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.

Monterey Breach: A Drone Short Film

These two have been friends since preschool.

Once upon a time, a little boy named Oliver made a whole lot of money selling lemonade on the corner of our street. He worked diligently and saved nearly all of it and began bugging his mother about spending that money, all at once, on a drone. His mother declined because that's a ridiculous thing to spend money on and you need to save that for college until, years later, it was clear that Oliver actually did want a drone and intended to do great things with it. It's my money, Oliver said. You're right, she said with a sigh. He bought the drone.

Oliver and Joe have been making incredibly inventive films for years. Oliver is game for acting and doing the bidding of Joe who is a preternaturally talented filmmaker and editor. You really can't believe how good Joe is until you see his stuff.

The Bird Photographer took Oliver up to Monterey this week to do a little drone photography and some whale watching. I'm not going to say how jealous I am (for obvious reasons), but Oliver -- on his first real whale-watching trip -- saw just about everything a person could dream of seeing on a whale-watching trip. Breaching whales, lunge feeding,  Great White sharks, dolphins, etc. etc. I have yet to see a whale breach, and I've gone out about eight times which is privilege enough. I just love this state I've adopted as my home. It is truly glorious, and I'm so glad that my children are California-bred.

Oliver and Joe made this short film that they titled Monterey Breach: A Short Drone Film. It blew my mind so much that I think I'm going to have to lie about how I tried to get Oliver to buy that thing for years because I just knew he was going to make something great of himself with it. I told Joe that when he's a famous filmmaker, I'm going to tell everyone that he made short films with Oliver in my little bungalow long ago.

Make it full screen, turn up the volume and be wowed:

#gratitude

Are you thinking jesus! When's this woman going to express her gratitude for the deep blue sea and the great blue whales? Here it is, my gratitude for the deep blue sea, for the coast of California and the planet's largest mammals that swim in the waters.

I saw five blue whales a week or so ago, not one or two or even three but five. Their bodies are sleek and shone in the sun. Vast.

Here it is. My gratitude for dolphins, for the thousands of them raced us, my efforts to not anthropomorphize so difficult because surely they smile and play and love?

Here it is. My gratitude for the island fox

for a dusty hot day

for a rocky beach where I lay with a book on a blanket, a stone under my head and in the small of my back

for a painted cave that smelled of damp and green. Lichen, the word

For white flowers that grew out of rock

for red crabs busy in clear water

for pelicans overhead

for this man for us

Dark Rainbow Bliss

I told you in my last post that I had the incredible experience last week of seeing a pod of orcas. I stood up in our small boat and took bunches of photos, but most don't do any justice to these incredible mammals.

I think whales are near-erotic, to tell you the truth. The words strong, glistening, muscular, sinuous, fluke. 

Here's a poem by D.H. Lawrence that a friend sent me:


Whales Weep Not!

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.





Perhaps a tad overwrought, but whew!

On Vacation

Otter, Moss Landing
Monterey, CA

Out until Thursday.

Photos of Big Sur, The Henry Miller library, California Condors, Whales, and Otter Crossing to follow at some point when I get up from my position here.

I miss ya'll already.

Sea and Sky

Glorious is really the only way to describe the southern California sky in January. And glorious, too, the sparkling water. I took Henry and Oliver down to Newport Beach where we met Erika, Phil and little Izzy of The flight of our Hummingbird and went out in a boat to do some whale-watching. We didn't see any whales, but we did see an incredible pod of dolphins, hundreds and hundreds of them, leaping and arcing in and out of the ocean, their black bodies slick as they sliced through the water. The boys ran up and down; they ate nasty nachos and exclaimed over the dolphins, the seals and sea lions; the boys tickled Izzy's feet, and we all marveled at her constant happiness. We turned our faces up to the sun and let our shoulders drop, relaxed.

Back on land, we ate a delicious lunch together, bought entirely too much candy in a local candy shop, hugged each other good-bye with promises to get together soon and then headed back home.

This is an IV bag filled with blood-like sugar something or other. Oliver thought he'd put it on Sophie's IV pole when she gets her next IVIG infusion. I was glad Erika heard him, because now she can vouch for how seamlessly my children move from the crazy to the casual.

The sun was setting on the coast -- the colors and changes so remarkable that it was almost distracting. We turned up the music and sang with Grace Slick, Allison Krauss and Carly Simon -- all three of us at ear-splitting decibels in the car. I can't remember when I've felt more happy.