Cousin Blood Lion

8pm 2/24/14

At my corner.

The weather doesn't fit the visual, the visual being unsnow.

The visual doesn’t match (it’s cold and windy and 30 degrees) the expectation. This is disheartening. Expecting one thing, getting another, that whole ho hum thing.

Like when the young child learns that her crush on an older cousin is wrong.

Or, as an adult, expecting to get X amount of work done, yet by the end of the day you haven’t touched half of half your intentions.

Or, expecting it to be a normal old Monday: library trance from 9am to 6pm, but it just ain’t so. Or maybe it is so, it’s just that the trance is a different trance, one you weren't expecting.

***

Today my cousin passed away. He was/is 32.

My heart is heavy. So is my head. And body, and this hand trying to write. Everything wants to rest.

***

Why am I here? A few years ago, I once told a friend who was considering an MFA, that the whole thing was self-indulgent.

Today I agree with myself.

***

Disheartening.

Diss heart-ning.

Dissed heart strings.

Dis heart hurting

Dis heart smears itself

Lightening bug

On a distant

disconnected

Blog.

Blah.

!

***

I am nobody

Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

***

The ink in my pen is frost bit, it’s not working with me, not recording what I want it to.

But then, I lift my notebook to the street light, and see that it was writing the whole time.

***

The yellow rectangle of my office floats above me. From where I sit three silhouette trees braid themselves in a conspiring thread to block my view. I am having trouble seeing much of anything, I huff to myself in Eeyor fashion.

 My brain says move, so I do. I come to a new angle and can see into my window, see the pieces of furniture that I imagined were there a few seconds ago in their visual absence. So I see the familiar, see what I expected and a mocking happiness washes over me. My confirmation of what I knew was already there seems so pathetic. Expectancy encourages a change of view I hear my body getting all preachy on me, but I’m in no mood. Expect nothing.

***

My leafs

Look at them holding on

                                         Look how they become “my” leafs when

 I personify them with strength

My leafs

My needs. To connect

I am connected to these “my” leafs (now your leafs)

What they hold on to, is the same thing they must leave

Leafs leaves or don’ts leaves,

Thank you girls for making your own

time thieves

Look how my leafs become “shes”

My she leafs

Our she we leafs

***

It’s a mixture of things—my sadness, the night, the cold air, my readings from earlier in the day—that allow me, right now, to allow nature to work its magic on me.

Tom Grimes said that it is not identity searching which makes us writers (this intrigued me. Weren’t the odd lot of us MFA’ers here precisely for this reason? To consider ourselves for an intensive two years? To study the ways in which we thought or didn’t think?), but something that precedes the quest of identity.

Check this out:

“Maybe what I wanted all along was what Tolstoy and Hemingway seem to have, which turns out, upon close reading, not to be identity, but negative capability, that mysterious Keatsian ability and desire to swim through confusion, and without  anxiously or irritably grasping after facts (those tempting transcendent things), keep themselves afloat…what I was really searching for was not identity, but mystery, reflection, doubt, a constant state of never knowing who I am, always testing, always weighing, always evolving.”

***

Self indulging? Depends on what day you ask me.

Confusing?

Absolutely, but perfectly so.

***

Cousin

Blood

Lion

Snow and Staccato Thoughts

11am Sunday 2/16/14

At my corner. Snow.

More snow.

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Before I got to looking at this snow,  I walked around a young man in front of my apartment’s pine green dumpster. His music was clear through his hoods, hats, and headphones. The repetitive chants of a rapper’s meditations form and slice through the dry snow air. The voice has been altered:  it’s lowered, and injected with bass. The beat’s been slowed down. There’s something both unnatural and hypnotizing--incandescent even-- going on. The pull is like a moth drawn to zapper light, a zapper light being held by the hallowed arms of Sylvia Plath. Like a poem I think I get.

“I get bad bitches and bad money.”

I fluttered around him. I stepped from the slim deer path of packed down ice, a path of name brand boot prints and un-name brand breeds of paw prints.

I clean my corner and take my seat. I get to looking.

***

Why is everything I take in related to education today? Related to the classroom? This week at ACJ (Allegheny County Jail) my students (eleven men ranging in ages: 20’s-60’s) explored figurative language, simile’s and metaphors.

