Basking in the sea

Vito says you can’t bask in the sea. Shiva says But you can bask in the sun, but I am thinking of floating in a warm sea, basking, floating, with no destination in mind. Surely the creatures of the sea can bask? What about the basking shark? I have seen turtles basking on the surface of the sea, with no destination. They were more than just floating, they were basking. Once, during the total eclipse, I sea turtle startled me and I nearly drowned with excitement as he swim beneath me. He was huge, like a sled or a boogie board and all morning I followed him around that bay as the sun in the moon wrestled in the sky between light and dark. It was a free time where all bets were off even in the natural world. We were out of time as tide and wind were in stasis. I followed that turtle ballet until I was so far out to sea, all alone. But when the sun returned as Maui the sun god pulled the moon's face from the sun's…. But not before I saw the diamond ring and the penumbra. Meanwhile a couple exchanged wedding vows and let their leis loose in the sea. Puuonuaohonaunau, the place of refuge. That turtle pulled me far out to see like a siren. That day I had no fear of drowning though drowning was at hand.

2/24//2006 Writers' Group

A place called El Refugio

Where do we go when there’s no place of refuge, when all has been taken from us and we are left with the pale ashes of self after the phoenix has flown, and a breeze left lifts us from the balcony to some distant shore? The Aegean has been haunting me again in my sleep as if I had some unfinished from a lost century. The scrunch of sharp golden sand underfoot, the blue sea inviting us into our dream refuge. Refugio. I am in another language, another sea, traitorous Cortez's sea and in a place called El Refugio that is anything but. When was it ever someone’s refuge, surely not within this century. Not this wide greasespot in the road, a dusty town we can’t seem to get out of. I watch dawn turn into midday, a man in huaraches herds his goats and pigs to another sparse patch of desert sand. I’m desperate for coffee and the next bus will not come, ever. At the bodega I manage to order a cafécito of sorts. Nescafé and Cremora. I find out too late to the amount I thought trifling was worth a day's wages to this man who kisses it and crosses himself and hold sit up to the sun exclaiming Madre de Díos. Mother of God indeed. Perhaps El Refugio was the site of many lost missions strung loosely together from Sonoma to Loreto where the wolf boy was born. They all have hair on fire faces—soft, downy and black. For them, even the girls, the only refuge was to run away across the border to the circus. Wolf boy send money home to his family each week. He looks in the mirror brushes his cheeks and brow, squares his shoulders to meet the public. For him there is no refuge, only gawkers. He longs for the normal life, with friends and family. No more freak shows but he will miss the money. In Refugio, inside of the sea, prison walls, prisoners within sight of the sea the brine dark sea. 

2/24//2006 Writers' Group

Morning Tea Ritual

The perfume escaping the Meyer lemon tree, exotic as gardenias in winter, or like sweet-scented coffee blossoms. I've never seen tea blossoms but I imagine them to be exotic, also like camellias. This morning I saw a photo of women picking tender leaves, hand pruning bushes with leaves glossy as camellias. Centuries of fingers have prised the leaves into topiary hedges. I am fond of my black tea in the morning. It gives substance and balance to my day. A morning without tea, and I feel sullen and sleepy, on the wrong side of the bed, even if there's only one side of the bed to begin with. Tea allows me to turn over a new leaf each day, not that I drink it black, or with citrus, like the English. No, the Irish are the singlemost largest consumers of tea, beating the national average of India or China. They drink out of such tiny cups, it would take them all day to catch up with us. No green tea or chai for me (once I thought I was having a heart attack, replete with palpitations, after a Pakistani friend fixed me a proper cup of Indian tea… He boiled the leaves with canned milk and cardamom for what seemed like hours. He added copious amounts of sugar. Lethal stuff.) No, I drink my tea with milk and sugar, added by the scant teaspoon full. The mug is important, as is the spoon. My only silver spoon, a castoff from someone's grandmother, garlanded with roses, the shank balanced just right so you can teeeter-totter it on your index finger while waiting for the tea to brew exactly 5 minutes. And the mug, sky blue on the outside with Paleolithic symbols, bear paws and Kokapelli, the water sprinkler guarding it. On the inside, it's orange as the Grand Canyon and wwritten on the rim like a watermark rise. My oversize handleless coffee mug that has never seen morning coffee, opens my eyes and offers me up to soaring heights of morning with that charge and verve of a citrus sunrise.

2/10/06 Writers' Group

Too hot to handle

Too hot, too hot to handle, my mind croons like a demented rockstar. Lorene's tea has slammed me sideways after an errant lapse of absence—from the cup, that is. As I threaded my way north with the precision of a Panama tailor, enroute to the writers' group, hot tea fans out over me as yet another moron in a truck bigger than his ego, (his other car is a Harley) cuts me off. And my tea spills again as I dust off and polish my invectives. You MF pussysucking cnt, I yell. And there it was, a scalding cup of tea wending its way down my front to my crotch. Lorene is laughing at me as I try to mop it up with a paper towel. Thank gawd its dark out, no one can see me grabbing my crotch. I'm laughing because I'm also holding a banger on a bun and Freud is riding shotgun in the backseat of my mind. This is too hot, too hot to handle, indeed. I love that first rush of spring when the pollen spores coat the windscreen in a chartreuse powder—like gunmetal tea. (Now, where did that come from?)With that, I shed my winter coat, though there's still a nip in the air. Epistolary bullets spraying the mind. It's an Al Capone kind of gangster evening circling Alcatraz with the perfumed air redolent with promise of yet another year to come. I wear a green millefiori heart from my childhood. Valentine's Day is almost upon us. Vito and Sinead's birthdays coming up. Vito, at 70, after chemotherapy, is also too hot to handle, but he is jubilant to be still in the game. I'm in a public place. So, should I drop the "l," is the word pubic too graphic? There's nothing like that prickly feeling when your pants are hot and sticky from spilled tea. I can't help but feel renewal with that turning of the sun, also too hot to handle. 

2/10/06 Writers' Group

BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT

BETWEEN DAY AND NIGHT

At that time between day and night
when everything is crepuscular in notion,
& the Cole Porter violin cresendo swells,
opens the doors between worlds,
is where the liminal and the real world collide,
where we dream, where we drift,
where you’re not sure where you’re going
or where you’ve been,
living both lives simultaneously. 

Vicariously.
Meanwhile, a petty dictator 

gets in the way of truth.

2/4/06