POEM: On News That Scientists Are Studying Why Songbirds Sing

In the news today
There is a report of a scientist
Who studies why songbirds sing.

He has discovered complex
Harmonic arrangements
Between birds that was previously
Only thought possible between humans.

He explores the spontaneous
Nature of music in animals
So we might learn the role song plays in our lives.
I know what this is, of course, but it is not science.

When he completes the study,
When he has dissected each colorful note
And willful plea of the most buoyant songbird,
What then?

Will it still sound like sunlight?
Breaking glass, fighting through the dark
For mornings’ neonatal breath?
And where does the miraculous go?

POEM: Portrait of A Smoker

She is a study in silent stillness,
With cigarette lodged
Between her sharp, white knuckles,
Wrinkled and protruding,
The stem like a lighthouse,
Red tip aglow
Warning everyone around her
That she is engaged in a
Breathing meditation –
Stay clear of the shoal of her,
Beware the rocks and tenacious sandbars.

There is the slow arc of hand at hip level
Rising to meet the mouth
The way pale moon rises gently,
Her pliant cheeks bellow inward;
Her plump though chapped and meaty lips
Enrobe the filtered end;
Her gaze is just a sugary look,
Like glaze, with curly smoke
That entwines her far off eyes,
An incense offering that purifies
Her hallowed space,
Arms crossed like a bound and pious saint.
There is an exorcism of evil spirits that occurs,
Which inhabits the few free minutes
She claims as her own, breathing all the time
An exhale like prayer of billowy smoke,
Rounded, opaque and so gray up to God.

To the Indians of the plains,
Tobacco was this gift from God,
So they could commune with Maheo
So they could make their way back to Him
In the form of love that ascended
In the form of smoke – she exhales
Pillowed clouds that latch on to changing winds,
Like thoughts that are her inner monologue
Of what she is really considering now
At this very moment: this and nothing else.

For now, she is present
To the lit and burning end,
To the snug fit between her fingers,
To the gradual diminishment of her cigarette
And what remains – time and tobacco
In a constant footrace.

There is the glow of silence
All around her everywhere
And she is entirely at home.

POEM: Bounty

Each day I must polish the emerald that is my heart
For that is where the lust for green things lives
And grows and where bounty resides.

Each day I must welcome the rain too.
It is the planting and the harvest just as it is the feast.
For here too, is where bounty lives.

Each night I must pray to dream,
For that is how I touch heaven, just for a single moment.
It is where bounty originates.

POEM: Farewell

Your words drape over me like ribbon
That I tie in a foolish way around my finger
So that I may recall the flavor of your self
Righteous anger when I told you I was leaving.
I had moved on, as I had grown and you had not.
Or you had grown and I had not – I forget which it was.

You had thought me capable of more humane forms of murder,
You had thought me so capable of nearly anything but this,
But now this. Now this!

Now there is this blood on my hands and the guilt and all the tears -
But the delicious fragility of this travesty
Made me want you even more – this, my one weakness
In a world that devours the weak.

No – I think to myself. No – I don’t do “weak”.
I will pull myself up by the ribbon of all the words you’ve used on me.

I will acclimate myself to the separate strangeness of our lives,
I will unlearn the ticking your very day
And the sound of your very breath
And the heavy footfall of climbing stairs.
And the fading vision of a dream we once set out to grow
But now watch blanch white, in a natural dimness,
Like paling light at sunset against a mountainscape,
As we learn to see anew in various shades of gray
Soon to discover all the potential that darkness can bring with it.

POEM: Daddy Sutra

Ego is the public enemy of the heart.
It is okay to accept it and let it roam free,
Just never let it out and never let it speak
If you can help it.

Faith is the opposite of fear.
Silence is the music of the unseen
While stillness is the dance.

Tend to the light but know that all things grow at night
In the dark fragrant soil that was once other living things.

The earth does not know you by name
But rather by how gently you walk.

It’s fine to not understand your purpose on this planet.

Engage all things promptly whenever possible.
Find the common face of all things.

Acknowledge the times you are wrong and never crow when you are right.

Accept that everything you do will hurt someone or something
Then forgive yourself and start from there.

Be there for the sunrise and sunset;
Be there for friends in need and in joy.
Let others talk - for none of us ever gets chance enough
To talk about ourselves –
Each of us wants desperately to be recognized.
Love hides in the recognition.

When someone steps up to talk with you,
Push your chair away from your desk,
Stop organizing your mail, stop synchronizing your IPod.
Do not be a thief and rob your visitor of his moment to be heard.
No one wants to be voiceless.

Let the weather occasionally dictate your actions:
On warm days, eat ice cream.
On rainy days, make soup,
On snowy day, drink tea
And know that just like the animals you too are subjects
In nature’s kingdom.

Drive without the radio on or CD playing.
Walk without earphones.

When riding in a car as a passenger,
Roll down the window, stick out your head and try
To imagine what dogs feel.
Or close your eyes and pretend you are eagle making
Some harrowing cliff descent.

Be kindest to those who are closest to you:
Too often these are the ones who get the worst parts of us.

Devise a plan to eliminate resentment:
Give each one a name and give them a persona
Then plan a going away party for each one
And bid them “adieu”.

Dig in the dirt at least once a year.

Plant something by your own hand at least once a year.

Remember to dance.
Remember to sing.
Remember to pray.
Failure to do these things will make you sick.
Some African tribes believe this is the source of all sickness.

Acceptance is sitting in traffic, late for an appointment, looking at the clock
And not letting it bother you.

Contentment is not looking at the clock.

Whistle often.

When you meet strangers, smile.
When you meet friends, touch.

Cook often for each other. Feed each other for
A recipe is a treasure map into the heart of another.

Eat chocolate once a day. *

* - not for diabetics or those who are lactose intolerant.

POEM: Suddenly, I Am The Wave

First, I am the still pool of blue love that bobs like cork on pond water
I am the pond with borders so defined that I will defend them to the death.
I will pull back at regular intervals just like the tide.

Then, morning will appear as it does today like a jewel.
The look of another, or maybe the music of a human voice convinces me
That we are not separate at all – the fresh cool air of a smile,

The way my heart sounds to me coursing through my own ears.
Then, suddenly I am the wave that rages like a sun flare
Travelling millions of miles in the vacuum of space,

A pulsar that reaches outward into the expanding ink of universe
Each cell pushing outward, agnostic and reckless;
Each cell, a galaxy in its own right. In between all things

Is the great vacuum that was God’s first home,
Before everything became incarnate - before body and spirit
Before blood and muscle, before muscle and bone, before hard and soft and

Even before the yes and no of everything.

POEM: The Ways That Rain Dances

There are ways that rain dances on solid roofs and thick plastered ceilings
That remind me of a metronome
Marking gain and loss in quarter, half and full note rhythms.

There are ways that rain dances like thoughtless fingers rolling
On the desktop keeping time to secrets that swarm my head like honey bees.
The ones I have forgotten, that wake me from a solid sleep,
The ones I hold in my hollow as regret.

There are ways that rain dances that suggests how well it knows
The obscured parts of me, the most remote sorrow of me.

The rain comes to me like spring with barrels of expectation.
I understand its grayness, I understand its muted light
How it needs to say nothing at all to be heard,
How it moves through me defying gravity like xylem
From my feet to my head in all its wanton lust for lazy stillness.
It is in this lust for stillness that I am just a little more made whole.

POEM: Brother

Have I told you how the gentleness dances in your eyes?
How the fire bobs freely in your wavy hair?
How the flecks of "welcome" spackle the brillo of your beard?

How was it that you were spirited away from me? At birth?
What angel stole you?
How could we not have noticed?
Like Disciples on the road to Emmaus,
Weren't our hearts burning all this time?
In breaking bread? In stories we shared, and what was said?

You have stood in my shadows.
I shall stand in yours, too,
Though we have signed no blood oath
As young boys sometimes do,
We did not spit into our hands and slap our palms,
And agree to the mischievous deeds by which boys are often recognized.

No,
The contract is written onto the fleshy parchment of our hearts.
Notarized by a painful hill-climb on a bicycle,
By the hole our fathers left in us,
By what we hope to add to the dreams of our children,
By the breadth and height and width of everything that we love.

You are a gift without my wanting,
You are the target for which I aim with squint eye cocked,
Slant head bent,
You are God’s bow and I am the arrow sent.

POEM: Recommencement

In late May the local colleges
Disburse the young and the hopeful into the world
The way poplar and ragweed issue pollen into the air.

It is this re-seeding every year at this time
That is so eternal:
Its flowers are their dreams -
Its rainstorms are the many trials that await them -
Its fresh sunlight, the many successes which further emboldens them -
Its fruit is everything that is brand new
Or soon will be the brand new
About the world, about living and us.

POEM: What If?

What if you were offered the chance to love something
more than yourself?

What if you could love something so much that it nearly killed you every time you were apart from this thing?

What if you were offered a chance to love something so intently,
so complete and so pure -
but only if you agreed that this thing could be taken away from you at any time, without a moment’s notice?

Capriciously. On a whim. Cruelly yanked away.

What if you were offered the chance at the most perfect love,
the most perfect way to love: to give it and receive it
but only on the condition that it just would not last.
It would not last at all.

Would you do it?

POEM: Early Spring Sky

Let it overcast,
The air rife and warm, bear the life
Of moisture and mystery -
I am pleased to let it cradle me.

Let the sun and space of shade repose
Beneath the cool clumpy shadowlands above me,
With windy hands that scatter poplar seed
Aloft like a secret, or a child’s bubbles.

In stifling slow motion, these dervish seeds
Twirl on the axis of hope -
That one day, it will be a sapling,
Soft, alight, free as quiet, as dreams always are.

Let the wind gasp through the afternoon –
These skyward cartoons,
These parade floats that turn the
Pensive day into moody night.

Let me rest in summer’s breathiness.
With a serious death-bed brow, enzymic clouds
Play music that urges sunlight dance
On the ground, it weaves the dimmest charcoal shapes.

Let it overcast, and huff,
Make the gulls linger one moment longer,
So they swoop in languid arcs of flight -
A starched white against the gray amorphous light.

Let the mysterious comes to life,
Coupled within the craters that reside in me,
Where passions pool too deep to speak of
And where everything yearns for freedom.

POEM: The Rain Makes Me A Contemplative

It forces me inward in a way that nothing else can.

The mountains make me humble,
Forging rivers make me weak.
Stars evoke the mystery of me.
Autumn leaves squeeze out the gratefulness.
The snow, like a mother, holds me in the crook of her arm
When I need holding most.

Only the rain presses her fingers to her lips
And invites me to whisper, not speak a word.
Only the light drumming of water sluicing
Down the gutter spout, the ticking seconds of
Time as it ages, reminds me how I need to be mindful and kind.

Only the gray light of a rainy morning insists that
I spend a holy moment in wonder:
Of the illusions that I hold,
The doubts that I carry like scuffed luggage.
Everything.

Of course, it brings the flowers with it too; greening pastures
As if a charm for the new mowing season.
It flits as soundless as a sparrow's heart.
Like an earnest want, wanting what is best for me;
It seeks a center where stillness lives
Where everything else will always wait.

POEM: The Secret Of Life Haiku

Gratitude is a
choice we always hold cradled
in our open hands.

POEM: Waiting For The Bakery To Open

I am waiting for the bakery to open -
Maybe for a Danish, some coffee for sure – my needs are simple –
It is my only chance to know the day as a friend.

I turn my gaze inward to where the quiet of space resides.
I will excavate un-mined silence like forgotten buried jewels,
Today, even the songbirds will marvel at my unrehearsed song.
I will push aside all the noise and watch what grows.

POEM: Breath Poem

Your were a friend, but then lost my address
You were a son or daughter, but now are orphaned.
You were in love only to become disillusioned by
The drama and the breakup.
You were alive and animated but then you passed on.

In the end is just the breath
That begins over and over and over again.

If not my own breath then yours,
If not your breath then creaturely breath,
If not the breath of creatures, then the sound
Of wind high in the hills,
If not the wind, then just fluttering wings
Of the luna moth,
Or the monkish junco, back for the new season.

Everything returns to the breath.

In the beginning too, it was just breath.

We artists of the creation that is “we” –
We squeeze truth out of light and dark,
From the sweet and the venomous
Both within and without us.

POEM: Aren't There Just Times?

Aren’t there just times
When you want someone to know?
Times when you feel like a hole
Has been punctured in your skin
And you leak all over everything?

Aren’t there just times
When the loudest shout is not enough?
When you want to stop people on the street
To explain how the pieces of your life
Fit together
And how they don’t?
How what she said and what he said
Was wrong
And how ready you are for what
Will happen today or not?

Aren’t there just times?
When you are right but everything
And everyone around you
Could care less?
When you want to cry and can’t?
When you DO cry and can’t believe you
Are crying now – of all times –
In front of him? In front of her?
Before them all?

Aren’t there just times?
When your fingers won’t stop drumming?
When you can’t get awake,
Or won’t stay asleep no matter what
Remedy you self prescribe?

When the smallest of things takes hold of you
Like the dry season,
You believe anything could burn
With the careless act
Of one careless match
And a spark
And all the possibility that brush fires bring.

POEM: The Commission

Tonight,
I commission you to make new promises:
Here, in our presence before everyone
And with the wild Kentucky Bluegrass to bear witness -
You are to write your history and your own tomorrow.
You are to carve out a new place in your heart
For the old passions and the new.

You are to remember everything,
The good and the bad.

Bring it all with you for you will need it
To refashion new youth
And re-passion a new path –

You are to reveal vistas yet unviewed,
And learn the music of songs yet to be sung.

We will make wishes of peace for you:
Full throated wishes of grand and long health -
Wishes for the embrace of warm friends
And warm beer -
And always the promise of more for you.

POEM: Promise

Today is earth’s damp gratitude
A spongy soil sort of promise.
It is that impulsive instinct
Dormant in every single atom:
Grateful for the loping boughs,
Of swinging pines;
Unrepentant for all the remnant decay
Scattered everywhere.

I pause to clip
A strand of forsythia branch,
And with my hands I bend that yellow branch
Into a wreath which I plant firmly on your head.

I kiss your lips as light as drizzle.

Beneath this canopy of spring,
In the presence of the sharper light
Of longer days,
We wed -
Each one to the other,
Then each of us to the earth –
Then both of us to every thing
That wriggles and crawls and flies
And gallops and walks -
In seasons yet undreamed by us.

POEM: Mystic

(On the event of John Patrick Thomas Nields-Duffy’s Christening,
Easter Sunday, 2009)

When they ask you what you believe in,
Tell them you are a mystic -
Tell them you believe in the miracle of the ordinary.
That simplicity glorifies God.
Tell them that work is how you pray.

Prophesy the whispering glint of each morning,
Your brotherhood with the pines and
The rapacious shout of each noon sun overhead,
As these are all the proof you need.

Trust what bubbles up from within
When you are alone, gripped tight
By the quiet footfall of a drowsy first snowfall
When your eyelashes catch the fragile white cloud shavings
That drop quiet as secrets all around you.

Closely watch the snowflake as it jukes downward
Into lumpy piles on the ground –
And that will teach you how to live.

POEM: A Good Buddhist

An enlightened Buddhist
Would put your kindness behind him;
Would hold the moment of your presence
In the palm of his hand and let it fly
Like unseen galaxies being born.

An enlightened Buddhist would never
Fold up your goodness into his wallet
So he could take it out to read like an old poem
Or share with others like a photo of a loving child.


But I am not an enlightened Buddhist and
I only aim to preserve the grace of you that overwhelms me -
One more pearl I string on the necklace that is my life.

POEM: Morning Glory

Leaning over in the dark April chill
Is the warm curve of you.
It is not a lust of the feminine I seek
In you, but rather the refuge
Of the turning into you, that
In the tempest of my sleeplessness
You are there – unaware – perhaps
Of all the sliding down that I do,
The slinking panic and the
Balled up fear that at times like these
Wells up in the vulnerable parts of me.

Still –
Leaning over in the dark April chill
I have the warm curve of you for shelter.

POEM: A Million, Million Colors

I wish you settlement.
I wish you travelled miles
Further on down the road.
I wish you contentment
And love in a million, million colors.
I wish you heaping servings of bravery,
And the peace of morning stillness.
I wish you closure and every new opening there is.
I wish you discovery and the breathiness of astonishment.
I wish you good food made by hands you know.
I wish you warm tea on cold nights,
And the cool affirmation of summer breezes.
I wish you love in a million, million colors –
And the kind of joy that you just have to sing
I wish you the growth that only dark nights can bring.

POEM: Hicku (A Hickey Haiku)

as kisses go this one comes
close to violence -
this bruised purple fruit.

JOURNAL: The Light of Early Morning

The light of early morning is not the same as the light at twilight. It is rather weak and submissive. It is not overpowering. The sun – a star of some repute – dreams the day. That is the only explanation for why the light in early morning is so special, why doves moan in it, why skunks and possum hunt for grubs in the watery dark. It is a light that holds all matter in suspension.

The quiet lonesomeness of this light differs so much from twilight. I can’t deny the promise I feel in it; its potential is horizon-less. Overhead, on clear nights, stars play in a molasses field. Then the black begins to drain into gray and then a drawn pale blue. Soon – and especially in the colder months – planes overhead leave crossing jet streams that look like stitchery. In the infant sky, it looks like the tracery of crystallized water as it freezes.

When that oversized orange ball, plump and vulnerable, elbows its way over the line of the horizon, for a moment I am breathless. I spend so much of my waking day looking for goodness everywhere only to stumble on it, groggy and undeserving, find it unexpectedly in the confessional of this fresh squeezed sunlight. I am made foolish. I am turned dumb as to what is good and holy. I am dumb to evil. I am reduced to something subatomic, seeking an orbit around something else, something material all while my life is held up to me as something ridiculous, made tender by the gentle morning light.

This is a prayer. Prayer is not an invocation of some higher power. It is not a laundry list of wants or needs. It is not words at all. It is perspective shift. It is first shall be last and last shall be first. It is the rich becoming poor and the poor ascending to wealth. It is me, this creature of certitude turned back into the dust that was spirit first breathed into nostrils a million million years ago.

The light of early morning is not overpowering. It is subtle. It is small. It shaves off the rough edges of me. It pulls me inside out and exposes me and for this reason I feel we must all greet the morning alone.

The light of early morning like harbor lights leads me home. Like the sand and ocean, it speaks of home to me. It is fresh every time and cannot be drawn or photographed properly. Like the face of God, one cannot look directly into its face but not out of fear of dying, but rather out of fear of not recognizing it for what it truly is: a sweet song, a papery touch of a lover, the favorite smell of my baby’s fresh washed hair. All these things pin me down and hold me motionless and here is where I know God to be.

POEM: I Want To Be As Strong As an Onion

I want to be as strong as an onion in how I love
Strong as an onion that is cooking –
I want to be stripped and sliced
Diced and white and nude
Caressed by the affirming touch
Of simmering viscous oil.
I want to languish in the softness
Of giggling heat,
To be caramelized over you,
Covered in the slick juice of you
Yet infused beneath the thought of you,
I want the very touch of sautéing flesh
That is every bit the savory jib of me
Turned over into the convulsive flavor of you.

POEM: I Am From

I am from love, a boisterous light that shuns the shade of propriety.
I am from words, holy artifacts and from the swinging rhythm of speech.
I am from sacrifice which shines the dream bright gold.
I am from trust, the grit I toss on the ice to keep me upright in winter.
I am from solitude that polishes my soul.
I am from whispering pines and mountain wind prayer.
I am from early light that washes everything clean and new.
And I am from twilight which hushes me to sleep at night.
I hold all things of value internally;
I leave the bric-a-brac of outside things
Angled against the shed and house
And know they will not last,
That they never point the way
To the pith of me.

My Father's Hands

The memory of how thick his fingers were catches me off guard. They are oversized hands, swollen like sausage overblown from the frying, something overripe. His pointer floats along the open church missal instructing both my brother and me where we should be reading along with the priest while we secretly make fun of those fingers, by doubling up our own and pointing at things around us, then laugh rife with the ignorance of kids.

But I also remember how his hands hold a football, how plump and meaty are the heals of his hands from the years off working as an electrotyper – a position long since replaced with the advent of the personal computer. The long, repetitive motion, the tedium of the job all took its toll on his body as he adjusts metal plates with these fingers that remind me of thickly braided rope.

These are hands that can change a flat tire on our station wagon on a warm summer night traveling from the beach. At night, in the shower of transient parkway headlights, these hands seem like mitts to me; they twist the stubborn lug nuts with relentless effort; they press into the bar of the jack, lifting the car, while my mother basks in the warm island air and smiles with the firm assurance of one who is cared for. He holds the spare tire like a Eucharist between his hands like he is giving thanks and here he seems so omnipotent to me.

I still see those hands on that dark night that, hands that glowed with power. As boys everything in the world seemed so much more powerful than we were. My father’s hands represented a power to protect. In this way, these hands were shelter from the few things we knew or believed could harm us, but also the many things out there we were incapable of imagining that could harm us as well.

Today as a grown man, as a father myself, I know what those things are out there that can harm my children. I know of the shadowy truths that we don’t like to talk about or think of. I have come after all this time to finally see the rough worked hands of my father as the only home I have never really left.

POEM: The Blessing of Homecoming

When your breath is frozen and sadness consumes you,
Stand motionless, like a hunter stalking prey.
When doubt is the only language you know, give in.

Accept that you will never know everything.
Accept that ignorance is just one more wanting among
All the others that puddle deep, deep within.

Do not judge the entirety of days by all the pacing that you do
In the grand room of every day moments –
Not everything is significant.

There are many doors through which guests may be greeted –
There are many windows to welcome the light.
Nothing needs to be shunted.

There is time to be unreasonable, time to change your mind.
You do not need to be anything at all
And you do not need to answer the telephone.

Dive below into the great green ocean that is you
For it is always the hidden things that kill us
In torturous time and in grueling ways.

No one ever makes sense of the instant of surrender.
It is not a way of living that I am talking about
But a split second of concrete uncertainty.

Like recognizing a loved one out of a crowd, it just comes to you
This recognition of the stranger you are to yourself -
It is a great blessing that has at last become your homecoming.

POEM: Step 9

At step 9, you were to make amends to me -
but this is irrelevant:
I forgave you before I even knew your name -
I forgive you now, as these words spill across the page -
I will forgive whatever is left in us,
Known and unknown:
Face to face,
Tears to tears,
Hand to hand.

But even this is irrelevant:
For it is healing we need,
So -

Restore your heart to its fullest size
and cook the dinner,then let me do the dishes

Finding My Second Grade Report Card

It felt like a sucker punch, right to the gut as the card floated into my line of sight, the ghostly green shade of card stock that looked at once both foreign and familiar. It was like seeing an old photo of oneself; you recognize shapes and colors at first, but not the details of what you are viewing. The familiar is as assuring as it is disquieting when at a family function recentlyI spotted what turned out to be my Second Grade report card from St. Anne’s in Garden City, Long Island, where I grew up.

I could almost hear the neurons in my head firing, remembering. I imagined the dust flying off in all directions and mice scattering to the deeper recesses of my brain. I envisioned my memory as a musty old museum replete with a deep maroon velvet rope to cordon off areas to be preserved for posterity and never accessed.

My sister had been clearing out her garage and found this unlikely fossil in a box. On the top was the serious and official looking logo of the Diocese of Rockville Centre (and yes, “centre” was spelled that way – the English form, perhaps to give it even more of “headiness” to it.)

My reaction was both visceral and uncontrollable, the color, the shape, even the faded ink from the fountain pens that we wrote with in those days that appeared on these report cards all caused me to jerk just momentarily.

I read the teacher’s name: Sister Du Bon Conseil – RSHM – the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. As a second grader I had bastardized her name, as second graders will do from time to time with adults’ names, to something like “Sister Dubon Secord” and for the longest time I thought that was her name. It never concerned me what the name meant or if it even had a meaning at all. I did not consider religious life or who these nuns were who gave up their worldly lives for this teaching life. They were like a club, in my head. They wore uniforms, the way I wore uniforms. In second grade, you do not consider your place in any world larger than what you experience day to day.

