In the Ever Present Rain

Yes, it seems it has been raining at least 40 days and 40 nights. The water drips down from the porch, over the stones, in a tiny rivulet, a mini waterfall over the green, green moss. The air is warmer than it was in the days of the hard frosts that covered the hillsides with glitter, but everything is wet.

When you walk the ground squelches. Champ the pitbull looks at me as if I am out of my mind as we set off for the hills or down the road. Go out in this? Get wet? I insist, and off we go, splashing through the streets turned into little creeks and the creeks turned to rivers.

Winter here sometimes seems to last forever, even though it isn't the closed in, cold winter of the east coast. I peer at the signs of green. I am pleased the tulips are rising up from the mud, that the geraniums I feared dead are showing green again, that the days are getting longer, second by second.

I think I can make it.

Winter has been healing and breaking my heart again. There have been deaths. There are always deaths, and don't tell me it is simply that I am older and people die--people have forever been dying in my life, and really...can't they stay around? So the guy who had the show following my poetry show on the radio died, and he was just a bit past 40, and his eyes were speedwell blue, and he was a joker and an artist and...

well, how come, world?

Meanwhile I selfishly was rejoicing that my oldest son made it through a medical emergency and a hospital stay and is healing, is well. But--having one's child go under a surgeon's knife has got to be one of the more terrifying moments of my life.

And so I balance that with my dead friend. At least it wasn't my son, I think. And I think--well, that is harsh.

"I was so lonely" says Scott, one of my friends who camps out in the rain by the river and who comes to talk with me when he has a moment and can be indoors. Scott, like my dead friend, is one of the blue eyed charmers of the world, worn and sobered by a lot of strange turns. But he's glad now, because a cat has come to live with him. From out of nowhere. He asks me a lot of questions about the care and feeding of cats, and I am so afraid this cat is just an opportunist, soon to vanish. But no, Big Cat seems to have settled for the winter with a gentle wanderer, content to sleep in an almost dry tent, on a special blanket I have dredged out of my boxes of rags and riches. There are good moments in the winter.

"Do the papers inside come with the book?" asks the very handsome young man, holding out a critical work on Nabokov as his very lovely friend browses the poetry shelves. I say yes. We always keep ephemera in the books as they came to us--the recipes, the love letters, the funny matchcovers, the grocery lists, and the newspaper clippings. In the Nabokov are mostly newspaper clippings--other reviews, notes on the author. I glance at them as I tell the young man the price of the book, and the total price of the interesting stack he has gathered. And I say "this book came from the library of a fascinating woman; she died a few years ago, but she was a good friend of mine"

And he says "she has some poetry in here".

I am startled by this, and ask...where? And he pulls out two sheets of folded paper. I laugh.

"She was a poet, that's true, but these--these were drafts of a poem I never finished. I'm so surprised she kept them".

He offers to return them to me, but I let go of that poem a long, long time ago. "I was probably younger than you are now" I say, "when I was writing that. It's so odd to think of that".

It's an interesting moment, this collision of the past and the present, and the future. I wonder what the young man or his pretty girlfriend may write. I wonder where their journeys will take them. I wonder why my friend, who once destroyed an entire pile of my manuscripts and letters, tucked away these two imperfect sheets of a poem that never really finished.

I write my name on a scrap of paper for my book buyer. And he thanks me, wondering perhaps...well, I'm not sure what he wonders. He has good taste in books, though.

And they walk out into the ever present rain, almost bumping into Scott who is come with another report on his new friend the cat.

(the photo is by someone called lepiaf. geo on flicker)

Poetry

Just a note, for I know that poetry is not to every reader's taste, but I have been putting more of my poetry at my other blog which is linked on the side, over yonder, or is right here

http://jarvenpa.blogspot.com/

Although my poetry has, as they say, been widely published in the literary and little magazines, it has never been collected and printed in a book. (ah, and not for lack of trying. The stories I could tell). Every so often someone wanders across a poem of mine somewhere and takes the time to discover where I am, through magic or cyber saavy. Since I direct them to my notebooks, and since some come back to me and ask where they can read more, and since the mice and rain are doing their magical transformations on my old paper notebook it seemed a good time to put more out for tasting.

The internet may not be the best place to read poems...but it is what I have to offer you, if you like.

April, that complicated month

I wonder what it is about April that breaks my heart? It is certainly the month of poets; heavens, it is even National Poetry Month. It is the month of songs and poems, the cruellest month, the brightest month.

It's the month of the births of two of my children, the month in which my father was born, the month in which each day has the name of a friend on it, and most of those friends dead now.

