Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.
--Yann Martel, Life of Pi
we lug our guts around in our bag of bones
and being
a ticking tangle of purpose and futility,
we seek to make magic of the mincemeat
we’ve been served,
to make art of our existence
before it’s gone too soon
gone to ruin
our dance with life
a composition
ending
in death
where decomposition
takes the final bow
meanwhile, the masters behind
like the masters before
the masters like us
break
bread over the bodies
of work we leave behind,
our dusty rewards raked together
in studied elegies
of the rise and fall
of form and function,
the composition
of the naked ambition
of all who came
and saw
and were conquered
before
begging,
more please my mentors
more please for me.
Hearts as good
as grits and gravy,
passions that run
like over-easy eggs,
my first block class
of seniors
is a heaping helping
of Heaven Help
with a whole lotta
Gotta love ‘em
thrown in too.
Scattered, smothered,
and covered up –
that’s what they keep me –
along with on my toes
and on my No’s,
but oh-so-many
Yes-es, too.
We should all be
this way, their way,
full of pushing ourselves
and our limits,
pouring our magic
into this, our magic hour
in this wild and precious world.
We should all be grabbing our minutes
by the forkfuls, the spoonfuls, the plate and bowl and platterfuls,
with hearts as good as grits and gravy, passions spilling off the edges
like
over-easy
eggs.
Before the grit
and grave
overtake us all.
(In honor and love of Jimmy Buffet)
My grandmother would mail me
a single stick of Juicy Fruit,
wrapped in its dustcover and
a birthday card, until I was ten.
Life like a tire swing, round and firm,
my arms wrapped tight, legs pumping,
toes stretched to touch the falling sun
the color of mangos above the
honeysuckle vine, nearly a whole
state up from Pascagoula,
where a man once busted his flip flop
and made a song about it —
though I preferred going barefoot
with my bathing suit and
Juicy Fruit.
Then we moved
a whole state over,
to a life packed and stacked
with stale air and skies scraped
by steel beams and glass,
where I grew older and straight up —
a tall, prickly weed wrapped in
concrete and trapped in the gilded
pages of my Daddy’s holy bible,
the canon thundering, me perpetually
blundering, the preacher men plundering
all the lost souls.
While the Pascagoula man sang of
lost shakers of salt,
They preached on lost pillars of salt
in Gomorrah, the trickster Delilah,
the wickedness of Eve,
how there’s always a woman
to blame,
but the man from Pascagoula
sang it’s his own damn fault.
And I believed him.
Breathed in, breathed out,
asked questions,
and found myself a rebel
two states east of Eden,
stomped on and stained dark
and wrapped up in the wages of sin.
I licked my wounds and searched
for the answers to questions that
bothered them so.
Through fifty-plus years
of perpetual caution
I’ve learned how to feel who I am,
make profit of price,
blend scarlet and spice,
till I filled my tin cup to the brim
with red wine and roses,
with strength and fine daughters,
with full-bodied, complex
self-love. I’ve now added sons
and a broad-shouldered harbor
to the glorious song of myself.
Smoky and tart, I pour from the heart
the tunes I’ve collected in here.
Chapter and verse, blessings and curse,
some tragic, most magic,
while the man from Pascagoula
passed on
his lyrics and lifestyle. The pied-piper of escapism lead me free of all shame,
so today I celebrate juicy fruit,
the falling mango sun,
the calcified shell of sin
I sling out past the honeysuckle vine
and an old busted flip flop,
and rejoice that shells sink, hope floats
that life is like a tire swing, and
that true legends never die.
Last night it rained, leaving
white blossom shreds clinging to dogwood leaves, blown green in an instant.
Sodden confetti clots choke gutters and grass —
the pink and white remnants of an azalea bacchanalia.
The fringe tree shivers in the cold dawn,
tender bits dangling naked in the breeze.
Yesterday, brazen. Today, sore ashamed.
Spring has sprung and is already speeding by.
Time flies.
And so do the wasps, building paper condominiums in the downspouts,
and the birds canoodling in the newly upholstered trees.
And the clouds skirting the sky in vanishing wisps.
Time leaps, like the squirrel getting his nut in the damp underbrush,
or the froggie gone a courtin’ in the mud.
It sneaks like the snake shifting weight through the sod
One blink – or not, snakes don’t blink — then it’s gone.
One minute intact
Like the five pale shell casings
In their spun-twig armory in the clutch of the sapling
just waiting to explode
or turn from a sky blown blue as rhinestones, to a broiling gunmetal grey
The woods, dappled green as moss, spike fevers soon, destined to fall.
Life is ever-eager, ever-ready, ever-thrusting,
Till its not
All things
New and raw, soon fecund and fat, all grow, sting, decay and drop
But words the poets know remain
Words, the poets know, retain
the birdsong, the blue stone, the echoes of youth and the splashing rain,
the paper houses and paper dreams,
in still-lifes — so there’s still life
Long after it’s all blown away
Kaleidoscopes. Remember them? Those geometric spinning fragments posing in rapidly shifting flash points of coordinated color and chaos?
Sliced beauty with sharp, precise edges. Jangled and jarred gemstones, clicking into view.
Suddenly you see…
Jewels tumbling from a pirate’s upturned chest.
Dragon’s scales shifting in flight.
A flamenco dancer’s swirling skirt.
A Spanish shawl.
A thousand butterflies having sex.
