whennothingworks

via Daily Prompt: Tiny

I often write the word tiny, little, small, trying to describe certain things.  It litters sometimes the papers I write my words on.  This tiny little desire to catch my breath today, this tiny little bird sitting on the edge of the bird bath today, shoved away by two fat robins and then suddenly they decide to let it stay.

This tiny hurt inside from twenty years ago when you rebuffed me, the insults of a thousand people walking by– sometimes a push a shove a snide remark or glance. The tiny enormity of these hidden sorrows, the stupidity of tiny self-centered emotion, the silliness of the tiny little faces in our mirrors.

The tiny joy of seeing that hummingbird one day in front of my face just a tiny foot away.. hovering there like a tiny helicopter mechanical leaf a grain in the sand a drop in the ocean, that such a tiny thing is so beautiful so small so delicate and can leap and fly a thousand miles a day.

Those tiny little peas I ate when my mother was dying and I didn’t know it, savoring each tiny burst of delicate green popping in my mouth like my desire for a breath of clean air, or England in the spring.

That tiny star I saw yesterday morning outside in the dark in the autumn air and the tiny birds deep in the shrubs near me suddenly awakened from their tiny deep slumbers, the sleep of the last living poetry lovers on earth who soar and sing and chant sometimes deep into the night.   The tiny voices not so tiny but shattering almost the night the sky the clouds and even re arranging the stars……..

The dark sky lightened and the tiny little breeze that lifted the edge of my robe the tiny little whispering a mile away of cars that sounded like a weird ocean and the big pink open mouth suddenly lighting up the sky like Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor poolside in sunny LA.  The pink wide mouth just appeared and a very tiny bird flew into it as though flying into heaven– the bird so tiny even tinier than the tiny plane that glided past and tiny bird and plane both the same, but I saw the tiny bird shiver as it sailed by the lipstick sky.

Looking in the mirror I saw something tiny dark green like an emerald in the shade and then lit up suddenly like the ocean by a vertical sun, such a tiny glinting thing on my shoulder and I remember the beautiful girl a decade ago at the Opera and her tiny emeralds dripping down her beautiful neck and back like tiny little stones scrubbed by tiny little droplets from gushing waterfalls, rivers,streams, meandering meandering like the tiny yellow leaves I see floating down the river and vanishing now like the tiny tiny tears falling from my chin.

via Daily Prompt: Tree

Once I was almost evicted from a dinner party because of trees.   In a beautiful house in an old leafy town outside Chicago.   I was sad that whole sorry decade because of trees and what people did to them.  At the party I drank a lot of wine and talked about trees, instead of children, houses, kitchens and bathrooms or the latest post modern de- constructive menus at the latest restaurant….a particular favorite at the time was a place where they didn’t take reservations, didn’t answer the phone, and didn’t even care if you showed up… there were plenty of people to take your place…… the hostess was very kind, the food was good, but they all wanted me to leave or shut up, and I wished then, like I often do these days at dinner parties……that I was on a long, dark and very lonely road somewhere, flanked by towering elms, chestnuts, lindens, or oaks,… no cars or people in sight, perhaps the sad and lonely scalded moon like bones in the graveyard walking me home….

I remember Grandma’s cherry tree in Canada and all of us spilling into the garden.  Aunts, uncles, moms, dads, and all the cousins with their tousled hair and puffy little skirts climbing the cherry tree, catching a branch,  searching the ground…. the cherries bright red like Betty Boop’s mouth and sour as lemons with a little maggot inside. We picked them anyway every year– our little family ritual.  Then after we had gone, Grandma really picked them, every last one, no maggots, and simmered them with sugar, a little vanilla and something secret she kept in her damp apron grandma pocket,  and bottled them up in jars and put them all in a row in the cool dark basement, and next year we would eat them perfumed with the sun and laughter, the joy of that day, our summer vacation cherry happiness.