It's the month in which I actually was in Paris, decades ago, dazzled by the pure light, amazed that even little children spoke French with flawless accents, enchanted by the hotel concierge's huge marmalade cat.

And yes, there were chestnuts in blossom, great candelabras of chestnut flowers. And little captured foxes in wire cages by the Seine, and doubtful gentlemen trying to pick up a much too innocent little blonde.

They thought I was Swedish. For some unknown reason--my professors in college also remarked on this--when I speak French I speak it as my Swedish speaking ancestors would have. Wasn't a bad thing, back in the day, though it dashed the expectations of my gentlemen.

My lovely daughter is now a few years older than I was. Though in some alternate universe that thin young blonde poet is still staring at the Seine, mulling over a line or two, waiting for her April born, dashing young love.

He would have been busy poring over dusty files in a library while I was off weeping over the little foxes.

April is the month of my last time at the edge of suicide as well. I was thinking of this the other day--not suicide, but that phantom anniversary, that little fork in a winding road I didn't know I was on. As I get older I am astonished at how quickly the time flows by. It was surely yesterday I wept and lay down in the long soft April grass and plotted my death so carefully, with such pure exhaustion.

And..I think 16 years have passed now, since I faced such a dark door, and then came through into the purest light. Think of that. 16 years. Entire trees have grown up that I planted by seed then. I have planted such gardens, and watched over dogs, and cats, and my growing children. My dear Gabe, though still fragile, has had a pretty good time these years. I have seen my quirky little girl flower into a spectacular womanhood, and my eldest son become a wonderful force in our community.

What on earth was I thinking? I can only tell you that the logic of suicide is strange and seductive. I wept the other day when I heard the news that Nicolas Hughes, the son Sylvia Plath wrote such moving poems about, had stepped out of this life. But I know the territory.

It was April. The friend I called to, out of my despair, was most fortunately for me a doctor and someone I trusted. And indeed loved. We walked through the river valley where the new flowers were blooming and the April rains were falling. We talked. For me I think it was my one last bid for life, and I didn't really think it would work, but I felt I owed it to my friend and to anyone else who might care to reach out once more.

But my soul was exhausted, my body was aching, I had gone through a winter in which my youngest was near death over and over and over again. When I lay on the long grass I was longing for my heart's mother to just swoop in and take me away. Let me rest. For God's sake, let me rest.

I intended, of course to take my youngest along. I was a good mother.

Of course I tremble when I think how close we were, my boy and I. And life had a lot more to give us and ask us, both of us.

My friend the doctor gave me a remedy. I had no belief it could work, but I took it.

And the sun came out in my heart.

It was April, the season of rains and flowers, and birthday celebrations. I sort of count one of my own birthdays from April onwards, not from my actual date of birth. Sort of "welcome back to life". It's a private celebration--but I'm glad to mark it.
(photo was taken in a long ago April. I'm showing my daughter how elegant it might be to wear four o'clock blossoms on one's nose)

At The Heart's Windowsill

Somehow I'd expect winter, not summer, would place my dead in my mind. Maybe it's just the wildfires burning, to the south, to the north, at the coast. The smoke gets in my eyes, in my lungs, I am constantly wiping the stinging tears away and staring at the vivid orange sun, the burnt orange moon.

When you have a bookstore, and you accept everyone's lost books, everyone's aunt's collection of Reader's Digest Condensed, every batch of literature from a divorce or a death, every so often you have a surprise. Or two. Because you are tending the orphans, the survivors.

And they come brittle, and they come with spiders, and they come with grocery lists and poems, with old letters and underlining.

Usually it is a pleasure. A couple weeks ago the daughter of a departed friend and mentor of mine brought in another batch of her mother's books. Poetry and gardens, literature and birds. And those underlinings, and...in a book of Nabokov, in the rounded young handwriting of my barely out of the teens years, two rough drafts of a poem.

I'd forgotten this poem entirely; the notebook of that time was lost long ago. It wasn't a great poem by any means, but there it was, in several versions, as is my wont still--striving to get the lines right, striving towards the poem that must be.

My friend must have picked these discarded pages up from where I tossed them, at the library we worked at, and held them. Perhaps she forgot she had them--but for decades she was, after all, my primary reader, the one who saw what I was striving towards.

Sometimes our friendship hit hard times, but her eye never faltered. It was a gift, and I have missed it greatly since her death.

And then, yesterday, in a batch of books stored in someone's garage, a little volume of poetry by Michael Skilling.

