How big is the heart?

Big enough, she said, to hold the universe, but not a singularity. A multiverse in verse, the pattern. Systole, diastole. The drum inside the drum, keeping time with the shore. The earth is our mother, the sea is our blood. How big? Big enough. There is so much to contain that the vessel capsized on a lonely shore. Enough to carry it across to the other side. Remember to bring honey cakes and coins, the river is asleep. Charon’s heart beating once every millennium, how big is his heart? The seas rose and no one remembered the honey cakes. The sea took her due. The river inside each of us carves a shore of grief and tears—the same as the ocean or blood. Can you cry underwater? Someone asks. Better to leave the unanswered questions for the city of the dead. They have time enough. They say the earth is resonating like a bell. Systole/diastole; Charon’s heart is beating a drum song, a tattoo of rhythm, life compressed, lived between the two beats of a wave. How big is the heart? Big enough. The elders are closer to hearing it, one step closer…they tell stories of when they were young. First job, first love. Their days carry the rhythm still. There is such a sweetness in the the room after they tell the stories and this room is filled with hearts so big the universe can’t contain them. So we write in verse, multiverse to Sinatra’s Very good year. And now that is enough to hold the world. Do we choose the size of our hearts? How do we measure the size of the heart. A beating heart.

1/21/2005 Writers’ Group

The last of the...

Wine? She asked, serving the guest of honor first. He gazed at her with his hooded cobra eyes, she forgot the other guests, the hangers on, the ones who came under pretext or another when the word leaked out, thrusting their foot into the the jamb of the open door, wedging their way in with tissue-thin excuses. Everyone wanting their brush with fame at any cost. Manners flew out the window, in this ex-pat town, where everyone was purveyor of everyone else’s business. The wine gurgled, cleared its throat in t the neck of the bottle, and then sang in the glass. A ray of sunlight caught the cornice and everyone was transfixed by that trapped rainbow. Then the utter stillness that followed. She too was trapped inside his gaze, like cat and mouse, the white wine trembled as if distant tremors struck the earth. It was possible the islands were restless. Sharp tang of resin, then, the sea. This is a defined moment when nothing happens, but within that moment, from the first restless tapping of the wine against the green well, to the final aria in the glass, an epoch had passed. It was as if all the ages of man were trapped in that bottle, and time itself ended when she poured the last of the wine. Soon, they would be reading about themselves thinly disguised as themselves in yet another novel. They would argue, and disagree as to who was who, never realizing that the wine had been poured and consumed long ago.

1/21/2005 Writers' Group

Memoir

At Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's Books, Sharon Doubiago says she's writing a 900-page single space memoir and I'm afraid of anything longer than a thousand words. She wears golden butterflies on her ankles—curious signs of slavery and freedom. She's living in Berkeley now. Three weeks. It must be a record. But the road is an old lover.

1/9/05
added,rev. 9/17

Celia Woloch's reading at Cody's 1/9/2005

Celia opens her reading at Cody's Bookstore, as an homage to Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country. She read a poem called Late, she says she undressing the idea of choosing to be lovely by wearing an earring as a talisman.

She reads a pantoum about being bareback and how the woods were on fire we rode towards the flame with the sky and our mouths close to that danger, a list poem. She read My Mother's Birds. Sucha was a nickname, she raised chickens. Chocka was the sound of chickens and also the sound of the ax falling. She said, We could escape unlike the chickens.

Blink a child's tattered self-image: being called wool-lock, chink-eye, Saint Cecilia, here is how the world turns on itself, a girl...

Apres la Luna Miel, a love poem the, moon of honey, the sky of milk. Naming the hypothetical children and escaping from them. She does a play on slow children at play, a dyslexic moment, something I know too well. 

Another poem The Passionate Suitcase, for her Gypsy sisters. I believe the moon blink, the traffic of leaving then the night slams shut. Don't look back.