I was shocked to see my grades, and that they were numeric grades for things like Math and Science and it struck me as harsh. I mean, having raised my children in the era of soft grading where “check plusses and check minuses” were all the feedback we received on how my kids were doing in school, this threw me for a loop. I mean, how could an adult give a second grader a 75 in Science? Worse was the fact that I got a “C” in Art and it hit me now where some of my phobias about trying to paint, or draw or sculpt originated. How do you give a second grader a “C” in Art?

Sr. Du Bon Conseil – whose name means Sister of Good Counsel in French – was of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, a teaching order founded by the French priest Jean Gailhac in 1802 and Mother St. Jean in 1849. They had a special mission in education and to this day are even linked to such prestigious colleges as Loyola Marymount and Marymount College in NY.

Our good sisters wore the navy blue habit of the day with long pleated skirts that hung like drapery. They had pockets that seemed to go on forever, like Mary Poppins’ magical carpet bag, there was nothing that I didn’t believe one of the sisters would not pull out of there. They wore a top that was almost cape-like, midsection firmly bound tightly by a navy blue cloth. The veil was a starched white arch that rose from one ear, over the crown of the head to the other. The navy blue veil was somehow attached to this device that kept the veil on their heads, though I also recall them fussing with it often. On the few occasions when you could actually see their legs, say, if they needed to tie a shoe, you saw the thick opaque navy blue nylons and I wondered if their skin below what was covered was actually navy blue. Many of us wondered exactly what was under those thick skirts, and this was nothing at all sexual. Of course at our age we wondered if they had feet or if they had some sort of flippers. To us, these were not women, they were forces of power in our lives. They controlled our immediate happiness or sadness on any given day; they had complete control, where our parents’ control ended at home, theirs resumed once at school, so complete and intact was the sense of authority they imbued.


Sr. Du Bon Conseil was the teacher who told my mother in front of me that I was an “overachiever” which means, I suppose that I really had little innate intelligence, but I worked like hell to compensate. This is fine with me. I always much prefer being labeled a “worker” over someone who was just smart. Thinking of Sr. Du Bon Conseil reminded me of some of the other nuns I had whose name I can still recall:

Sr. Antonoio Marie – a tall, stern looking woman with a reddish face and who had a penchant for picking her nose when she thought none of us was watching. There was Sr. Bernadette who was this tiny, fearful looking woman who was the principal of our school. She scared the sin right out of us, but I can’t recall why. I do remember her extra thick glasses and a very round face. Perhaps she looked alien to me, I can’t exactly recall. Sr. Andre Marie was a small fireplug of a woman, young, who would often play “keep away” with us. She could outrun most of the boys, and we noticed the small mustache beneath her nose. Looking back on it now, I am sure she might have been a lesbian, but we had no knowledge of these things back then.

One of the things the sisters used to make us do was to start every composition by indenting two-finger’s width for paragraphs. I recall lining my fingers up against the faint blue line of the looseleaf paper. At the top, they would have us write the phrase: “ALL FOR JESUS THROUGH MARY”. I had no idea what this meant, and in fact, even today, I would be hard pressed to explain it. Except that as Marian nuns, they honored the presence of Mary in the life of Jesus. You could think of it as honoring the feminine presence in all things. To this day, whenever I am at a Staples, looking to test one of those pens they leave out for customers to purchase, that is the phrase I invariably write.

As I looked now at my report card I noticed how I had thirteen days absent in the second quarter and I remembered how I’d had my tonsils removed in that school year. This was also the year the Beatles played at Shea Stadium because I remember not being able to talk after the procedure so I could ask my older cousin Chuck just what “the Beatles” were, that night that he came over to ask my teenage sister if she wanted to go to the concert.

I noticed now how profoundly “Catholic” the card was designed. It was clear someone put some thought into the design. It was broken into subject areas by sections: there was the first section at the top labeled: “GOD” and under that was only one thing – Religion. Then came the section labeled: “MY FELLOW MAN” under which fell the subjects Social Studies, Geography and English. After that came “NATURE” under which Math and Science fell. At the very bottom of the card was the last section labeled “SELF” under which only the subjects of Handwriting and Art appeared.

I laughed at this. I presume this was how I was to live my life as a Catholic, and they took even the opportunity of an evaluation to indoctrinate. I was to love God first, then my fellow man, then nature and at the very bottom, only then, could I consider my self.

On the back and at the bottom of the card when I turned it over there were no comments from Sr. Du Bon Conseil. I was hoping there would be; maybe some nugget from the past I could use to help me understand myself just a little more, who I really was and how I came to be this way. Nothing.

At the very bottom though was where my parents had to sign the card to show they had seen them and there was the signature of my Dad: Richard L. Biegner. It took the wind out of me just for a second because to be honest, my Dad has been gone 34 years to the day that I am writing this and really recall nothing personal about him. Mostly I can’t remember his voice and it bothers me a lot.

Pictures don’t capture the essence of a person, but a voice does. And a signature does too. Seeing his signature, I touched the long ago dried out ink hoping for some sort of communion. The slanted “R” in Richard with that big oversized loopy “L” for Louis, his middle name. Then the braggadocio of the inflated “B” in Biegner – these letters were all written by his hands, hands I once remember admiring and writing about, hands that were capable of anything to me as a second grader.

Here before me was the accretion of his past as a child in a possibly alcoholic, dysfunctional family – what had he seen growing up and what events in his life made his handwriting look the way it did? Suddenly I recovered a link that I thought I had lost so many years ago: this report card, with his signature on it was just like a fossil. This signature reunited me if only for a moment with a man I had only known as a child and then in the tumultuous years as a teenager.

The magic of ink on paper cannot ever be overstated. It is as flesh and bone and as tactile a ghost as one will ever find. These things surround us every day if we are only open to them.

I am not a “thing” person. In fact, I am forever telling my family that we are just not “thing” people, we are “people” people. Things will come and things will go. It is the people we carry with us. But that night, I tucked the report card into my rucksack like it was a relic, a precious bone of some holy saint, knowing that for me, I had found my most precious possession.

POEM: Faith

your fragrance is sage that purifies
soft thighs the pew
into which i rest;
open welcoming hips
the collection plate
into which i am tossed;
round, tossed charging breath
the choir of my heated skin;
the divine and profane
on my lips to your tongue
when love drips
white, clear and vicscous
from my soul to yours
from my eyes to yours.

POEM: To My Dearest Writing

Someday it will happen;
I will untangle all the knots,
And it will be you
With that abused, smirking, grimace;
Seeming like a stranger
Never showing the patina
Of the familiar;
It will be you unraveling
String & Grace,
Welcoming
The unwrapped.

POEM: The Darkest Decembers Grow Into the Balmiest of Junes

We are more than the Decembers of our darkest loss,
We are also the warm Junes as well;
We are the endless daylight of friendship too;
We are the most barefoot-in-the-grasses pirates of love,
We are children on school-less, moon-less summer eves
Who believe in everything.

It is here you will always find us.
It is here, where we will always be.

POEM: Love Meditation

Let it go
The blame and the praise
The details of your vacation,
Your day at work –
Both the fear and the certainty too.
Let it go
Let go how jaded you have become of love, of others, of yourself.
Let it pass, noticed but never taken up,
Let go
The knowledge that we are wise, and even all the good we do,
Let go the guilt that comes from all the wrong doing –
Let it slip away as soundless as dusk at morning.

For this is all that matters in the small of your heart:
The subjective action of “I love” is the breath I take in
And the concrete object of “you” – is my glorious, warm, breath out.

POEM: Preparing For The Winter

Last night, I dreamed of wood spiders
Large as my thumb, nestled, snug deep in the firewood
Roused by the ruckus that is stacking wood
Like bricks, they stack; these stacks I build by stoking wood
To later dream of stoking fires -
I button up the withered season that yet survives.
I prepare for a time that will hold your absence,
Frozen in the palms of its very hands.
Who ever plans for the gradual diminishment that is life,
In slow, painful cooling days and nights –
And then the longer nights that devour days -
Who plans for just such things?


The firewood stares out, like a stony grave
To wait out the harsh season that will follow
While such neat and stiff-angled bundles,
Such blessẻd rugged lumber
Leans with gentle bias toward the house.

Quiet, I am free from the distractions
Of a faith in the immortality of things –
A faith that divides my silent heart
A faith with the same rock hard stare that is reserved for stacked firewood -

Come, I will build a fire made from the kindling of my heart.
I will love you in your life now and in your memory.
I will make you steaming mussels and you will teach me how to pickle
Red peppers and garlic like giant hearts afloat in white vinegar
Distorted by the magnifying glass of mason jars.


What remains in fullest bloom is how much
We loved each other -
Like firewood, stacked so upright and so tall,
That waits for the cold to come, against the sturdy warm resolve of you.

POEM: To The Slaughter

The terror of a sliding down life
Is the fear of a diminished heart.
It lifts and falls in muted movement
Like November clouds straining sun.
The hard, red stone that is my heart
Counts seconds as a reflex
That is want, ticking off the great suck
That are our most frantic dreams
Like running in water, or losing all our teeth.

Though. . .

I remember love
I know beauty
For these things sing in me
When I can recognize the tune.

But strong is your hold on me, immortal guest,
Fearful is the gravity of your mass.
The lamb offers her blinding white fleece
To the omnipresent future of the bloody vest.
My overcast spirit shuffles off to the slaughter
Where all of me is buried hard and deep
For the next lambing year,
Where everything is reticent and held at bay,
My God, my God – how again will sun ever recognize the day?

POEM: Taylor's Notch

Desiccate stalks of browning corn
Like good New England congregants stand
Reserved to listen to cool October reveal her secrets in slant light,
Each stalk whispers to the other and watches me
Ascend through stained glass daylight,
While I process up a foliate cathedral aisle ,
Boots scraped hardscrabble clean, rough hewn by
Razor sharp volcanic stone,
I climb the top of Taylor’s Notch
Transfigured by the solitude,
Reformed by pulsing blood sluicing through my ears
My breath etching the smooth plate glass of cool air.
I lean into the stern steep slope
That is the mountain leaning back against me.

At the top, incendiary Autumn is hard at work,
Like the black-faced statues on Easter Island,
I am watched by everything.
Every saw-toothed oak leaf, singed lightly
Around the edges, is ready to combust.
These are the colors trees are meant to be.
The chlorophyll just hides it all, like makeup,
Covering over summer’s gluttony:
The ochres so uninhibited; the yellows so unashamed,
Sumac’s harried shades of red and
Maple’s frantic orange try to keep a frantic pace
An ocean of tactile colors yet unnamed swirls below me-
Trees dance to the music of what they truly are
Without any remorse or one single embarrassed movement.

I have forgotten the chlorophyll that courses
Through the miles of my networked veins.

What colors lie within me?
What hues nestle deep beneath my skin-line?
What truths once drained of all my wanting
Will bubble up before me here
On Taylor’s Notch, before a prim audience
Of erect yellow pine and hemlock
And the quiet song that is the Holy West wind?

POEM: Nov 4, 2008

The change we've sought for too long
has come at last.
Let it leak inward, and destroy our masks.
Let it end the bleak, corrosive moments,
Let us be forgetful of mean things said.
Let it bring life to the hearts of the dead.
For we each one of us needs the other,
so become a sister, and become a brother.
To work is to be free, so be free and live!
And then?
Forgive,
Forgive,
Forgive,
Forgive.

POEM: Foxtail and The Construction Site

In a nearby field where once foxtail grew
Straight and lean, full lipped, with effervescent glow,
Dark and rich earth now broods, upturned and in grief -
There rest the rough-worked calloused hands of progress
In the guilt that is a simple mound of dirt.
I relive mornings that I watched the sun paint
The foxtail red as any blushed October.
What remains is a scar in the shape of loam.
But the way newborn grass refracts airy light,
I mistake this for some enduring tribute
To an immutable and ripening day

POEM: To the Asymmetric Rain That Would Not Abandon Me

To the asymmetric rain that would not abandon me:
You are loyal,
And Count each and every leaf
On each and every tree as you fall.

To the flashing lightning
That dies like a fluorescent kitchen light:
Dying is a job each of us is given
Though no one wants.

But you are arms that wrap me tight
In the friendless place
Of the end of night
And the promise of still more rain
Yet to drop onto my roof.

POEM: Breath Meditation

My inhale is God’s breath out.
My exhale is my deepest hurt.
This is how I converse with everything.

POEM: Had I Only Known

I would have jumped into that river to save you
From drowning
I would have pulled you out from the freezing water
And breathed fresh air back into your lungs
And pressed the reddest blood back into your heart
I would have carried your wet body
Cold as night back to up the house to rest
Cleaned you up - laid you out dressed in a stately way

I would have cried missing the smell of you
The comfort of you in my peripheral vision
I would have drunk too much coffee so I would not sleep
So I could tell you all the things I was too afraid to say before
I would have listened all night for that laugh again
I would have written you new poetry
Made even god cry hard enough to give you back
I would have kissed the coffin as it wheeled by me at church
As I tossed in my handful of dirt
As I peered into that hole as deep as sleep
I would have remembered how to pray

I would have jumped down into that hole to save you
Had I only known that I was drowning too

POEM: The Science of An Inner Life

I am a flag that flies stiff
In the wind over you,
Moved by forces no one ever sees.
I am taught control from my very birth.
That it is control which turns the very earth,
From west to east in a gradual dawn,
From shadow to light, from evening till morning.
But I have been gifted with no such wisdom.
I am just this flag
That signals a love for you
That wildly waves and knows you as true,
That draws attention to graceful silences
Which comprise the unearthly science
That is the inner life of all things.

POEM: When I Wake (Part I)

When I first awake
When I wake
When I first awake
And when I arise
When I awake and rise to greet the day
When I am alive and before I judge things
Before I am judge and jury
Of myself and others
Before I am sane and brim full of logic
While I am still groggy but before the deep rush
Of sobriety and good common sense
Races in before I hold back
And surround myself
Before I hold back and isolate
Before I know the meanings of words
Before I wear knowledge like clothing
Before words become mayflies
And I swat at them unmercifully
As some annoyance
When I first open my eyes
When alertness and caution creeps in like the dampness
When I am able to be
Just to be
Before my pain has had its first
Cup of coffee
When I am defenseless and stupid
And naïve and a dupe, it
Is THAT person that I want you to know

Me at my very best at my most inept
At my most unkempt
Slavishly attached to my disheveled best
Unhinged as an open box, open
To the joyful crying outstretched arms
Of the blue of sky which has waited
For me all this time
For the real me –
To once and for all finally arrive.

POEM: When I Wake (Part II)

When I am brother to all things
When I am sister to all things
When I am the sum of man and woman
Of flora and fauna
Of rock and water of land and ocean
When I am the dark dark matter
Aloft in the dream of space
In the dreams of my head
In the dreamy landscape of my bed space
Where I return to the place
Where everything hidden resides
Where the blackest parts of night go
Where the bruised glow of sunrise comes from
As it arises awash in dreams
When it awakes
The sun and I when we awake
When we dream from the same place
(And who knows what stars dream?)

But awake it too rises before the horizon
Tries to capture it border it
Keep it in and box it in
Before it too is sensible (for a star)
Brawny and bright awake and alert
Before it too is judgmental
While it is timid and seeks nothing
Asks nothing.

Awake we are the same
The sun and I looking for the salve of creation
For the divinity within us
To come through us into the world
Like a miracle
Like resurrection-
(That is what light is!)

Faith that pierces the hollering of doubt
Which brings the darkest parts of us to life
Through creation
In seven days or seventy –
It does not matter
With human ribs or dust
It does not matter
From spilled blood or not
It does not matter
Your myth is not my myth
It matters not to me.
Before I wake and judge everything around me
As worthy or not
Before my brain strikes these words
Dead in their tracks
Cold lifeless words
Mourned too young
Dead before they had seen their adolescence
Before I arise and wake
And this page is put back in prison
And Writers Block is the overbearing prison guard

Before all this happens
The white field of the page is mine!
Every verb is my musculature.
Every noun is what I move and touch and taste and see
Ever adjective is my heart thumping
It is all mine.
Where alone is not a four letter word
Where I rise and wake and eat and wash
Where I fuck and garden and cry and doubt

I wake and before I let the parts I show
To everyone else control my world
I greet the heart inside of me
That just wants to give birth
To everything!

POEM: Just Today

Today
Just
Today –
May I convert an enemy into a friend.

Just
Today –
May I be bread that feeds others..

Just
Today –

May I not wear love like a garment, with whimsy
But may love be the muscle and bone
Of who I really am.

POEM: My Garden Is an Expectant Mother

My garden is this expectant mother
Belly full and round,
Sagging with all this life it holds.
Tomatoes on the verge of red
They pull everything down.

The engorged cucumbers try to hide,
While knuckled string beans
Dangle like earrings,
Filled with harvest pride.

My garden is this expectant mother
Belly, full and round,
Waiting to deliver
All the goodness of the ground.

POEM: (What I Understand About) Women and Men

Women love tall men.
Women love bad boys –

While men
Are trapped
Like coal miners
With faces bitumen black
And starchy white eyes
That stare out from the void
In wonder about entrances
And the nature of fresh air.

POEM: How It Goes

This is how it goes
Me this old shoe
Scuffing around the house
Without you –
This is how it happens
I imagine the moment,
Calling 911,
Calling famiy,
What do I say
And how do I say it
I never thought you would go on
You were never
So adventurous –
This is how it goes
How lives cleave
Rip apart
Like a geologic fault.

POEM: The Sinfulness of Moonlight

The yellow moon gives you away,
This heat, the sadness in your voice,
A trip to the beach, you tell me – you might as well be
Stirring a cauldron, reciting latin-like phrases
And be dancing about nude, enticing the moon
To descend, to engage in Love’s
Profundity which grows in the dark, moist sky,
Like earthworms wriggling through the
Bark shade of soil as slippery as oil.

The clouds try to hide your yellow love
But they cannot even come close.

You are at this canyon about to step in…
Go ahead and smile - no grin - and enjoy the leap into sin.

POEM: On The Road From Ollytamba

Light rubs its dusty fingerprints on the town of Ollytamba.
It leaves a tarnished copper shade of red, a light fatigued and slender.
Ollytamba kneels before the mountain gods who stand around
Snowpeaked white like bearded prophets, protectors
Of this resting place for warriors.

The mischievous winds find their way in, they chase
Their tails round and round and round like a dog at play,
Circling the plaza, dizzying the children playing tag
And stinging my ears with a short sharp clip.

On the drive home, I watch the mountain gods recline
And the fog stretch her white legs and bare arms
As feathered white as the Milky Way.
Intertwines her arms and legs over
The lustful mountain, places herself right on top
Filling the open space that he has made for her curvy form.

Dusk has announced its presence like a shy, dark child
Who will not make eye contact -
The mountain and the fog rest as one, breathing as one, in unison
Beneath a moon smile and the finger pointing of the Southern Cross.

Tomorrow, light will come from this union,
The sun god will come alive, shall be reborn –
Ollytamba will become a child in the freshness of the morning.

POEM: Alive (Siento, Que Vivo)

Alive

(For My Brothers and Sisters at St. Martin, Villa El Salvador, Peru)
July 2008

Once our hearts beat separately
Like the millions of stars that fill the Peru night sky.
I could not dream of you
And you did not dream of me.
But now, brothers and sisters,
You are alive to me
And I am flesh and bone to you.

Together we are resurrected,
Each of us in the other,
And all of us in Christ.

If I could tear open my chest and expose my heart to you,
The heart – that most dangerous place
Where only important things live –
If you could see inside my heart
You would see your faces,
You would see your own smiles
As large as the Andes.

I have learned not to look for the sun up in the sky in Lima
For the sun lives in your eyes,
In your working hands,
In your solidarity with each other,
In your warm arms and free kisses,
In your beautiful children.

Your songs are as insistent as the Pacific,
Your goodness, as plentiful as the sand
Upon which Villa El Salvador sits.

Words, embarrassed by your goodness,
Refuse to leave my pen,
So I am a poet without words,
Just a heart full of the grace of you.

Once, I did not know you,
And you – you did not know me.
But now, everything has changed.



Siento, Que Vivo

(Para Mis Hermanos y hermanas de la capilla San Martin de Villa El Salvador, Peru)
July 2008

Antes nuestros corazones palpitaban separados,
Como las milliones de estrellas que brillan en la noche del cielo peruano,
No los soῇaban conmigo,
Pero ahora, hermanos y hermanas,
Son una razon de vida para mi,
Y yo soy como cuerpo y alma para ustedes,

Juntos, hemos resucitado,
Cada uno de nosotros en Cristo.

Si yo pudiera abrir mi pecho y mostrarles mi corazon a ustedes,
El corazon, el lugar mas sencible
Donde solo las cosas mas maliosas viven,
Si pudieran ver dentro de mi vorazon,
Ustedes verian sus caras,
Sus propias sonrisas, tan inmenso como los Andes.

He aprendido a no ver el sol en el cielo de Lima,
Porque el sol vive en sus ojos,
En sus manos laboriosas,
En su solidaridad con cada uno de ustedes,
En sus calidos brazos y en sus generosos besos,
En sus preciosos niῇos.

Sus canciones son tan infinitas, como el Pacifico,
Sus bondades son tan infinitas como la arena donde esta Villa El Salvador.

Mis palabras se rehusan a salir de mi lapicero,
Avergonzadas de tanta bondad que no puedo escribir
Y yo tambien como poeta me quedo sin palabras
Y solo con mi corazon lleno del la gracia de ustedes.

Yo no los conocia,
Y ustedes –
Ustedes no me conocian;
Pero ahora, todo ha cambiado.

POEM: Off To Peru

That dot, that black spackle against wild chicory blue sky
Is nothing alien, just the start of another story -
It is not me flying off to some past Inca glory -
I fly toward vertiginous height
One that is more than just Peru.
This speck in the south, this pinprick of light,
A pinched hole by which the soul
Of the unknown comes back with and into me
And thus, comes back and into you too.

Kate's Graduation Letter

June 2, 2008

Dear Katherine,

So you are graduating high school and your Mom and I are trying to fathom just what a day will look like when you are not here!

It’s not just that we will miss you – of course this is true. I have been preparing myself for this day for years: for when we will have to soldier on knowing that you will be orbiting some other planetary pulls and gravitational forces. But it is not just that we will miss you. I have learned over the years that things are far more ephemeral than they appear to the eye. All things pass: the good things, all too soon it seems, but also the hard times pass as well. You should always find some comfort in that, scary and sad as that is.

For now, I must come to terms with the fact that one of my very favorite people in the whole world will not be here for me to talk with, to discuss etymology at dinner with, to discuss philosophy with. Hardly seems right that as a parent, if I am doing my job right, your leaving should hurt this much, but it does. Rest assured though that this is the kind of hurt growing older offers in return for other things: like getting a beautiful, poised, intelligent and loving daughter in you. I will take the hit for that any day.

I think we have told you this before, but it bears repeating and in writing: did you know that we imagined you long before we were married? I often tell people that we named you “Katherine” after Katherine Anne Porter, one of my favorite short story writers. That sounds so impressive, doesn’t it? The fact is, your Mom and I were at The Bottom Line in NY City once long before we were married watching folksinger Tom Paxton. It was a snowy evening.

Before your Mom and I had the discussion that many couples have about whether or not to have kids, long before you were even an abstraction in our mind’s eye, you came to us that night from of all things, the lyrics of a folk song.

Paxton had announced to the audience that he just had a little girl whom he named “Kate” and he proceeded to sing these words:
Oh, I have a little daughter, and my daughter's name is Kate.
And she's every bit mischievous as a kitten on a skate.
Take an angel with the devil in the twinkling of her eye,
And that's my Katy, little lady, and I love her.

You might have heard me sing this a few million times in your life.
Fact is though, I would jump the moon for you; I would swim the sea. There is nothing that Mom or I would not do for you. I believe now that he was singing to us about you.


When the song was done, I remember looking over to your Mom and she to me, and it was as if the same idea struck us each simultaneously, independently – two discreet souls being touched by the single stroke of God at that instant – and we knew, we KNEW that you had to be Katie.

To be fair, there was never a thing about you that was mischievous as the song indicates. When I tell you that you have been a joy as a child, I do not say such a thing as parents might from time to time because, well, that is what parents are supposed to say about their kids. I say it from my heart because it was and still is true. You have been air to our stifled lungs, certitude to our moments of doubt, a road sign that our steering might not have been so cockeyed after all.

So what do I want you to know that we haven’t already taught you as you head off to college?