I never called him that; he was Poet. To some he was Michael the Poet; to me he was only Poet, and that last year or so of his life he came to me for a certain refuge from a difficult life. Most of the time he was drunk, often he was also sick, and in the end the drinking and the pain killed him.

My friend Red tended to him his very last days, and Red too is gone from us, and what do you do with the grief that still wells up, the loss of good friends, the pity of it all?

So Michael called me Finland, except when he called me by my full and formal name, a privilege he took to himself. And he howled mad poetry, and he wept for his dead wives, his burnt house, his still present and faithful cat.

He died in the winter. I remember rushing to his hospital bed, only to sit with his father beside his body, to sit and cry and talk about his son. His father too had just arrived. Red had made certain Poet's body was decent. The little hospital let us burn candles in the darkened room as the storms swept by.

His poems aren't great, but I can see him singing them. He hung out with Ginsberg and Neal Cassady; he was a great friend of Bob Kaufman's. He had rough times. He was street wise, friend of the Hells Angels, full of passion and regret.

I have his hat. I don't know how I ended up with his hat, a thing of patchwork and madness, but I have it. Probably he left it here one of the times he fell asleep near the poetry, relaxing a bit, leaning over "Hey, Finland, you're a fine woman".

From "A longing to be gone" by Michael the Poet

Sometimes he'd wander
But mostly he'd roam.
Sometimes use a treebranch
for a brush and a comb.
Sometimes he'd stay up late
To help people home.
Sometimes he drank raindrops,
Sometimes river foam.
Sometimes he ate wild oats,
Sometimes he'd just sow 'em
And even standing quietly
Would look like a poem.

So one day he laid down
And stayed down to rest,
As falcons flew homeward
While owls left their nest,
And bright fishes danced
On the dark ocean's breast
And the moon moved soft shadows
That chased on his chest.

He dreamed that a wolf king
Stood high on a hill,
Two paws like a thief
At the heart's windowsill,
Looking for footprints
Which a princess would fill,
For he knew you'd be coming,
In the ways that you will,
So far away, Magic,
But I love you still.

A moment with Justine

We were discussing Ezra Pound that summer afternoon, just a few weeks ago, my partner and I and some customers, when the people ran in the door in a rush of confusion and shouting. Call the police! Violence! Craziness!

My instinct in these situations is always the same--to rush out, to see for myself, to see what can be done. And this is what I did.

By then the action was right in front of my bookstore anyway, in what we term our violence free, drug free, peaceful zone--"hey, do what you like, but not here, guys, okay?" The wild eyed blonde was grappling with the sweet checker from the market down the street. My partner had come out behind me. He pulled the checker away, and she ran back to work. I laid my hands on the wild girl's shoulders. She'd been screaming a lot, and as she whirled to face me she screamed "I want to die, no one cares about me!"

I do, I said, and used her name. I care about you. And she started to sob as I held her , there on the sidewalk, the crowds around. Oh baby, I said, I know it is hard, it is so hard. But I care.

We got her into the shop, and I had her sit down and have a cup of water as my partner called 911. She was shakey, she was on some drug trip or another, she'd just been left by her current male friends who'd driven away laughing, and she'd exploded into that whirlwind of anger and grief.

We'd hoped to get some medical attention for her, but of course it was the police who came instead. I helped her to the door, I earnestly asked the officers--please, please, will you see that she gets some medical attention.

They told me about the check in process at the county jail, where...well, I've had a number of my friends from the street die. I wasn't too impressed. It showed on my face, yeah, you bet it showed.

How do you know this woman? asked the cop. Are you her mother? I was tempted to claim her as one of my own, but I knew that would certainly complicate things...so I introduced myself to the officer and commented that I hadn't met him before.

Of course you know me, said he, I've been in the newspapers.

They cuffed her and drove her north. She never saw a psychiatrist. She never saw a doctor. At 3 in the morning she was released, because no one was pressing charges.

And today she's in the field again, a bit dazed, smiling. "oh, I'm trying so hard to be good" she tells me, and says, yes, she had something to eat today.

She grew up here, child of an old family. Pretty girl, with her bright blue eyes and lovely body and her bright gold hair, though she cut her hair off today. She's been raped, sometimes by those she's trusted. She's been hurt in a hundred ways. Her brother killed himself a couple years ago, and she was there.

She has the soft trembling mouth of a four year old, and a mind that is perhaps stopped at about age 10. For months I've talked with her, as she's wandered through. For months I've tried to watch over her just a bit.

And the other day the governor of my state cut all the funds for mental health services to the homeless.

"oh, I'm trying so hard to be good. Won't anyone help me?" How do I answer those blue eyes?