Tony

What were you doing writing me poems as you stood on the edge of life and a death only a year or so away?  Your poems were full of light, and humor, and sexiness.  Once you wrote about my belly, how unlike that of the muse that inspired the Song of Solomon, it was not a bowl of wheat.  I could feel the heat of your fingertips on the paper, reaching through to touch my belly, felt myself rising to you, a few miles away, safe and celibate in your parents' house.  You were a joy to them, and everyone you met - that bouncy smile, upturned, petulant face, silliness ever ready.  Who were you with that face, and then the one you kept turned away like the dark side of the moon, infrequently considered, and known only because there must always be an equal and opposite.  That opposite turned out to be an extreme none of us would have dreamed existed.

I am still writing to and about you 17 years later.  Every day is a lesson in how long loss, and loneliness, and wretched, vomitous missing can go on.  What a bizarre never-ending for a first love.

a friendly creative spirit up in the eaves

A joke you told fell on
friendly ears, all
creative types who get your crazy free
spirit.
Up they soar, away with you.
In the end, I'd so much rather have a goofy artist husband
than some genius, hunkered like a paranoid owl, up in the dark
eaves.

Ashland in photos

We ran off to Ashland last year during spring break, and couldn't think of a good reason not to go back this year.  The flowering trees and milder climate are a relief from the wintry mix of Bend in March.  Here are a few of our favorite things...  I'll publish more when I figure out how to download photos from my phone!

Dinner at Gogi's in Jacksonville.  That's a local wine, and a beet and herbed chevre salad with a tasty fried basil leaf.

Flowers. everywhere!

The sign says, "Ashland Home for the Easily Amused".

Whew!  Glorious sky, and budding trees!

The next few were just fun for our eyeballs...

a romantic spectrum

I'm startled by how these 'vertical sentences' can evoke so much imagery.  Perhaps there's just enough structure to free me up.  Today sentences are album and song titles, taken in order from my electronic music library.

In that liminal moment, you stared at me
the heart of our relationship suddenly broken,
glass at our feet and in our fingers.
All I cared for had fallen away,
my carefully hung curtains hiding
doors I didn't know existed.
Any last thoughts of staying vanished, suddenly
given wings to fly.  Which
day is it, and how did we come to this?

****

Where we met, along the river,
the mud is thick.  Even the
internet can't penetrate.  Between our toes, the mud
cools us, we amble
downstream as the wind blows up.
Futuradio will see this walk as a
sweet throwback.

****

Say you'll bring me that strange green flower!
Hey - I bet the florist knows what it is.
I won't accept roses, or convention.  It's
got to be just us - a
love unlike any other, no bridesmaids, color-themed weddings, reception halls
for our wedding.  I knew that's what I wanted when I cast my lot with
you.

Home dreaming...

On our drive home from Portland, I took the Tumalo exit to our prospective new house, and pulled in the driveway as if we owned it.  Felt good to end our drive in a place with trees and sky, mountains in the distance - I could see it being a lovely place to arrive home.

The good to the last drop feeling.

That's what they tell me
the
good doesn't last, you must get used
to rolling with the tide, don't fight
the undertow. If I'm lucky, the
last thing I'll see is the sun sliding under with me, just a bright
drop in a vast ocean of
feeling.

I can't stick to treating my clients like meat.

I hate writing poetically about myself, I
can't abide my being on the page. I'd like to
stick my pen in my literary eye
to blind myself to myself, and restrict my
treatments to my
clients, the homeless junkies, anything exterior -
like the birds outside, little flying bits of
meat.

Go hungry so you will want to eat.

Go on now and touch the sacred stone.
Hungry for insight, or meaning
so depleted by everyone else,
you
will be filled again,
want for less, sit down
to
eat.

I'd been slapping massage treatments like Band-Aids onto clients...

My writing hut/studio/strawbale/retreat

I can't wait to be writing from my little straw bale writing hut, looking out a low window to the raised beds that will replace that big chunk of pavement at the bottom of the driveway at our Cline Falls house.  I can see a series of windows, some about hip height, with a sill just high enough for feet to rest, and maybe some longer, lower ones that let in the entire vision of the garden.  I think I'll sit in a chair like a soft net, draped with a quilt.  There'll be a desk, too, movable, for both writing and painting.  I think I want a low or a sloped ceiling, so that it's cozy, with a green roof on top.  There have to be other seating areas for writing visitors, maybe some kind of bench built into the wall, a futon, a hammock chair, just pillows on the floor?  Only slippers will be allowed.  How will I light it?  We'll build shelves directly into the wall, for books and trinkets.  There has to be some surface to which I can attach things, something better than cork board.  Maybe I can free myself enough to regularly paint or write on the walls.  I'll have a little broom for sweeping, plants, flowers, and herbs everywhere, and a dog bed for Siri.  Wind chimes outside, maybe the bamboo ones.  My own bird feeders.  A beautiful door with tile outlining it.  A little stoop, also tile.  Perhaps a poem tucked into the bales.  A friendly creative spirit up in the eaves.  A bed loft?  Definitely mobiles.  A beautiful earthen floor.  Maybe my musical instruments out, on the walls.  What to do about shade?

Where we think the writing hut and raised beds will go.

Our new house, your tractor-beams of love!

Dear friends, who have been crossing all your limbs and digits in hopes that we'd eventually get the Cline Falls house that we so love,

Surely you're as tired of the body part crossing as we are.  We've been trying not to think about the house in hopes of avoiding too much heartache, but in the face of yet another delay, we've decided to try a new tactic.  We've decided to go heart-fully forward and summon the house to us with full-on creative imaginings of what it will be like once we own it.  To that end, here is a picture of the living area, as it now stands.  How do you imagine we might make it the vibrant and welcoming heart of our home?  What do you imagine we all might do there?  (At the very least, we're removing the carpet...)  Any and all thoughts of remodeling, decorating, coming together, eating, music making, etc., are welcome.  Please post your comments below.

We are casting aside all our cynicism, worry, and doubt in favor of faith in having a home with lots of heart.  Please help us tractor-beam this special place to us with lots of creativity and love.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!  SWAK!

View from the dining area. Note the woodstove in the back corner and bookshelves on the half wall.

View from the bookshelves.

More sentence inspirations:

The yellow crocus just outside the front door is not a miracle of light. - Matthew Dickman

The
yellow pee in the bowl blossoms like a
crocus,
just another irritating reminder that life is kind of miraculous.
Outside, I'm prepared to be astonished:
the true flowers are enough, full
frontal plant nudity blows the
doors off my mind.  Must I be confronted with what
is my own one-in-a-billion chance of being, of being me -
not a rock, not nothing -
a miracle?  I don't want to appreciate that,
of a groggy morning, sleep-scented, relieving myself into a bowl of
light.

I don't have the razor's edge of bluster anymore.  - me

I will eat alone.  Please
don't call me,
have a plan to cheer me up.
The
razor's on the
edge of the tub, not in my hand.
Of unhappiness - I know it, but lack the
bluster of action.  It just doesn't matter
anymore.