You have everything you need to succeed, however you define that term, and remember, that defining “success” is really the tricky part of living an adult life.

Remember what Blaise Paschal wrote: that many human problems can be traced to the fact that people have a hard time sitting quietly, alone in a room.

There is only one absolute in the universe that I know simply by intuition: that love is the power that rules it. Never forget that, though it may seem hard to believe at times.



People will literally throw themselves at you trying to get you to hate them and you may or may not love them in return. No matter what people do or say to you, no matter how hard they try to make you hate them, how mean they are to you, how badly they behave towards you –you will always have the capacity to love them. This, mi hija, is infinite in you and is as boundless as space.


It is always, always, always your choice to love, to forgive, and no one can ever take that away, or diminish your capacity to love even more fully.

Finding meaning in life is easy, but discerning how to love more fully, ah, that, as brother Shakespeare wrote, “there is the rub.”

Your Mom and I have raised you Catholic. It is a tradition that we believe, despite its flaws as an institution, is a pretty good way to experience this love of which I write, God’s love for you and all. But keep in mind this is not the only way to find God’s love. All the great faiths of this world point to the same sacred source of life for their strength. I pray in time you will recognize this more and more and in turn, realize your kinship with the whole world. May you expand all your worship experiences and find God in each breath of every living being on this planet. May you find God in the whispering winds, as Ezekiel did.
Embrace the mysticism of your faith, Katherine, and never be ashamed to proclaim that your greatest faith is often in things that are not explainable at all, except in the quiet whispers of your own heart.

Take time at college to cultivate a habit of solitude, for it will serve you well in this culture that thrives on distraction and noise. It will bring you peace and perspective.


Pray constantly and learn that prayer is not just uttering words, but can be the act of listening: to a friend in need, to yourself. Be forgiving to yourself first and foremost. It will be easier to forgive others. You have a pure heart and no amount of wrong-doing will ever change that.

I am so grateful for many things, but your gentleness, your intellect, your sweet, sensitive personality are right at the top of my list. Your work ethic is impressive and I even admire your somewhat “nerdish” tendencies.

You should know that you have taught Mom and me so much more than we have ever taught you. When you have kids, you will understand that last sentence. It seems odd, but it is true, nevertheless.

Remember always that you were a child of a vision; that you came to us as a lyric in a song, so of course you were destined to always make our hearts dance. This is your heritage; this then becomes your destiny – it is yours to fulfill.


Have fun. Make lots of mistakes. Admit when you are wrong. Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. Know that even the hurtful times that will come are important too, and you should not avoid them, just because they hurt. (You will learn the most about yourself!)

We have loved you for so very long, long before you were even dreamed of, sweetheart. In this way, you are magical.
God Bless always and thank you for gracing our lives with your beautiful being.

Love,
Mommy and Daddy

POEM: The Combustability of Things

In Holyoke, the paper mills are burning down.
With warped and lacquered floors,
Shredded dust upon the ground,
Scraped raw by cat tongues of ghostly flames
That gulps the air around it in a giant sucking sound,
It chars the wood, the steel, its frame,
Till the dizzy structure wobbles and then goes lame.
It swells and contracts, finally at once to heave
Like struggling lungs, collapse like laundry and leaves
A blackened soul like crumbs of toast.

And around me, lives are burning down –
Incendiary ones – like rice paper,
Ones that ignite as simple as an addict’s craving -
With want that is cold and raving.
Anger, the accelerant, like napalm clings,
Proclaims its faith in the combustibility of things.
But it just turns a charcoal black
As sleepless, sunken, slack-jawed eyes,
As gaunt as a homeless face,
Thin as house studs left erect –
Up from the rubble – this monument, stiff and correct.
White ash floats off to clearing skies -
This is a petition for extinquishment.
This column of gently curling smoke
This solemn snake-like smolder,
Dry as parched lips, rising drunkenly upward to
The red ever-quiet morning question –

Love, we. Cry, we. Send in rescue teams, we -
Try with all our might we
Expend every last one of our dreams, we do.
Until finally fire is quashed and
We mark ourselves in the sooty ash,
We make a promise to every sister and every brother,
Father to son, and daughter to Mother
Each to ourselves and each to the other -

We promise to honor that which is true:
What is mine in me and what is yours in you.

Leap

The Leap

You are afraid of leaving him because who you are has been defined for so long by the inconvenience of not being there one day. Truth be told, despite your acuity with the Twelve Steps, change and how to initiate change, is not covered by any of them.

From so long ago you believed the stories that the men in your life have told you that every woman needs a man to take care of her. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the woman they told you to see?

It’s not about love at all.
It’s never about love – love has nothing to do with it. You love him and weren’t we told that love would find a way? You never stop loving him, even during the bitter arguments; even during the most hateful moments, you love him, the history of the good times, piled like his dirty laundry of oversized and rough construction worker clothes that sits by the washer in the basement.

I often wonder what becomes of those good times in a divorce? Where do they go? Did they not actually happen in the first place? Are they just photographs in an album somewhere and does his image become a ghost, wearing that look of someone who has passed on to the next life, how they wear that look in pictures of being unaware that they soon would become a vapor to you?

You can hire a lawyer to divide up your assets, but what do you do with the emotional assets of those true and legitimate happy moments? Who divides those up? Where do they get stashed? Did they ever happen at all?

But knowing that you still love this guy doesn’t help does it? It just makes it worse – sadder really. You both sit with your finger on the red button: you, about to annihilate the “Soviet Union” of him, while he points his emotional ICBMs at you – each never once believing the other would push the button. This “mutually assured destruction” theory of marriage has gripped you like the long, cold New England winters for so long, you almost forget the definition of “happiness”.



You believe that he is sick. You ask me how you can leave a man who is ill? What sort of woman does this? What if this were cancer? Or Lou Gerhig’s disease? What stories would be told about a woman who left a man in his condition? You believe you are abandoning this poor lost soul whom you still cherish and would live out the rest of your life with in this static hell if he only would seek treatment. Or you see yourself as judge and jury, ultimately condemning this man to wallow in the mess that is himself.

But do you remember that day when you showed me the Mary Oliver poem:

…there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

You know how this works. You deal with addicts and alchies every day of your life. You hear the stories that break lives into a million shards of tiny, irreparable glass; ones that ruin the very fabric of a person’s humanity. But you have also seen the healing.

You ought to know that you have nothing less than a whole army of people to support you no matter what you do. I promise you only that you will heal, in time, and if you want to and if you work at it.

So look deeply into yourself for the courage you need to be content – not ecstatic, not zealously joyful – just content to be where you are. Can you imagine contentment, my dear? For nothing ever becomes real that is not first imagined. What is it you imagine for yourself?

Can you imagine rewriting your own story so that you, at long last, are the protagonist of your story?

Take the lesson of the nail which is powerless but is given the power to hold heavy boards together only after the relentless hammering. The difficult part – that step off the ledge – will feel like a hammer to you. But from this you will have the strength and staying power of the nail. You will rebuild your life from the lumber of your confidence.

So gather up all of your gifts and your talents. You will need them all. Wrap them up in the threadbare remains of the dreams of what you thought being a grown up woman was going to be like when you were just a little girl. Eat hearty for the journey is treacherous and you will need your strength.

I will be here all the time on your path to Golgotha. I will be your Veronica wiping your face. Your Simon to help you carry your tree part of the way. It is not love you seek or love I offer – that always abounds. It is survival. It is a meaningful life that we are trying to wring from the murky waters of a marriage that is long overdue to have its bucket emptied and refilled with clean, fresh soapy waters.

And when it is all over you will sit over a quiet, aromatic cup of coffee and realize that this was the biggest thing that you have ever done. We will go find church bells to ring and proclaim a year of favor, proclaim liberation, proclaim a new and insistent spring like no other you have ever encountered.

Life will ebb and flow and it will continue to bring its normal share of aches and pains – because this is what life does – but you will even be able to enjoy the bad times that will come just a little more.

Then when you drop to your knees before bedtime at night and offer up your prayers, even God will smile a generous smile, for you - His most beloved sheep - has finally come home. At long, long last, His sheep has come home.

POEM: Burn

Stars never shine as bright in the milky light of day
As they do when pressed firm into the soil of the night,
They burn their passion incandescent,
They burn limitless, unashamed,
They burn fearlessly, and measure nothing in between.

So burn
And light the way.
Right where you live,
Where you work and where you play.
I will follow you into what is unseen.
Bring beauty into the dark -
For it is still beauty -
And that - that is enough.

POEM - The Dogwood

This is not a time for doubt –
Certainly, the Dogwood shows none,
As it opens pearl white petals to the infant spring -
It proffers flowers as the gentlest smile,
With a still beauty that is open and wild,
And asks us for the most painful kind of trust.
It is her generous gift to a world in resurrection.
And you – you are just her shy smile too,
Her open-hearted gift to the uncertain dusk
Her faith in resurrections and what must be true
About all that lives, about love, about things both old and new:
That what remains is always kept in the quiet marrow of us.

There is no room for doubt now –
Only gratefulness and memory as love’s final bow.

POEM: Black Raspberry Ice Cream Reverie

The dogwoods look so tired tonight,
But I –
I breathe in the gauzy light and lilac air tonight.
The west emits a black raspberry glow tonight
As Canadian whispers swoop down on us tonight,

Dogwoods dance in slow romantic moves tonight -
Step and slide, step and slide -
And the trees – the other trees
Which make up the community of trees –
Accept this call to quiet, this gentle reverie tonight,
Belted out in brassy tones by the breaking –
By the breaking up of fragile light.

While I –
I can still taste the tang of the black raspberry ice cream
We ate today in warmer air,
Swaddled by a melting friendship -
Now what could ever taste as sweet?

POEM: The Return of the Skunks

At last! At last the skunks have returned
The skunks have returned at last!
With ghastly scent that hangs stiff
As laundry hung out in frigid air
They walk ghostly down streets
Smeared as a portrait of black and white,
The skunk meat releases a cloud that tastes
Like rotted peat - it shouts out loud:
“At last! At last! The skunks have returned.”

“What is that smell?” the children ask.
It is effluvial spring arriving hungry
And nocturnal, on the prowl for
Freshly awakened root gnawing grubs.

With a face a stern as Winter,
The odor, this tangible thing,
This lust for life, sulfur’s cousin -
Is the lust for everything alive.

It is Winter, starting to decompose.
It is the miracle of shade as it returns,
It is piled snow being replaced by an army of skunks
It is the sweaty breath of earth
Rediscovering herself yet again.

POEM: Spring Flight

On the shores of May,
Forsythia arches apostrophes of yellow upward,
While Dogwood stands expectant like a first holy communicant.

Strawberries wend tendrils unseen
Through spongy loam, that aches for June.

Soon, you will leave to occupy a foreign land.
Your heart will occupy a country that does not wish to be free.
You will become squatters to a homeland that you never sought
In the first place.

As for me - I shall be here
To remind you of all the kindness you have
Pulled out of me, nearly against my will.

The words “NOTHING IS PERMANENT” are tattooed
Into the deepest flesh of me.
Still, May is nothing if not a promise.

It is a prayer of safe journey,
Of return flights with no delays,
Of health and maybe just a little sleep,
Of sharing food, and exploring friendship
And the immortal memory of these things
Which become the raw material of our souls.

POEM: Viral Love Poem

In the hard glint of day
Words just get in the way:
The gently measure of morning light
Wrinkles night
For the first blush of day.
The desiccate winter crumples up, blows away.
With all that is so hopeless in the world,
There is you –
I have you in the only way –
There is always you
To hold the worst at bay.

POEM - My One Great Fear

When I am forced to face my untimely death,
when i am made to still my holy breath,
I am certain that a poem - perhaps my greatest work of art -
will float shadowlike across my embattled heart
while I am unable to grab paper and pen in time
to scribble it down and make it mine.

POEM - Instructions For Morning Sun Salutations

1. Stand quietly and remember to be faithful to the morning, which is nourished by
gratitude and fed on the fresh imprints left by last night’s vivid dreaming.

2. When you reach up, arch backwards; imagine yourself as a bridge that unites
good with evil, faith with unbelief, strength with weakness, love with hatred,
life with death.

3. Grab a whole fistful of air, then bend forward and abandon all control.

4. Pull down as much hope as you can with two hands and one spacious heart.

5. Hang there momentarily in silence and measure all the contradictions within you.

6. Step or jump back and commit yourself to the struggle of all hopeless things.

7. Lower yourself down with the grounded knowledge that the warmer air and flowers
have not deserted you; that the dark eyed juncos are returning from the south and that summer announces its arrival in a whisper.

8. Push up into the belief that light is a shy creature and loves to play games;
that the two of you are cousins.

9. Step or jump into the wisdom that humans are not carbon-based but are forgiveness-based and even the shortest friendship outlasts the longest night.

10. Rise with open arms and be faithful to the morning, which is nourished
by gratitude and fed on the fresh imprints left by last night’s vivid dreaming.

POEM - Spring, Today!

Rain tries to assuage the winter pain
whose edge is blunted, arranged, and splintered,
So even the grainy hardness of ice is made soft,
While tips of stoic tree limbs that are held aloft
Take on the shape of human hands -
pleading against sky’s cool field of blue,
Up toward a light that tiptoes in on the back of the cold,
Furtively, so deep, so despairing and old -
Now it seems bolder, more nascent and gold.

And the birds! Oh, the birds
These colorful clowns of the air,
In cameo roles, appear everywhere,
Unaware of what transpires below,
Far too embroiled in their own dramas to know,
As they make themselves known to me and then as they go,
They take center stage for a curtsy or bow:
The stern hollow knock of the woodpecker’s beak.
The sweet loopy voice as holy cardinal speaks.
The spastic brown flurry of effeminate sparrows.
The watchful stare of stony faced crows:
These are yawning signs that everything in and around me, grows.

Meditation II

Today while meditating, something startling happened. I am a perpetual beginner at mediation and I know others say the same thing. We all have a hard time observing, not judging, breathing without our monkey-brain jumping up and down creating a ruckus. One technique is to imagine your thoughts floating on the surface of a river, as you, the observer, try not to direct them, or engage them, but just watch them float.

Today, something else happened. Today, I felt (and I can’t really explain this) for one split second, perhaps even for one microsecond, that the universe accepted me, nodded to me, smiled at me, and approved of who I was, of who I had been and of who I was becoming. It was a just flash: hardly worth writing about actually. It was a flicker, like a shadow that passes, I could no more hold onto it than I could reproduce it.

I just smiled. No one was around. No one noticed. No one could verify if what I had experienced was a moment of bliss, of rightness. As soon as it came, as soon as I could get my lips turned upward in a gentle smile at the grace that was just bestowed upon me, it left and I was left with my brain again scrambling to balance the rest of the day.

I was already busy, back to toting up my hurts and snubs. Back to making a list of the friends and enemies in my life, and how to reward and punish each. In short, the three year old who runs loose in my brain was hard at work, building walls, fortifying boundaries, proclaiming lordship over all he surveyed.

I was back into the primordial darkness of my own personality and it cast a pall like the pre-dawn “iffy” light that makes everything one drained color.

I must learn to love the loneliness of truth seeking. It is not a well-traveled path amid the distractions of daily life. It is a one sided conversation that often resembles those conversations I have with myself in the confessional of my car.

It is easy to demand things of others in an attempt to fill in the gaping hole of my ego - who I think I am, what I believe I deserve – but at the end of the day, knowing even for just a second that I am a part of everything else is heady stuff.

The presence of friends and loved ones is intoxicating enough to want it always, but I need to learn over and over again that I cannot dwell in the love of good fellowship, warm feelings and even love. It is the brokenness of me that wants it all, that creates illusory worlds to manipulate what is real. When I am satisfied, the three year old is satisfied.

Acknowledge and appreciate the love in me. Acknowledge and appreciate the love in the other. And on those wonderful times when food can be dragged into the equation, we should feed each other. That is all.

I must share who I am with others out of the poverty of my life as well as my abundance, from my broken as well as my whole pieces. Then I must simply let and observe the three year old wreak havoc: the one who demands that everything be static; the one who wants to be exclusive, cruel and mean; the one that ultimately inflates the swollen puffiness of my silly and bulbous ego.

This is the child who wants to box up the universe into me, alone; to deny the expansive beauty of something that is not owned, is not bordered, is not controlled like a universe that holds you and me in the palm of its hand and every so often nods at us in approval at who we are, even if we don’t feel worthy.

POEM - My Wish For You

The grace of a breakfast, prepared for you;
The first sip of coffee after the aroma
has reminded you of an old friend;
The hint of sunrise, before it is light;
Restful sleep;
Fits of laughter, and a fistful of smiles
from the most remote strangers -

And a heart which finds a home in stillness.

POEM - Meditation

All mankind's troubles are caused by one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly in a room.
~Blaise Pascal, Pensees, II, 139

How do you know the silence?
Is it a cathedral whose spires greet the morning?

Is it a room that is kept locked,
one you stumble into against your will from time to time?

Words are very hungry things and need it to live.
Are your words cherub faced, round and content?

Or are they thin as gruel,
distended belly grossly protruding?

How do you acknowledge the silence,
the whispery shadowy face of it, the dimly lit smile of it?

Does its heart beat just below your beating?
Does it breathe just below your breathing?

Does it live deep inside you as your hottest wish,
one that nags at you? And why dear God, does it frighten you too?

POEM - What A Heart Is Good For

A heart is the cloud which waters
The desert that life can sometimes be:
It floods the arid grounds of fear.
It is the moist early morning air
And the spectacle of a putty red glow
That bloody dusk dances
In distant skies like fire.

It douses the thirst of all things
With the sweet waters that travel
Very long distances only
To find a path back to me.

POEM - The Constant Companion

His are hard hands, long and cold,
Encrusted with dirt that makes a corrugated skin -
Solid, stiff and stony hands
To do the work he was made to do.

On Ash Wednesday, dark hands
Smudge me black as soot -
I - I carry my father's fleshy hands
And impressible heart,

Pulpous as loam -
As obliging as a pornographic dusk.
I hold a tight leniency for all things in this world,
Yet, still I declare fealty to the constant companion

Whom I wear on my head like a third eye -
Who waits with me, as still as first snow, while I sleep;
Who watches over me, as I roust to face the day,
I dispatch him as just one more errand to be attended to

At some future date, just another appointment.
Pain waits to be assuaged by the constant companion
Who carries my name scratched deep, deep,
Deep into the mystery that is his breath.

POEM - Lenten Prayer

I shall give up being right for Lent –
I shall give up the comfort of being among the chosen few –
I shall deny consumerism three times before the cock crows –
I shall admit to myself that at the core of each of us is fear,
That we share it, that we deny it, but that we share it.
I shall take great comfort in being lost –
I shall dance to no destination,
To no timetable, to no schedule –
I shall be consoled knowing that everything
And everyone I need is wherever I am,
Whenever I arrive, if I ever arrive:
With or without luggage,
With my shirt on inside out,
With or without two forms of government issued picture ID,
With or without a husband or a wife or some significant other,
With or without children,
Without that Grammy,
Without that Pulitzer,
Without that Nobel prize.

So I shall give up being right for Lent
And set a place at my table for Doubt
To come and break bread with me,
For we are no strangers.

Subsistence takes the shape of a pinwheel
With a great, big, erroneous, loving, foolish
And empty heart, holding anchor at the center
Waiting for you to fill it up,
And slow the spinning just a bit.

POEM - When Fly Married Frog

“Marry me,” said Frog to Fly.
Fly considered the offer.
She considered the advantage of moving on up
Just a smidge in the evolutionary neighborhood.
Her diet of rotting carcasses
And wild pungent fermented shit
Made her first question her own judgment.

“The marriage between a fly and a frog is folly,” she thought.

But to Fly there was such an attraction in this idea:
Never being alone,
The imagined feeling of swimming in water,
The stability of land access over flight –
It all excited her into a near panic.

“A husband!” she mused but knew deep in her fly heart
How it would take her some time to grow
Accustomed to his green skin
And his propensity for hopping.
She would wear his skin by proxy,
Finally, she would have an exterior life.
To touch,
To feel things on the outside of her body,
She imagined herself as green as spring.

“Marry me,” said Frog to Fly
And a tsunami of giddiness swamped her
Making her dizzier by each second,

Feeling desired she grew desirous;
Feeling wanted she suddenly felt wanting.

“Never was a love so true, so constant
So pure and intact!” she thought.
Never, too, was a love so ravenous -
As Frog croaked just once more,
And with a “schloop” of his tongue
Pulled Fly in and swallowed her whole.



Her final thought was gratitude
For to Fly, to be consumed by one great love
Was the highest form of being.

As she was slowly digested,
Deconstructed, embroiled by Frog’s digestive juices,
As she disappeared particle by particle,
The experience confirmed as true everything
Fly believed about love.

Frog’s only response was a gentle burp
Which sounded oddly enough
A little like the words: “Marry me.”

POEM - Living Christmas

Then, it happened, that she realized she was living Christmas.
She was grateful for her colored ribbon life,
For the candle-light brightness of her children’s lives,
For the manger her friends and family made for the infant
Love that was born alone in her, announced by a star.
She negotiated the day-to-day things
Illuminated by her children’s dreams,
She spoke the language of Chocolate,
And in everything she touched, sweetness bloomed -
Even in the deadest part of winter.

In the end, she knew how to live Christmas because she was Christmas.
In the end, she found the baby she sought nestled amid her hurt
Deep, deep, deep within herself,
Where the Messiah lay all this time,
Waiting for discovery.

POEM - To A Young Girl With AIDS

Too young to know any better,
you told me how getting Aids was a blessing, how it purified you.
You,who are held ransom by these streets you mistake as family
reared on abuse and addiction,
You now tell me how privileged you are to be touched to by this disease
by a God swollen with retribution for all your sins.

You welcome the endless drug cocktails,
the dizzying schedules with doctors,

You've grown adept at the flirtatious dance with pneumonia .
You are grateful for it all.

What could I say?

I could tell you there is no cosmic ledger waiting
to record graces and failures like debits and credits.
I could tell you that when we cross over, there will be no bank note due;
no repo-man, no bill collector harvesting I.O.U.s.

I could tell you all of this, but I don't

Instead, I just listen,
Instead, I hear the joy in your voice,
as if you had won the lottery.

Which would be easier for me to say:
“You, my dear child, are a misguided loon”,
or “Go – your faith has made you whole”?

It is as if the angel Shushienae descended:
and taken up residence in you.

Secretly, I wanted you to lay hands upon me
and issue the benediction:

“As it is: not as we wish it to be,
As it is: not as we work for it to be.”

POEM - Absence

Your absence is this unopened gift!

It slants the day for me, knocks time and
Light sideways, angling it so obtuse.

My senses play tricks on me like an
Amputee missing his upalong limb.

Ghost-like- so much so that you are the
Phantom-heart that haunts my own chest, two

Sinus rhythms, the thumps, an echoe in
Tandem, cradled by my ribcage home.

My eyes fill in the empty space of you,
My ears hear what you would be saying

If you were here, speaking. Then like a
Medium, I would call back all the

Departed bits of you, piece by piece:
Have I not written on your body

That there is not one molecule of
You that I do not love?

Have I not memorized every mole
On your body, noting latitude and

Longitude by my fingers across
Your skin like a navigator’s divider?

There is not one fold of your skin that I
Have not spelunked , not one of your breaths

That I have not inspired as my own.
There is not one part of you that is not

Fully here, right now, before me, in
Spite of your glorious absence.

So much of you is revealed to me as
I miss you, all generously granted

By the plenitude of your absence.

Considered While Waiting In Day Surgery For a Friend

I know that I could easily deposit you at the hospital day surgery and that you would be in good hands.

I know “real” people do this sort of thing all the time.

I know that my sitting here, reading, checking email, playing with my Blackberry is not the most efficient use of my time. Despite my proclivity for magical thinking, I really do know that my presence in this room while you undergo a minor surgery will not affect how well the surgeon cuts, or how attentive the nurses are, or how quickly or easily you will levitate above all the anesthesia they will pump into your body.

Here is what is scratching at me:

I don’t believe that we are supposed to deposit people at hospitals and then go off to do our business. These are not grocery stores or the movies. The way that health care is not just a business, and that while the free market can maybe deliver effective health care, it cannot deliver compassionate health care.

