Yesterday C and I walked beside a beautiful wall webbed with Virginia creeper just starting to bud out red and lush. I told C that I really felt like writing a poem about that wall and she said, “Hey, what are the words?” The Words, as she calls them, are the Sunday whirl words posted on the FB page on Saturday. Most Saturdays I read the words to C and R and they tell me the first things on their mind as inspiration for my poem and then I usually go with something completely different…lol.

So I read the words to C and she said, “Good luck with that one mom!”

But reading the words over and over this morning I thought of The White Horse in Uffington. I love to walk that land and always feel a terrific happiness there. I took this photo of harebells growing at the ancient white bones of the horse.

saturate, control, bold, unwind, sword, often
skeptical, slight, might, sigh, ninth, threshold

I often climb the hill to the White Horse to unwind.

To walk around his massive body, to rest beside it, to sketch and write and dream of the ninth century, of the Celts and of magic, of the maiden the mother and the crone.

To sit on the damp grass and let the sun saturate me with warmth; the Vale stretching blue and violet, the horse shining white and bleached and bold in its green pasture flecked with daisies and harebells and butterflies.

Walking close by is a woman. She doesn’t look back at her husband; there’s no need. She knows he is behind her by the familiar sounds his body makes as he exerts himself.

He is skeptical about a line of rocks and resents being sent from the air-conditioned, captain’s chaired coach now cooling in the parking lot.

He picks up a piece of the body, a bone white rock, a skeletal part of the horse’s back, passes it from hand to hand and tosses it in the grass scattering the crickets; the sweat from his forehead dripping off his chin.

The day fractures and the breeze turns on itself catching a dandelion clock in midair, swirling the parachutes around and letting them float to the ground with a sigh.

In the stillness of that moment she knows she has to leave. In that stillness I was sure that if she stayed her body might dip into the earth beneath her feet.

I lift the stone in my hand and hold it in the breeze and wash it in the sun that has warmed it inside and out for so long, smoothed back the little loosings of powdery rough so when the breeze calls the horse again he’ll know which way to look.

The man wheezes and turns to leave. He doesn’t realise that mounted in his hill of gold and green, the horse can’t call the breeze but only hears it breaking on his body and feels its aching pull.

There’s nothing his wife can say. She follows in her mate’s footsteps across the meadows. He turns to see she is following and there’s a slight controlled smile on her lips as she glances back to me.

She smiles to say I have to leave but I am still here. This is the threshold of my being. I am still made of that magic that I touched for a few moments today.

And a sword held in the hand of the mother is passes to the hand of the crone deep within the barrow, turning the breeze from east to west along with the setting sun.

Oh boy, it’s difficult to have a story line in my head that has little to do with the Sunday whirl words, but I persevered and hope this try doesn’t disappoint.

merge, project, activate, technology, unity, mantra,
smudge, sing, delicious, inquisitive, urge, stellar

In the crush of the people who merge from different corners of London into Victoria Station, a forced unity of technology, the evening exodus on the 19:35 to Haywards Heath, across the aisle from me is a girl with unbelievable hands.

They are pale, which suits her, and graceful and smooth and look like they sing fluent piano, even with thick rings of blue and green and one with silver butterflies fluttering together with every movement, tinkling on the correct fingers.

She slips the rings off in some urge to be free and lays them all on the table in front of her.
The butterfly ring rolls around the table and she stands it up and forgets it, and it rolls over the edge with the curve of the train and tinkles to the floor.

She either doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind but studies her hands which flit in front of her face now like messenger pigeons; her fingers project forward and fold to her palms in a delicious rhythm influenced by the swooshing of the train.

I watch her hands reflecting in my window although I think she might know because there is nothing past the window but the stellar night, so I wipe at a smudge to guard that I am watching at all.

She checks the articulation of her fingers according to the diagrams open in front of her and continues with her graceful mantra, every sign mirrored, not that I would understand the difference.

As the train stops at Gatwick she picks up her rings and folds the patterns of speech and secrets them into the pocket of her peacoat.