•    The Splenda snow, my students would dig that simile. They’d dog each other and get into a discussion about the taste of sugar.“Splenda tastes like shit,” one would say. Tastes like         shit, another opportunity to highlight the similes of our everyday speech. What does shit          taste like? I might ask, encouraging them to use more similes in their explanation. 
•         The Floam snow. There’s a culture/era marker. I’d have to check for understanding of this simile. Pictures help. This would be a good segueway into a discussion about the audience.

***

This snow has been trying my patience.

My thoughts on snow right here, right now:

 Snow the shape shifter: How it comes with force, with community, with the masses, demands its place to rest. How it melts, changes it shape and travels to those tiny veins of the unseen, the unconscious, freezes, unfreezes, calls attention to its expansion and contraction. How it calls attention to the blocked, water proofed, barricaded, impenetrable places of the soul. How it points its liquid finger at stunted growth. There, there, there, work on that, make that grow.

Snow the enforcer of absolute thinking:

White or black

Hot or cold

Good or bad person

Good or bad student

Good or bad teacher

Good or bad writer

Real or fake

Love or hate 

Snow the encourager of staccato thinking:

(See above and below format of this blog entry).

***

Somewhere during my writing the young man has left, taking his music with him. I feel a sadness, his bus hadn’t yet come, did my presence scare him away? Associative rhyme:

Good morning Mary Sunshine, why did you wake so soon? You scared the little birds away                    and shined away the moon.

To wake up is to scare the little birds away.

To wake up is to scare others away.

***

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Blog snow like, like, like...

Connection

"Each year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. The voice of nature is always encouraging."
                                                  -Thoreau

9am Sunday February 9, 2014

23 degrees

Sitting at my corner. My first conscious capture is the lime on the wood planks: long stacked-like brick planks that hold the earth from falling into the street. The color links up with my memory and I’m associating:

color pop

push pop

ring pop

candy paint

jolly rancher

sour apple

jell-o jigglers

Pretty paint on barriers like paint ball splots on police shields, like tropical murals on condemned Philly row homes. Bright colors holding hands with drabness: winter whites and bland browns plus the mean mood of those cool winter blues.

The petite chimney of my wide apartment building is putting out a faint but steady puff of steam, looking tired, looking like The Little Engine That Could: I think I can, I think I can.

Pencil-tip pellets of snow drop to my notebook, demand attention: dandruff on a black dress. Plus they have a bounce to their step, a soundtrack to their entrance: Zing! Zing! Like those shoots of light that fall around Beast as he’s resurrected in front of an awed Belle, in front of an ensnared five year old watching through the screen.

I chase a fallen pellet with the tip of my fountain pen, inject it with ink. A tattoo. How this is beautiful and grotesque. The white pellet now a melted clump of black ink, like it never was once snow. How vision is an illusion, how it’s limited in its ability to tell the whole story, the whole history.

How history is an obsession of the writer (me).

 In this vein an image surfaces: crabs (writers) in a bucket. But the other crabs aren’t other writers, they’re me. All those claws, and clamoring for freedom. All  that truth. All those obsessions, and opinions-- they’re me.

***

There’s those leaves again, the ones who never let go. The ones who make their own schedule as to when. How they’re both brilliant and foolish. Tough-- but for what?-- they’ve already braved the winter. Ovid said: “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

 I’m thinking about my students at ACJ, how they embody these lone leaves: brittle, beat down, weathered, but connected. Holding on. To be a writer is to hold on.

***

One bird, then two, but they are far and unidentifiable. Then the giving of a red spot, a Cardinal. I feel glad to know his name-- this celebrity.

A school of baby stingrays fly over head and they dart nervously in unpredictable redirections.

As I focus on looking at/ for birds, it’s their sound that comes into focus. How could I have missed this?

It’s amazing, personalities galore.

-joyful

-whiney

-melancholic

-aggressive

-nimble

-friendly

-annoying

What’s going on? Why all the sounds?

I reprimand myself. I am silly to think that these noises are out of the ordinary. I feel further shame, in that I know birds are a big deal in the literary world. How quick I am to find birds and their metaphors in a text, but how blind I am to them in real life. That seems extremely disconnected to me.

