Mark Twain and I being thoughtful and very literary.I attend a writing group for women over in Walnut Creek called Word Garden East. Every Wednesday we do two or there exercises like the ones you will see below. We could be staring at a bucket full of paint chips or listening to “California Dreamin.’” We write about whatever inspires us about the physical image, the idea behind it, any associations we have with it…These are not necessarily the beginnings of stories or poems but just ideas, lines, words that we may or may not use at a later date. The idea is to get you thinking in different ways, approaching an idea from a different angle and certainly to just be writing. (I put up a lot of exercises, take your time.)This was derived from the first line of a poem :“I didn’t just read the Bible I lived it…”I didn’t just read the Bible, I lived it. But then there is…
Sloth…which I am too lazy to say much about, although it is also this very ugly looking creature in some kind of jungle in another hemisphere which may or may not be some kind of a sign. And then there is
Gluttony…see every holiday and probably every American ever and then there is…
Avarice….greed, money, power, I want a microphone in front of my face every day and kind of blind following, see 1984 (George Orwell did turn out to be some kind of prophet). And then there is
Lust….Men, Older men, younger men, Marines, musicians (drummers), closet writers, red heads, tall men, anyone named Andrew and then there is…
Pride….I mean I am pretty hot stuff. And then there is
Envy….but still if I could just have Jennifer Aniston’s stomach, then I’d really be in business
And there is one other one, one other deadly sin, a seventh, which it is probably a sin to forget. And yet I have. So one day the sky darkened and those stormy end of the world type clouds were sprinting in a race for who got to rain on me first and dance until lightening came shooting out of the soles of their feet in to the field of bright yellow mustard weeds. I think mustard weed is as pretty as any flower and deserves a better name, especially that gorgeous field where I was doing it with Billy in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday. And then there began this incessant droning sound that felt deep from with in like tectonic shifting but constant and numbing air conditioning in an office building. It was the locusts.
Don’t worry, this isn’t as scary and feminist as it sounds from the title. This was an exercise based on the first line of a poem…My Vagina Does Not Want to Talk. No my vagina doesn’t want to talk she is more shy than she might like to admit. And speaking of admitting… A fighter pilot named Ox tried to visit once, but that just wouldn’t fly with the folks up in the tower. A drummer named Dan with a terrible inferiority complex wanted to learn her rhythm, but the snare whispered in my ear that he doesn’t read music so well. And then there was an old buddy of mine who thought now that we are older it is about time, but the Geneva Convention has strict regulations about friendly fire. And my vagina thinks that my track record with men is about as successful as George Jr.’s going on two terms in office and she is feeling a little bit like a blue state, and it is alarming how accurate of a comparison that is. No my vagina does not want to talk, she is happy, leave her alone, she is planning a trip to scenic Vermont, because hey, who doesn’t love real maple syrup, I mean my knees and my belly button and especially my eye lashes just love it. But my vagina is worried, what if the plane crashes and we land in a fiery inferno of twisted metal and up right seatbacks in a red state. They will see by her surroundings that what a sinner she is, I mean she already knows that the men in Idaho don’t speak her language.
Answering the personal ad of a man who had called himself prime real estate, not damaged my any low rent, short term tenants…I am the woman on the bow of the ship, all the sails are raised and cradling wind on my way to somewhere I have never been and can’t yet see. My chest and face flying forward, my hair waving back like wheat stalks in September and my arms behind me like a butterfly, who is frozen in this moment, but is surely opening her wings. I have been salted by my travels through the sea. It is the nature of the sea to evaporate away in the sun of everyday life and leave a residue. This residue is thick and coarse, but it is now the topography of my form, helping me slice through the sea more deliberately and with more appreciation for the whales, the marlins, the fish, the glimmer of the waves and of course the sailors.
The prompt was to write about a stranger you have seen our one you made up, this is a man I saw in Italy 4 years ago… This man’s suit is the color of eggplants. Many eggplants, sitting heavy, like wine bottles, making the hue seem deeper than the color a single vegetable could emit, drenched in the Italian summer sun that is assaulting him now. His shirt is yellow, the color of the edge of the sky when the sun sets peacefully, the color of Easter eggs, the color of lemon meringue, the color of sweet corn. But this man is gaunt, the nourishment of the vegetables weighing down his slumped shoulders and concave chest, squashing his vitality instead of creating it. His hair is black like the richest soil, but slick like an oil spill. His cheeks curve inward and hang on his bones. His skin is both brown from the sun and gray from the ash on the end of the cigarette he just flicked on to the empty train track. He holds a shopping bag that is white with a black insignia I don’t recognize, he holds it the edges of the bag instead of the rope-cord handle I can see has flapped over the side. I wonder if the is because he does not want to look as if he is holding a purse, and is that a personal concern or one held by all Italian men. And I wonder what is in the bag, who it is meant for and what is it meant for. Is it a birthday gift for a sister, which would make him, despite appearances, a good guy, or an apology gift for an old love, he left for a woman who left him, a gift for a woman whom he obviously should have married so he would not end up aging and alone on a train platform covered in tourists. So that his skin would be tanned by the sun he reveled in while drinking red wine and telling stories seasoned with characters both real and imaginary. Is the item in the bag a gift he has bought for himself that he will take home to his family and a marriage that is fine at times and less at others, which doesn’t make him a bad or a good guy but places him in the pantheon of the notorious/glorious/normal/average/nothing of the sort/just doing their best/moments of splendor that we all belong to.