I remember once living in the slums, and the first time we drove to the rich suburbs of our new city and the trees bigger than houses and wider than mountains filling the sky with green fresh breath as if the world had just been born, and even dinosaur mouths  were too small to grab a handful of leaves.

I remember driving in the country and seeing the small white farmhouse with the white picket fence and the barn big and tall, the old elms and horse chestnuts bigger and wider still, the cozy, safe and secure warmth, like a mothers arms wrapping up the whole farm in her goodness.  And all the cows, horses, pigs and lambs seemed protected by those trees, even seemed to withstand the tornadoes and hurricane winds that lashed day and night.  And in the morning the old trees were still there, glistening with dew that fell on your face like a baptism.

I remember the tree on Oakley Ave, and the first time I saw a stupid person cut down a tree because it was in the way.  They didn’t want to rake the leaves, and they didn’t want to mow around it. They wanted more light; they were afraid a branch might fall down.  It was easier to cut down the tree.   And you, such a big strong man , ran outside unabashedly crying, and begged them to stop but they cut it down anyway. We both had to call in sick that day.

I remember buying my first house,  a small cottage with the biggest greenest Elm for miles around.  My beautiful tree that I watched from the window each season and especially in winter when it rose up like a hundred black sculpted arms and arrows to the sky.  Two years ago it caught Dutch Elm and I came home and saw the silver mark they put on the tree– a sign it would be taken down.   Marked like a pariah or leper or condemned man or woman, the silver circle of death.  The day they came with their trucks and ladders and chain saws I thought I would pass out from sadness, the horror of seeing that towering tree destroyed.  The birds flew out screeching and screaming and shattered the world that day.

J came over immediately and took me to the Botanic Garden and left me there in a corner while she went home to teach.  She gave me a bag of peanuts, fruit and a bottle of wine and I sat there weeping and drinking and eating while they hacked down my tree…. she picked me up later and took me to her house for dinner and made sure we didn’t get home until almost midnight so the shock would not be so bad…. but even then at midnight the nakedness, the baldness, the sterile bleak sadness.. we both screamed at the sight and had to cover our eyes.   I ran into the house and stayed there for days …

I live in a town where some people build very big houses and often trees are in the way and they cut them down…… the houses are now taller than the trees and this does not seem right to have houses taller than trees.  “Do not destroy the trees…”. there is a passage like this somewhere in the Bible but I forget where…. Perhaps one day they will not like the blue sky they will try to make it lower or higher or paint it a different color.

I used to sit in my back yard and watch in amazement two towering silver maples (that some people consider bad trees) in the garden behind me.  They were so tall and silver and sometimes on a very windy day with a storm approaching, I would sit in the garden and watch them, and weep over my mother and over all the trees that I have seen disappear over the years… some to sickness some to drought or wind or fire,  but too many to accommodate someone’s new kitchen or bath.  I sat there one day when the wind got more and more ferocious and my garden was almost shaking as though it would be ripped away.  I sat in my chair drinking and looking at the silver maples, how their thousands of leaves fluttered and glinted like old metal, then sparkled shiny like silver and then looked like snow like dew like frosted grey hair floating on cold rivers and the sky got so black and then green, but still I sat watching the old silver maples and I almost wished they would fall on top of me and crush me to pieces…..I forgot to mention those maples were home to hundreds of birds who twittered and chattered and sang themselves silly night and day.

One day a fierce wind broke off a huge branch of one of the silver maples and then a lady developer decided to tear down the charming old brick house, the thirty two year old mature  garden and decided the silver maples too would have to go away….

The house next door went one day.  And then all the trees on their east side (my west) were chopped down.  For years whenever I came home or woke up in the morning I heard chain saws or drills or hammers and something always came falling down. ..

Shortly after the trees next door came down to make way for a huge house with six bathrooms my mother died.   I sat there for days in a stupor drinking myself to pieces in my now naked garden, my American dream, my American nightmare suburb with all the trees to the north, south and west of me gone.

