slides open I try not to make eye contact through the fuzzy dots on the screen. My hands fumble for my rosary. This time, I skip the Hail Mary and begin at cross and say the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t know if God can hear me, so I continue to repeat the prayer until I put myself into stupor.

Confession booths battle between sight and sound. First I hear Father Joseph—a slight rumbling of footsteps, then his door being securely shut. He’s reaching for something at his feet, perhaps his Bible. I hear him taking in a deep breath.

Is he whispering something? Will he recognize my voice?
Did he see me enter the booth? My head begins to spin. Just focus on the cross.
I sit on the red, oversized chair and know even the smallest of holes can fracture the light.

Plastic & Paper: Variations of Silence

2008-11-14T11:33:00.000-08:00

I’m standing at Border’s Books. I can’t afford the five books that are in my arms. I wish they had lay-away. At the register, I quickly chose two books. One book is about love amongst the landscape (what does that mean?), true love, I guess and what it can endure. The other book is about "loving where you’re at" and in order to find happiness one must not disregard the questions of their heart, or as the author states, “Learn to live life with the questions. Learn to live them out.” People are making money of this...and I'm supporting it!

In line, a couple behind me makes small talk, but I get the feeling they actually want to be heard. From the genetics of their conversation, I know they’re dating, I’d say, probably somewhere in the first six-month stretch. He’s the dominant one in the relationship. She teases him about various things, trying to soften him, but he remains positioned. He tells her she carries too much plastic. I move my neck around, as if to stretch, smile, and see he’s referencing to her credit cards; they are both peering down into her over-stuffed, small Coach handbag. The city of Fresno keeps Coach in business. She tells him that he needs to recycle the magazine he has in his hand and not let it build up dust with all the magazines has bought.

Silence returns.

All of us wait for the line to inch us forward. I hear her say, “Not everyone is that fortunate,” then, back to whispering lovers. What are they talking about?

I stand self-conscious in shoes; my skirt feels suddenly too tight. I turn to look at them. Her boyfriend stares at my chest. It’s a rude stare—past the “1-second rule,” which places him in the “pig with no manners” category. Covering my chest with the books, I pin my eyes on the carpet. I stand frozen, only my eyes dare to move, ever so slightly, on the two colors of threaded on the carpet.

Essays

2008-11-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

I'm emptying boxes from one, two, three moves ago, and finding essays over twenty years old. I sort through the pages--nothing is consistent--everything from ruled notebook paper to bound journals; their titles are young and trite and stuffed with cliches'; all the voices wild with raw hope. One day, I know someone has to sort through all of this. As I create 'shred' and 'file' stacks in the center of my dining room floor, I wonder what would be the advantage to keep them, even with the possibly of never returning to them again?

Preparing for the Song

2008-10-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

Preparing for the Song: A Self Portrait

As the Tang Dynasty (618 AD – 907 AD) disintegrated, the concept of withdrawal into the natural world became a major thematic focus of poets and painters. Faced with the failure of the human order, learned men sought permanence within the natural world, retreating into the mountains to find a sanctuary from the chaos of dynastic collapse. They were preparing for the Song Dynasty (960 AD – 1279 AD)

It was that year
when I had failed to love,

the mystery of my portrait
being washed over with ink,

the stone, becoming monochrome,
being watered down by fine hairs,

the sweeping across my face,
neck, shoulders, poems.

This won’t last a lifetime,
the stare into absence, the need for color:

we’ve become two bodies
in motion, moving apart,

then back together—trapped by the seconds
only landscape can frame.

I trace the long lines
and the indentations that define your hip;

here we are, again, naked, almost human,
inside the dream of white space.

--Pilar

As Land Would Have It

2008-10-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

(An excerpt from unpublished manuscript, "Homesick")

It wouldn’t take seven years of living in suburbia to know this is the greatest distance, and time span, I’ve lived from the ocean and a four-lane bridge. I am positioned in the Central Valley, a good three-to-four hours by car—southeast of San Francisco—nestled against the southern Sierra foothills. Regardless of the season, a road trip out of the valley always seems the same.

I pass through dizzy strips of civilization bordered by fuzzy mounds of earth, hilly plateaus smoothed by time. Fast food chains and patriotic mega superstores have emerged from the landscape—clumps of a mirage that offer convenient replenishments that have risen like weeds towards the sky. Their steel tubular necks stretch above Interstate 5 advertising fast food, gasoline—refuge for the weary traveler.