One needs to be claimed in places like hospitals. One needs a connection to the normal world, the one where life and death is less compressed. Someone needs to be there to claim you when you return, when you are wheeled out. Otherwise, it is like the sadness of luggage going around and around on those carousels at airports. Something needs to pull you off and say “You are part of me!”

This is a stake in the ground that holds you fast when everything else is flies at you in millions of pieces.

I also believe this is true of Airports and meetings with one’s oncologists.

There are places in our lives that try to claim our souls, that try to turn us into coins that we pump into vending machines and the prospect of no one waiting, no unbridled joy at the return is too much for me to bear.

Everything hangs on a thread in this life and fortunes really do turn on a dime.
When I choose to error, I always want to be on the side of presence over absence.

How about you?

POEM - yule (ebb) tide

toss away the wreath (its evergreen is out of place anyhow)
untangle the wires with a twinkly knuckled light
wash the cookie tins and let them air dry to secular music
wrap the baby jesus in limp newsprint
let the vacuum suck up needle confetti and exhale mountain air
wrestle the tree with bear hug intent out the door
roll up the stockings once cherry and festive now anorexic and sad
peel the christmas cards from the wall and let the voices of loved ones
return to our silent longing memory
the christmas gifts that sit in celebratory piles - just the way they were opened –
seem a bit duller

let exhaustion come and do its work
let us return to our dreams of rest
let us worship in the faith of not doing
let us reacquaint ourselves with the beauty of stillness
with sleep and
with boredom’s gentle grace.

REVIEW - Juno: The Case For Common Ground

Juno, set in suburban Minnesota, is ultimately about family in the same way that other quirky hits like “LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE” or even “THE BIRD CAGE” was. These were movies that dealt with off beat topics, even taboo topics but were ensconced in the cloak of family to give them big laughs and great pathos. Given the subject matter of Juno, however, (a 16 year old – Juno - becomes pregnant and must decide what to do with the baby) I was pleasantly surprised that it is above all else a feminist film. It might not seem like this would be the case given that Juno (Ellen Page) decides to have the baby and give him up in a closed adoption to a yuppie Minnesotan couple (Jason Bateman as Mark and Jennifer Garner as Vanessa).

The film has received raves for its smart dialog and odd asocial characters, but this I think works against the film’s real depth and heart which is, of course, Juno’s discovery that adulthood means making painful decisions and then sticking by them, even when most adults don’t behave this way.

It is thoroughly refreshing to see her supportive family (played brilliantly with the right mix of humor, cynicism and “I-know-better-than-you-because-I-have-lived-longer-than-you” wisdom provided by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney) who when being told of her pregnancy by Juno originally suspect the worst: failing in school, or stealing a car, never considering for a moment that their little girl could be pregnant. I am not sure there are many families whose parents would have responded as supportively as Juno’s does, but that’s okay. I like this about this movie. Personally, I think it’s high time that our culture portrays families as supportive institutions and not just the source of all the dysfunction therapists everywhere are exposed to. As parents, we don’t have to approve their actions, but we do have to love and support them and this movie provides that sort of safe haven feeling that is family.

Where the movie fails for me is that the dialogue is smart- very smart, in fact, too smart. It is easy to see why the teenagers and twenty somethings love this movie. I was in a theater where the crowd was predominantly the Facebook/MySpace group and the points in the movie where they laughed confirmed for me who the target audience was. Teens and twenty somethings are all about the quick snip, appearing smart rather than being smart; appearing counter-cultural all the while being absorbed into the MTV/corporatized version of what being “counter-cultural” means. The banter was too acerbic, too quick witted for my taste, but the kids in the theater I was in loved it. Subtlety is not a teen-ager’s long suit so the dialogue may seem a bit juvenile for adult tastes. But while the humor may be puerile, the heart of this movie is as subtle as a Minnesota snowflake and that should appeal to the most cold hearted of adults.

The decision Juno makes at the end of the movie is heartrending and should provide ample evidence for those looking for a moral that getting pregnant at 16 is just not a good idea (don’t try this at home kids!) Some people look for that sort of lesson in order to redeem the somewhat controversial subject matter. Juno provides this without being preachy or overbearing. For those who like to revel in the humanity of such dilemmas that make us human, this movie provides that as well. The relationship between Juno and her friend Bleeker (Michael Cera) is froth with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the age. (Cera is brilliant at doing this both in works like SUPERBAD and his work on the TV series ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. ) There is no overt passion in the act they do that gets Juno pregnant, it is adolescent experimentation brought on by boredom and curiosity. Throughout the movie, Bleeker struggles within himself to do the adult thing and step up, but he can’t. He learns that while he is physically ready to father a child, he is not emotionally ready.

Bleeker’s estrangement from his own manhood tears at his sensitive relationship with Juno, evoking feelings for her that he has to hide for fear of being rejected. (And what adolescent hasn’t done that, I ask you.) Ironically, we see the adolescent Bleeker finally come to terms with his own masculinity, and supports Juno, while the only other non-parental male in the movie – Mark (Jason Bateman) flees his responsibility to grow up, to love something outside of himself and his own dreams of glory as a former rock’n’roller. Bleeker respect Juno’s decision, acknowledges that he really does love her – and she, finally, him - and supports her after her delivery when she gives the baby up. (A man supporting a woman’s right to have the baby – when have we ever seen this? Isn’t it usually the guys badgering the woman to “get rid of the thing”, if they are even involved at all?)

This is the reason I say this movie is one of the few truly feminist films of the era. It respects Juno’s choice to have the baby, and to give him away, as hard as that is. It bypasses the danger of romanticizing another single pregnant teen, raising a baby by herself. Another woman’s choice might have been different. But Juno’s choice is one she comes to on her own.

Vanessa learns that Mark really doesn’t want a baby and by the end of the movie Vanessa and Juno find common ground: both become single mothers as Mark and Vanessa divorce. Juno’s choice is to affirm the strength of women to raise children alone, even though she is not capable of such a thing. The movie deftly avoids the abortion polemic by satirizing both pro-life and pro-choice factions. Juno’s Korean friend stands outside the abortion clinic alone holding a sign chanting: “All babies want to be borned”. When Juno gets inside the clinic, she is greeted by a cavalier, face pierced, gum-snapping receptionist who smugly offers her flavored condoms. Juno flees the clinic, repulsed by the callus atmosphere.

In the end, she has the baby because of the realization that it has “fingernails”. On the surface, this appears part of a pro-life agenda point, but feminism has always been about a woman’s right to decide for herself. We are all free moral agents and as such we should be free to make our own mistakes or successes. In this way, the feminist struggle is akin to the fight to abolish slavery in the middle of the 19th century. If all teenage girls are “supposed” to have abortions where is the choice in that? How is that supporting a woman’s right to choose? A culture that respects women ultimately respects the very personal choice to have a baby, to get pregnant in the first place. In this way, Juno should provide common ground for both pro-life and pro-choice factions. There are no men in this movie pressuring Juno into having an abortion.

The movie works for adolescents because it brings the smarm that marks their generation (okay, the same smarm that worked for my generation and I suspect all adolescents since recorded history.)

But the movie is sweet, and heartfelt too. It provides an affirming message to women of all ages. It gives us a model of how parents are supposed to act with their wayward kids. It treats young pre-adult kids with an adult sense of respect, all the while engaging in the travails and triumphs of growing up. It is a coming of age movie that poses some very hard questions about what we value and why.

POEM - Tree Bodies (Haiku)

limbs aloft like meaty arms;
bones, replete with snow
as flesh: blanched, muscular woods.

POEM - Wasp

who mourns the aphonic death of a wasp in sleepy autumn light?
who weeps at the resignation of sunflowers standing guard over a field at day’s end?

markings of change go mostly unnoticed, blankets of snow
like starched pressed linen surround me and want a surrender.

the tomatoes are rotting corpses, horrific and crucified to neglected stakes
in theatrical poses rooted as a headstone in my bleary garden.

mummified stalks of day lilies with spackled gray stems make for fine kindling,
so I gather them with open arms and anticipate the fire I shall make.

the stars are glad to see the night come in sneakers, entering on tiptoes,
for they have been waiting all day to perform.

in the haste of the fluttering heartbeats of seasons we no longer honor transition —
like the hardy mum that smiles at me with confidence

convinced that the Fall would never abandon it
that winter will never come. never.

POEM - The Christmas Clementine

For Christmas, you gave me a clementine.
Not a full sized one, but rather a dwarf,
a vulnerable, lumpy, oblate fruit,
unnoticeable in my hand.

I marveled at the feel of it
then began to remove the peel, bit by bit
until the fruit was exposed flesh as tender as that Christmas Baby
shivering, naked in the Bethlehem evening.

I had the urge to wrap it tight
like a flower bud,
to place it in a manger
to keep it warm by my breath
while I absorbed its sweet orange whisper scent
And dreamed of April,
When the juices of living things flow again.

You are a clementine wrapped and small,
both the gift given by the magi on that first Christmas,
and the Baby Jesus wrapped up into one swaddled
piece of fruit,
one great Love, orange and surprising –
this Clementine that offers the forgiveness
which brings the winter to its knees.

Changing the World

The world will not be changed by do-gooders.
The world will not be changed by meetings or agendas, by marches or letters.
It will not be changed by good, stable jobs, or by sending our children to good schools.
Nor will it be changed by empathic social movements to share wealth, or even good deeds alone.

The world will be changed when we change our vision of who we think we are, what our place is; when we learn what our true voice is.
Discovering our one true voice will change the world.
Discovering the divine within us will change the world.

But discovering our one true voice is a scary thing.
It means forgetting the stories we have told ourselves over and over about who we think we are,
what we think we like, what we think we are good at, what we think will be good for us and what we think will harm us.

It is seeing first hand that we have a worth that can not be measured by our friends, by our money, or by our fame or recognition.
It is not conditioned on “success”, or on promotions at work,
by good grades, or even by the praise of our parents, our teachers or our bosses.

Sometimes it is in that quiet, unnoticed moment when we just keep our head down and burrow through thoughts that we are not worthy of any sort of love at all.
It is in that mustard seed of faith that whispers to us that we are stakeholders in creation,
even when we believe otherwise.

Even when we just can’t see it.
Even when we think it is not possible to be loveable.

It is when we take that kindness that we so often dole out to others and turn it inward on ourselves that radical change begins.

Forgiveness is the answer to every question.

When this happens, justice flourishes. It is not an "act"; it is not a "schtick". It is not like a garment we put on at the start of day, and take off before we go to bed.
It is the fruit of a loving life.

The Perfect Christmas

Part of the problem with Christmas is the austere reverence with which we enshroud it. Usually when things are so serene and reflective and earnest, it simply begs for a joke to break the tension. This tendency to laugh during the most serious of times, psychologists tell us, is a mechanism to deal with the great social pressures being exerted on us to be solemn, or in the case of Christmas, the pressure to find serenity.

But what if that “perfect” Christmas always eludes us? What if we can’t find it? What if the joy of Christmas-time eludes me despite my best efforts? What if all those TV specials, and the music and muzzak are not enough to make me find that one thing, that one thing, that is the secret to everything.

Every year I tell myself, “This year will be the year to find that perfect Christmas” but every year, I seem to do less and less to get caught up in the froth of the season, finding it harder to find the brew of the season. First, the lights stop going up outside: too cold outside, wastes energy, hate keeping up with everyone else. Then the decorations get downsized: a few pictures, a wreath hastily hung up on the door.

As a family, we are at the point now where the tree is the extent of our decorating and I believe this is because it is not just for the showy effect of having a wonderfully decorated evergreen in the corner of my family room. The tree becomes a process for us, as we each plays our great Christmas role adding ornaments, the traditional swearing, the dragging of the tree into the house, tracking mud and felled pine needles everywhere, the butchery also know as “trimming” of the branches, the tinsel application, and of course the perfunctory “tree falling” that usually occurs sometime the week following its installation.

“Dad?” Kate calls me on my cell phone. “Are you coming home early tonight?”

“As a matter of fact I am sweetie, I am just coming into town now. Why do you ask?”

“Well, because the tree fell down and we need help.”

Ah, what is the holiday season without its seasonal drama, I ask you? Why it is as traditional as eggnog and caroling! As I enter the house I see my wife and daughter holding the tree. They turn and look at me with the look of a man on death row who just has been given a reprieve. How long, I wonder to myself, would they have stood there if I hadn’t been coming home early?

POEM: Harvest

The season is showing off its clenched jaw again.
Even the light looks sullen
and the gulls, who normally just laugh
all summer long in the heat, are grimmacing.

We are nothing if not the collection of scars
we harvest over a lifetime;
the ones we pick up like nettles
as we lope through each day
toward that great party that awaits us.

If lucky, we get to show off the accretion of things
we've collected throughout the visit to this place,
all the while, hiding the knowledge
that the inevitable destination is the landfill
or the compost pile,
Like the hardy mums that smile
while shivering in the new born cold air,
pretending that winter will never come.

POEM: The Summit House, The Lighthouse, The Sailor and The Temptation of Christ

In the mornings
I see the valley filled like a cereal bowl with milk
when I come over the highest points of Holyoke.
From its perch, the Summit House glares down
lighthouse white, it shines and calls out to every
lost soul who looks up at it, seeking direction.

The sailor takes his best girl to the lighthouse
where she asks him: "How ever did you find this place?"
To which the sailor responds:
"I'm a sailor. It found me!"

I imagine what sort of prayer the natives offered up
centuries before me, to give thanks for this sight
of the valley, the sun and the carpeting fog.

Did they believe in grace the way I do?
Did it feel the same way to them as it does to me?
Unaware of what was to unfold for their people,
did they, too, make the mistake of believing
that their old ways would last forever?

Then I pretend that I am with Jesus in the desert
as he is tempted by Satan who offered up the whole world
if Jesus would only drop to his knees and worship him.
I imagine the scene looking just like this one,
looking out over the valley as the world,
the thick dewy fog, the bright Summit House
white as a lighthouse and the sailor with his girl.

This must be what heaven looks like.

POEM - RiverThanks

The river has folded its hands and bowed its head -
it squats among golden hills, in reverence.
Beneath the promiscuous slope of mountain,
covered by pale blue that is like wanting,
from somewhere, out of nowhere -
From the daring swoop of hawk, or the bubble of river water,
I cannot be sure which -
I heard the words "thank you".

POEM - When Her Sister Goes Off to College

She thinks about the time in the near future
When her sister goes off to college.
She wonders what she will do
When her sister gives her heart away to others.
I was grateful for the love
as possessiveness that bubbled up from the question.

She will be bored at first.
She will be a bit lonely
when her sister's heart is not her sole province,
when the geography of their love
must be explored by others,
mapped for others' use,
when their private language becomes public.

I think these things, but I do not say them aloud.
Instead, I tell her that the answer to her question
is as stark as the daylight:
that when her sister lends her heart
out to the world, like a library book
then you will let your grip on hers go
so that your heart expands just so.
This, I tell her, is how our own hearts grow.

POEM - Because I Cannot Sing

Because I cannot sing from dead places,
Each song I sing is alive –
An endangered species
Released into the wild to multiply
Living brazenly among humans.

Because when I sing I use only the green notes,
The Spruce, the Juniper and the Sycamore
Make plush harmonies with me
Out of what the wind delivers.

Because I sing with a torrential voice
I carve out canyons in every ear.

Because I cannot sing from dead places,
Summer passes over the flat noodles
Of my vocal chords
So that even in drought stricken places things grow:

My voice is rain and air and sun
And sweet fecund soil.

POEM - The Yin and Yang of Things

Something in me wants so much to give up -

I can't explain it.

But just as strong is that other part that

Just won't let me.

POEM - Foot Massage

All she wants is a foot massage.

It is not an engagement ring.

It is not a thirty-year adjustable rate mortgage
With points.

It is not a deposition given under sworn oath
Beneath the hawkish glare of some
Reptilian lawyer.

It is not a cell phone service contract
Shackling you into generational
Slavery

Or some deal to address and mail ten
Envelopes to your neighbors
For the American Cancer Society.

It is not even like pregnancy
Or having a vasectomy:

It is just a foot massage.

It is the hug of bare feet as they sink
Slightly when first stepping
Onto brand new carpet.

It is that moment in your bed
When you look over at your clock
And realize you have one hour more of sleep.

It is the meniscus edge of that first
Gulp of water that sluices down your
Throat on a hot afternoon.

It is the tight grip of the bed sheet as you
Pull it around bare shoulders
The first cold night before we use heat.

It is the feeling of wearing long pants
For the first time after a summer
Of wearing shorts.

It holds all the smugness of some
Post-coital smirk.

It is the blood red moon that sits
Deep deep in the dark of your eye.

Dead, Again

Oct.2007

“A coward dies many deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Ceaser.


Boy, Shakespeare had it so wrong.

This weekend I journeyed to my childhood home for the last time. I went down to gather with my brothers and sisters to help my Mom move from her house of fifty plus years to another house further out on Long Island. Where suburban spread had scattered my siblings who remained on the Island, my Mom stuck fast to the small house in Franklin Square, a suburb just outside of Queens and a short 35 minute train ride into New York City.

When I spoke with her earlier in the week she mentioned how everyone was going to be stopping by to help with the move. I told her, of course, that I would be down to lend my back and heart to the move and I could tell she was relieved. “Oh, that would be great!” she said. I could tell that she had landed the answer I knew she had been fishing for.

I drove down Saturday morning over the same route I had for the last twenty years. When I pulled up to the house the movers were just finishing closing the truck and I could see my Mom sitting on the stairwell that led to the upstairs with the front door wide open. It was a very warm October day and the sun drenched the house with a sort of golden-amber hue.

With my old Minolta 202 slung over my shoulder, I took some pictures of the outside of the house. “You a photographer?” one of the movers asked me. “Nah, just one of the movers,” I replied. When I stepped into the living room it was bare and the emptiness caught me completely off guard. I heard myself wheeze lightly, as if I had been sucker punched and my breath was drawn out against my own will. For the years I’d lived here, I had never seen the rooms so barren.

I hugged my Mom and thought how stoic and frail she looked. She smiled, but it was a smile of duty. She had been through a lot over the months with the sale of the house. I know the physical strain had taken its toll, but there was the emotional toll that we really never talked about. I had seen this look once before. It was at Daddy’s funeral a million years ago she wore that look: that look of uncertain weariness.

Thank God my sister Denise was there, directing the movers and my mother with the skill of Patton moving his tanks against German Panzer divisions. Together we cleaned up what remained: some clothes, a mirror, some plants, some switch-plates. We stood by the wrought iron railing that led to the upstairs, the same railing we used to slide down when we were kids. We were considering what else had to be loaded into the last of the cars when Denise unscrewed the decorative brass finial that adorned the end of the banister and tucked it into her bag. We used to do the same thing as kids but then we would use the brass ornament like a microphone and sing into it. “The new owners won’t mind if we take this,” my sister said. We kept finding pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters on the floors of the empty rooms. We would pick them up, only to find more later on. “It’s Daddy,” Denise said. “He’s trying to tell us something.” When the movers and Denise left, it was just my Mom and I. I went from room to room and took pictures. Then I just stood in each room and recalled some event that took place in each of the rooms. I touched the dark pine paneled walls of the upstairs rooms where Joe and I lived through our high school years. I stood on the exact spot where my trundle bed stood and recalled as if it were yesterday that morning when my brother-in-law climbed the stairs to wake Joe and me to give us the news about Daddy’s passing after his stroke on that day that changed everything for all of us.

I went into the garage where I had once destroyed my sister’s ten speed when I was first learning how to drive. As I was backing out of the garage one day, I accidentally hooked the frame on the car bumper onto her bike and rather than get out of the car to see what was holding it up, I simply gave the car more gas. I still owe her a bike to this day. It was in this garage that my brother Dave and I took apart the engine of an old Pontiac Le Mans Grand Prix that our neighbors gave us. I helped him do a valve and gasket job on the engine. He actually knew what he was doing; I just liked getting dirty. It was in this garage that the old Dodge Plymouth Valiant given to us by our cousins Sam and Rena lived – my Dad loved that car.

I went down the basement and found some of my old high school poetry scribbled in chalk onto a wood panel by the washing machine. There on the wall was the remnant of a Mari Evans poem: “If there be sorrow” was all that was left – the first line of the poem, the rest of the poem was all washed out but I remembered it and I recited to myself it in a dark, moist whisper: “If there be sorrow/Let it be for things/Undone, unachieved, unrealized, unattained/To these add one:/Love withheld, love restrained.”

I went outside and said goodbye to the multi-stemmed Black Birch tree in the back yard. It looked like a hydra with its many thick trunks. The many stems made it ideal for building a tree house and I remember nailing boards of plywood between the trunks, and two-by-four steps climbing high to the top of the tree. I touched the tree and said goodbye to it like it was a person.

Just next to the tree was the concrete patio extension that jutted out from the main patio that my Dad poured when he bought that brick façade barbeque pit. He built it during an era when barbeque pits were the rage. I recalled how as a kid I stood at the other end of the yard and pretended I was pitching for the Mets hurling a heavy sponge ball against the brick backstop of the pit until the brick began to give way and the façade started to crack. The barbeque pit is long gone but the concrete extension is still there, intact and as fresh as when the concrete was first poured.

I went back inside and loaded my car with a few more things. My Mom hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was 10:00AM. She was starting to shake. “Ma,” I said to her, “you’re diabetic!” Then I mouthed the words in an exaggerated deliberateness: “You have to eat!” I drove up to Dunkin Donuts and got her a croissant and cup of coffee. Afterwards, I went outside and finished off the roll of film, then put my camera into the car and walked back in.

She was on the steps again, with that same look: overwhelmed but resigned, uncertain but sure, tired but anxious. I hugged her again and tried to say something wise, offer up some verbal balm that would soothe whatever anxiety or doubts she had. Up to this point, I had been cool, nostalgic, but not really sad. I felt grateful, really, really grateful - for being able to say goodbye to this place, this sacred place in my life that had harbored me all those years. Growing up here had been nothing if not a safe haven. Whatever interior, spiritual life I possessed now as an adult was formulated here, within these walls. Then I felt the lump in my throat and that burning behind the soft of my eyes. I said nothing – I couldn’t - but my Mom did: “We had some good times here, didn’t we?” I wanted to say “yes” but I was crying. I hugged her again, nodded and turned to leave. I got in my car and drove off sobbing past the nicely trimmed Long Island lawns.

As I was composing myself in the car, trying hard not to seem psychotic (now the picture of some man sobbing in his car, alone, would barely raise an eyebrow in New York, I had been living away from New York a long time so naturally I felt self conscious) it suddenly hit me what it was that I was feeling: I was dying. I knew that I would never be back this way again. The friends I had in high school are no longer in this town; they are all over the world now, and now my Mom too would be gone. I had no business being in this neighborhood ever again. I was experiencing grief, not for the loss of some good times or old memories – but the real and actual death of who I was back then. The person I was, the one who grew up in this house, was gone – actually had been gone for some time but now the last tie was severed and it was like mourners throwing their handful of dirt onto a coffin. This was my way of experiencing the death of me as something real, something tangible.

In a way I felt a little relieved. We would be retelling the stories of the old neighborhood on any occasion we could – our family life is built around this sort of story telling. But I was free to feel sad for the loss of who I was back then. The words of the mystic Julian of Norwich suddenly came to mind: “All shall be well, and all shall be well. And in all manner of things, all shall be well.” As I heard these words bubble up from my heart, words that often comforted me, I eased into the loss like a pair of new jeans.

I headed over to the new place where in true Biegner fashion we made (what else?) but a party of the event, moving my Mom’s things into the new house thus opening another chapter, starting yet another story, beginning another epic tale to be told at some later date and time. We worked hard and ordered out for dinner together and got her settled into her new home. Like an old fashioned “barn raising”, we were tired but happy, really happy to be able to be together for something like this. Not everyone can say this. Not everyone has the ability to be together and celebrate the passing and comings of old and new things in their lives.


We do not die once but many, many times over – coward or courageous soul. During these threshold moments when we are afflicted with the blinding clarity of truth, it hits us square between the eyes and we are defenseless to stop it. When we are forced to give up our childhood home it forces us to give up at last our identity of who we thought we once were. Once we accept this identity as the sham that it is – for we are never really who we think we are, anyway - we are free to pass. It is not until we recognize these moments in our lives that we finally understand the freedom of this sort of loss. With just a bit of pain and a bitter hint of melancholy, we can let go as we move on and allow ourselves to grow just a little bit more.