I went out and bought two trees and I planted them in honor of my mother and I called them Mamasha.   My two trees are now very tall and my yard is almost overgrown almost too shady too wild too crazy too weedy too unkept too unmanicured too insane too schizophrenic paranoid mad… because I want trees and green and no people or houses anymore……  so badly have I been shaken here in my little paradise, the greed for more houses and bigger and better spaces at the expense of nature’s most beautiful poetry….

I was naked alone in the garden with everything destroyed around me for bathrooms and kitchens ……… one day I was so sad for the trees and the birds and the squirrels and even the hummingbirds, who often rest for a long time in its upper branches…and I went up to all my trees and my shrubs and I wrapped my drunken arms around each and every one and I whispered, “I promise I will never leave you and I promise no one will ever cut you down.”

via Daily Prompt: Fierce

Fierce.  Like the maw of a lion.  The sun, this summer has been.  Beating down so relentlessly I want to jump into its mouth and fry like those little crisps you eat there in that cold and drizzly country of yours, or on the subway train, the sweaty half dead commuters  littering the floors with the tiny greasy crumbs. That’s how you feel sometimes when there is no rain and you think you will never see it again. You wander the villages and dirt roads half-naked and ashy grey with a little tin plate hoping to catch just one little drop and keep it there, a tiny teardrop of a lake on a plate you can lose yourself in.

Then suddenly July turns into August and September and the maw opens up but this time gushes rain and rain and rain until you want to go back into the maw of fire and never leave.

It was so cold today when I left work and walked outside. I saw some leaves turning red at the top of that tall tree.  It was too breezy and children I see are going back to school.  The trains the buses the cars and the roads are packed again.  Soon there will be that unbelievable sharp blue and gold crispness and appleness again.

Oh where did it all go, the summer fun of beaches and water and picnics? The long leisurely walks among the fragrant rose arbors,  and those roses, in all those lipstick colors and the waving and tossing of all the summer flowers. Waving hello and goodbye and hello and goodbye again.

Caught in the rain yesterday walking in the park with my groceries.  No one there.  The trees massive and happy and the shrubs wide and deep like walls for giants to leap…the air misty and shadowy and I could be in England in that grand London park or I could be in the Cotswolds chasing rabbits again by that meandering brook or by Dylan Thomas’ “holy streams”.

I walked through masses of goldenrod six feet tall mounds of black-eyed Susans, whole prairies of them, the Helianthus, all manner of the black and brown-eyed sunflowers like models strutting down the golden highways of America saying hello and goodbye and hello and goodbye again.

The rain fell harder and harder and the gold all around me was honey and amber and yellow cartoon crayons, golden chariots of fire, golden gods, girls and boys, and the gold was so  gold and the yellow so yellow….. if you don’t think you like yellow walk in this field now of golden-hued flowers,  the susans the sunflowers and the robin blue ones, like late delphiniums hiding.  As though a piece of  blue sky shattered and crumbled itself in.

The gold the gold the gold of that fierce and fiery voracious sun the sun I cursed on July and August  noons,  the unforgiving sun has given me this tumbler of gold dust this forest of filigree this carpet of moon this wet yet fiery afternoon and home I go lamenting already the sun the massive fierce maw of the lion the piercing eyes of the sky watching watching watching you and the beating of my heart is so loud so rough so pulsating the whole rainy golden park is one fierce scream of unspeakable joy……

via Daily Prompt: Mistake

Mistake?  My whole life is a mistake.  My mind my thoughts my hands feet hair and face.

I am my own black hole hurtling coming being existing in the nothingness that is my space.

I sit here in my Japanese robe at my desk in my room littered with papers books bills old magazines and a poem tacked on to the wall that you wrote decades ago.

It’s signed Love, John.  It should be signed Love, Maybe or Love Kinda Sorta

I was supposed to clean the house today, write on my blog today, start the first page of my novel today  look at the dozens of unpublished poems today.

