Illuminations

(this is an excerpt from a poem I drafted over a month ago. Good way to round out the month of June--with writing to spare--):

The river was slate
that October day.
Sodden leaf clumps
clung to water's edge
before slipping heavy and
unremarked
toward the bay.
You asked me something and I--
having cautiously thought of it before--
agreed. You took my hand,
I remember, and we crossed
a sand-colored bridge, drizzle
like sparse pinpricks on our faces
in the cold and grey. I remember
the white walls of your
narrow walkup, your minuscule
room, the clean air
as the rain slowed, how things
brightened like peeled and sectioned
oranges.

Barb

I saw a tall woman standing on the mezzanine walkway at this conference. I hadn’t seen anyone there with comparable stature, so I went over and introduced myself. Barb was six-foot-two in stocking feet, and positively towered in the heels she wore that day. She had a low forehead with a deep widow’s peak over dark, deep-set eyes that twinkled impishly, wisps of shortish brown hair, and a face and build that made her seem perpetually on the fence about whether to be dainty or fierce, as though she could accomplish either with ease.

you

Remember that you are here only for this: to be sipped by life like the dew from a flower, delicate and trembling, in a meadow just discovered.

Exerpt from "Internet Date"

And now, because I feel like I'm lagging & want to have more than one post for June, I'll include an exerpt from the piece I worked on today:

"Life is a series of accidents in some way, and we are sometimes surprised to find ourselves part of someone’s sacred and solemn life passage when that wasn’t our intent at all. I had a friend in a meditation group once who was planning a big wedding with a man for whom she was head over heels. I didn’t know her that well, and I don’t remember if my son, my partner and I were even invited to the wedding. It was getting down to a couple of months before the ceremony, and Lily happily took her two chosen bridesmaids to the shop to have their gowns fitted. Or so I heard later. One of the bridesmaids, also an acquaintance of mine, flipped out when she saw the style of dress that Lily had chosen for them—a bubble-gum-pink floor-length sheath that of course put every pound you carry on lurid display. The bridesmaid flat-out rejected the dress, accused Lily of trying to make her life miserable, and dropped out of the wedding party. Bridesmaid number two supported number one, and Lily was suddenly left without any women to support her on the happiest day of her life.

A few weeks later, Lily approached me with her request. The dress wasn’t all that bad, and would I take a look at it for her, and tell her what I thought and since she knew I didn’t have any money, she would even pay for it herself, if I’d just stand up with her. Lily’s hairdresser came along as new bridesmaid number two. I felt so sad for Lily, and knew that she really needed someone she could trust to help her. The dress was hideous and I was bigger than the bridesmaid Lily had first chosen—I was going through a period of a lot of stress eating. But it was a matter of honor to me. When a woman is going through a sacred ritual like menarche or marriage or childbirth, you need to be fully present to their needs, you need to be like their handmaiden—the woman’s handmaiden—to serve them and support and accompany them through the gateway, into the new world beyond. That is how I felt with Lily and I stood up for that dear woman,"

My best writing warm-up right now is to write down my dream(s) from the night before. Then take the subject matter that I want to write about, and kind of mash it in with the dream, or just make up a dream sequence about my topic. Things will fly and change shape and say absurd and inept things, and make me nervous and ashamed and angry for no reason because then in the dream sequence, I start thinking about something else and go down this different path. Here's an exerpt from this morning's warm up. I didn't remember my dream to write about, so I made up a dream I could have had about my topic:

"... he was like this guy I met once at the Visiting Nurse Association in Boston. That’s the image I’ll go with. I met this guy at an office where I was working. He had a few kids with someone and had to drive somewhere a few hours away to get them for visits every now and then. He was cute, with brown hair and stylish sideburns. He was a very efficient worker, in fact, I felt kind of inadequate next to him, as he was churning out the paperwork like a news press. Fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip went the papers on his desk, all flying out like leaves being blown through an autumn street. And then we were in the Boston garden which was pretty near that office, on Newbury street. And the trees lining the streets all held these different colored rectangles with notes and paper on them, and there were the green-headed mallard ducks from the Charles, and they were perched in the trees, nesting in stacks and stacks of the papers. And I looked around for Larry, because he had told me his name, and I didn’t see him anywhere. And instead of Larry, there was this other person from the Visiting Nurse office—a supervisor, whom I don’t remember too well, but she was stern. What I remember about her is that instead of having sideburns, like Larry did, she had bushy hair stretching across her brow, literally stretching, as though a scant amount was glued there for a purpose, but there wasn’t enough of it."