I notice the butterfly ring on the floor as she begins to walk away and bend down on one knee to retrieve it.

“Miss, I think this is yours.” I call out after her, but she doesn’t turn, doesn’t hear.

She steps from the train to the platform of the active station and into her soundproof dark.

She throws one inquisitive look to the window and I, looking back, don’t know what to say.

Beautiful, beautiful words to play with this week and, once I had an idea, this wrote itself. Except for the pesky word “jar”. Couldn’t manage it even after 17 tries and every possible meaning, so was forced to let poor jar stand on the sidelines like that last schoolchild no one wants to pick to play the game.

disguised, forgotten, country, hurry, tree, wound,
mind, sand, stirred, jar, across, yesterday

Yesterday I followed the pulse of a tree.

My mind was open in the forest’s hush of chirping insect and slicing bird calls and creaking tree joints, when a human heartbeat echoed thru the curvature of the trees and my own heart danced a painful rhythm in response.

I walked on thru shattered sunlight, the carpeted trail forgotten, and the beat and the light intensified until I found the source of the pulse.

A fallen tree. A giant cedar lying with his great arms splayed in a river’s currents, water pounding into the trunk disguised as heartbeat.

He was born to this country and crowned by bird nests and weighed down by long-haired club moss and moved by the winds and the rains and uprooted by vine maples inching over his kingdom.

I pressed my hand into the stringy bark and the throb reverberated up my arm and my fingers came away tingling at seventy beats per minute, a good resting heart rate.

A bit of peeling bark revealed a wound, sap flowing, merging with the river, I leaned in close, the water thump stirred the resting king beneath me and my heart rate slowed down to match his.

And as I pressed my body to his I thought I was a great cedar but I’m a vine maple instead. I am not strong. I’m thin, green and malleable, funny leaves, flattened hands reaching to pet whatever passes, whirligig seeds, not a care what I stand on, marching quickly across sand, loam, rock, in a hurry for a new kingdom to conquer.

But right now my place is at the feet of the cedar, palms open reaching for the rain as it filters down thru the thick protection. Misty vine maple who clings to his rotten feet. Vine maple cowering under the king’s protection. He lives forever, he rules the forest he is vine maple’s shadow.

At night I dream of cedar, tall fish-spine branches and candle-flame seeds. I’m forgetting now, it’s rotting in my mind, the gnarled wilderness of this forest-chest, in soft animal hair curled tight against skin, under wing-twisted clavicles, fingers tracing strings of moss up my spine and out my shoulders folding back and diving toward my waist.

I did what I always do this morning. I read the words to R and C who said, “renovation” and “living in Tuscany” respectively. In the end it turned into an ode to a shoe cupboard … naturally.

Actually, I have to blame thank Jeannine and Alicia for the inspiration over a little FB joke.

(Jeannine, the Manolos pinch!)

paint, use, sprees, outsider, away, fearsome,
part, reserves, body, intimate, written, window

There is a shoe cupboard built into the back wall of the bedroom closet of my 100 year old house.

I use it to store some of my silliest shoes; the results of overly-emotional PMS shopping sprees. I hide them away from the sensible part of my life.

My best friend came to visit a year ago and when he saw it he said, “When you renovate, this will be the first thing to go”.

But I think the cupboard will stay right where it is for as long as I live here because, while it’s a bit plain on the outside, the inside wall is covered with shimmering white and gold vintage wallpaper, a brilliant backdrop for my intimate fancies, a domestic geode bearing the glitter and sparkle of darling shoes.

The wallpaper is covering layers of paint; the last one is chartreuse, shining from around the edges like little moons.

I imagine the ladies who once filled this house, who filled the shoe cupboard with their shoes and their happy and fearsome days. The shoes are gone but nothing has really changed.

In this cupboard is all past strife and confusion, mistakes that we are, passed down from one before to the one who comes after.

Together we stand in our shoes. Bruised and beautiful in the filtered light from the closet window.

I can see you now twirling in your shoes on the wooden closet floor, your body looking perfect in each imperfection.