POEM - Hum

Hum the working class Bumble-bee.
Hum the rapid flapping of Chickadees.
Hum the thunder wings of Eagle and Haw.
Hum Tree Frog’s incessant nagging dark.
Hum the Fall that approaches like a stranger asking directions.
Hum the dance that all things do
And hum the spacious stillness too.
Hum the violent wave of clasping Leaf.
Hum the voice I hear when I listen to Who listens
When I do not speak.
Hum wordless adoration of morning’s placental breech and birth.
Hum Living, Life, Dying and Death.
Hum the long linger between everything said.
And hum, hum,
Hum the Breathing and the Breath.

Before Mary Was the Mother of God

Before Mary was the Madonna, she was a little girl. She wore party dresses to parties, played hopscotch with other little girls, braided her hair with her girl friends and whispered secrets about boys she liked. She played with dolls, dressed them up and pretended to take them to schul. She taught them prayers that she, herself, was learning as a little girl, like the blessings before Shabbat and the prayer to say when hanging a mezuzah. She loved to dip her fingers into the clay pot where her Mother stored honey and she loved to sneak sweet licks in between meals, even though she knew she was not supposed to.

Before Mary gave birth to the Son of Man, she dreamed of marrying a kind man, a good man, one who would take care of her, one who would dote on her, a handsome, rugged man who would give her lots of children, girls and boys. She always wanted girls, but never spoke this aloud to anyone for fear of insulting Yahweh. She dreamed of meaningful yet boisterous Seder dinners with this man. She even knew the scent of him as he came home from a long day at work, a scent that reminded her slightly of her father.

Before Mary was a miracle and a mystery, she dreamed of watching her children grow into young adulthood, of watching them marry under the canopy, and eventually giving her lots of grandchildren as she grew old and gray. Before she uttered that fateful “Yes”, accepting unimaginable suffering, she believed that life was hard but good and that her God of Abraham was the sound choice of gods of her day.

Before Mary was persuaded by that angel, she was just a girl who loved to read. She was thoughtful, and looked after Samaritans, tax collectors and synagogue attending Jews alike. She befriended Romans, offering drinks and baked goods whenever she had the chance.

Before she gave away her life, she’d had only one period and thinking this was a sign from Yahweh she believed it a miracle until she learned from her mother, aunts and female cousins that this was the way it was for all women. She was naïve, but God loves the naïve ones - they are so much easier to work with. Then after learning that her “period” was not a miracle at all, and at age thirteen, became pregnant never once having tasted the sweetness of conjugal love. Now pregnant and unmarried she knew she would have to attend community college at night to get her degree, all while taking care of a toddler with a “messiah-complex”. She was aware that she lived in a part of the world and during a time in history where women in this condition were usually stoned to death. She would learn to lay low, to ignore the graffiti spray-painted by the gangs that roamed the streets of Palestine, the ones calling her “SLUT”, the ones who would taunt her with comments about her “bastard kid” who would never amount to anything. They would tell her she was a drain on society, living off Roman welfare, driving the Empire into ruin.

Still, there was a steel-like quality in her love for Jesus and others. Everyone underestimated her: her parents, her friends, her cousins and aunts and uncles. They all told her she should move, to find a man who would marry her before she began to “show”. She refused but even still, she decided to ask Joseph to help because she knew he would. He was her prom date after all and even though he was a jock at school he was a good guy, a reliable guy. He was one of those guys who worked with his hands in woodshop, and always smelled like fresh cedar or dogwood and always had pine shaving in his hair.

Before the pregnancy that defied all logic, before her bloated-ness and tiredness, before her Braxton Hicks contractions, the constant need to pee, the incessant backaches, even before a birth which by modern third world standards seemed primitive and savage – before all those things, Mary was just a little girl who once suckled at her mother’s breasts, who sometimes had nightmares and would run to snuggle next to her Mother as she slept. Once, she was just a little girl who wanted to make a difference by being a mother and giving love.

POEM - Fog

I think of fog as my soul
That hovers close to water,
The Source of all life –
Here, I think myself beautiful,
Suspended in the instant
Of a smile that is sunrise.

POEM - Buddha Moon

Pin Oak, Hemlock, Black Walnut:
When the great Chaos named these trees
The Wind that touches us all carried these names to us.

In utero, before I even knew what words were -
Before I learned how names could disjoint and categorize,
Before I knew Song, there was Wind
In the flirtations of mosquitoes,
In the graceful applause of flapping birds in flight.,
Before I knew the hammering of Clock
There were acorns dropping through Forest’s canopies
Tapping at the bed of raw umber pine needles
That is Forest's feathery floor below.
Tree Frog sings of Night to come
As Holy Dusk fills space made by vacant leaves

A Buddha Moon rises to rest its belly
Over the closing lids of Sunlight’s eyes
And skips Horizon’s rope to wake me wide.

POEM: The Graveyard Vandals

Tonight, the dead are mortified.
Tonight, the dead have never seen such disregard
For peace and sacred space.
Headstones lie flat, chunky as blocks of cheese,
Grass is carved up, uprooted yellow roots showing
As frayed as pulled hair,
While down below corpses wear pinched faces,
Mouths frozen into the shape of the letter “O” –
Yellow police ribbon marks the scene of the crime
While detectives who would rather be working
Some homicide case,
Wander while wondering
“Who would do such a thing?”

Yet below – far below – the peaceful dead
Feel violated, feel stiff bodies,
Feel stiff arms and stiff legs
Splayed like some rotted swastika,
Like an opened Swiss Army knife,
Imagining chalk outlines around their bodies –
Victims in the after here,
Victims in this “victimless crime”.

Tonight, the dead shiver in bony fear
That the graveyard vandals would strike again –
So that if given a choice when asked,
The dead would just as soon remain dead,
Where dignity at least lives.

POEM - Satellite Spotting

Gaze up at pinpricks of squinting light,
Night emerges, padded as fog.
"North-South is ours, East-West is theirs”,
I recount from my cold war days.
But now there is no "we" or "they" -
So how can I tell if light that cuts
through constellations is friend or foe?
It is the stars that are God's eyes,
Ones that giggle at the languor
Of satellites adrift like the
Lazy cricket notes in summer skies,
Amused by such folly, looking down,
Offering up their own prayers:
"North-South is ours, East-West is theirs.

POEM - La Dolce Vita

I love how mushrooms figure out how to grow
in the dark, like buttons without
the aid of infrared devices of any kind.

I love how bats strut their stuff to the
sound of their own voices,bad-ass, streetwise,
with little bat cigarettes dangling from little bat mouths.

I believe that I could navigate this life with my sense of taste alone.
I learned to trust from the sweetness of things,
I learned trouble at the first sign of bitter.

The summer was the stain of Italian ice in the heat
when we walked together with caramelized hearts,
and kissed in shades of twizzler red.

You held my hand like an ice cream stick,
and savored all the melting I did for you,
against the soft red give that was your tongue.

You bit down on the stick and found
the flavor of my splintered woody remains
which reminded you of the all those trees we climbed

when you and I could taste everything.

POEM - Me The Floor, You The Ceiling

Me the floor
You the ceiling -
Not the light
Not the brume
That hangs off the white
Like sheets we washed
Today in the basement,
Where I live,
Where I swim
Effluvial tides
Of the waiting
That we do
With each other,
One-on-one
Two-on-two.
It’s not the warmth
That we bring
But the growth -
The fullness, I think.
A crazy sarcoma,
Turns into a swell -
Opportune
Are moments -
Pearls offered up
In the smile
I crack at you –
The horizon
On the curve,
Of an earth
That
We’ve dreamed up.

POEM - Priority

In the days to follow, when we recount
The dithering, when we recount the drama
That seemed important. When we recall the rage
And righteousness, I will come to cherish the
Simple meals we took together.

I know that I am not to be exclusive.
I know that I need to include everyone
In the envelope of love that balls me up
Like laundry. Still, in the grace of such facile
Presence, in the glow of the ease of you,
Waking is just a gift that the day offers.

This is what I will cherish, what I consider
Important. This is what I will let sustain me,
What penetrates the opaqueness of the day,
This nourishment, this answered prayer.

15 Ways To Annoy Your Friends Who Love Harry Potter

-1- Call Professor Dumbledor "Professor Dum Dum"

-2- Suggest that in a duel. Samantha Stevens from "Bewitched" would kick Harry's ass.

-3- Confuse the Lord of the Rings Trilogy details with those of the Harry Potter series of books repeatedly by saying things like: "Remember when Gandalf and Voldemort were fighting and the Orcs took over the Hogwartz School of Wizzardry in the Town of Rivendale?"

-4- Wonder out loud to your friends if Harry Potter was not in fact the secret love child of Colonel Sherman Potter and Hot Lips Houlihan from the TV series M.A.S.H.

-5- Suggest to your friends that Harry should consider a line of Prada eyewear instead of those horrid horrid round glasses.

-6- Tell your friends that if Weezie Jefferson married Ron Weasly her name would have been "Weezie Weasly".

-7- Inform your friends that "muggles" are what Fraggles drink beer from.

-8- Whenever speaking about Harry, refer to him as "Mr. Pot-Tare" the way Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington did in the TV Series "Welcome Back Kotter"

-9- Suggest that Andi McDowell would have made a better Voldemort than Ray Fiennes.
-10- Refer to the author, J K Rowling as "J J Walker" and tell people you think she is "Dyno-Mite!"

-11- Repeat every 15 minutes to your friends that "Hermione rhymes with 'hiney' "

-12- Insist to your friends that you saw the actor who plays Professor Dumbldor on a TV infomercial for Viagra, talking about his "limp wand" problem.

-13- Tell your friends that Quiddich is not a real sport, like golf, NASCAR, horse racing, bowling and poker.

-14- Wonder out loud to your friends where Harry takes his invisibility cloak to be dry cleaned.

-15- Order the last Harry Potter book UPS ground and then when it finally DOES arrive, read only a few pages per day.

Family Affair

I am sitting in a Long Island church watching my niece Lauren’s first communion and no one is going to convince me that this is not a dress rehearsal for a wedding.

The girls wear virginal white. They give off that nervous patina of brides. They wear smiles that shout, “Look at me!” as they hold their hands in perfect a prayer position so as to show off their expensive manicures. Hairstyles of various curls and flips abound; all the girls’ heads are covered by the delicacy of lacey veils, the acquisition of which has been the source of so much melodrama with their Mothers.

The boys, on the other hand, wear the traditionally austere navy blue suits and the just as austere and blue looks on their faces. They’ve used enough hair gel to keep their spiky little hair studs in place in an F5 tornado! Some wear bows around their arms and they all – ALL – appear like they would much rather be peeling their skin off slowly with a dull butter knife.

Long Island is the land of Super Sweet Sixteen reality TV. I know it is possible to live simply and raise simple kids on Long Island. I know that people do. I just could not explain to you how one goes about doing that. In the context of Super Sweet Sixteen parties that have parents offering gold plated cell phones to the party guests as favors, it should come as no surprise then that even things as sacred as a first communion do not go untainted.

I watch these kids walk down the aisle in pairs. One girl – a whole head taller than her male counter part – has her head turned, looks at her partner the whole time, her hands folded, and whispers orders to the boy about how fast to walk. “Not so fast!” “Now. Faster. Hold it. Slow down!” the whole way down the aisle. It’s clear to me who is going to wear the pants in that family.

My niece, Lauren, is beautiful. She has this absolutely angelic complexion with light icy blue eyes and it just takes my breath away to see her looking so – well, grownup is the word I will use. And of course she is growing up. Her long blonde hair is set in ribbon-like curls and she wears a choker that has imitation pearl drops hanging from it.

I don’t recall the fashion part of this sacrament when I received, but then again, I’m a guy, so I wouldn’t. I just remember being told to wear a suit and to walk. Being Italian, First Holy Communion is a threshold experience in the minds of the families in attendance. This will be Lauren’s first time receiving the Body of Christ. Ostensibly, she will never be the same after today. I lean over to my mother and my aunt who are sitting in the front pew with me and I whisper: “This is such a godfather moment.”

In Italian families, all rites of passage are celebrated with the kind of flourish that leaves one’s mouth hanging as wide as some of those Long Island flounder I used to catch in my youth in the salty waters off the Island’s shores. Outsiders – that is non-Italians – seem to have a hard time getting their heads around the verve with which things like a first communion are celebrated.

As we sit in the pews of Holy Family Church, though, I begin to think about the nature of family in all this. First communion is nothing if not about the sanctity of the family especially as it pertains to the raising of children. The event is a landmark for these kids and their parents and it is presented with enough pomp to make it feel important.

The common understanding in Catholicism is that the Holy Family and the ordinary family mirror one another: Father is the God-head while Mother is the Marian archetype. The idea of being a good Catholic Christian is most certainly, though not exclusively, bound up with being a good member of the family. However, in the context of the status quo, and Jesus’ mission on earth, I have some misgivings about this concept. It’s a perspective that might not make that cannoli sit so easy in your stomach.

If we look at how Jesus responds to families in the gospel, it seems at odds with this sort of Church blessed notion that families are the basis for living a good and moral life. In fact the first and only childhood story we have of Jesus is the one in which he escapes from his mother and father to preach at the temple. He chastises Mary and Joseph saying in effect, “Don’t you know I need to be doing my father’s work?”

Hmmm. I’m pretty sure a response like this would have earned me a stiff crack across my butt. Jesus gets off scot-free.

Later in his life, Jesus warns his disciples that they must leave their families and He would make them fishers of men. He admonishes Mary telling her he has only one Father and, oh by the way, it isn’t Joseph. God, Jesus tells us, is “Our Father” too, thus creating a new family dynamic: the brother and sisterhood of all humankind.

Doesn’t He also side with Mary against Martha at Lazurus’ house? Martha complains that Mary is not doing her fair share of the cooking, setting the table, doing the dishes, performing her familial roles like she’s supposed to. Rather, Mary is at the feet of Jesus
listening to His every word, slacker that she is.

Jesus never suggests that having a good family is the way to achieve the Kingdom of God. In fact, He seems to be indicating that the opposite is true. But weren’t we taught that this is what defines the moral person, the good person, the one surely on the righteous path to heaven?

If we really examine the nature of the status quo we quickly realize how it is the rigor mortis of unjust social structures that provides separate and unequal living standards throughout this world. If we see Jesus’ ministry as something counter cultural, then it is easy to view His perspective as radical, meaning “root”. Jesus’ radicalism - getting to the root causes of things - sees the status quo as insufficient, tepid, not going far enough to bring the Kingdom of Heaven at hand, which as he kept saying throughout the Gospel, was why he was there in the first place, if anyone had bothered to listen to Him.

It would be fair to say that each of us has an affinity to his own basic tribe. From an evolutionary point of view, this sort of tribal behavior gave rise to social living. It is the way animals live and from the standpoint of preserving a species, it works. Today, this sort of tribal belonging gives us our sense of self-esteem, our confidence and turns us ultimately into social creatures. All in all, this is a good and positive thing. But if we never move beyond this then the social dynamic becomes and always remains “us” versus “them”. Believing in “the family of man” then is more window-dressing, more of an intellectual endeavor than a spiritual transformation.

For example, when we consider where we learn the notion of redemptive violence, this idea that violence can correct human behavior, don’t we learn this from our family? Don’t we teach our children not to hit others by the action of rapping the child’s wrist? Is it me, or does it seem that most of our dysfunctions as individuals stem from the unhealthy relationships that bubble up from our immediate, biological families? It seems to me that Jesus was suggesting that “status quo” behavior is what the nuclear family is best at imparting to others and that this would never do if we wanted real change, root change, radical change. This aspect of family - the tribal nature of it - needs to be replaced by something more universal, more encompassing.

I have a friend who often talks about the family you get and the family you choose. I believe this to be true. When we are born, we are born into the family we are given. But the fact is unless we turn our backs on conventional thinking, the kingdom of heaven will always be out there somewhere, or in the sky or someplace other than here and now. Unless we change how we view what a family is, then family life will be an obstacle to the sort of transformation that is required to bring heaven on earth. Until we open up our view of family to that of the family of all men and women, nothing will ever really change. We will continue to fight the same “wars to end all wars”, we will continue to feel aggrieved time and time again, we will continue to feel the injustice of poorly distributed wealth since we will always give in to our own tribal needs for the creature comforts of belonging, while all the time there is a larger sense of belonging that awaits us.

Unless and until I can see the homeless person as my real brother, the battered woman as my real sister, I am just promulgating more of the same relationships between me and everyone else: us and them. The behaviors will remain the same and the results of all my actions will remain the same.

This is not to suggest that we are all called to leave our families and to fight for justice as some might suggest. Instead, I believe that we are called to extend our notion of family to those who don’t think like us, look like us, pray like us, live like us, sound like us, or love like us. The gospel repudiation of family is not one that has us turning our backs on anyone, but rather opening our arms to everyone; to see family as something more than owning some turf, more than a wall to gather up “my own” and to keep out all of the “thems”.

So as I watch these beautiful children process on this beautiful warm and sunny Sunday morning, as I watch all of these wonderfully neurotic families climb over each other to get pictures of “their” son or “their” daughter, right here in Holy Family Church, I wonder if anyone would even understand what I am talking about. I wonder if the notion of family can ever really be transformed the way I believe Jesus was hoping it would. I wonder if we can ever really believe in a family of mankind, that our destinies truly are conjoined. Common ground is always a conspicuous thing, sitting right there under our very noses, if we choose to look.

POEM - The Yoga Tick

The tick mucks onto the mat
Waiting for savasana,
While yogis seek illumined
Life, breathing to enlightenment.
But the tick seeks contentment
Through attachment to a warm,
Full, pulsing, red-blooded form.

POEM - Soft

It took me all this time -
Fifty-one nomadic years -
To find that solid white line
Which runs like limestone through me.
"Soften," my yoga teacher says,
Meaning bone and ligament;
Meaning muscle and intent.

She might as well have been
Speaking about how to live.

St. Anne's

It has been said that you cannot go home again and nothing underscores that point more than when your childhood home is up for sale.

I am driving from New York to my home in Western Mass with my mother and she unloads two bits of information that disturb me: one, that Rudy Guiliani graduated from the same catholic grammar school as I did, and the other, that she was putting her house, our house, my house – the one I grew up in – up for sale.

The Guiliani fact depresses me. I admit this. He went to the same catholic grammar school as I did. His conscience was formed by the same priests and nuns as mine was. His formative years were influenced by many of the same factors as mine were; he walked the same halls, prayed the same prayers, received communion at the same rail as I did. Guiliani is older than I am and older than my brothers and sisters, so none of us remembers him or his family in our school. My mother tells me this, I surmise, so that I can partake of his celebrity post hoc. Despite being depressed by this fact though, it really doesn’t surprise me.

St. Anne’s School was a fairly large catholic grammar school in the heart of Garden City, Long Island. It was pretty well off folks who sent their kids there, mostly stock brokers and other Wall Street types; folks who thought life was pretty sweet, I’m sure, commuting on the LIRR each day, folks who thought they had it made, even those who worked at the World Trade Center years before its collapse.

We were from the other side of the tracks – literally – Garden City South, much more working class. You might even call us a sort of urban white trash if that term had been in vogue back then. Oh, it was not Compton or Cabrini Green to be sure, but everything is relative.

I say the fact that St. Anne’s produced a Rudy Guiliani doesn’t surprise me because most of the kids there wanted for nothing except maybe a conscience and a little humanity. I know this is a skewed perspective, decades after the events, but I went to school there as a complete outsider with few friends, thinking all the time that I was never cool enough for the cliques that always formed like mold at schools everywhere throughout this land. I was idiosyncratic, nebbish and quiet in ways that separated me, and it always seemed like I was the misshapen one. Turns out I wasn’t.

Some memories were formative.

Like when David Hughes and Tim O’Brien stopped me in the boys bathroom and wanted to see my baseball cards that I always carried around in my shirt pocket. Tim reached over to grab the cards and I slapped his hand away to stop him.

“Oh, smart guy, eh?” was the last thing I heard before he slammed my head into the cold hard tile of the boys bathroom. (In my memories, everyone talks like a 1930’s mobster!) I slumped like a sack of potatoes, saw stars and I believe I saw Jesus Christ holding a 1968 Gil Hodges baseball card in his glowing white hand.

In short, I did nothing. I rubbed the back of my head where a lump was rising to newfound glory. I got up, and never once spoke about it. I’d like to say this is where my path to non-violence began, but the truth is, I folded like a cheap bridge chair. I was afraid.

“Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence,” Gandhi wrote. Where was that bit of catholic social teaching when I needed it?So it doesn’t surprise me at all that St. Anne’s would produce a man like Rudy. What DOES surprise me is how they produced someone like me.

Rudy’s legacy will be his walking around New York City with a mask and a bullhorn after 9/11 promulgating the myth that redemptive violence is the answer to all that loss. Rudy seems to have learned nothing at all from St. Anne’s about the gospel whereas my outsider experiences there are exactly what the gospel message is about. I just find this funny.

Few experiences cause a personal seismic shift of your worldview. Having or losing a baby is one. Losing your last, remaining parent is another. Having your childhood home sold is another.

As I stood outside the house, I remember my seven other brothers and sisters growing up here. I remember climbing up to the roof to gaze at stars or play my guitar long before the James Taylor song. I remember jumping out of the second story window of my room, or climbing over the flat tarred roof of my sister’s room, to sneak out.

Our basement was semi-finished. I say semi-finished because in 6th grade two of my friends, my brother and I got it into our heads to have hamsters. We pooled our money together and walked down to Gardner’s Village near the Island Garden where the Nets used to play. They sold hamsters in addition to plants and other gardening supplies. We built cages out of scrap wood and chicken wire.

Now here is where a catholic education is severely deficient: four hamsters and not one of us had considered for a moment the sexes of any of these rodents; rodents whose prolific fecundity is unparalleled in nature; rodents whose gestational periods are measured in hours rather than months.

Why would we need to wonder where babies came from? We were trying to care for hamsters. Now you would think there is an outside chance the store worker might have grabbed four males, or four females. Instead, he grabbed three females and one very happy, very sated male. (The male lived quite a long life for a hamster which adds to the anecdotal evidence about the relationship of the amount of sex one has and longevity, but I digress.)

So of course we had dozens and dozens and dozens of hamsters. Litter after litter they came, little jelly bean wrigglers. “Oh look,” I can still recall hearing my own prepubescent rusty voice squealing, “the mama had babies.” Only to be replaced with, “Aw, look, the mama is kissing the babies,” finally to be replaced with the horrific “Oh, look the mama is EATING the babies!”

Yes, we learned the “dog eat dog” ways of nature through the squeezed views of chicken wire. We learned more about hamster breeding than we ever wanted to know. We tried to sell the progeny back to Gardner’s Village, but they wouldn’t give us money, they would only pay us in hamster food. Good thing too.

Soon we could not build cages fast enough, and they started escaping daily, ending up behind the wood paneled walls of this semi-finished basement. We were an ingenious group of kids, so we started removing the panels from the two by four studs. We put the panels on makeshift hinges so we could easily remove the walls at a moment’s notice without tools, or any loud banging so we could look for the fugitive rodent.

My parents only had a vague notion of what was happening. Keep in mind that my mother had eight of us to keep track of and my Dad – my poor Dad – worked two jobs to get the money to finish the basement as well as put food on the table. He would come home at 5:30 each night, have dinner, then go off to his second job as a manager at S.Klein’s department store toy department. He worked that job until 11PM when he would come home and watch TV for a couple of hours, dunking his cheap Pathmark Oreo knockoff cookies in his milk before he would go to bed, only to repeat the process the next morning.

The laundry room of the basement held a special sway for me personally. It was here, on the exposed concrete walls that I began scribbling my teenage poetry using chalk and chipped off pieces of gypsum board. The poetry was brooding, dark, enigmatic – all the qualities I believed good poetry should be back then. There were philosophical puzzles, rants, keen observations about the inner workings of a depressed teenage mind. Writing these thoughts on the walls expunged them from me, but more importantly, it made them permanent. I believed I would be immortalized on this concrete wall the way publishing makes real writers immortal. So long as this house stood, I thought, I would stand.