A million flowers spilling seeds.
Blood blooms. Light bursts. Magic is born.
All at the flick of a wrist.
It all feels slightly pornographic and oh-so-beautiful.
I can’t help but be reminded of life. The creation of life, sure, in the flick of the wrist, the spilling of blood and seed, absolutely. As the cylinder twists in the slimmest of fractions, new magic appears. in glorious technicolor.
But also in the biting, sharp edges, cutting almost constantly, spinning almost endlessly, into gravity-defying, rotating cartwheels of color.
We can choose to see life as broken shards of complete calamity and chaos in ever-widening, gravity-grinding, beyond-our-control tumbling. Nothing more than flotsam and jetsam crashing inside an unrelenting tidal wave. (It certainly felt like it this week, what with all the stomach bugs and travel woes and deep-seated cavities of the physical and metaphorical kind.)
Or we can choose to see ourselves and our lives as prisms of dancing light, beautiful and gleaming, made all the more so when we’re bumping and rolling up against other jangled and jagged prisms. Again, slightly pornographic, but I didn’t mean for it to be this time. Or maybe I did. Because that’s for sure beautiful, too. And the absolute quintessence of life.
For me, I choose prisms of dancing light.
I like to see us all as slivers of sapphire and ruby, gold and obsidian, emerald and opal and more. Succulent suds of shimmer and shine, made exquisite when randomly and richly tossed by the universe into predestined patterns, made richer with family and friends and even complete strangers knocking up against us in richly syncopated design.
Our lives are what we (and our maker, with a flick of the wrist) makes them. You see what you choose to see. You be who you choose to be.
Tumbling jewels, coupling butterflies, phosphorous flotsam.
You decide.
Me? I choose gemstones and swallowtails, tumbling and tossed. In this randomly rotating gyre, my kaleidoscope blooms beauty and light.
Two friends. Two distinctly different personalities. Both now gone. Gone way, way, way too soon.
The first was full of cuddles and comfort — the human equivalent of gingerbread and coffee. She warmed and invigorated. She sweetened a room. Her cheeks were sprinkled in cinnamon. Her voice was warm molasses. And when she laughed, your moods floated like cream in her wake.
The second was sandpaper and salt — all quick, gritty wit and billy goat gruff. She flashed lightning one minute and sunshine the next. She could be a tough nut to crack, but once you broke through, she loved you for life. And you were a better person for that love.
Both women — larger-than-life itself — now gone from this lifetime.
It’s always such a jarring, jagged feeling, knowing someone has been pulled from the world, leaving snagged roots and empty spaces — in this case, big, buxom empty expanses where bright patterned tunics and laughter once rang.
How can the world simply keep spinning? How do we just adjust to their absence?
And it seems like sacrilege to ask such questions as a mere friend. A friend. When we know others have been so much more enormously — monumentally –impacted by their loss. Children and parents. Spouses and siblings.
My bruises, though they feel deep, are nothing compared to the trauma in those lives. To the violent rifts and vast voids and crushing avalanches of raw emotion they know and feel.
I’ve started to write about my first friend half a dozen times since her death, but I kept stopping. It didn’t feel right.
And how could it?
Because it was all so wrong. So very, very wrong. My friends had families. Children. Grandchildren. Parents. They were loved. They were needed.
And somehow or other, some force or other chose not to take that into account.
And it infuriates me. And devastates me.
But that’s the nature of time, isn’t it? She’s a bitch. Or is Time a HE? Father Time, isn’t it? Of the infuriating, devastating, abusive variety.
Never asking permission. Doing with us as he will. Sketching lines, loosening skins, brittling bones and dry-rotting joints. And stealing friends. And former students. Time is a crook and a thief.
And he steals more and more from us as the years whiz past.
They say death happens in threes. But it seems in the past few months there have been many, many more than that. Friends have lost fathers. Mothers have lost sons. Families have lost matriarchs.
But I guess that’s the nature of the game. And as we get older, death increases exponentially. And none of us escapes the endgame. And eventually, if you’re the last one standing, then… you’re the last one standing.
And that’s hardly a good thing. I definitely don’t want to be the last one standing.
But I do want to stand a whole lot longer. My two friends who recently left this world — they weren’t a whole lot older than me.
I would appreciate it if Father Time would simply sling me more etched lines and loose skin and spare me a lot more life. Because my boys and my girls and my grandkids and my husband… we’ve got more we want to accomplish. We aren’t finished yet. Not by a long shot.
But then, neither were my friends and their families.
Every morning and night, I drive by one of their houses. There’s a light shining on the front porch, as if waiting for her return.
The primroses that pepper the front lawn of her house in the spring are nowhere to be found in this cold winter chill. The trellis, just visible in the backyard sits sparse and bleak in its grief.
But soon, nature will replenish herself. That’s simply her nature. Always resurrecting.
But the inhumanity of humanity is: we don’t. At least not in our original form. But if you’re a believer, there are options out there…
Some people believe in transmigration of souls — from one body to the next. Or others believe in a spirit realm where our loved ones may watch over us as angels. Still others believe in an afterlife where we will all meet up again in mansions and on streets made of gold.
All of these beliefs are the spiritual equivalent of cuddles and comfort amid the sandpaper and salt, the pain and the tears, of this life.
Cuddles and comfort. Sandpaper and Salt. That’s what life — and the afterlife — is made of.
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