Life

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a ride!'"

-- Hunter S. Thompson

Stones that roll

I seriously wonder how many times
I would have to listen to Gimme Shelter
before the intro stops giving me chills.
I need it louder,
I need it to fill not just my ears,
but every corner of my cells -
it swirls in the air around me, but
it fills me up, too...
Songs like this are a drug for me,
songs that make me feel this...thing...this...
need 
to be turned inside out
and infused with their essence,
not the notes on a page,
not the distinct syllables of the poetry within them,
but to become one with the soul of the song.
I heard Jane Says on the way to work,
windows down
volume up
and I felt like I could fly.
Perry Farrell, you demon of goodness!
I half-smile, as a memory flits through me of another Perry I loved.
The smile quickly fades as I remember more;
what a wild time in my life that was...
it sometimes feels like an era that lasted so long it should require carbon dating.
I lived a lot of adventures in those short few years
between a perfectly sheltered mormon upbringing
and my first marriage.
Hiking to the hot springs with the ornithologist's son,
or with my guru,
or the time with the rattlesnake in the path,
but every
single
time
there were naked middle aged men lounging about
in the steaming water
in the deep night of Diamond Fork Canyon.

They were mostly benign,
except for that one time,
that one guy was so insistent on giving us foot massages,
even though we didn't want our feet
anywhere near his
lap.
Or the long-haired hippie boys laughing with each other and
swapping accusations of playing the skin flute,
(the first time I'd heard the term,
which conjured images of a tribal musical instrument)
and stopping them in their tracks
by softly stating my proficiency at that pursuit.
Or the time we slipped and hopped and balanced our way across the rushing water
to brave the frigid waterfall and see what was behind it.
Cold-wet-dark-rocky
ness
was behind it,
and I regretted leaving the warm embrace of the water,
and the fading sobriety of the ornithologist's son.
He slipped away,
back into the teeming valley of prim and proper students and professors
from which we'd escaped to seek out
life
and growling intensity
and wild abandonment of
everything we'd ever known.

The girl I was then:
 (showing off the wicked sunburn I got the first day in Hawaii, 1996)

(Looks like I'm repeating myself, haha!)

Tolstoy’s Nephew

He sat across from me at the small table, his arm in a wide arc around his coffee cup as he spoke the words, “Marat shot a man last summer.”

We all looked at him for a moment, with mild disbelief. He pressed sparse details of the story into our palms, like a crisp bill to a valet. The body in the lake, a stone tied to the head.  The smile on his face should have been a tip off that it was all just some exaggeration of life behind the Iron Curtain, but instead it made what he said more real, more solid—as though he were sharing a great secret with us.    

Morning bled into afternoon, and someone suggested a drive through the desert.  Casinos have a way of flashing their neon invitations straight out across the Salt Flats, beckoning to the good people of Utah from all those miles of shared border, so we all tumbled into a car and headed into the sun.  Somewhere along the way there was a gas station with crunchy-gooey nachos and cold beer to soften the edges of the long ride on such a straight road.
I think that was the day he traced the length of my arm with his fingertips in long, slow strokes while we murmured under the spark and pop of conversation coming from the front seat.  He told me about home, as we sprawled across the seat, wedging a knee against a door, a foot against a console.  The tickle of his accent against my eardrums still resonates, but I can’t remember his words.  Most of them are lost in the dry air of the lumbering salt flats.  A few of them clung to the smooth surface of me long enough to work their way inside, where they slid neatly into the pile of thoughts he has planted in me. Thinking was one thing we did well together. Fucking was another, which is what started this whole crazy dream. No, I guess it’s not accurate to call it a dream…even if it feels like it was one.
He wasn’t actually Tolstoy’s nephew; he wasn’t even Russian anymore. 

--Salt Lake City, November, 2006

A Great, Salt Lake

Fifteen years I lived in Utah

and never visited the Great Salt Lake.

I saw it, smelled it, knew it--

it was unavoidable, its greatness unexaggerated.

But I never slipped into that thickly salted lake

to bob around like an apple or a bath toy.

When I returned to Utah last summer,

it occurred to me

that I had once wanted to know

how it felt.