I’m stuck inside a dream; somehow, I make progress through the wind tunnel where water and oil are sacred. What we really need is shade, a break from the ever watchful sun: squirrels sit on their hind legs and nibble next to the wheels of the passing cars; hesitant lizards hide in the waves of blonde grass, trusting no one; snakes I cannot see, watch from under piles of twig and bark. Everyone takes refuge from the deadpan heat. I envy the face of the desert, the solitude. I drive to try and keep my momentum. It’s not very often I get to use the cruise control feature.

Luna Park

2008-10-30T10:28:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across a great blog today:

http://lunaparkreview.blogspot.com/2007/09/new-issue-review-creative-nonfiction-no.html

The picture of the "Lion Tamer," lithograph, by Gibson & Co., 1873, I find especially fascinating.

Apart From Nature

2008-10-24T15:28:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, when we’re not looking, death has the ability to grow by the inch.

Outside my bedroom window, facing the backyard, a white oleander tree has littered hundreds of poisonous white flowers. The tree is positioned in the corner of the fence with a full head of hair that hangs into two of my neighbor’s backyards. An underground network of roots has pushed its way through another season, reaching for something underneath the earth, using its first instinct…to live.

At night, I become a silhouette and stand at the window. My gaze casts long shadows across the glow-white speckled dirt. With each flower that drops to the ground, more questions surface. I remind myself, beauty is often overlooked. From behind the glass, I engage like a curious ghost. Right now, I see the conflict, the conversation between good and bad—all induced by a caliber of self-inflicted questions about beauty and death. Like this tree, is it possible to be liked and disliked, all at the same time? Are we all just one of the same?

Living with such a large tree requires me to sweat. Sometimes I rake the flowers into organized circular piles, followed by weeks of waiting, as the pools of petals begin to wilt into one another, becoming a dry and crunchy mess. When clouds of dust rise it’s a sign I’m making progress. I think of the master gardener who gave me a complimentary consultation on my backyard and spent an hour and twenty minutes talking about “weed control.” It was a hundred and three degrees outside that day. The dead flowers mean nothing to me now as I place them in plastic bags and into the apartment complex’s dumpster. The apartment complex doesn’t have a green waste container, so my partial composting efforts are wasteful. And my calculations of a renter’s responsibility have shifted into knowing what I’m really doing is dirt management. Walking away from the dumpster, I think of the flowers being shipped to the landfill, and eventually spilling free from the inevitable snags to the Dollar Tree lawn and leaf bags.

Is it possible to co-exist with this tree? What are we here to teach each other? Drifting so far from the genetics of a tree can put us odds with ourselves, apart from nature. From the window, again, I see the fullness of the moon twist itself through the branches of the tree and onto the white sheer linen drapes of my bedroom. A liquid blue haze cascades down each of my arms. To the opossum taking a contemplative break from his wobbly journey along the top of the fence, I could be a threat. Neither of us move. I drift into remorse, loss, and of my own reflection. I watch the opossum move a few inches towards the direction of the tree. It will be a refuge, once he arrives…soft branches with chewy green leaves, and endless intersections will become available to him, something the fence will never provide.

This home is not forever, but it’s where I live now—a Fresno neighborhood with a mix of working class professionals and senior citizens. Our backyards live back-to-back to one another. The noises of the neighborhood, our work afterlives, become alive, and quietly become intertwined into the weekday evenings. All of us move in and out of the resistance, the deadpan heat, while some of us grow weary from the hum of our air conditioning units. Eventually, we’ll crave something finer, more than just fresh, cool air.

The more I see, the more I see who else is connected to the oleander tree. My dog carries the flowers into the house with ones that have collected between his toes and have become tucked within his long fur. His innocence in transporting the deadly flowers into the house breaks me from concentration of the crop circles—all the walking of back and forth across the carpet. I leave my thoughts about future careers in a confessional heap on the floor. My cat, the color of dirty snow, races past me, hysterical in her white happiness, and drops the poisonous petals from her teeth. A year ago, my mother gave her to me as a birthday gift. The first thing I learned was cats could smile. I retreat to the hall closet to retrieve the vacuum. I begin to suck up the silken floral bodies, while others slip away like refugees and hide beneath rugs, curling up in dark corners—a mix between disappearing and dying—under dressers and desks, borders I cannot reach.

