Brilliance

Thanks to Twitter's #haikuwordgame, I wrote a poem today. It's the first in quite some time. Energies seem to have been going to the daily grind, securing a new job (starts in ten days), doing the work of another group in the series at Women in Transition. The words for the word game today are brilliance, night and fragile. I attempted a haiku, then tried gogyohka and finally realized that the combination of words called up something I have finally processed through to its end and needed more room.

Writing through something is always healing. Maybe for a time I didn't want to be healed, I just clung stubbornly to a vision I had. In sharing this draft, I am also posting to this blog for the first time in five months. I would say that I'm ashamed, but I am not. Post-divorce changes, work, parenting and exploring writing in different forms all take time and energy. I commit, however, to posting regularly or to making the decision to close this blog.

Here is the draft (work property of the author):

Brilliant

At last, one night I spilled it all,
and your lips speaking what I spoke
and that kiss, they shocked me.
The brilliance stopped my breath.

You were aware of that, the sudden
suck of air and the fierce joy as you
paused, listening. And I wonder if it was
my intense response that turned you.

The months that followed have
served their own shock, your silence
a ban that speaks shame
into my mouth, where lips met, where

tongue greeted your gentle, testing
tongue, where a sigh took voice
as it rose. Maybe it was too much.
Maybe too much of me repels.

Months of self-delusion have turned me
from myself, as I found one memory
more real than the silence, less fragile
than your arm's grip of my hips. At last

I am able to remember myself without
an assumption of you. Less jubilant
but centered. No memory matters
more than this moment.

Station - a poem. Finally.

Station

I.
Pitted blue glass windows
line the church aisles.
Centered in each window
a square panel depicts
one Station of the Cross:
gilt figures on black slate.

Sundays after Mass, her
Grandmother walked through
the Stations, rosary
looped over her hands,
the skin silk-smooth, loose
on the bones. The kids
would all wait in the car,
impatient for the ritual’s end.

One station: Jesus carries His Cross.
Another, He falls the first time.
He meets His mother. A murmur
accompanied the beads’ clicking.

II.
On Fridays in Lent the upper
grades attended observance
of the Stations together.
The censer would swing gently
on its chain. Wisps of incense rose
with the priest’s thin voice:
eloi, eloi, lama sabachtani

Someone might faint
or pretend to in
the close hungry afternoon.

The priest and the altar boy attendants
moved on to the next one: Jesus dies.
He is laid in the tomb.

Between panels, the light streams in.

III.
She tries again to repent

wonders whether peace
would come if she made
confession, if she knelt down on
marble at the communion rail
or shed penitent’s tears.
She waits in the shadow of
the great crucifix above her.

She would pray: Jesus
how You suffered,
make me good.
With thorns or a whip
or with nails
make me forget
this longing.

Banana Boats, Baseball and Camp

This morning's small gift of joy was the Banana Boat Song on the radio, when I was driving in to work. The first time I heard the song was when Harry Belafonte guest starred on the Muppet Show (I know, I'm dating myself). There's the well-known and well-worn "De-O" but when I hear it now, what stands out is the smoothness of Mr. Belafonte's voice and the almost spiritual background chorus ("daylight come and me wan' go home..."). With a little more knowledge than I used to have of choral singing, I can pick out bits that I love: the bass voices that converge and make the dashboard vibrate, and the different notes making up a chord. But I still picture muppets on the end of the boat.

Last night I enjoyed a rare opportunity to attend a Phillies game. I had a pair of tickets for a corporate suite, and took a friend who could explain subtler points of the sport that I would have missed. What a game! The Phillies skunked the Reds 22-1, a game that was easy even for a novice to watch and enjoy, especially sitting just above the Phillies dugout. In the past, the few times I'd been to a game generally involved the nosebleed seats. It's not nearly the same, and I have just enough fear of heights to have thought a lot then about different possibilities for falling. Still, I have a very vivid childhood memory of Mike Schmidt hitting a grand slam in Veterans Stadium!

So, those are two good things in the present that also triggered memories of past joys. I wonder how I might describe the way experiences converge, like music does, to my children. I have spent most of the past several days coaching my Peanut through the grief involved with the end of a week at an amazing camp for kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders. He struggles to accept or to forget or to move around the thought that he won't see those friends again for a whole year. Kids with Asperger's typically focus on the negative and tend to perseverate (remain excessively focused) on an idea, both of which have come into play and made it difficult for him to cope. I'm working on coaching him through it and trying to organize some sort of reunion picnic for the campers at the end of this summer - something positive and a much easier wait time.

It is so hard to let good things end, and I relate to his insistence that he just can't stand it. Some day the memory of camp, the memory of (hopefully) reuniting with his fellow campers and of returning to the camp will all be part of a comprehensive camp experience. He is so fortunate to have had the opportunity to go (I don't remind him of this when he is crying because he wants to go back, knowing it won't help). I remind him that every day it gets a little easier to keep going, and try to teach him to trust that there can be more of a good thing, even if you can't see it right now. And, somehow, the past and the present will come together to amplify the joy.

You don't look back along memory but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing ever goes away. -- Margaret Atwood