Go On With Your Thinking

More and more I'm thinking of resilience and sorrow all mixed up together. Meaning, on waking, I want to sleep but not because I want to sleep because (but) I want to not be awake. This sounds depressed. Sorrow fills me up but doesn't define me in the same way that watching Sophie seize never gets easier. On June 14th, it was twenty-five years since she'd been diagnosed. Muscle memory. I could keep plumbing the depths of sorrow. Fathom the plumb unfathomable. It's down to words. Rage is just a cover for sorrow and everyone knows that.

Carl and I went out on the water yesterday on a whale-watching boat. Everyone was in masks except for a small group of over-dressed ladies who spent the entire time taking selfies. I steered clear of them and anyone else who came too close (oblivion) and found a quiet spot at the back of the boat. I sat in the sun with my face up, watched a couple of pelicans soar, at least a dozen terns torpedo into the water and a hundred or so dolphin dive and swim in the choppy water. It was cold. About halfway through the trip, a minke whale. At some point, mesmerized by all of this and the hum of the boat and the muffled shrieks of the people on the bottom deck, I wondered what it would be like to throw myself overboard, to slip in the water much like Hart Crane did after folding his overcoat over the railing. No one would see. Could one drown oneself? Could one keep gulping water or would the instinct to breathe, to thrash to stay alive kick in? This sounds depressed. The boat rocked me, though, and the late afternoon sun made the chop gold and glint, Carl was off in the distance, his lens raised and the sorrow rocked, too, back and forth, calm and soothing, making me who I am not quite all filled up.

Here's an excerpt from "Winnie," a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks:

Yet I know
that I am Poet!
I pass you my Poem.

A poem doesn’t do everything for you.
You are supposed to go on with your thinking.
You are supposed to enrich
the other person’s poem with your extensions,
your uniquely personal understandings,
thus making the poem serve you.

I pass you my Poem! — to tell you
we are all vulnerable —
the midget, the Mighty,
the richest, the poor.
Men, women, children, and trees.
I am vulnerable.
Hector Pieterson was vulnerable.

My Poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My Poem is life, and can grow.

Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.

I am not a tight-faced Poet.

I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to
shape perfect unimportant pieces.
Poems that cough lightly — catch back a sneeze.
This is the time for Big Poems,
roaring up out of sleaze,
poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood.
This is the time for stiff or viscous poems.
Big, and Big.

Runes and Ruin

Sunset, Pacific Ocean
December 2019

Vikings had only an oral culture. Eventually they used runes, which were a sort of alphabet.
Here are some common ones that I lifted off the World Wide Web:

 Name:Hagalaz, “hail.” Phoneme: H. Meaning: destruction, chaos.

 Name: Naudhiz, “need.” Phoneme: N. Meaning: need, unfulfilled desire.

 Name: Uruz, “aurochs.” Phoneme: U (long and/or short). Meaning: strength of will.

 Name: Thurisaz, “Giant.” Phoneme: Th (both soft and hard). Meaning: danger, suffering.

 Name: Ansuz, “an Aesir god.” Phoneme: A (long and/or short). Meaning: prosperity, vitality.

All the free men in Viking World would gather together to make laws and settle disputes without resorting to blood and violence. They called this meeting The Thing. Ever since I read Sigrid Undset's books in my early twenties, I've been fascinated by that name. The Thing.

I'm going to call what's happening between my ex and me The Thing from now on. So when I disappear from this space you'll know it's The Thing, and that there's been no blood and violence.

Anyway.

I went out on the wine dark sea yesterday with Carl. We saw one gray whale, about fifty dolphins and some sea birds. It was really cold and really beautiful. The sunset was incredible. The photo I put up there is blurry, but there's no filter on it, and don't you think that oil tanker could be a Viking ship? You see where I'm going, right?

I didn't walk around the boat much because earlier I had wrenched my foot while cleaning up my porch. I was wearing clogs and stepped on an uneven spot and stepped off the clog. The clog, rather, bruised the side of my foot. I have a bum knee as well on my left leg, so now I have a bum knee and a bum foot, and I'm walking weird. I feel heavy but not rooted. On the boat, though, I sat and swayed and rode the waves like a whale myself.


Reader, what are you doing?