The Cardinal lands on a lime log plank while I’m wallowing in my deficiencies.

Associations begin anew:

Christmas

Christmas in the Caribbean

Senses on a Rainy Night

8pm Sunday (2/2/14)

Night time, and the intentions now are different. Take away sight (or lessen sight) and my other senses would be required to do their thing. So I set out to do my thing, call upon my senses to show me what they got. Show me what you got oh put-on-the-spot receptors of my small reality. Show me what you got.

Smell: I take in three deep breaths, nothing. It smells like nothing. Whats nothing smell like? Deep breath again, and there it is: someone’s doing laundry. Somewhere a dryer tube is puffing out warm wafts of lilac, and I’m getting it-- ever so slightly-- emphasizing it and spiking it with narration. I register it to this moment: a memory in process. The mood, my mood, has taken a split-hair turn, enough for me to look at my ambivalence from a different angle.

 I’m thinking about aromatherapy, about lilac, about the book The Giver. In this story, the Giver lets Jonas experience memories of the world: fear, joy, awe, shock, ETC. When I smell lilac I am transported to a pleasant memory that’d be titled, for the Giver’s purposes, as “The Overwhelming Need to Share Something Beautiful.”

I’m five, and I’m snapping lilac. I’m collecting the spectrum (white to purple), holding them in my clutch. I’m barely holding on to my body’s movements in my excitement to share these bombs of fragrance and color. For my mother! For my mother! I can think of no one/nothing  but my mother.

Touch: It’s raining and I feel the cold moist air finding its way into my clothes. My hot skin, barricaded with its man-made materials (say for some cotton laced in the mix) confronts the invasion and tufts of truces erupt in invisible mushroom clouds of condensations and evaporations. Hot or cold, the feeling is wet.

Sound: There’s the drip!/drip!/drip! of water torture that isn’t torture at all. (Water torture provides a sturdy template of sound, but when its mold is removed is the uneasiness of the initial evocation of torture too powerful a residue?) Or maybe I like this idea of torture: going crazy to the sound/feel of water like a “would you rather?” game without an alternative option. drip!/drip!/drip!

Taste: I taste only my mouth. I taste my ambivalence. How I won’t lick the road, or the tree or the house or the human or the animal dead or alive. I taste my baby steps. I taste my taste in growth that’s only comprehended via a time-lapse camera. I taste my ambivalence. Hard headed and stubborn is a taste, too sure of itself to tag any type of metaphor.

Sight: This sight, which I thought would be lessened, is nothing further from the truth. Everything is illuminated with a light that shines not from the sun, but from within. So that dead tree: brighter and deader (yes, deader) and more alive in its deadness (and beauty) than I’ve ever felt.

No people or cars, but yellow/orange squares of windows and the flickering movement of a shitty (sorry-- Eagles and Steelers baby) Superbowl game. A bus (61A) filled with empty seats and bus driver who’s fair game to caste a narrative upon.

A burnt mattress leans against the slick dumpster of our apartment. I’m thinking about the fire that burns behind every visual, every sense, every story, every ambivalence and every open heart.

Abandonment and What Was

Abandonment and What Was

Ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

                                                                                                                                -Noam Chomsky

Monday 5:30 pm.

Trying to identify this dead tree is like trying to give John Doe a more personable name at the Morgue. No shoots of life (leaves) and no name tag. But who am I kidding? I couldn't identify a tree for the life of me (with exception to a decorated Christmas tree).

But here I go. Out of all the slightly hopeful-of-life-in-the-Spring trees, my eyes beeline to the dead one.

Abandonment. Let my obsessions be revealed (like those persistent moles of the Whack-A-Mole variety-- I gotta acknowledge them, or they just keep coming back.)

So below this dead tree (abandonment of life) is an abandoned red car (abandonment of human investment) and behind me is the “Yellow House” (*Garden View manor) with its grounds that are anything but abandoned. But it’s a Red Herring. See, inside its manicured yellow walls walk those whose mind or soul has abandoned their body (or on the verge of abandoning their body-- permanently or temporarily).