I was supposed to not go in the garden today because it finally rained today and everything is glossy green shiny today. It was a beautiful grey day and much can get done on a grey day inside.   But, the sun has just come out and the garden calls but going out now would be a big mistake.

So I shut all the blinds and I sit here in the somewhat dark feeling lazy feeling tired feeling half eaten like a moth.

It’s harder and harder to get going and to remember why you should get going for what and for whom.

I could get dressed and start doing something.   Rick’s mom an 89 year old woman who died recently with all her wits about her was a wise woman.   She always told Rick that the first thing you should do in the morning is get dressed.   Just get dressed whatever it is.  Tea shirt jeans skirt tie shirt pants or dress.  For God’s sake just get dressed, the rest will follow.

I never get dressed right away anymore.  I go out disheveled, makeup less, underwearless, lipstickless, shoeless, I go out  in my loose opened Japanese robe and I walk around the front and the back of the garden and look at the grasses, the zinnias, the anemones, the Nicotiana and all the other nameless flowers.    A dog walker or jogger or mailman or UPS person or neighbor comes out and I run like a rabbit back down the long driveway to hide.

Mistake Mistake Mistake

My whole life is one big rotten mistake.  Anna once said she could be Oprah Winfrey’s only guest for a year and there was enough garbage in her life for a thousand trucks to haul away.

Mistake Mistake Mistake

The only thing that is not a mistake is a garden and all its flowers and trees and shrubs and the smell of watermelon after the rain.

Or yesterday, coming home  after the reception at the gallery featuring artists’ visions on the 25th anniversary of the Independence of Ukraine.  I loved the one artist who was dressed in sheer fabrics that clung to her wispy body like silk tattoos.  Her grey tight bun and weird shoes.  Why do artists always wear weird shoes?

In the parking lot on the way to the car I saw a rat and then another. Two big rats and a third.  Rats!  Rats!   Rats!   In Ukrainian Village, recently voted one of the hottest neighborhoods in America. ” Rats!”  I screamed.  You pretended you didn’t even hear me you are so enamored of this hot and urban neighborhood.

You drove me home to my safe serene green dark night “suburb” as you always say.  I got out of the car and smelled the dark soft night and saw  about a thousand white stars lit up like candles and smelled jasmine and vanilla and a scent five thousand years away.

Mistake Mistake Mistake

I am my own black hole hurtling whirling swirling in the quicksand of my rotten life and its rotten stupid filthy mistakes…… but for one minute last night stepping out in the garden and smelling the white flowers in the dark I realize that some things are not

Mistakes…..

I can hardly move my hands across the keyboard, breathe, speak or walk.  Much less explain, tell what I see this morning in this little plot of land I have been graced with.

Got up late — past 7:00 a.m., that, for a gardener is like noon.  You want to be there in the absolute quiet, stillness, translucence, clarity, fragrance, breathlessness of a garden waking up.  Just stirring from the midnight dreams.

Rushing to make the coffee and almost crashing through the glass door to step outside. Clasping the wonderful dark and bitter brew that gives me a lift when nothing else does…especially after last night’s  decadent slightly over the top dinner…. all that  wine….not so much at dinner but all that wine I drank wandering around the garden…..

Oh the glory of the garden even now at 8:00 a.m.! Everyone must still be sleeping…….  if only they could see this lovely almost heart aching Saturday morning.  The sun sparkling on everything and everything sparkling back with  dazzling colors, scents and forms.

The first thing I see are the morning glories.  The ones most people have,  deep dark purple with pink throats.