Winter in Southern California and The Guadalupe Valley, Baja

Don't be jealous.

Gray whale breach

My little sister Melissa and I

Old dear friends -- Brumi Winery in Baja

The view from my shower

The Wall (the thing that fucker in the White House wants built higher and wider)

Four Things and a Quote

Pacific Ocean, The Port of Los Angeles, Snow-topped Mountains

He slid further down as it reached his shoulders, in a kind of nirvana not based on freedom from desires but on attainment.

James Salter, from his novel All That Is 

 I.

It was a rough week because of Sophie and isn't it usually about Sophie and while I've written here in (on) air for years about these days, these rough days, I came up for it (air) today lying on my back rocking with the boat my face to the sun. The word rock. The word lull. The boat rocks and lulls me, the expanse of gray, a bit of blue. Once we'd passed the lighthouse, the slick seals on the buoys, the drone of the motor and the wind in my face, my hair whipped, I'm whipped, god but I'm always so damn whipped. I held the hand of the man that I love, he gives to me (air) and the whales do that thing with air, the word blow, and we stand there (in air) and wait for the rise of it, the arch of gray over gray (a bit of blue) before it slips back under, last the tail. The word fluke. 



II.

Two men in a donut shop drinking coffee and eating crullers. You know what war is? the older white one asked the younger black one. The other man knew it wasn't a question for him to answer. He waited. It's the failure of imagination, the man answered.



III.

I read this somewhere and wrote it down, without attribution. I'm sorry for that. Birding is a way of heightened, finely tuned seeing.


IV.

Labels. I pulled into a crowded gas station at sunset tonight in San Pedro, made room for a man leaving. Your lights! I said. Thank you, baby, he said. He was bald. He was black. The woman at the tank next to me was cleaning garbage out of her car. She wore a head scarf. She was Muslim. A man walked up to her and remarked on her scarf. Insulted her. He was bald. He was Hispanic. I said Knock it off. He looked at me, cocked his head and walked away.  She nodded her head, got into her car and drove away. I have long dark hair. I am white.

Notes On Whale Watching

I was literally awestruck on Saturday when I went out on a boat for a seven-hour whale watching tour with some friends off the coast of Ventura. I don't think any amount of writing could do justice to what I saw, so I'll post some notes I took off and on, in-between sunning and rocking and gazing out into the blue. I took over 700 photos, so I'll post a few of my favorites. We saw at least 18 humpback whales, one blue whale, one Minke, multiple sea lions, more than 6,000 dolphins,  countless birds, including several rare species and a bait boil where birds flew around feeding amongst a pod of dolphins and multiple humpbacks. It was wild.

The tell-tale (tail?) stench of whale breath: invisible, fishy, something rotten
The story of Jonah who was swallowed and coughed back up.
Had he displeased God?

On the ocean, my capacity for wonder is as large as the blue whale -- the largest creature on earth.

Memories of sitting with Sophie as a baby under the blue whale in the main lobby of New York's Natural History Museum. Back in the days of constant crisis, the shadowed space below the hanging whale was one of the few where I felt at peace, where Sophie quieted down. We both looked upward in blue light. 

Twenty-one years out, and I'm in the ocean with one.
.
Four breaths and then the tail and then the dive back down. Ten minutes later, four breaths and then the tail and then the dive back down. 
Over and over

Cloud hovers low over the arches and monoliths of Anacapa Island

How does condensation take so many forms and so much emotional weight?

Van Morrison's "Purple Heather" an echo 

A lonely wooden tower, there you go, lassie go

This morning. Gray blue light of dawn bleeding into room. 

Hesitation. The rhythm of what will come is set by passivity. 

I am drawn to patience. Like held breath

like water

The color blue

cerulean

sky into sea

blue bleeds into blue

Does blue bleed? 

So I don't forget

I can contain my desire despite it seeming uncontainable

The rocking of the boat is constant, and I am never sick.

It's like love

the making of it.

The female body as container.
Desire
The space inside that is filled.
The whale tail and the female uterus

Slick as a dolphin
No amount of cliche could contain it
A container for desire

 

The audacity of the sea lion

The body as water

The body as vessel, as container, as passageway

The grounding of rock and ancient arches 
My tilted sense of wonder