And as much as “they” remain a “they,” I can’t help but feel a deep connection to them... as in the whole idea ain’t that unfamiliar to me. The woman who lives below me once said, “Siobhan, the only difference between this house (our apartment building) and that house (the Yellow House) is that we pay for our food.” I laughed a laugh that was polite, but had you been able to read my mind, you could’ve felt my acceptance of her theory.

It’s now 6:00 pm as I type this. Damyon has until 10 pm to receive calls. I just tried calling him, but after a faint voice says “Hello?” he/she hangs up.

Damyon, my 16 year old nephew, is locked down in a psych ward.

I just tried the number again, and it’s busy. I suspect whoever answered and hung up before, didn't want the line clogged up. I can dig that. If I had talked to him, I would've told him I was writing about him in my “nature blog.” He would've laughed and said “what's up” to you.

(((“What's up?” from my nephew Damyon.)))

My uncle died in a psych ward. When his name is invoked at family gatherings, there’ll be head shaking and a ho-hum exhale, “it all started with that spider bite.”

Last year, when taking another family member to a ward, a patient rolled up behind me bumping me with his wheel chair. “Excuse me,” said two gauzed-up and bloody wrists. When I looked into his face he was smiling.

I am trying to connect three rivers here: abandonment, mental illness, and a nature blog, all tentacles of capital N Nature. 

I'm thinking about abandoned buildings, buildings that house abandoned souls and the eerie nostalgia abandonment musters, as in Ted Kooser’s poem:

Abandoned Farmhouse

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

a tall man too, says the length of the bed

in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

says the Bible with a broken back

on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

but not a man for farming, say the fields

cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall

papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves

covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,

says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.

Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves

and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.

And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.

It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house

in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields

say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.

And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard

like branches after a storm--a rubber cow,

a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

This was the first poem I read by Kooser, you can probably guess I was an instant convert. Why are we so drawn to abandonment? 

I think abandonment gives us (me) an honest expectation of life. We abandon, or everything must come to abandonment (life, this MFA program, you name it). What's more, abandonment still offers strings to the "what was." So the memory of a loved one, the neighborhood that once was, the way a grandparent's eyes gloss over when they hear an old tune. Abandonment feels like an honest way in which to navigate the world, life. In Buddhism, its called impermanence, these concepts are similar.

Today the snow offers me a couple of abandoned objects beyond the tree and car:

 A crushed can of ginger ale.

            He was lied to, said the crushed can of ginger ale.

And box of Robotussin.

            She was ready for the Spring, said the open box of Robotussin.

And finally, if looking at myself from a bird’s eye view:

                She was connected, said the words filtered through her notebook.

                

 *Riding up the driveway to Garden View Manor (formerly Jane Holmes), you can sense 

the historical significance of the building and the grounds to the many people who 

worked or lived there and the neighborhood in general. This significance has been and 

continues to be expressed by residents of Wilkinsburg through thoughtful recollections 

of an organization as a pillar of the community and as a dedicated neighbor.

Dating back to 1869, Jane Holmes provided short-term and long-term assisted living in 

various forms. At different times throughout its history, the home offered a safe haven 

for expectant mothers, and personal care and assistance with daily living for seniors. 

Today, in keeping with the more than a century-old tradition of care, Garden View 

Manor continues to offer adults residential personal care. 

Mercy Behavioral Health is especially proud of the fact that one of the reasons we were selected to obtain the facility was because our mission paralleled that of the former Jane Holmes.

Mercy Behavioral Health (MBH), part of the Pittsburgh Mercy Health System, provides 

community-based mental health, mental retardation/developmental disability, and drug/

alcohol prevention and treatment services through Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Taken from: Wilkinsburg Sun

Questions for Readers

Questions for our readers

Ayres:
1. Physical labor, housework, are important in your discovery process. In your family unit, what is your relationship with cleaning and tidiness today? After your home has been filled and brought to order, do these process's continue (cleaning), or do they emerge in another form in your life?

2. Have you tired of bears since this book writing journey? Have you become an an unofficial spokesperson for bear talk small talk? Give examples, if so.

Bakken:
1. I feel somewhat silly asking this, as it is often a shunned upon question, but it is a question nonetheless. The question is why? Why Greece (I know to study food and to work), but beyond that? Are you Greek? Why the attraction, generally and specifically?