The day was scorchingly hot,

with a clear, sapphire sky arching overhead,

met halfway by chalky peaks.

Antelope Island called to me,

boasting herds of its namesake

and imported buffalo.

I took my boys

on the blinding-bright walk across the muddy expanse,

through the wall of tiny insects that billowed to life as we breached it,

into the soft, warm water lapping at our ankles

Shins

Knees

Knees

Thighs--

we walked a mile ‘til we reached our waists,

so that we may lay back and giggle as the water held us too far aloft,

off-balance, unable to sink.

Brine shrimp infested our bathing suits,

filled our hair with their dull brown glitter.

Shimmering water spread out around us,

drowned by the salt of the desert.

We floated like angels

among the reflected mountains.

(Here is the blog post I wrote after a 2013 visit; this poem was written for my Fiction Writing Class at the University of Iowa the following year; the background of this blog is composed of a picture that I took on that visit to the Lake)

Poems, or the muck rattling around in my brain...

I wrote this on my original blog, in June 2011...I am leaden with the weight of all that has changed since then, sad for the lost opportunity to forgive my father, and for the magic that would have averted (could never have averted) the creeping autoimmune factors that caused O's pancreas to turn against him and saddle him with a lifetime of insulin shots; these losses were looming ahead in the near distance the whole time.

Because maybe
even though life is beautiful
sometimes there are things in it that aren’t.
Like being a child of divorce,
suddenly
and rather unexpectedly
at the age of 36.
Wondering if I’m as selfish as my
selfish
selfish
selfish
father
because I already know I’m like him
in some less-than-flattering ways
and I don’t
want
to be.
And maybe it's more fair to say,
also,
that he is kind and good-hearted,
but right now,
it's the selfish that really
sorta
stands out.

And maybe sometimes
it makes me too sad even to cry
if I think about my mother
left
alone
at her age.
73.
She should have been widowed, not abandoned.
but
of course
I don’t mean to say
that I would prefer my father had died,
But.
It would have been sad in very different ways.
And he has still left her.
Left all of us.
Because he’s not planning to come back
from California.
Who could blame him?
(Well, besides my sister and I?)

I am angry at him
and I am angry
and I am ANGRY!!!!!!!
The font doesn’t grow large or red enough for me to express the depth and breadth and inexplicable fieriness of my anger.
He
        could have stayed
should have left sooner
would not have made her happy if he had stayed, anyway...
But she was happy, is happy, will always be happy.
She is content and sure and grace-filled.
She didn’t need him, ever
and maybe that’s why...
He wasn’t able to stay.

***********************

Twin Fever

I am obsessed with
immersed in
riveted by—
the videos of my boys as toddlers.
I lose myself for long chunks of minutes
inside these scenes from my past.
I listen to myself narrate the video,
giggling at their antics,
(myself in stereo:
laughing then, laughing now),
the love I felt for them palpable,
visible in their shining dark eyes.
The love is still here, of course,
but it’s easier to gush over toddlers than tweeners.
They fight it far less.
Watching their first steps,
their first words,
their first, toddling wrestling match...
I want to live inside those moments,
indeed, it feels like time travel.
I want to bury my face in the soft skin between chubby cheeks and tender necks.
I want to lift them onto my hips,
two at a time, like I did then.
Ten years have passed in the blink of an eye;
those just-walking babies will be 11 next week.
Those 4-pound preemies are now each 5’ 1” tall.
They are smart and funny and are
just
about
to
turn into People.
It astounds me.
They astound me.
Those soft little cheeks and giggles and rounded words.
They are everything.

****************************

A seagull stole my mango yesterday
From the deck of my sailboat
as we rocked in the salty air.

I leapt to the dock
and chased him down.

I got my mango back.
--for Captain Chrissy, F/V Olad, Camden Maine

JPG

You're a digital image

seared into my mind,

burning through me

with the speed of light.

Past Life

I am Fitzgerald

and Bukowski,

with a dash of Hunter S.

thrown in for good measure.

Or,

I used to be,

back when I was unhappily married—

oh, what a thrill that was!

To live in a world I could reject

(with some measure of impunity)

and in which I felt trapped

and compelled to dream my way free

of my white-picket-fence prison.