We fray the fabric of our lives; we count down the hours, dressing and breathing in the light of our mornings.

You can choose to see, you can choose not to see, but if you choose to see you must look deeper, harder, to sometimes strain, because the shoe cupboard reserves the answers you are looking for.

I sit cross-legged on the closet floor, my computer humming quietly beside me, the story waiting to be written, a cup of tea in one hand; I close the shoe cupboard with the other.

I started off taking the words seriously. Words like “blessed” and “snare” and “deserves” are serious words, aren’t they? But then I had a visit to one of my most favorite places in Vancouver, Southlands Nursery, and found these wonderful seed packets.

Now I know deep down, and I know you also know that these seeds will produce the same radishes, peas, etc as the not-so-wonderful seed packets, but don’t you think there could be something “Jack and the beanstalk” in a packet like this?

So, as long as the silliness is all around everything’s alright with the world.

blue, blessed, deserves, first, gasps, instant,
slap, snare, dust, unbalance, ride, wings

Here’s a first!

Let’s pretend that we’re an upholstered sofa grown on a sofa farm somewhere in Middle America by two fat-bottomed sofa farmers and their ten blessed children.

We’ll be shiny and new and have spring in our step and cushion in our fall and not a speck of dust on our creamy body.

Maybe we’ll live in a lovely parlor room with lovely ladies who do tea, crumpets and cakes and they will believe that a lovely sofa like us deserves adoring gasps and dainty things and adorn us with petit point pillows.

Then again we might live in a conference room feeling the unbalance of arguments from each side, hearing the slap and snare of verbal fights between husbands and wives who’ve lost the kind perspective in relationships.

Or we could live in a dark basement, our fabric flickering blue from the glow of the TV set, our middle sagging from the weight of so many teenagers piled on top like bushels of rosy apples.

After one of their drunken parties they may give us wings and carry us on their shoulders to some new and exciting place, like the middle of a park under a shady tree so we can sit and watch people passing by, our creamy fabric slowly turning green in the rain.

People will see us in an instant and stare wondering what we are doing and maybe they will come close and inspect us hoping to find a message in our decaying fabric.

And maybe the fat-bottomed farmers will ride by with their ten blessed children and they will wonder what their sofa is doing now.

But we won’t have to say anything. People rarely expect unexpected sofas to explain their actions.

I couldn’t find a truly representational piece of art work this morning and also I’m running out of time to post, so I’m going with this lovely, atmospheric bit of sky. If later I manage to find/create/alter one I’ll add it to the post.

Thank you Brenda for the lovely words to play with.

discipline, pieces, stealing, heroic, moment, fly,
prophets, limits, gazing, patience, tears, sublime

The air is thick this morning.

She stumbles to the window to slide it open it and to hear the rain and traps a fly between the panes and gets lost for a while in the frantic buzzing.

She walks down the carpet to the cold tiles and stands in front of the mirror with her eyes fighting hard, stealing focused glances.

She dresses and collects herself and the pieces of paper representing her week’s discipline in a garbage bag, steps out and feels the rain hit her face as she walks thru the city.

She shortcuts across the grass focusing carefully on each trampled blade and smacks her elbow into the elbow of a stranger passing by.

Her bundle falls to the ground; a sketch peeking out from the black plastic bag.

The startled man turns and stares at it; a night scene of a country church.

He sniffs his patience away and makes a heroic gesture of wanting to help from under his umbrella.

The rain is mercilessly editing the art work, stretching the limits of charcoal, quickly twisting the cross on the steeple and blurring the stars.

She stands in the rain gazing at the paper and willing the man out of existence.

In this moment she sees, and her tears mingle with the rain. The man’s shadow disappears behind her.

And it happens just like that, not in the blink of an eye, maybe a blink and a quarter, maybe a blink and a half.

He doesn’t see it, no one does; the sublime twists on the paper.

She slowly pulls on a corner of the plastic bag and exposes all the paper to the rain.

Somewhere up high the prophets nod their heads in silence.

This is what they wanted to say.