She reads from Tsigani, a book-length poem. My friend Ken Bullock and Celia took another epic Budapest train ride, which led to the poem I knew snippets of the story, then I hear the Gypsy history interpliced. The what if poem… what if I had no documents, no country… While waking into the dream of Budapest, my name in his throat like a jewel. 

Dien dobre, Polish for good morning. Celia told a story of how she was robbed, no passport. Someone said something about selling her to the gypsies, with no proof of country. I had grown thin on a diet of grief, consonants lost between languages. The neighbor, worn as a blade, eggs in his hands. Djen—day: eat what is offered in that light.

Proposals: Happy Independence Day another list poem. I don't know who'd who they think I am dressed in rags of wind with eyes of green fire.

Doren Robins says there's a tenuousness in Celia's poetry. Segue to Sholeh Wolpe, born in Persia, who said who said 10% of the people will never kill, 10% will always kill, the rest of us who will go either way. Then a reference to Hotel Rwanda, the idea of distancing oneself from the current governments of the oppressive. What one man will do to another. 

The Persian culture is now flourishing. But women get the raw end of the deal. They serve men. Condoleezza Rice is a two-man army on her own. In their writing and art they continue to serve men. Bomblets, not leisure, but sperm. Muslim fighters are given a key to heaven to paradise. The idea of the virgin paradise is sewn into his father's pants. Words have no need for light, they shine on their own. 

Afterwards we all go out for a meal at an Ethiopian restaurant and talk until the restaurant closes. The foggy night tightens its prison issue blanket about our shoulders.

One heart

One heart beating, two hearts drumming, the little boy who lost his one heart’s delight, bearing a drum to the silken sea who took his heart and then spat it back each morning with bleached shells. The new shorelines were surprised to find themselves front and center as beachfront. They tried on their new coral sand gowns as the sea lapped at the hem of the coastline, mirroring their frothy beauty. The little boy couldn’t stop drumming. Each morning the reporter found him playing his solo concert to the sea.soon he noticed that the sea answered the little drummer with a cease-surcease. The boy was so absorbed he forgot about the pain in his heart. He drummed and the sea answered. There was a strange beauty to the sea, and the color of sky, so blue, but something more. He drummed for the mother who came down to the strand each morning to collect the gift of children’s shoes the sea had returned in the night. He drummed for the toothless old man hunkered down on his haunches, collecting shells and broken bits of coral. The boy couldn’t believe his sister and mother were gone in a heartbeat. Not until his father took him to their graves. But they were empty, so he still held out hope. He gathered the piles of shells and coral the old man had left behind and outlined their graves in the shape of one heart. They said that two sisters were buried in the same coffin, and his mother in another. He outlined their empty graves in the shape of one heart. Like after 9/11, everything was post 9/11. After the tsunami, everything is post tsunami. Gaia, Gaia, Gaia. The one heart of the earth beating to the drum line.

1/7/2005 Writers’ Group

Chichi-jima & Haha-jima

 Obviously the two rocks had to get married, living next to each other like that for so long. The sea was their witness. The fisherman finished tying the knot on the silken rope, the same knot he used to mend his nets. That will hold them for an eternity, he thought. But the sea was jealous, and pushed its waves between them, widening the distance between them until they were bowed, the lovers’ knot holding them true. The sea grew angry and threw up a wave so huge it lost its balance and stumbled. The ocean floor shifted and dropped. Too late, the sea tried to call back its wave but the anger had spread to distant rocks, more distant shores. Islands moved 60 feet, coastlines sank. The sea stared into the aftermath of flotsam and jetsam and strange fish, like the fisherman, sank to the sea floor—as if to mend the rift in her heart. The sea cried, her heart wept molten rock, a new island arose from the gaping wound of her grief, but it was alone, not another rock to marry. But the sea wasn’t about to give birth again so soon. She crept back to the two rocks that the fisherman had married but it was obvious he was gone along with the other strange fish on the bottom of the sea.

1/7/2005 Writers’ Group

Art from the Heart 2005, oil pastel, poster paint

Art from the Heart, 2005, oil pastel