And as I looked at the house now on this spring day, I still think this is true. The move for my mother is completely practical: she will be closer to my siblings who now live further out on Long Island. She will walk away with some cash out of the deal, moving into a smaller house, with everything on one floor, important for a woman who is getting older and having a harder time walking. She knows this is going to be a hard thing to do: to untangle fifty years of living, to remove the memories of raising eight children. Each of us leaves a bit of us wherever we go. It is what humans do. So yeah, it's going to be hard.

My great fear though is that the next owner will tear the house down and my memories will no longer have a substrate on which to adhere. My poetry would be rubble, and then, would I cease to ever be permanent? The words in flaky chalk white, the dusty footprints of hundreds of hamsters: all just gone. Soundless. Would they squeeze onto the one hundred by hundred fifty foot lot one of those hideous McMansions that are going up all around this neighborhood? It would be a celebration of the kind of superficial living that those pricks I went to school with at St. Anne’s celebrated.

And that would be more than I could stand.

POEM - Oak

the sight of felled oak makes me sob
these quartered trunks gray as elephant legs

this wrinkled bark skin that begs touch
that speaks of reconstructed earth

of some great sacrifice for progress sake
or at least something more noble

than just a new gaggle of condos going in ¾
the sight of dying oak makes me weep

the humility of the coppice of common shrubs
is dwarfed by the sadness of cut oak

positioned in final acts of a torturous demise
piled up discarded as dead dead piled upon dead

everything is captured for autopsy later
held fast by the embrace of remembrance

that stores all wisdom in silent counting rings
and the unnerving quiet bravery of graying wood

POEM - Possum

Possum spread like peanut butter
across a bitumen road,
looks towards a rendered light
and with its remaining breath
is still able to envision a world
that is always dark,
where grubs are plentiful,
where trees are always lush and air warm.
where humans are left smeared
in the street with no one
to witness life skittering away
on prehensile feet,
scratching on pavement
avoiding bright light.

POEM - Grass

I am inflorescent grass,
Brought to tenderness, bowing
So gently, made crescent shaped
By the winds of your goodness.

POEM - Gene Therapy

Chemotherapy actually changes a person’s DNA
This explains why a friend’s hair
Is straight, thin and blonde before
The breast cancer diagnosis,
But is thick, brown, curly like an impasto painting afterward.

That our DNA can be changed in midlife
Comforts me somewhat.

Perhaps, it could be used to make me taller,
And look a bit more like George Clooney,
Or croon more like Frank Sinatra.

But there are limits everywhere –
Even to the miracles of altered genes.

POEM - Eating Corn

Whenever I push my spade into the
Fatty folds of brown earth
I feel like a surgeon making an incision.
Fields as dark as a coma await planting,
An open wound that waits to heal.

In July and August,
When foliate scarecrow stalks reach up high
Everything is covered, everything seems healed.

I steadfastly denude the ears of corn,
I dutifully boil them, then christen them in oil.
I dust them with salt for bite.

I know well how to live off scarified things

POEM - Grackle Song

Oil stained Grackle chokes
Out his song because spring is in full motion.
Yellow eyed, he observes the leaves
Which have begun to do their little
Flag-waving dance that they do when they change
From tightly wadded buds to flat, waving palms.
They show off a mania for more sunlight
And the arrival of worms at a respectable,
“Peckable” distance, just below the soil,

Robbin shifts his feet in anticipation
He can just taste the plump snack.

The cornucopia of freshly filled backyard
Feeders awaits Grackle and they sense it!
They cough more than sing, with a voice
That is more croup than croon
There is no mistaking the tone:
Winter will return soon enough.

Today is an Italian aria
And thanksgiving all wrapped up into one!

POEM - I Give You Back

I give you back but not willingly.
I give you back with rubbed raw eyes and denying,
With somber questions about what “Good” is,
And a rabid sort of crying.

I give you back as hard as granite,
I give you back with splintered faith,
With grizzled love, and warm trust that levitates
From your dark, soft face.

I give you back from my darkest place.
Back to Night sky, my sweet friend and dear black hole,
Though yellow pale starlight offers me nothing
In return when you leave and we reverse roles.

I give you back, here and now, in the spring of love divine
With one more heavy heart than when you first arrived: mine.

POEM - At Even Sky

At even sky
Before moon has loosed
Her laces to run barefoot
Through blue-black night field -
Before the velvet of dark
Drapes a vanquished color over us -
Two languorous trees,
composed, reverent, and still,
sway with the gentle swagger of a compass needle
In quiet repose and pray.

POEM - Morning Drive

And just then,
When it seemed like Despair
Would leave its fingerprints
All over me,
I turned and faced the east.
Where that smudge of rising light
That is the sun
Reminded me of how small
I really was;
That today, I was being granted one more
Single day to love harder -
More purely
More intensely -
Than I ever had before.

POEM - The Word

The Word
---------

We are the word -
Thought refracted
Like sleek pond fish
In slow, churlish
Murky water.

We are air that
Begins as wish,
Hidden within
Folds of furrowed
Brain, lost in the
Un-spelunked caves
Of expansive hearts.

We are sound that
yearns to be spoke
aloud, bubbling
sound, up from the
holy diaphragm,
Piped through warm tubed
Airways, over
The flat noodles
Of our vocal chords.

We are the sound
Swirling at the
Base of the throat,
Over the glottis,
A resonant ghost
Dredged up by spirit
We try to deny,
To keep to ourselves.

We are warmed
Air over fleshy
Tongue, between teeth,
Hissing like flooding
Vernal waters,
Snaking over lips
Freely into air,
Until it escapes,
Is free and is
Up for grabs.

We are the word
Long held captive -
That you helped loose -
This prisoner
From its flimsy
cage: gratitude.

POEM - East and West

NOTE: This poem is from a cycle of poems entitled: "The Canine Canticles" - poetry written from the perspective of a dog.

MC Biegner

When you leave to go to the West,
The sad eyes of the East will note your departure.
Westerly skies will lighten on learning of your arrival.
The pink, thin lips of skyline that cheer
The rising of a red round sun
Will moan 'goodbye' like it was the blues
And I will be jealous of the West for it has you!
The East will go mad, if only for the moment.

But when you return, a maelstrom of light will erupt
In the West. It will dance like distant brush fire.
The East will welcome you home again
Smothering you in food and kisses.
Flowers will burst from their bulbs
With a sharp crisp pop. Pungent life
Will find air; absence will be forgotten,
Left behind, never to be spoken of again.
Then the West will be jealous of me.

BrainDrops

1.

I made up this prayer up this morning:

“Dear God,

WTF?

Love, Michael”


2.

April is not the cruelest month. It is the coldest. At least in terms of its actual to expected temperature ratio: the ratio of actual air temperature to expected. Expressed as a ratio, this April is more like January or February.


The sight of limp white snow early this morning was sad, wasn’t it? Was anyone else saddened by it? Sometimes being a level 1 “EMPATH” is a drag.

I was watching an enfeebled Winter shaking a bony fist with a Parkinson’s tremor at the ensuing spring, knowing all the while May and June were snickering on the sidelines, just waiting in the wings.

I believe in prayer, but not the supplicant type. This is not do say I don’t do it. I just don’t really expect God to take a minute from his or her busy day just so that I can make a stop light.

Prayer of gratitude is the most important type to do I think and it’s the one we do least of. It involves being aware of things outside ourselves and really that is a kind of listening isn’t it? Listening involves being aware of the “otherness” of things around us.

I’ve always loved the C.S. Lewis line about his needing to pray not because it changes God, but because it changes me. (I’m not sure if he actually said that, but it was attributed to him in the movie about his life “Shadowlands”.)


3.


So a group of friends and I were sitting around and the subject of Einstein’s basic question about the universe came up. You know the question: at the end of the day, each of us has to decide do we live in a friendly or unfriendly universe. What do you think?

Incidentally, I just learned that Einstein had an illegitimate daughter named Lieserl when he was in his twenties. He had two other children by two other women – married to each one.

So let me recap this for you: Einstein had 3 children by 3 different women.

I find this comforting. The thought of loveable avuncular rumpled Einstein getting his groove on fills me with great hope.

I have this idea of making t-shirts that read “EINTSTEIN WAS A SLUT” on the front, with “GOD REALLY DOES PLAY DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE – DEAL WITH IT” on the back.


No one knows what became of Lieserl though. Somewhere out there Einstein’s DNA is floating around unaccounted for. Now when people say about another person, “Well, he’s no Einstein, is he?” - well, maybe he or she really is. It’s worth considering, no?


But the issue of a friendly or unfriendly universe is one that I wasn’t really prepared to respond to. I sat by considering the arguments being put forth by my friends, and could not render an opinion.

Part of the problem is the terminology. “Friendly or Unfriendly” universe sounds so anthropomorphic to me. Do I believe the universe moves to act for me and just for me? Could I possibly be that self-centered to think this is so? Something inside me chafes at the very notion that this collection of amino acids, DNA, molecules and shit ass chance has any more sway over the collective conscience of the universe than say a lamp. Even a lamp with one of those compact energy saving light bulbs that everyone thinks is so sexy now.

Part of me really wants to come down on the “unfriendly” side of this argument, or really, the idea of an indifferent universe, set up with laws and where I am a marble that bangs off other marbles. So there is interaction. But is it intelligent? And does it need to be for me to have a meaningful life?

So then I look down at myself and wonder why I am dressed like an inmate from prison in gray? Maybe I am just stuck inside of “Mobile with the Folsom prison blues” again.

These are the dangers of dressing in the dark, rising early in the morning 5:00AM to make my way to the gym because believe it or not, this is the most peaceful part of my waking life right now.


4.

So just where do you stand on the subject of light? Some people like it bright, others darker. It is clear though that if it is not of your liking, i.e., too bright or too dark, nothing else can get done until this is remedied. Then again, what is the purpose of the light? (Light has many uses.) For mood or ambience, a darker huskier shade will do. For reading, or fine detailed work, one cannot get enough. Bring me one of those 6 million candle power lanterns with a lens the size of Jupiter and runs on car batteries and can very nearly provide you with an x-ray of your body parts if you hold them to the lamp just right.

5.

Why are there leaf blowers? What deranged lunatic could possibly have dreamt up this device. “I got it”, the young inventor must have exclaimed. “I’m going to invent a device that sounds like a cat being tossed into a blender with razor blades, and I will have it blow the leaves into an amorphous mess so I will have to stand there with this Ghostbuster-like Proton Pack, this massive tumor-like thing on my back for three times the number of hours it takes just to rake the leaves.” Brilliant. At least I don’t have to move my arms though. Now THERE is a savings. Because arm movement has been associated with so many human atrocities. Where is the machine to replace masturbation then --- no – wait. I just don’t want to know.

Nothing like taking a wholly organic and meditative activity like leaf raking, add a small engine to it so it could use even MORE fossil fuel (because we are not using enough), to create a smoky, noisy excuse for productivity. I’d really like to know who invented this device. Why is it we DON’T know who this is? Because this device does not stack up against things like the polio vaccine, landing on the moon, the Camp David Peace accords. No Nobel prize for you, pigfucker – whoever you are.

6.



When you dial an out of region phone number, you have often as I have had the experience of receiving the message: “Please dial the number 1 before entering the phone number.” Here’s the thing: this is software that does this. I know a little something about software because I write it. If they can instruct a computer program to decide if the phone number requires the number “1” in front of it, why can’t the program insert the fucking errant digit in the number and send the call on its way without stopping to piss us off? Why?

7.

Why is it when people use the expression, “To make a long story short,” it is usually after about fifteen minutes into the story, when it is already too late to make that long story short? “Too late!” is what I want to say, but I don’t.

8.

Getting into the car tonight to come over here, there were snow flurries. Say it slow: SNOW - FLURRIES. I could see my breath.

So I sat down and I wrote this email to the channels 40 and 22 weather forecasters:

“Dear Weather People:

WTF?

Regards,

Michael Biegner
Easthampton, MA”

POEM - Spider Silk

Women are like spider silk –
Which when gathered into the width of a pencil,
Can stop an airplane in its tracks!

You are like spider silk
To me – lenient but just as formidable,
With every kilogram of grace!

Let them try to cut you down
And you come back, renewed, fresh.
Little girl, mother, woman, friend –

Let me carry you. Embrace me whenever we dare.
My torn spirit is a spider web broken,
One that aches to wrap you up -

I am an angel of silk spun around your heart.
Helpless, here is the song I wrote for you:
“ I am medicine. Drink me up!”

That is my prayer, my heart, that is my prayer.
Go ahead and pray it with me.
God hears the love hiding in our voices.

Go ahead and let your body be cut down,
You are always like spider silk to me -
As endless as my love for you.

Give. Withstand. Endure. Live!
You are as tough as spider silk, it’s true.
But always always always beautiful too.

POEM - The Question of Melting Snow

Is it that the snow – tired of its purity,
Has smeared an oily grime over its face?
Or, is it that dirt – tired of the commonplace
Has at last achieved divinity?

POEM - Snow Kayaking

Under a tired winter sky four boys push a kayak up a hill.
Ruddy faced, icy skinned, they pile in
Limp as cooked spaghetti, careless as wet laundry.
They descend with sluice-like slithering
And steer with kayak paddle fins.

Under a tired winter sky as fading light gilds mellow meadows,
A once wild wind is now demure.
The sky pulls up the nearest hilltop to sit,
Chin in hand, elbow to feet, touching knee
And tries to catch its broken breathe.

Under a tired winter sky Venus pops open like a waking eye.
She offers sweet light to the deep lethargic blue
Descending – dendrite branch tips as pliant
As tousled hair relaxed, grateful
For the respite of these vespers.

Under a tired winter sky the boys, once laughing and cold-bitten
Now sleep like Olympic kayak-ers,
With dreams as complete as a mitten.
Outside, the kayak waits, wanting just one more run.
While Venus yawns and soon retires.

Saturn jealously ogles the kayak far below
Then climbs the sky, to rule Arctic air and luminous snow.

POEM - Snow Fields

Snow-fields splayed in rounded white are
Inviting - not nearly as desolate as they seem
At first glance. Reclining, they motion to me
To explore, to leave tracks, to break the stillness
With the beating of a human heart so
Soft in the middle of all that ice. Love has drifted
In me every bit as tall and sloped as the snow
Reposed against fences and rusted barbed wire.

Snow-fields invite me in with gleeful eyes.
How can it be that I have never walked them?

POEM - The Sharpest Parts

It is the sharpest parts of you that penetrate deepest into me.

Like the story of the Buddhist monk
Who sought redemption of an insensitive life
By tying a Buddha statue to his waist.
Up a steep mountain slope, he ambled,
To a peak overlooking his monastery
That floated on the lake below.
Hand over hand, through snow and bramble,
Dragging the Buddha with him every step.
At the top he placed the Buddha looking out,
Over the mirror flat lake, the air thick with exhaustion,
Where he sat meditating for days
Without a gram of water or food.

I want to jettison what is tied to me,
To become the net that catches the fish
But let’s the water flow through.

You –
You wear forgiveness like loose fitting clothes
And with the sharpest parts of you
Bore out in me all the space I need.

POEM - Love In An Arctic Cold Front

I reach across a table to steal just one kiss
And it is as calamitous as jangling silverware,
These thoughts of love that crackle like ice underfoot.

Yearning is never frozen, rather it is warm like a wet tongue
To a metal pole in shivering, polar air;
It stays warm even when French kissing heavy metal objects.

Warm enough to reach across a table to steal just one kiss,
To jerk the shroud of the familiar around me – the contour
Of your face amid a crowd of strangers.

To wear the kind of forgiveness that begs me to jump – just jump.
To become a green tenderling to your brown broad-shouldered earth,
A fiddlehead curled asleep, coaxed to awaken, unfurl.

A finger that beckons to me of promises of anything.
“Come here and turn love into concrete,” it says.
“Come here and stave off night with the million suns

You carry about within you”. Light everywhere,
It achieves love in inches instead of miles.
It reaches across that table to steal just one kiss.

POEM - Decree

I decree that we have no right to opinions or tastes if they are patently wrong, parochial, limiting or fearful (fear eats the soul.)

I decree that sex after death is not only an inalienable right, but a metaphysical certainty.

I decree that from this day forward, no lives are too small.

I decree that we will do more with what we have and less with the things we don’t.

I decree that garden-watching shall heretofore be declared the American national pastime in place of baseball and that Walt Whitman’s words about baseball being “America’s game” be expunged from the record.

I decree that we should observe: “National Honor The Unknowable In Ourselves Day”.

I decree that beginning today, all speech will be outlawed – free or otherwise – and a period of free listening will begin, lasting until we learn to stop talking when we have nothing to say.

I decree that childhood officially begins at age 50. (Everything prior to this age is to hereby to be considered “neo-natal”.)

I decree that priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, Imams, monks, shamans and holy men from all over the world shall heretofore strip naked and wear only a smile whenever preaching about God.

I decree that art does not have to be good: it merely needs to be truthful, and that is enough.

I decree that politics are like a new suit of clothes and should be changed often and that no one should refuse offering a meal to another on the basis of his “wardrobe”.
(After all, it’s only politics.)

I decree that loneliness is part of the human genome.

I decree that Blowin’ In The Wind shall be our new national anthem.

I decree that a bloodied hijab of an Iraqui woman be the new flag of our country and that it be flown at half-mast on every flagpole of every state of this nation until hostilities cease.

I decree that coffee shall be declared as the drink of choice for kids on dates, at strip malls, at weddings and bar mitzvahs and that the martini glass replace the dowdy coffee mug as the cup of choice for coffee.

I decree that no one be allowed his preferences if it means another life having to be lived as a “cough”.

I decree that self loathing is a greater killer than cancer, gunshot wounds, heart disease, automobile related accidents and suicides combined and it should be treated as the medical plague that it is.

I decree that DNA is the new human alphabet of which we are still illiterate.

I decree that effective today, the “smile” to be the national language of America.

I decree that belief in anything is all that needs to be held in order to travel anywhere in the world.

I decree love.

I decree you.

POEM - A Great Descent

Everything begins with a great descent:
Like birth or the night that rolls out day.
I face sloping ice fields as hard as whispered truths,
This undulating white, the beard of some
Old testament God, bending to no one,
Forgiving no one, wagging a starched
Finger at me.

Hold it gently – this view – on a teabag string.
Dip it into bubbling sunlight, steep it long and still.
Eventually, you witness how summer
Has been blanched out completely,
How it leaves a lack like a great yawn.
Winter is that season all the others talk about
Behind her back in smug, furtive tones of exclusion.
But stand outside, in paper mâché light
And you understand how this is a season
Of shortened things – you dare not stay out
For too long because of how much
It takes out of you.
Mailboxes, benches, street signs -
Even living things have left exteriors behind
And what is left is the “thing-ness” of things,
Cutouts - cardboard barricades,
Bereft of juices, the bone but not the fat.

Everything begins with a great descent:
Like night brandishing a thin lipped
Pinkness, who kisses me like some winsome stranger
So hard
That I blush from embarrassment,
Tightly holding what I hope to be.

POEM - Flood

Yesterday, the icy waters from up north
melted and gave way.
Dams, unable to gird themselves,
split, and water ambled
Snake-like through the valley
seeking gravity's blessing
in a race to tranquility.

Yesterday, the waters of your tears from up north
melted and gave way,
dissolving a frozenness that has gripped me
for so long that I am unable to sew two words
together to even make one coherent thought.
These waters move with no grace at all,
That we are left so helpless by the hurt
that there is nothing left with
which we might defend ourselves.

Today, the morning arrives earlier.
The light is sharper and air cleaner.
Today, even the sad, naked trees
Want to dance.


M C Biegner

POEM - The Gravity of a Friend

I could be completely deaf
But still, I would hear the shrill
Whistle of the wind as it bores
Right through the hole I carve
Out of me for you.
More like a shelf, really.
One to hang your homelessness on to,
One to hang all that doubt
You carry about in bulging pockets.

If you were a cartoon,
I could never have even dreamed you
Up out of thin air!
I lack the imagination,
I lack the mastery of language
That is required:
Verbs would have insufficient muscle;
Modifiers would blanch in comparison
To what you are really like!

From other galaxies, we are just
Overlapping points of gravity, studded
Like nails driven into walls
That hold everything up, when all it
Wants to do is collapse.

POEM - Egg

Slick and cold as chocolate milk,
Consider this: Life as unopened gift,
Brown and wanting as summer grass.
Oh rounded grain of potent dirt!
Oh bare armed silence of the earth
As private as an infant’s thoughts!
Within – everything so sweetly compact
Like the unused ordinance of my love –
Imperfect, still: but ever intact.

POEM - Wish

No battle today.
No bloodied noses.
No testosterone feeding the fracas.
Not control, but negotiation.
Not domination, but cooperation.
Not anxiety, but confidence.
Not the concrete slabs of agenda,
But gardens of ideas,

Just prosperity of spirit.
Just folds of consensus in abundance.
Just glory for everyone.
Just – maybe - a touch.
Just courtesy.
Just an act of kindness.
Just a handful of honesty.
Just an armful of blinding Truth.

No battle.
No bloodied mess today, my sister.
Not today for you - or me.
No. Not today.

POEM - To You

I am that part in you that you refuse to know,
That box left in the hall ignored,
That thing in the corner of your eye
That you convince yourself
Is unneccessary.
I am everything that you
Have given up for dead.

POEM - To Me

You are that poem that tugs
At the deepest possible good in me.
The way ocean motivates land,
The way the open palms of waves
Curl, and beckon sand
To venture out to open sea.
New continents wait to be formed:
First goes the tide, then the wind,
And then, me.

The First Church of the Holy Laundromat

On any given Sunday they congregate, stepping into sultry air and hard fluorescent lighting, revelers in the soil of life. Sinners one and all seeking, salvation, reunion, wholeness through convenience store glass doors, hoping to air their dirty laundry, hoping to be clean once again. For what else is trafficked in here but purity? What else is made but a claim for redemption, a ransoming from stale, onerous body odors and embarrassing marks where life has laid its hands upon us but good? They come in, these children of a sullying world, baskets in tow with weary faces and bedraggled hair; entering with a sense of dread and leaving with a more buoyant soul, brighter colors and whiter whites; understanding renewal, understanding new life and the reinstatement of perfection. The warm air of the dryers expunges moisture. It forces wrinkles from their lives, adds the scent of detergent into their nostrils and the hint of fabric softener into the air which rises to the drop ceiling tiles above and circles the room like incense.

The intense heat reminds the congregants of the fiery winds of Gehenna, that waste dump of souls, where the longing for purification reminds them of how it will be on that last day when darks will be separated from lights; when permanent press will be segregated from the knits, and the hand washables shall inherit the earth - or at least some bureau space – when all God’s fabrics, rayons and cottons, wools and acrylics, will hang side by side and when each article of clothing shall be judged not by the colorfastness of its dye but by the content of its very character and its resilience to machine washing.

Around the outside of the room, slot knuckled machines sit like votive candles, like beggars with a hand out waiting for quarters to commemorate those missing socks, those torn and twisted favorite blouses, those bleach dripped jeans with white burn marks like holy water on the forehead of the Great Beast himself, making the jeans un-wearable except as cutoffs in the summer. The congregation gathers around the waist-high tables like altars with bowed heads and folded arms, flagellating garments as a penitential rite at the First Church of the Holy Laundromat; purging the speckled soiled chunks of daily living; dishing Whisk as the holy sacrament of stain pretreatment; avoiding the purgatory of effervescent static cling by way of a waxy dryer sheet or two. This consecration of holy water and blessed cleansing soap reenacts the miracle with each load of each garment’s first birth, held in a warm tub, immersed in salvation and squeezed pure by the spin cycle that is reminiscent of Christ’s very descent into hell to free us from a soggy damnation, shaking loose the stain of original sin: not pre-treating that blueberry stain – yes, blueberry that most Satanic of all stains – immediately after receiving it. The penitent pre-treats, then soaks, then scrubs with hopeful digits, like fingering a rosary or prayer wheel, achieving a singleness of mind that would rival the Buddha himself, hoping to achieve the return to that pristine state.

For that is what is they are all doing here on this Sunday night before another week of work begins, before they expose themselves again to things that darken, things that break them down, things that glorify the dinginess of being in this world. There are things that mark us, that make us different, that move us off the mark that is perfection. The congregants are all here. It is a quest for re-entrance into the pure light and the soft Snuggle bounce of a fabric softness we know is there and aim to achieve.