2.  I love the description of the one eyed ewe- an argument for vegetarianism, although it is quite clear you are not a vegetarian. I am interested in your eating/food history. What was you diet like growing up? What is your diet like, now here, in land locked Pittsburgh?

Signs

Signs

I’m at my corner. It’s around 4:30 on Sunday January 19^th-- snow is the overwhelming visual, and through it I am doing some specifically snowy associate thinking.

The way it further disguises history and mystery with another physical layer. How this physical layer makes me work that much harder to uncover “it," how I thrive on challenge. 

So under this layer of snow, I make my dangling clodhopper snow boots dance around, stirring up the slimy brown leaves who neatly lay themselves upon each other like human spooning. I dance my boots until a neon orange slice of trash surfaces, and I instinctively begin creating a narrative. After the narrative sounds right in my head (punk ass teenager letting her litter fall like its nothing, because to her, it is nothing and I feel that because I’ve been there too, thinking like no one cares about this neighborhood, so why should I?) I move on to another visual. It’s interesting my thoughts here ended, or felt complete and ready to move on after a human history was evoked.

 I am a human hugger, holding my magnet up to “nature,” waiting for humans to be pulled into my biased attraction.

 A new object. A red and white “Do Not Enter” sign tagged with permanent marker, “D.S.H.B.” (a violence, "don’t stop hating bitch"). I wait for my thoughts to emerge, first slowly, sleepily like flurries, then eventually ravenous and energetic like a poignant squall.

I am transported to my early childhood. This is rural (rural) Pennsylvania, I got an R.R. address (rural route) and I’m walking to Homer’s pond. Before walking up the small hill to the pond a sign’ll be passed that’s only read when a guest is in toe. They’ll stop. Read it out loud. They’ll inflect humor or disbelief or straight up fear. They’ll laugh nervously, they’ll lower their eyes asking in a low toned seriousness, “are you sure we’re allowed to be here?”

“Trespassers Will Be Shot,” a message from Homer. Now here in Pittsburgh, people are divided into two groups-- those who walk past in familiarity, and those who stop to consider the sign: “Stop Shooting We Love You.”

I am thinking about violence. The violence of words. The violence behind warnings and the way these acts of violence are muted or invisible to those who are used to it. When I first read that sign here in Pittsburgh, I fantasized about riddling it with bullets like a metaphor. 

 “Stop Shooting We Love You,” is a perplexing message. Who is this message directed toward? Shooters…shooters of bullets, shooters of violence, shooters of hate, shooters of negativity. And who is we? The community. We (the whole) love you (the individual, the smallest unit) regardless of the bullets we feel/know/see you shoot (stop shooting).

Associative thinking: I want to share a poem that confronts this violence straight on. This poem was written by my close friend/ mentor/poet, Kathy Sheer Bonnano, in response to the grisly murder of her daughter (she was strangled with a phone cord by an ex-boyfriend).  

Look, violence is nature...here to stay. Like Kathy, I got my art (writing) to understand it-- to consider/question/challenge/agree/deny/avoid/like/dislike/scold/praise/belittle/minimize/maximize it. I welcome whatever thought-- enlightened or not-- that trickles into my brain surrounding the issue.

I’m just talking the talk here. Watch how Kathy walks the walk…considering violence through art, through nature, thus transforming it forever into an untouchable beauty.

Poem about light

You can try to strangle light: 

use your hands and think 

you’ve found the throat of it, 

but you haven’t. 

You could use a rope or a garrote 

or a telephone cord, 

but the light, amorphous, implacable, 

will make a fool of you in the end.

You could make it your mission 

to shut it out forever, 

to crouch in the dark, 

the blinds pulled tight—

still, in the morning, 

a gleaming little ray will betray you, poking 

its optimistic finger 

through a corner of the blind, 

and then more light, 

clever, nervy, impossible, 

spilling out from the crevices 

warming the shade.

This is the stubborn sun, 
choosing to rise, 

like it did yesterday, 

like it will tomorrow. 

You have nothing to do with it. 

The sun makes its own history; 

light has its way.