This is the confetti of my era.

The twelve-foot oleander tree leans over the fence and into two of my neighbor’s properties, littering an equal amount of poisonous petals onto their patios. My mother tells me it’s only poisonous if someone were to eat the flowers; the poison is in the oil from the leaves and flowers.

My neighbor says one day to me, with the tops of our heads over our shared fence that she’d like to pour Round Up on my side of the fence. She’s talking to me in between the brisk movements of her broom that is scratching across her patio. I wait for her to stop sweeping the cement…scratch, scratch…and make eye contact with me after her last statement. She continues sweeping for a few more whisks and peeks back over the fence at me. I’m standing under the tree looking up. It’s blooming, again.

Later, I’ll stand behind the sliding glass door, the tree in view, and will feel a heavy remorse press its nails into my chest for having played along with her toxic suggestion. By not responding, I responded. I need to speak for the tree. I stare at the white oleander, and tonight, it has my full attention. I’m not capable of killing a tree, poisonous or not. It’s not that simple. Who are we to decide if a tree should die? Two months after renting the house, I learned the tree had been a discussion of death for some time. Some had proposed to chop it down, while others protested it would still grow back. The roots had to be pulled, other argued. If I agreed to the killing I would offend someone, someone like myself. Removing the tree may only be a temporary fix, and then, there will be something else, weeds, and another tree, something else for the community to focus on. How would I sleep at night with a big cavity at the corner of the fence, knowing the swollen moon no longer had something to detract its light?

My cat sits upright, frozen in her stare looking out from the sliding glass door, watching the doves eat the seed I’ve left in a large metal bowl in a plant stand. She must wonder what it’s like on the outside, what it would be like to climb up the tree and swing from one branch to the next, white flowers raining everywhere.

* * *

My mother is coming down the hill to cheer me up; we’ve decided to paint my window-less bathroom, a long-awaited project in the short time I’ve lived here. The biggest wall in the bathroom, opposite of the mirror and sink, is wallpapered. The wallpaper consists of country kitchen blue ribbons with floating lotus flowers against a dirty beige background. My mother tells me whoever hung the wallpaper did such a great job that it will be impossible to remove without having to resurface the wall. I watch the flat of her hand move down the wall. After her evaluation, she tells me we can simply paint over it. She brought with her a gallon of taupe paint she had in her garage, leftover from her ‘paint phase’ when dad was homebound, dying of cancer. I am more then grateful for the paint, and at this point, any color will work. My mother also brought her two-foot pruning sheers. We discover my bathroom isn’t big enough for two people, so while my mother begins to paint, I go to find the pruning sheers and head to the backyard. I go to the four-foot shoots, better known as “suckers,” which are growing from the base of the oleander tree. Suckers slowly choke the life out from a tree, hence, how they got their name.

My mother says, in order to prune, I must position my hands as close to the edge of the handles as possible. I see life in everything, even in the lushness of green weeds that have the freedom to flower in my backyard. Snap! I’m a clumsy clipper, but one of the stalks slowly breaks away, and falls gently to the ground. And, again, snap! Another one falls to the ground, but this time, exposing a set of little black eyes. Looking straight up at me is a dove. We are locked in a gaze, shocked by each other’s invasion, coming within inches of the deadly error—seconds from snipping off her head. Paralyzed by fear, we both wait to see what the other will do. I make the first move. I squat, taking a closer look at her. She’s nestled between the stalks. I watch her fear move into sadness. I run inside, calling for my mother. In the distance between the backyard and the bathroom, where my mother is, I imagine saving the bird. I can see myself feeding it in the cage we’ve built for it along the fence. And eventually, the dove will come to trust me, sit on my finger, even shoulder, as we sit in the backyard. It will trust me to bathe it and nurture it back to health. Once I set her free, she’ll come and visit me. I will spot her amongst the other doves. She’ll help me fill in the blank spots in the book of love I’m writing.

My mother reaches for the dove with her bare hands. The dove slips out between my mothers’ grip and flies a few inches, bounces off the fence, until she makes a soft landing onto a bed of weeds. My mother instructs me to go get a bowl of water. Get a bowl of water. I know it’s in this extended moment—between life and death—that my mother is attempting to prepare me. Secretly, she knows the dove is dying. My mother will keep me busy, reducing my list of questions. I run into the kitchen and grab a large clay bowl—I use it for salads. I fill the bowl with cool water from the kitchen sink and carry it outside.