Absolution is what spins around those machines and every chugging drain from each machine carries away the separation we hate to admit runs our lives. When the silver slot knuckles of each machine swallows those quarters, we sit in mediation praying to be made new again, hoping for another chance to be good, clean, new, fresh, at least for that first moment Monday morning, when we reach into our drawers, when we pull out an article of clothing, folded with the veneration of a sacred vestment, when we slip the shirt or pants over our head or legs and for that one split second the gates of heaven open up to us and we feel like we are home once and for all.

POEM - On Your Birth

(On the Event of Christine's Fiftieth Birthday)

You received your moonlight skin
That my fingers savor unabashedly,
This skin that reads like poetry,
That I let down my guard for
At its very scent, feeling
Safe from the doubt we carry about in armloads.
You received the moistness of your lips,
The homespun welcome of your hips,
Your generous breath that you
Hand over when we first touch.
This is a language that we have adopted -
This noiseless tongue that leavens
Love like fresh warm bread.
I love the yellow yearning of your trust.
How it reaches out like crowds for the hem of Jesus,
How it sets off the plush azure of your glinted eyes:
For within you is a tidal constancy:
The target for which my arrow ever aims
Finding in me, an unworthy gift giver,
And in you, the grace God seeks to deliver

POEM - The Ways of Broken Things

Do not be afraid of broken things.
Do not be alarmed over the loose parts
You find unexpectedly in your hands.

My dear, this is what makes up everything:
It is a flimsiness that wedges deep
Into the steely edges of the day.

Let’s completely fill up the holes, the ones
We are embarrassed to speak of with courage.
Let’s make them solid, press soft putty between

Fingers clinched; smoothing scarred surfaces.
There are gaps in the galaxies, my heart,
And if stars can bear such imperfection,

Who are we to deny such a kinship?
Do not be afraid of broken things,
Or the random pieces we find shorn off,

Strewn wildly about; held with panicked strength.
It is into this shared emptiness that
We pour out new and made up kind of love.

It is how we find each other when nothing else is true.
It is how we know that nothing else will do.

POEM - Venice

If I could visit Venice

How would my poetry read?

Would it sway like the easy slung back
Sunlight off of canal waters?
Would it hold the ciarroscurro shadows
Of statues, bridges and spires?
Would it peal majestically like church bells?
Would it feel as expansive as those stone plazas?
Round as the rolling Venetian tongue
Rippled like cobblestone?
Would love inch through me, muscle by muscle
Like a gondola, leisurely and expectant?
Would home fill my nostrils
Unlocking the memory held in my DNA?
Would I comprehend romance as my native language?
Would it turn me into a fountain
Of lasting beauty and would I
Finally come to see myself as “beautiful”?

If I could visit Venice
Would I fall in love with my life again?
Know that desire has geography
And borders and requires passports?

And how would my poetry read?

Would words avoid me, fly from me like birds?
Would the city devour me? In its breezy hustle, be
Digested whole, spit me out into the sea
To be caught by local fisherman the following
Day and haggled over at the market place?

Could I ever sleep again?

Would my heart ever return to its normal size
Or would it simply explode?

POEM - Mother Christmas

And just what does it mean to give thanks?

That day in Bethlehem
When those three kings came with
Gifts for the little Baby King -
Did even one of them stop and say to Mary:

"Thank you for salvation" ?
"Thank you for showing me the way home" ?
"Thank you for your efforts, for the
pain you are about to endure for all of this" ?

Did they?

It is no mean feat to traffic in
The joy that you've heaped upon this world,
Creating nothing less than a brand new landscape.
It is a revolutionary act to raise a child –
Threatening Herod in his dreams with Baby Kings,
Born in some hangnail of a stable,
Not even fit for the animals that lived there.

Dear Mother, can you feel the rising thankful blood
That flows through these hands of mine tonight?

Here on this paper in fragments like bones
I spill words like the gifts of aimless Majii
Who come to bear witness to a new terrain that
You’ve carved out with your own heart space.

For this is what you bring forth like December snows:
That each time we make contact with another,
Is one more chance for us to be changed.

POEM - Birthday

Today,dear Friend,
Wonder Mother -
Sister Embrace -

Today
I faced the gravity
Of your birth -

Of its weight and girth
Of its importance in everything.
In the worlds you hold up;

In the post and lintel love you share;
In your frailty but especially in your strength,
All gift wrapped, curly ribboned, taped.

Today
You came to me
As a whisper of joy

As a shared cup of gratitude
In just knowing another pilgrim
Who shares the search, I am better off.

Today, dear Friend,
Wonder Sister,
Mother Embrace,

You were born
And even the cold November
Morning seems satisfied.

POEM - Fish

This fish feels
Like oil to me
Its bony dorsal
Fin pricks like
Glass into the
Thick of my hand, lies
Parabolic,
U-shaped, flat broad
Body pressed bent
Into the fat flesh -
Still struggling
After being
Removed from the
Water for hours.
Not alive, yet
Keen for living.
Dead, still I hold
Refusal in the
Palm of my hand

POEM - For Lila (On The Event of Her Christening)

Flower
- Fiore adornato -
Whose name rolls off the tongue
The way waves slipcover beachhead -
Adding and subtracting sand
Creating and erasing land -
Dear Little Peanut!
Unearthed treasure!
"Li-La" -
Musical appellation,
Springtime syllables,
Oh, Peace that we seek -
Make us blithe, make us meek,
Find us worthy.

POEM - Crow and Gull

Crow -
Great birthmark on the blue
Skin that is sky -
Dark spot in flight as drear
As insomnia -
Somehow, is able to catch
The easterly light when it is fresh
Just right
Transfiguring him
Momentarily
Into Gull.

POEM - The Guitar Player

Guitar notes pour out copper like bourbon
Everywhere, set free like helium balloons
Adrift, with wagging heads, like protozoa,
They celebrate what I love most about you.
The guitar player keens every liquid note,
Bending pain as if professing heartfelt love.
It is like that large open heart of yours,
Those radar dish eyes that hold everything
Whenever you look at me, recalling what
I was before my need for walls took hold.

It is a language of waiting,
In a dialect of tremolo, these
Notes scudding like evaporated love
And every bad decision ever made -
All real joy is held in the great sustain,
Isn’t it?

Love disgorges itself from that guitar,
Through the sound hole, percolates in languid
Fashion, this chisenbop of the heart,
Finger spelling for the deaf and mute in me.
The guitar player hugs the curves of his instrument
Just like your shape, the one I feel beneath
My hands, tenderly gripping frets,
Hands that slide along a slender neck,
this movement that evokes metallic squeals
Of chords changing flagging the progression -
The best of me is reflected in the woody warmth
Of you, in rounded smooth ways I can never explain,
The way the varnish reflects stage light.

This is just what this solo conjures up
In me, like voodoo, simple plucked strings that
Pull open the gates of everything that
I guard jealously, in elongated
Notes, longing to release a wanting
That I can barely even acknowledge
To myself in broad daylight.

POEM - Four A.M.

Four A.M.
Who do I think I am kidding?
I lie here trying to cheat sleep
Again. Maybe this is how death
Will come to me, in a creep, not
In one violent blow but as
Theft of my own replenishment
Bereft of loving refreshment.

Who am I trying to kid?
This gray flat garden terrain is
My breakfast these days; an oatmeal
Lacking the flavor sleep provides.
Mid-November sits outside, with
No recallable visage. A
Crayola carpet, wall to wall
With absentee color. Even
Light is limp with a sleepless verve.

So I get up because playing
Games in my head this early in
The morning, before the birdsong,
Before my dreams are done, flapping
Like film spun off a movie reel
Incomplete and unwatched, just seems
Wrong to me. I get out of bed
To face the tombstone white page
Empty and alone again at
Four A.M.

POEM - A November Crazy

I

November light splurges burnt ochre
Over stone and ivy walls, making it
Seem older than it really is:
It is the face of a drowsy day
Begging for a little more sleep,
Beneath sky as flat as tin foil, deep
Cartoonish, a cesura - the peaceful
tension of clinching day and night's release.

II

At the shelter I looked into
Institutional eyes as dark as
The horizon, we ate soup and bread
Together, you laughed when you said
How much you loved your grandchildren
And crack cocaine; how this place wanted
You to surrender and that you were
Just not ready to surrender yet.
You left to return at eight so that
You could get a cot because those
Were the rules if you wanted a place
To sleep that night and November cold
Is nothing to fool with. So we shook
Hands and your smile grabbed back and held me
Like cement until we separated.

III

I find myself sitting in a November crazy
Watching things die, circling the drain.
I carry all my things with me too,
Just as you do: artifacts of home,
Fossils from another age, as you do.
I feel unkempt, just as you do.
I feel invisible, unable
To be heard - just as you do.

Who will slog through the muddy fields to help?
Who will lay unctioned hands upon my
Forehead and squeeze the demons out like juice?
Everything resides with great tenderness
Just behind my eyes, if you look carefully you will see it.
Peace tonight is torn bread and strong black coffee.

IV

I shuffle around the city within,
Looking for a warm place too, as you do.
I am just as lost. It is as though
A marble sized life is dropped into
A space that is its own universe,
Between a quark and a hard place, blind to beauty,
Unable to climb out, as thin as smoke
Mixing with the raspy November air.

POEM - Morning Lips

Rising
A red roundness
Like lips that aim to kiss –
Raising a morning
Good gentle healer,
That starts the day
Off, cold but light;
Smudged like pastels,
On cheeks,
On eyelids,
On forehead,
On lips –
Rising
A round redness
It is a hunger.

M C Biegner

POEM - Paths

All paths are divergent.
Wandering like a lost child.
Attempts to hold on just empty us,
Like a knocked over tumbler.
Parallel paths, circular ones –
They all deliver the pilgrim in us to us,
Explorers that we are
Though pretend we cannot be.
Feeling like a homebody as a wanderer –
Just a little,
This is all I ask.
The mortar and brick
Of lives hold back the
Great wingspan that is hope.
Waiting in us,
Hiding and colorful like an Easter egg.
Fear and laughter and love
Are qll the ingredients we need.
All shall be well, my dear,
And all shall be well.
What you hold for me as unspoken
And what I hold deepest for you,
This is what is most true.

I Slept With The Wolf Man

The door to Trey’s studio apartment flopped open and there, there in the middle sat a bed, worn around the edges; a postage stamp really. Now I have to tell you that I am a tall woman, six foot four inches tall, statuesque, a could-be contender in America’s Next Top Model some tell me. Whatever, I say.

I liked Trey in high school. We knew each other slightly, no romantic interest then, but we lost touch over time and now, here in the middle of my mid-life meandering, I sought him out; like a scent, hunted him. Over drinks and dinner we caught up. He changed but not much. Standing at the doorway to a room that was square with rounded dark shadows for corners, a slight hazy smoke wafting in the room like a Holy Ghost. We faced the bed like newly-weds: all six foot four inches of me and five foot whatever of Trey. The sudden thought of a Chihuahua mating with a Great Dane popped into my head. “Damn head,” I thought and I shuddered at the idea of Mexi-danes being born. I stepped in.

“Drink, Kenny?”
“Kendra.” He liked the homoerotic nature of calling me Kenny, but really I only let people close to me do that. I knew Trey as a “trisexual” as in “he would try anything” when it came to sex. Now, side by side, facing the bed in the middle of the room and feeling the corners stuffed with shadows, an enveloping feeling took hold. Arms and legs felt like they were folding, begging Trey to open me gently, here on this bit of land of bed in a sea of dismal, all in a quiver, just a quiver that I know Trey could sense without even touching me. When he did touch me, it was like climbing the first hill of a roller coaster, the car angled steeply back and there is that clicking of the chain that pulls the cars up filling me up with suspense like a tea kettle. Just beyond a shadow, I could make out one figure: that of a taxidermied gray wolf in attack pose, teeth bared, hair up, rear legs poised to leap. Trey saw me notice the stuffed wolf and offered no explanation of how he was able to acquire such an illegal thing, as gray wolves were protected in these parts.

“Like him? His name is Bart the Alpha male.” The voices in my head started: “Please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird.”

Then Trey: “Want to check on my collection of gray wolf scat?”
Click
“You know wolves have been known to nurse and raise other species.”
Click-Click.
“Want to try some she-wolf milk later?”
Click-Click-Click

Me (inside): “Please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird.”

I swear that my lips are moving as I internalize this, but Trey doesn’t notice or maybe I only think I am moving my lips. I spy a small kitchen area with a pot for coffee on a burner. “Coffee?” I say, trying to smile but am only able to manage a crack across my face. “Please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird.”

We talk and he seems just as I remember him in high school: bookish, diminutive, nerdy but in a now-nerdy-is-hip sort of way. Once again, images of Mexi-danes dance through my head as I realize that sex in any position with Trey is going to be YouTube fodder for sure.

“It’s been a while, Kenny.”
“Kendra” and I am now worried that I don’t know to what he is referring as having “been a while”: sex for him (quite likely), sex for me (uh, yeah) or just the time that has lapsed since we were in high school together (an interminable infinity).

So the evening passes like the dull thud of city street noise: relentless and just below the threshold of unbearable. Finally, he says to me: “So – “ and he lets it hang right there like laundry. “I was sort of hoping…you know…” and now I find myself both drawn in and pushed away by the possibility of having sex with Trey. There is Bart and the wolf scat running like a toddler loose without parental supervision in my brain, but still I consent. Jesus Christ, what a girl has to do to get laid around here! And again like a Greek chorus: “Please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird.”

I say yes to Trey, let’s – as though we were talking about painting the ceiling together. I slip into bed, into dingy sheets, a dinge I can see even in the dirty gray light strewn about like clothing about the room. The darkness is not complete, it is veil-like, not hiding exactly, but rather revealing in small ways. Trey, now naked save for his thick wooly socks, ambles over and gently lifts Bart and places him under his arm. He brings Bart over and now I too am naked, beneath the sheets, eyes wide, my skin made paler by the way the mercury vapor street light outside stretches my skin. Trey pets Bart gently. “Please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird.”

Trey places Bart under the covers. I am for a moment like a mountain climber losing my grip, suffering from altitude sickness, and can anticipate the fall. Bart’s fur brushes up against my legs and crotch, my skin now at a full gallop. Somehow, Trey gets on the other side of me and spoons me. Like a sliver he takes up no space at all and crushed against Bart’s dead fur, I feel Trey’s warm springy pubic hair. “Please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird, please don’t let this get weird.”

I settle back, breathe deeply through my nose to slow my heart, when Trey in almost a slow motion movement reaches over and with the gentleness of a loving mother, turns back the top sheet of the bed. “So he can breathe,” he says.

So he can breathe?

I hear something snap. I mean I literally hear something snap or at least I think I do but something definitely made a pop. I’ve watched Silence of the Lambs enough times to know it all. Hadn’t I yelled at Jody Foster during that basement scene when the killer donned the night vision goggles? When Jody is hunted and all breathless and desperate, didn’t I scream each time I watched: “Run Jody! Left - Lookout behind you!”

I bolt tripping over everything and Trey’s head swivels like it is on a ball bearing. I bolt dressing in the street, all six foot four inches of my frame, fully extended, now I slam into a shelf I missed on my way in. I bolt and I don’t stop running until I am safe at home.

At home, I begin to wonder what sex would have been like with Trey. Would he have mounted me from the rear, doggy style and bit my neck repeatedly leaving marks for everyone else to only wonder about? Would he have howled – actually howled? But then only the headlines of my mother found their way into my head: “Woman Found Assaulted In Grizzly Murder” with descriptions of my jugular vein ripped out and entrails found in the fridge of her old high school sweet heart who had this obsession with her.

“We were not high school sweet hearts,” I say out loud to no one but the headlines in my head that buzz around me like bees.

Okay, so months go by and Trey calls me out of the blue like nothing happened. He wants to go out again. Says he had a great time and would like to see me again. Really.
I want to be kind. I really do but suddenly it all pours out of me, the words; they pour out of me like an open artery. I feel warm and I can’t stop. I want to be gentle. I don’t want to hurt Trey but no I tell him. No, I say. And no and no and no and no and no one last time and soon all I am hearing is NO. I am certain I threw in some linking verbs, some nouns and modifiers and I am sure there were some complete thoughts, some reasons, still all I heard was NO. In the end, Trey swore his love for me and that he would fight to win me back but he did so using a very, very weird voice – almost cartoonish – that we were meant to be together, it was destiny.

In the end, Trey was not a murderer, of course, he was just an odd acquaintance in my life of many odd acquaintances like Melissa the trans-gendered handy-man/woman or Carl, the painter friend of mine who climaxed at the smell of fresh latex.

Being single sucks – I say this categorically for those who might have delusions otherwise. It’s funny how fear drove me into this date – and how fear drove me away: first the fear of being alone, then the fear of being torn apart: maybe both irrational but both very palpable. Fear is the fuel for the engine of many things we do, I’ve learned. But now I have a new problem: my roommate wants a dog. I tell her no way, I don’t do dogs. I guess I need a new roommate.

The Reasonably Short And Colorful Life of Leonard Macey

Leonard wrote in color. That is not to say that his words appeared in color, but rather he thought and conveyed ideas and emotions using a language of color. It was a skill he discovered as a child, as an infant in fact – where most infants stared up at colorful mobiles, Leonard studied them: their shades, their visual afterglows, the way light was changed by various temperatures and the way it all affected mood and intent. All this became fodder for a baby whose genetic predisposition allowed him to learn other languages with little effort. Where other children’s first words were usually “mama” or “papa”, Leonard’s was “blue” – not the sonic word blue, but the color blue. He conveyed the most baby of blues to his proud mama and papa who suspected they had a child prodigy on their hands.

As he grew so did his palette vocabulary until Leonard was able to write and speak in the most subtle shades of color, some visible to the human eye, while others not. He tried his hand at writing colored poetry which confused people at first thinking he was just being politically insensitive. He started with the visible hues first so that people who could not speak the language – and that would be everyone else – could at least have something to look at while he read. Eventually he took to writing poems and stories in the upper frequency spectrum of light, even into the UV range and soon his art took on the tenor of performance art, since whatever Leonard read was invisible and inaudible, it appeared to listeners that he was just standing there.

This worked out well in some quarters, avante garde coffee houses for instance, that embraced that sort of thing and since most people were usually too stoned for critical thought, it usually went over reasonably well for Leonard and he developed quite a cult following. In time, Leonard tried writing a novel with the title “Indigo Reddish Green Cobalt Blue”. Those were not the words of the title; those were the colors that were in fact the title. Only Leonard knew what the book or it’s title meant, but that did not keep some one from publishing it and the NY Times Book review from reviewing it, giving it high praise for a great attempt at a first quote – unintelligible art piece – unquote. Leonard rode a wave of fame as his book climbed the best seller list until, it appeared in both the top ten fiction and non-fiction lists since no one could discern under which genre the book should fall.

Soon, color fell out of fashion – as color will from time to time – back to basic black and all that, and how everything seems to be the new black, but soon on the heals of colored literature was the unlived memoir movement, followed by the living memoirs of someone else’s life movement, all which proved to be great fodder for the talk show circuit, C-SPAN book TV and lawyers. Over time, long after Leonard was gone and was just dust, libraries would remove any sort of catalog system since all literature gave way to a mélange of genre’s of writing that could easily be fit into any category. This branch of literature became known as “FU” writing as in: “Fuck, I don’t know what to call this kind of writing.” (Author’s note: FU literature enjoyed great popularity among airline travelers and was eventually replaced by imprints of cat paws on reams of watercolor papers known as the Feline movement. Literature was not much fun in the future!)

But Leonard was an army of one in his branch of literature, that of writing with color. Doctors examined him when he was young at first thinking his “disorder” was a variant of cinesthesia but then creating a whole new type of neurological anomaly. Leonard was directed toward traditional Art as a form of expression but he had the overwhelming urge to paint still lifes of creamy Italian pastries which only served to make him hungry which in turn exacerbated his cholesterol levels and drove his blood sugar levels beyond borderline diabetes to full blown raging diabetes. The more he painted, the more digits he would lose on his hands and feet, and Leonard did not consider that a fair trade at all, so he turned his gift in a completely unexpected direction.

Despite the success of his only novel at the age of 23, Leonard was denied his opportunity to create his magnum opus, as he died only two years after the publication and eventual nomination for a Nobel prize in both literature AND art in the same work. The event was most unfortunate and tragic and could never have been foreseen. It seems Leonard was leaving a book signing and while crossing at the light of a heavily trafficked intersection, frequented by large double tandems and construction equipment, the combination of the light suddenly turning to green, combined with the way the sunlight just happened to hit the stop light created such a color that spoke to Leonard in a way he never anticipated. He froze. He stopped completely in his tracks. Maybe it was the voice of God that none of us would ever hear, but in that one colorful syllable, the mysteries of the entire universe, of all the mulitverses, became clear to Leonard. So he stopped. But maybe too it was just a fluke. Maybe the combining light waves just so happened to reveal all this to Leonard. But no matter what the cause was, Leonard stopped – which was an unfortunate thing since a large dump truck unable to stop in time plowed poor Leonard over, knocking his very soul out of him three counties away in an instant. The coroner said it was instant, which we all assumed must have been the case, because, well, who would really know anyway, and it did console us greatly to think such a thing. Police recorded in the accident report the testimony of one witness who said that Leonard’s last words were “turqoise gray!”

He was not a man known for swearing, but under these circumstances, everyone felt he could be forgiven.

Trigger

The bullet sheared off the head of his penis – clean as a chopped carrot – in shape though much more effusive in texture; like a split garden cherry tomato oozing with greenish seeds everywhere.

Slyvia was aiming for his balls – she wanted to shoot at least one of them – but the gun went off just a microsecond sooner that she’d expected. A quiver of the trigger - a flinch really – and the bullet was away, expelled through the dark tunnel like portal that was the barrel of the gun. Traveling at a muzzle velocity of 1,000 feet per second spiraling. A reflexive response, not premeditated, Sylvia pointed the square black semi-automatic Glock at “The Kurt” and at all the other “Kurts” before and after this one. She fingered the silver curve of the trigger like a penis.

The cauterizing heat of the lead that snipped off the head of “The Kurt’s” penis head sealed the wound almost instantly, with very little blood to show for it. “The Kurt” grabbed for his crotch, eyes bulging like that of a hooked fish. Stumbling backwards, “The Kurt” sat down at a table, mouth fully formed in disbelief in an “O” shape.

The trigger still within her finger’s reach, Sylvia knew the fierce pull of blood – she felt reckless, like a broken levy, pouring out everywhere. Reckless, but strong. “The Kurt” would not try that again. He would think twice. Sylvia was breathless with strength. For the first time through the haze of her mental illness, through the medications and all the counseling, Sylvia felt empowered. “The Kurt”, however, only breathed in heavily, swore in shock, in fear, in shock more so. For the first time, Sylvia knew that the obsession had been worth it. She waited the requisite five days for a gun background check, where they would skip over the doctors and the hospitalization. She went down to the local NRA chapter where other “Kurts” – ones with large hands and beefy sideburns showed her how to turn the gun safety on and off. How to clean her gun. How to load it. How to hone the trigger. Sylvia knew the obsession was worth it. In her head, she saw the bullet tear through soft mushroom flesh of “The Kurt’s” penis head, pulling, pulling at it. Stretching it until blood vessel walls tore away, like pulling soft bread – until the tissue would not hold together.

“The Kurt” was disintegrating at the molecular level right before Sylvia’s eyes. She saw the spinning bullet pass through white gelatinous flesh – through the space where his two thighs met – between the space like a football field goal, between the uprights, into the wooden floor behind him in the coffee shop.

It was a fragment sentence of one morning when Sylvia walked into the coffee shop. A moment and she could have turned the other way, walked down toward Main Street, to the Starbucks that was there. She could have been late or been sick, or decided to take the day off instead. She could have gone in early to work, on the 32nd floor, north side of the building, cubicle 12C, 5 rows down past the copier that always broke down and drove Sylvia crazy.

But this was an abbreviated event. A decimal point really in a day of contiguous lines. It was an event that took only 18 seconds to transpire and as such no one in the shop moved, except, as already noted, for “The Kurt”, who stumbled back and found a chair. Slyvia tucked the Glock into her oversized purse, fingering the trigger like she was stirring coffee. She turned and walked out, and no one moved until finally the barrista called 911.

