Food is life freewrite

It’s those damn kiwis, the fruit, not the Islanders, that puts my tongue all in a twist. I love their burlap exterior against a jade green mandala, and that aroma, almost strawberry, almost passionfruit, but my tongue objects, turns into an object de art, swollen along the taste buds, inflamed. Bitter and salty buds objecting to the acrid tang of the kiwi from down under. Call them Chinese gooseberries if you want, but but they are more like burlap testicles hanging from the vine. Who would've guessed all that greenness hid beneath that all that burlap? A neighbor I worked for, Alice Kent ,delighted in the rare and the unusual. One of my jobs was to check on the progress of the kiwi vine spanning the trellis. I delighted in the creamy blossoms, a cross between a blackberry and a magnolia, all porcelain and cream. Strange progeny of fruit to follow left the tomatoes girlishly gasping at the stud fruit hanging from the trellis. The roses got all huffy and pulled up their stocks and took to the road, unable to cope with that upstart vine from down under. I remember one full moon, the siren call of the garden led me down to the pond barefoot where the water iris had open their triumvirate arms to the moon. I was so mesmerized, I stumbled into the pond to pluck that alabaster light from the stems. My bare arms were calyxes beneath the moonlight. Having no knife and their resistance to plucking got the better of me, so my teeth severed blossom from the stem, sweet juice like corn on the husk, this food of life for the soul, for the tongue, for Isis.

2/18/2005 Writers’ Group

Exorcism, or what am I afraid of?

What am I afraid of? Let me count the ways. Where is Emily when we need her? All hummingbird and rose wings in the garden. Neighbors dropping in for tea. The world came to her, our Emily. What was she afraid of: does it matter? Post mortems on writers long dead, butterfly wings resurrected and reincarnated too many times for the counting. Maybe some of those molecules made it to this coast from Amherst. Maybe they’re in the room right now as we write. Maybe a molecule or two found Its way into the first strawberries of the season. Unlike Emily, we no longer know the origin, the natal land of the food we eat. They say all molecules are recycled and so we eat dust of the stars. radium, butterfly wings, and yes and bits of Emily too. What am I afraid of? The void, like everyone else. That final answer where consciousness and corporeal body are seven at the naval and all that’s left is the umbilicus of faith, any faith, it doesn’t matter. Port in a storm. What we cling to, our egos building fortresses of thought to sustain us, to offer us hope, but it’s all Maya Maya Maya in the end. Therein lies the fear. The question: what if… yes, if, if, if. And not preposition but question, that is, interrogatories of unimagined futures or will versus shall and all that it conveys. The future is always in the imperfect tense, whether declarative or not, and wishes are horses riding that which never comes and is always too late. Regret is the other name of fear, a complex soup of what if, and should have—that is where fear lies.

2/18/2005 Writers' Group

Age has no mercy tonight or, freewrite

Age has no mercy tonight or, or any other night for that matter. In my latest poetry class a student uncharacteristically asked me how old I was and I said Older than dirt, which drew a few titters. Age has never been much of an issue with me. As the saying goes, You're only as old as you feel. But yesterday I was using a handout I had made on how to teach calligraphy dated from 1980, and then it hit me—these kids' parents hadn't yet been born. I had scribed out the alphabetic family of shapes from my cabin under the live oak in Sonoma County. What meadow, what age? I was not yet 30, negotiating a tricky Saturn Return cycle and poetry was my consolation prize. I was given a bottomless suitcases of muses' words, their glad rags, their hand-me-downs. Today I listened to young girls read their newly minted poems about the goddess within. Amazingly, they were so unselfconscious as they incanted their poems to the four directions. We made something come alive today in that dreamy classroom. So what if Tom Hanks went to school there, it's a dungeon, no monk's cell of arcane learning. But somehow we circumnavigated our surroundings and suddenly we were all of one age, one mind, scribing the words on the water, deep in the well, slaking a thirst we didn't know was there, pondering the ages of Man.

2/4/2005 Writers' Group

What I saw in the garden freewrite

What I saw in the garden was barely there as if an angel breathed, and the leaves shivered as if someone had walked on their grave. Is it spring or is it winter? Flowers make a run for the border and bloom in a fit of passion all at once—just in case winter should return, which it usually does. According to the marmot, it will indeed return for six more weeks. Meanwhile, I haul out last summer's clothes that I never quite got around to packing away, but the edges of shadows say it's not spring, though the jonquils and narcissi madly nod their perfumed heads in the breeze. Spring! Spring! they gleefully announce with their yellow splendor. Yeah, right, the shadows still converse with winter. Angelino Bernini, the old black cat takes a power nap on the stoop, his dark coat is so warm, it's like an electric blanket, sparks fly as I pet him. He looks up suddenly, as if contented, as if to say, aren't I responsible for the nice weather? I envy him soaking up all that joy and radiant heat. But he's no angel, he drools and feebly attempts to take down the more careless birds. But he's just a fat black cat living out the end of his years dreaming in the garden. That's what I saw.

2/4/2005 Writers' Group