The moments between the sink and reaching my mother become blurry. I remember there was heat wave that day and I tried convincing myself the dove was probably dehydrated and that’s why she was stuck in the shoots. The mantra had repeated.

My mother holds the dove again and tips her beak into the bowl of water. I see her swallow, but my will mother later tells me that she was gasping. Maybe in death there is little difference between swallows and gasps. The dove and I never break eye contact while she’s being angled towards the water. I still have faith.

My mother dips the dove’s beak back into the water, but this time her neck just hangs there as my mother moves her beak up and out of the water. Later, my mother will tell me, this is when she knew the dove wasn’t going to make it. The dove died in my mother’s hands.

Once inside, my mother asked if I wanted her to bury the dove on her property.

I shook my head yes, and thanked her. We took a break from everything and went searching for new towel bars for my bathroom. In the car, my mother realized that last night a bird had died in her dreams. I knew it to be a sign, maybe that things were about to change.

Before my mother leaves to go back home, I find an Ann Taylor shoebox with some white tissue inside and give it to my mother to use to bury the dove. Not even an hour after she leaves my house, I imagine my mother driving home, close to two thousand feet in elevation. The dove belongs in the Sierra foothills and far from the oleander. Even in the small currents of our understanding, we pause to offer what the earth quietly takes back.

Fish Eggs

2008-10-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

For me, many essays begin as a poem.

I'm somewhat working on a book-length poem, Here's the begining...

~~~

Fish Eggs

My mother, blonde and bent
Cleans the garage, not even a year
After your death, pulls on blue miles
Of dive equipment, cracked black hoses
Baked from the Sierra sun, the heat
That beats the bones, of what used to be

Years of being underwater, memories,
Soft as sandstone, fall between the piles,
Oxygen-starved heaps destined for the dump,
And be covered by the earth. She continues

Late past summer, learns to count
Three falling stars before she sleeps,
Dreams of metal songs, winds sweep
Over a half-empty house, a slowing starts
Towards the hours relucant to pass.

She finds his dive slate tucked in a crate,
His writing still legible, saying to her
That what she sees are fish eggs,
Little sacs of life, small sizes of hope,
Oceanic youth, tart as bourbon, legs
That kick in unison through thickness,
A diligent emergence, rising and falling,
Hand-in-hand, inside the salty earth.

Roosters & Lipstick

2008-10-15T10:33:00.001-07:00

I was up for a half an hour before I realized there's a rooster that lives near by. Four long hollers through the black air. Morning is here. Fall is here.

Every time I walk my dog in the morning darkness, I am reminded of Winona, Minnesota and my dolls, and how I shoved their stalky rubber legs into the snow to make them stand--most of the times, nude, with that blank stare, plum-stained lips, hair--a complete disarray. I would come to their rescue and pluck them from the snow bank and wrap them in a doll quilt, carrying them to my first real car: a red convertible, with just enough room for me to sit with one doll on the front seat. There was nowhere to put my grown up purse, so I'd leave it on the sidewalk--hand me down lipsticks already beginning to freeze.

Body & Soul

2008-10-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

I'm always open to suggestions. And when I saw that Sun Magazine (one my favorite places for great photography, poetry, and essays) was open to topics/themes, I didn't hesitate. I, of course, suggested: Relationship to Landscape.

I've asked this question a million times, "Are we shaped by landscape, or does it shape us?"

Having left the Central Valley for almost nine months, I felt a pit grow in the center of being. I stopped writing, slept, and spent a majority of my time commuting into San Francisco for work--up to three hours a day. On the bus, I had plenty of time "think" or simply stare. I worked out all these literary equations. But in the end, I realized, regardless of what hoards of money one might make, if you've become detached from your soulful landscape, the spirit will ultimately suffer.

Some of these things seem obvious. Other times, we have to live them to understand them. Cliches have a backhand that can burn--even when we see it coming in our direction.

I've Joined the World

2008-10-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

This is my first blog. I thought about it at lunch today and how there's this desire to reach out, and retract, all at the same time.

My attempt is to capture some of my studies, thoughts and explorations in the world of creative nonfiction in relations to self and the landscape, and how memory, is well, utlimately altered, preserved, or lost.

I hope you'll enjoy this journey as I share my observations, photos, projects, and studies.