In time, “The Kurt” – whose real name was Adam –would be fine. With prosthetics and the advances of plastic surgery, Adam would date again, needing to relate the story over and over to some unsuspecting woman who only wanted a little romance, a little fun in the sack. When she saw his penis, she would be aghast, and Adam would blush, and then the story would be told again. Sylvia made a left out of the door, smelled the cool autumn air and moved dreamlike toward the bus stop.

POEM - God Still Speaks

God still speaks and prayer is a hothouse orchid
Called “Listening”.

His voice is my hard, deep crying;
His voice is my orphaned faith;
His voice is the loss stuffed in my pockets;
His voice is the empty branch offering nothing,
Like a skinned, bony arm holding nothing:

A whisper, an owl’s wing;
The color of summer souring;
The shudder of a leaf;
The deadly silent wells of grief;
The gathering bell and
The graveyard’s slope I know full well.

God still speaks and prayer is the torturous act
Of listening.


M C Biegner

POEM - Leaf

The orphaned leaf set ablaze by the season
And God’s blinking eye, scratches at the asphalt
At the wind’s very beck and call. Torn leaf from limb,
Freely tumbling, separated by the Fall,
Left to stare upwards at a pin prick night sky,
Free-floating and wondering about the way
To unearth all those things it needed to say –
Like the sleepy maple syrup held trapped and
Untapped, locked deep within the trunks of trees
Kept away, guarded tight with such zealotry;
Wondering if forgiveness was the way
Despite the heaping mound of absence in its
Short life that keeps reunion off, held at bay.
Until the cruel winter snows cover it up,
Turning the leaf into atomic things:
What becomes nourishment for hungry trees.
Which, with Spring’s heartfelt grace, pushes out
Buds, round and like an infant’s fists, yearning to face
Fresh light, like an open hand greeting friends;
Wanting to be accepted once again.


M C Biegner

POEM - Isadora Duncan As A Down's Syndrome Child

You are this Isadora Duncan to a
Bleating over-caffeinated expresso
Machine – laughing like holiday cellophane
Dishing wordy smiles and festive eyes that have
Drunk whole white-capped oceans: a blue suggesting
No limits. So worldly in an “own world” way.
The music is yours alone, tones I cannot
Hear – outside my frequency - it makes me love
You so hard and without fatigue. Quick step, hop,
Skip, step again; swing jangling arms and legs
Until at last you go to sleep, where I place
My head next to yours and I fill your ears with
Kisses. Then you and I are healed here. We both dance,
Clasp arms, and feel the impulse that some people
Call joy, but what we simply call “each other”

M C Biegner

POEM - Choice

Here
Silence and sun washes everything amber -
Blankets really -
Soft fog aims to hide
What light spray-paints the color of one aching heart.
With broad strokes,
Sinewy shadows, drawn as objects bleeding black.

Here
As I pass, everything holds a sturdy desire to rest.
Bent I am, like a spoon
In the hands of mentalist Uri Geller,
Toward silence washing
Over black road, uphill,
Light in the face of large open face houses.

On
But on go I, passing through
This painting, some sort of moving reverie.
Called, I respond.

POEM - Morning Meditation (What The Bats Told Me)

“How we long for morning!” is what coffee sings
To me in aromatic melodies.
Soft as tissue, cat-like as it stretches
Through arbor vitae, stiff as royal guards,
This colorful ribbon that is worn around the
Neck of the day.
We remember things like how to throw a curve ball –
The toothy seams touching callused fingers, roughed by rawhide.
Like a curveball, the day spins away from us,
Once released.
Morning is the empty glass bottle, all angles
And curves that sits with the patience of a garden,
Wild with the kind of wanting that we do not
Usually carry around in our wallets
Like pictures of our family.
Desirous as a hairpin that needs to control,
As insistent as a cell phone.
Even the bats above, turning in for the day, know
That light has a serrated edge like a quarter
With which it tries to grip the slippery dark
And push it down.
We may doubt everything else about our lives
But never how the morning is ours –
How we belong to it –
How right it is to love the felt part of the day
Before it turns on us.

M C Biegner
9/2004

POEM - Surprise

What is cherished most is like the game we sometimes play:
“If a fire burned down your house,
which things would you save?”

A waterproof bicycle map of the valley,
given to me on my birthday.
A small coffee grinder I use
to brew organic French roast on Sundays.
A santuku knife I received as a Christmas gift.
Your trust
and how you said that you saw heroic things in me.

You serve up wholesomeness
in a couscous and mushroom casserole
with flavors that suggest you are no stranger.
You serve up faith in the family of disparate things,
wholeness bound by the thread you use
to sew the gaping holes in me.

I linger in the feeling of belonging to you
And this shocking truth still surprises me.

POEM - Listening For Loss

Listen
For the loss:
One great
Insurmountable
Lost love.
Inexplicable –
Goes
Ghostly and
Apparitional:
A heron gray
whisk of wishing verbs;
A leaden dross;
A heaviness that
Waits for returning
Things here,
At the mouth
Of September.
Wearing it
Like a cross,
Carrying it
Like old coins
I can’t bear
To spend.
Listen
To how
Quiet pronounces
My name.

World Trade Center: A Review

Against my gut, I went to see the opening of World Trade Center.

I say against my gut not because I thought I would hate it, but because I was afraid it would evoke the exact reaction it did from me: sadness. Great, heaping mounds of it.

I am not an Oliver Stone fan, but this is not to say that I hate his work. Truth be told, I am relatively ignorant of his works except by way of plot summaries and word of mouth. And anyway, every artist should be measured only on the basis of the work at hand. Each creation is a tabla rosa.

Is five years too soon to make a movie about the collapse of the Trade Center? I think so, based solely on the visceral reaction I had watching it. But let’s first be honest about what this movie is: it is a tribute to the courage of these two men and the men and women who were the first responders. It was a tribute to those lost as well. Should the story be told? Absolutely. It deserves telling. As a tribute movie, this story works.

The scenes from the inside of the towers collapsing which, of course, only one of the 20 survivors could authenticate, is harrowing and nightmarish. It had all the markings of one of those 1970’s disaster movies. There is no fear of spoiling any ending here because well, we know the story. The buildings fall and these guys are rescued. The drama then is somewhat stunted, as it is in all biopics or historically based movies. The only thing these sorts of movies have to offer is some sort of unique perspective. Unfortunately, perspective is the one thing lacking in this movie – the one thing that might actually make me feel that I walked away with something, anything, other than this great sense of loss.

The first half of the movie re-invokes that same sort of voyeuristic compulsion that held us all glued to our TVs when the event actually happened. After it happened, when the news showed the towers fall again and again, we knew what was going to happen, but we still watched anyway. This movie has the same sort of effect and I have to say, it’s disquieting. It was horrible when I experienced it the first time, and this “rebound” voyeurism is even worse because I should know better.

There is a scene where Allison (Maggie Gyllenhall) has to leave her house she is so distraught over the looming reality that she may be a widow. She goes out into her New York neighborhood and the soft glow of all the other row houses TVs spills out into the night. Presumably these people are glued to their TVs just as we all were. I must say that Gyllenhall’s performance was among the best, as she portrays a young pregnant woman not knowing whether her husband was going to be coming home. She exhibited in a realistic way a woman in the grips of some sort of post traumatic stress disorder very convincingly, even to the denial she heaped upon herself to get her through the hours.

To some extent, this is what Stone is banking on here. This retelling of a familiar story that offers little if anything new can only be to call up in us that same sense of dread and horror that we felt when we first watched the towers fall. That is exactly what I was feeling. Maybe that is how he tries to get us to buy in and become emotionally invested but it is not done well enough; the writing is not good enough, or the observations are not keen enough to make it seem sincere.
The first half of this movie is about pulling me back into to that swath of grief that laid me emotionally bare enough to welcome the comfort of strangers, good will from people I’d never met, or from people halfway around the world. This is touched on briefly as some actual footage from world reactions is played just after the attack. The complete shock and awe on the faces of those who should have been disinterested parties really reminded me of that moment of closeness as well. As sad a time as that was, there was a great sense of common unity and this movie does well to remind us of this. But this movie was not about that moment. It was about the theater of the absurd that the fall of the towers represented.

Unfortunately that sense of oneness was quickly abandoned by a “a few good men who will need to avenge” this sort of act as Marine Sgt David Karnes (Michael Shannon) presciently says at the end of the movie into his cell phone to some unknown person.

Karnes in fact is one of the most interesting minor characters of the movie. Presumably based on a real person, Karnes discerns while deep in prayer in his evangelical church in Wilton, Connecticut, that God is telling him that he needs to go down to Manhattan and help. Appearing heroic in a GI Joe sort of way, he actually came off a bit creepy in my estimation. This sort of “white knight” persona represents the same sort of zealotry that allowed those to fly planes into the Trade Center towers in the first place. Is Stone trying to teach us about the nature of zealotry; that it can be a double-edged sword, which can kill and save? The irony is obvious and almost too exaggerated to be by accident. But who knows? Maybe the guy really is that rigid. Still the irony is perfect, even if Stone did not intend it.

The movie really breaks down when it tries to explore the inner workings of the minds of Officers Mcloughlin and Jimeno. The attempt to get us into their heads while they are dying (and face it that is what this movie is about, watching these two characters die while others scramble to rescue them) tries to take this movie into a direction it shouldn’t even go. There is nothing deep about their reaction. It is perfectly normal and understandable that they should have visions as they are dying. And so what? Office Jimeno (Michael Peno) is worried about what his wife is going to name the baby when he is gone. Officer Mcloughlin (Nicholas Cage) has doubts about whether he was the kind of husband he should have been. These are very ordinary things that any one of us can relate to and I guess that was the design here: to further draw us in on a personal emotional level but that is unnecessary. It was an attempt at something meaningful, but it just came off cheesy to me.

The latter part of the movie does resemble a Hallmark moment, but there are moving moments as well. When Mcloughlin says to his wife Donna (Maria Bellow) as he is being brought into the hospital “you kept me alive” you can’t help but bawl. But in a way, I sort of feel that my grief for the WTC tragedy is being manipulated and exploited.

The fact is I am not ready to give up my grief about what happened on that day. I don’t want to “feel good” about 9/11. I want to be connected to other humans – the way we all felt in the first few days following this disaster. It is clear that Stone meant this movie to be an homage to these people. But for every Mcloughlin and Jimeno there were thousands more still buried in all that rubble or worse, vaporized never to be heard from or seen again – as though they’d never existed in the first place save for those countless grieving others left behind. There were thousands more family members who worried and did not have the same sort of joyful outcome that Officers McLoughlin and Jimeno's families did. They even attempt a classic dramatic twist to keep us emotionally involved as both wives rush down to the hospital after being told one just “walked out onto Liberty street” only to be told later that he was still being extricated. It doesn’t work though because we know the ending. The two wives in a sort of attempt at eerie “woo-woo” confluences, actually pass each other at the hospital, but neither knows the other, or how their lives are unknowingly bound together. But all of our lives are that way after 9/11. Again, maybe it really happened. Who knows? But it seemed contrived to me.

It’s not that modern art ignores what happened on 9/11 nor should it. Subtle uses of the WTC collapse, as in the Jonathon Safron Foers’ book “Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud” for example, uses the events of that day as a backdrop that drives young Oscar Schell to seek a connection with his father who perished in the WTC collapse. The tragedy is used to uncover the 9/11 in our own lives – those collapsing building moments that we have with others, how we are all survivors of one sort or another. In this case, the WTC collapse is really used as a metaphor.
The bottom line is that this is a story that should be told, but not now, and not with the idea of trying to use the heroism that was exhibited that day to smooth over the tragic nature of the event. We are grieving still and five years is not enough time. One hundred years will not be enough time.

I am glad these two officers survived. But people who subscribe to psychoanalysis claim real growth only comes through pain, I’d like to see the devastating events of that day sensitize us as a people. Sensitize us against war, against what is happening in Iraq, against what is happening in Lebanon, and Darfur, against violence in general.

That would be a truly heroic thing. It is only in that sort of context that the rescues of Offices Mcloughlin and Jimeno would be best told. It would make all the suffering and loss almost seem worth it.

Raising Feral Children

What does it mean to raise “feral” children? Some would argue most kids being raised today ARE feral. They have no sense of right and wrong. They are disrespectful. They are in every sense of that word “feral” – truly wild. But that is not what I am getting at here.

First, I reject the notion that kids today (and you can pick the age) are any more unruly than they ever were. Yes, I think culture has made things harder for them, but I also believe that culture has less of an impact as a teacher than a child’s first and most indelible teachers: his parents. Parents, no doubt, are informed by the cultural norms every bit as much as kids watching MTV. I think there is a double whammy: that of a corporatized world which tells kids and parents alike that life just ain’t worth living if you don’t have that widget, that new gizmo; if you don’t have that branded sort of life that makes you beautiful. It’s a tag team type of depersonalization. The pressure is real, it is palpable and it is completely self-inflicted.

Second, given the decline of any sort of meaningful dialogue about anything in this nation (and with it a sort of demonization of intellectual things as being “effete” and “snooty” and of course “tight-ass”), there is an aspect to being “wild” that I believe we need to restore in our children.

I recently spoke with a colleague of mine who had just come back from China and his most interesting impression of the country was how the people he met there seemed to have this overwhelming sense of personal responsibility in whatever they did. For example, not only did he witness people riding scooters without helmets but they were often overloaded with goods and too many other passengers.

My first instinct was one of horror. No helmets? No regulations limiting how many could ride a scooter? No, my friend told me, people there seem to be freer in many ways than we are here. They know that riding without a helmet is risky and when tragedy strikes, as it almost always certainly does, the grief and responsibility is almost always personal.
My reaction was evidence enough to show me that I had drunk the “cultural Kool-Aid” for far to long and it made me recall times when that a of laissez faire approach to things was how life went down and to be honest, it wasn’t always the worst of things.

Now let me be the first to say that this is a very difficult subject to argue. No one wants to see anyone get hurt. And please don’t think this some sort of libertarian call to arms. No one is trying to revoke child labor laws or (perish the thought) let the market decide what we should or should not be allowed to do. But in the noble attempt to save lives and avert disaster we have to pause and ask ourselves what are we giving up?

Here’s what I think we are giving up: a wildness in our kids that let’s them think they are immortal so they will try things; so they will not be so afraid and dependent on a culture that makes them dependent on consumption. True enough, it is that sense of immortality, that fearlessness of life - what I as a parent have sometimes called “stupidity” – that gets them into trouble. It will even cause tragedy. But here is where the personal responsibility part comes into play. Kids have to know enough, be lucky enough and be self reliant enough to make it out of childhood with enough risk so they can hone skills that will ultimately allow them to contribute to society. One way they get this is through the love and support of the family. Another is through experimentation. Our kids need to be allowed to fail if we have any hope at all of raising a generation that does not require the giant government teat and a society of privilege to get them through the golden years.

Raising children is no different than running nations when you stop and think about it. The other side of complete control (fascism) is always fully blown freedom (anarchy). It’s a natural dialectic between order and chaos and it permeates everything in our lives.
Consumerism, however, seems to have blanched the wildness out us. Much has been made of the post 9/11 fear culture converging with the post-industrial age consumer culture. But colored alert days are really all not all that different from the “duck and cover” drills of the fifties. Fear is fear. What has changed over the last 50 years since I first started breathing is this idea that we can always prevent bad things from happening to good people. It seems that we believe we can: by considering every angle, every law, every possibility in every event. This is the sort of “missile defense psychology” that says rather than do the harder work of enacting real political and social reform to lessen the likelihood of nuclear missiles flying everywhere, let’s have that garage door opener technology and make it moot. Similarly, when it comes to our personal lives, there is a very difficult lesson that we all want to avoid: that sometimes, bad things happen. Sometimes, really bad things happen. But rather than equip our children with an appreciation of the preciousness of life, and a sense that we are all in this together, we have carved out the great litigious society: this is the social equivalent of the Star Wars missile defense for the tragedy that befalls us on a personal level. So now our kids are all bundled up to go outside in the snow as in that funny scene from the movie “A Christmas Story”, except we can’t put our arms down, and God help us if we fall down!

Theodore Roethke wrote: “Self contemplation is a curse/that makes an old confusion worse”. This myth that we need to protect our children from everything comes from the heart, no doubt, but it is wholly misguided. It is the result of over analyzing life instead of just living through it and dealing with the consequences. It is truly a case of making an old confusion worse because each time we fail to protect our children, we are paralyzed even further, looking for other holes to fill to keep the next child safe. It ultimately robs our kids of chances to grow, learn, and eventually gain compassion for others about the ways of the world. It allows us to avoid the really hard questions too.

So what do we do?
Perhaps the trick is the middle path, as the Buddha would tell us.

A reverence for each child’s abilities is a start. (Real love requires this anyway.) This will create children who will challenge us to be sure. In fact it is the challenge that we should be seeking as parents. It requires letting go. It requires faith. It requires wisdom to know where to step in and where to step out. Most of all it requires a reflective thoughtfulness on our part as parents; a conscientious effort on our part to change the world, in the same manner as we compost our organics, recycle our plastics and buy more fuel efficient cars. After all, raising a feral child is nothing less than an act of saving the world, as green as any environmental activity one could imagine.

POEM - Weeding

the sweat that drips off my nose like small globes
waters dusty soil beneath -
this is no drought but my body is the rain cloud.

there is a sweetness that grows within
when the weed roots finally let go
and surrenders itself -

when i get it full, complete,
not just the tops,
i am afraid that they

will just be back next week
to laugh some more at me.
I love to hold those weeds in my hand

like a shrunken head, by the hair,
and gaze at frazzled whitened roots.
It relents to the strength of arms and hands,

The berating sun smiling hard at me
as i toss the trophy into the
wheelbarrow ready for a great composting.

M C Biegner

POEM - Lesson Of The Ages

My icy hands are warmed by yours,
When winter comes to claim them;

“You have no blood,” you say to me,
“Take my hand, it will suffice.”

The split loose-leaf lines of your face,
bunch all over mine as well;

My balloon-like paunch is your
Pillow at night, my skin,

The blanket we fight over
While we are asleep at night;

Your arthritic hands crack
A samba beat for me when

You make lunch, just so I can eat.
These spots on my hands are where

You first kissed me, before we kissed
On the lips and sealed the deal,

Dotted the I’s and crossed the T-s.
These droplets of chocolate

Love, were all the sweet we craved.
Your graying hair - confection -

As we braved the diabetes
Of our relationship.

My burgeoning scalp pushing
Through trampled grass of my hair.

I become the wishing charm
You rub whenever you need a wish.

We are bound tight to each other by
Wilting shadows of young eyes;

Like ivy clinging for dear life;
Your infirmities are mine; mine, yours.

I nightmare, and you awaken,
In a deeply set panic.

Love, in this age, my dear, is not
The labor everyone thinks.

It is a concoction: (one part fool,
One part artistry, one part mule)

That allows us to withstand
Many things, replenishing

With the joy that we both set out
To garner at the outset.

POEM - For The Little Bird Breathing His Last Breaths

The little bird breathing his last breaths
wiggles on the red clay but the janitor,
with his lit cigarette dangling,
pushing his trash, goes right on by.
He doesn't even notice the hatchling desperately
flapping toward little bird white light.

Why is it that flowers do not seem to suffer so,
even as they wither?
Their end seems so graceful and quiet.

Or is this just the trade-off for mobility: that endings are so much more turbulent,
Dramatic, demanding attention?

M C Biegner 7/21/06

POEM - Weed Whacking The Headstones

Death comes dressed to the nines, in a fine tuxedo,
Made from fine purple cloth
With all the pomp and circumstance of a June graduation
Or the new-penny-shininess of a wedding.
It is really a mass spoken in tiny Latin whispers;
Its back completely erect,
Its movement a measured out ingredient
In some recipe that is grief.
Here, in this hangnail of a cemetery,
I watch a groundskeeper
Weed-whacking the headstones
Because things need to be kept up:
Appearances and faith.
Just one more thing on a list
Among a myriad of other things to do.

M C Biegner
7/8/06

POEM - Daylight

Shade overcomes me as silent as oil,
I thought it was you for one long moment.
It held lust and rage just like you did once,
Now it holds surrender the way summer
Air holds moisture. It seems we would not be
Able to save each other like we thought
We could. Our new worlds drawn out in crayon,
We drew all the fantasies we would need.
We made play, like children. Still, as newborns,
We sought relief in cool, shifting shadows.
Until daylight wore us down with the strength
Of Tidal fingers sculpting a beachhead.
Until we peered over the water’s edge
And recognized who it was that we were,
And to whom we ultimately belonged.


M C Biegner
6/28/06

POEM - Planes

Sometimes I think the planes that fly overhead
Ones that have really long necks like ostriches -
Will take me to imaginary places.
747s with swollen heads that
Converse in the language of Thunder and Thrust,
That carry small villages of people the way
The great fish carried Jonah in its gullet.
There are planes with choppy propellers that bounce
Around like a Coney Island roller coaster.
There are the foreign ones with fancy colored tails
And strange symbols written on the fuselage.
There are the ordinary ones that look like Jesus' cross
Above, as if offering Jesus’ love.
On my roof, I often kept my 9:00 o'clock
Rendezvous with the Supersonic Concorde,
Pterodactyl of a shrunken Atlantic,
This caped bird was like a kite stuck fast to the
Flat gray ozone blanket over JFK
With wide triangular arms spread, scooping sky,
With that crooked nose that dangled and sniffed out
The scents of New York, Paris or London.

These days I pilot my planes on paper in
Words, with which I struggle to navigate through
The foggiest weather, or most grave ice storms
Praying that these planes on paper will ascend
Past the limits of impossibly thin air;
Throguh the limits of my childhood’s end.

POEM - Mt.Holyoke College

Oh tough beard of five o'clock shadows,
Of stubble that scratches stoney wall faces
With sinister cheeks and malformed noses -
I am warmed by abundant, swarming ambition.

As if those parapits could protect each detailed plan!
As if they could separate the winners from the losers!
As if they could protect the beating heart of womanhood!
I am warmed by abundant, swarming graces.

Sturdy, giraffe-like spires, prayer as architecture,
Inspire me toward skyward things,
Toward everything that is higher -
This, the pulse of some great, youthful haste.

The pride is like some distant and erect, blue gray cliffs
That poses in regal profile in distant, weepy fog.
The silent oak doors are a stern face
That upholds the weight of slate roofed promises which

Reserves, bookmarks, and dogears
The winningest days, and dreams fulfilled.

M C Biegner

Gimme That Old Time Science

(Published by Crunchables.Net, June 2006)
http://www.crunchable.net/articles/?p=323



I don’t understand why some people want to promote the idea of “intelligent design” in place of Darwinian evolution. Considering how the world looks today, I would think theists would want to distance God from having any hand in creation.
The thinking behind intelligent design goes something like this: not all of Darwin’s ideas about natural selection are supported in nature, hence, there must be some other explanation which fills in the gaps. But would a loving intelligent God really give us mayflies? Mosquitoes? Fire ants? Paris Hilton?
At intelligent design’s foundation is a basic Aristotelian syllogism: if there is movement then there must be some prime mover. If there is order in nature, then there must be One who created that order. But that’s hardly a scientific hypothesis — it’s not provable, or even measurable. It is not a theory so much as it is a solution in search of a question. Sure, science can’t prove that it wasn’t God who had a hand in all this, but it can’t prove that it wasn’t Tinkerbell either. Still, I don’t see anyone offering the “Tinkerbell Theory of Evolution.” [Note from the eds: There is, however, the Flying Spaghetti Monster Theory.]
Any scientific theory based on a presumption that God even exists ends up as nothing more than a “does too, does not” kind of debate. This is not science, which requires thesis and experimentation and peer review. This is just the sixth grade playground all over again.
Theologically, this kind of theory actually undermines faith. “Proving” the existence of God through reason is not faith at all. It’s an arrogant assertion that we can find God all on our own, rather than accepting the humbler notion that we find God through grace; through art and meditation and other ways we use non-cognitive intelligences; even through dumb-ass luck.
Art and music and even religion all try to describe interior truths — subjective ones, but ones every bit as real as fossils in an archeological dig. The attempt to turn the intuitive into something objective reflects a bias toward a rational view of the wor