I found the little shoots growing all over the gravel driveway sometime in May or June, and in the tomato pots earlier and transferred them into big pots and put in tall tomato cages to contain them….. now all three pots are in bloom at various stages along the driveway…. dark grapey gumball purple.  Look inside and there are magenta stars etched out like ancient cave drawings and the throat narrows down into white and the stamen like a tiny pink ballerina.   The sun shining through makes them glow like they’re burning with a deep dark secret or the greatest love, with the intense pleasure of being this shade of purple, this alive, greeting the morning with blazing trumpets… you can almost hear them sing, hear them ringing out a call for joy. They’re growing in front of a wall of pink phlox that has started to bloom, looking like cotton candy and clouds,   reminding me of everything in my grandmother’s  magic garden… perfuming the air with the fragrance of honey,  grapes,  and apple blossoms…..

And the air, the  astounding presence in the garden of this air all around me, the deliciousness of the air that is as palpable as the fish broth last night as the mint or the basil as alive as the bubbles in the pink champagne,  the fragrance the essence of this air that is so strong and so elusive yet it seems to whisper and talk and wave to me though it is not there, the air, yet I feel it on every single pore of me inside and out of me and it’s so delicious so fresh and so clean that I keep looking up and down the garden to see if there is someone or something  in the garden showering it on me from something or somewhere.  You can actually taste and feel and almost see this air the billions of particles all around you and then pouring into your lungs  and  purifying you  like pebbles in a stream.

… As I wandered about in my long black and maroon Japanese robe the air blew gently around my ankles instead of sticking to me like glue….The air itself is happy.  Not too hot not too damp not too dry.  If air could be happy this is happy air, emanating from a happy benign gentle sun that doesn’t burn but makes things grow and not stick, makes things tall and wide and fluffy, slender and thick and dangling, upright and curving, throwing in a gentle breeze like kisses, kisses everywhere in the garden to make the big bad wolf of darkness go away….

No one out, few cars, as though the air and sun and sky and mesmerized planets told them all to go away or simply to stay inside for a while.   Let the birds enjoy the peace and quiet of humanless existence.  And they are. They are dancing and flying in each and every corner of the garden.  The air buffeting them around like kites…. so light they dance on tiny branches and settle even on leaves that hold them in a gentle caress— the birds seem to know it is a good morning, a beautiful morning, a brilliant morning, the kind you get once in a thousand years…… the kind poets write about in the month of June, the kind in some sleepy village in England where Beatrix wrote her children’s stories…

I have it here right in front of my eyes and can hardly stand it, all the beauty all these birds like little happy beings for once not hiding but dancing in the very air, sitting on the roof and then sliding down like children at play, chirping now madly,flying past the blazing morning glories. Dancing and dancing in the air, twirling themselves into birdy butterflies.

The bees are buzzing about the Russian sage that is a mass of misty lavender already gone to puffiness, looking like swirling clouds rising from the sidewalk in front of my house,  and there are all kinds of strange beetles, narrow, wide, long and short, striped with spots of purple, orange and blue, tiny white butterflies going in and out of everything,  and then the monarchs too, one or two or three only, but even one is always a joy.

The black butterflies are back, dark as midnight with tiny blue markings like eyes… and oh, the cosmos, masses now blooming in deep wine  bordering on lunacy.

I can hardly sit here and keep writing and don’t know why I am writing instead of flinging myself out there, throwing myself on the ground, into the pots, on the grass, trying to grab a bird to dance and waltz and jitterbug with in this garden, grab each molecule of air and shove them into my mouth for later when the dryness comes again, the dampness, the cold— yes the cold, it was a tiny bit cold yesterday and dark and grey and drizzly… but a good light steady drizzle that finally drenched every leaf and tiny shriveled root that was begging for water these last few weeks……

You can water and water and nothing works like a rain, a gentle long and steady rain, a long cool drink for each and every living thing…. and then the morning comes shining into the world calling you with its gleaming, its brightness, its almost sugar candy  lollipop cartoon sweetness, the slow slow churning of the honey inside and the bees waiting the birds waiting the air waiting the glory there waiting waiting and waiting… come and see come and see this morning, and Rejoice!