The prompt was to write from this poem, in the poem a woman put a bowl full of rose petals and bees in front of a man’s door who had decided he could not love her because she had breast cancer and the image of bees took me back to when my house in Pullman had an infestation…I see that there is not to be a moratorium on the subject of dead bees. They have haunted me for quite some time. The color yellow of an unripened lime stripes the tail of these creatures like Halloweens’ midnight version of a candy cane. My skin was unfreckled and plain before the queen made her kingdom inside the walls of my bathroom and her worker men, now and then, would take a shower with me, cleansing themselves with scented shampoo of mango and rose hips and poppy seed. I believe that at first the bees and I were friends, living in harmony. But then, my dear friend, Patience her given name, brought me a slender yellow tower with sweet nectar inside to lure all the soldiers, like the siren’s scarlet song, into the Lotus land that would destroy them. And the tiny yellow bodies stacked up inside the plastic prison, but it seemed that all of the bee families had come in full force to take their revenge on me, congregated in a buzzing armada next to my rusting water heater.
Carl said he’d never seen a hive so big, in Whitman County, in the twenty years that he’d been killin’ things that crawl. He said that trap had attracted every bee zooming over the hills of the Palouse, turning the tower so the red warning in the shape of a stop sign warning to keep the trap 25 feet away from the house would face me. But still I can picture the queen inside the wall, all three hives that had melded into one withered into old, brown apple core and she, sprawled on her back, all her little legs flapping to her sides, her crown fallen into a crumpling crevice like a wish in the shape of a penny down a well, which she can never get back.
Write about New Year’s Eve…Casinos smell like stale cigarette smoke sinking into carpet with a pattern so loud it vibrates and chlorine that sanitizes all of the artificial streams of the jungle themed buffet from copper wishes so spending New Year’s Eve in a casino does not, in itself bring freshness. I’d like to open a literal window, but all I have is a figurative one that has been painted shut. Unsettling to be in a place that stays alive by not guaranteeing anything. So I elbow strangers to get to a bartender who doesn’t know what a seven highball is, which reminds me that I should see my grandmother more. I pass a man with a beard who reminds me of Andy and not having anyone to kiss at midnight. I see a woman in a silver sequined dress, with a hyena-donkey laugh like I did once, which reminds me I am going to be more bold and sparkly next year. I stand precariously not having figured anything out, not really, in a haze of smoke—which for the first time ever is not a metaphor. Mullet man with his dirt brown hair and unfiltered Marlboro is leering at me, but I feel safe because he has had enough frozen Margaritas to turn him into a flamingo, wobbly like he is standing on one leg and if he leans in any direction he will fall in to the waitress who is not wearing any pants—on purpose—the slot machine covered in neon fruit and dinging like church bells on Sunday, or his fat friend pumping quarters into the machine. So every one is ending one year the same way they begin the next, getting lost instead of getting lucky.
I started with a bucket full of paint chips with names on them like anthem red or peony pink…I feel like my body is a harbor for things like the smoky oranges of dusk, of pink peonies, baby shoes, a man’s face when he is freshly shaved and a moonless night.
I import these items from around my world so I can selfishly have each smell and each scent and each glimpse and touch for myself when ever I want them. I will not share them with my friends who I adore and my family who I cherish or any of my past or future lovers who I do unspeakable things with. This world full of all of the things which I have chosen as precious is only for me. Each thing is tied to a memory, most likely of one of them, and they would not understand why I value the way a single note—from a song I can’t remember—ruminate through a tiny chapel I will only visit again in the safe harbor on the shores of my own walled country.
I think my insides must be covered in footprints, and clean seductive smells and haze like it is always sunset and sunrise of everyday as if there is more to mine out of shades of the sky. It is always the onyx sky slipping into the obsidian sea with nowhere to look into the future, it is always the flowers with personalities Kelly wrote about. It is always the anthem red of a rose that declares to me there was a love drinking of my salty waters.
Sometimes we work with form, this poem is called a Pantoum, it is a very repetitive form, the line scheme is on the side (yes line scheme not rhyme scheme)…The Summer of Singing at the Top of My Lungs
A I do not remember the genesis of that particular fight.
B It was night, and the stars were swirling, and everything seemed like a good idea.
C Even the moon was calling me to dance in the middle of the street and accompany my own steps with my own music.
D My tangoing toes were barely balancing on the yellow line of caution in the middle of the road.
B It was night, and the stars were swirling, and everything seemed like a good idea.
E It was the summer of singing at the top of my lungs.
D My tangoing toes were barely balancing on the yellow line of caution in the middle of the road.
F So Ted began to find my penchant for self-expression embarrassing.
E It was the summer of singing at the top of my lungs.
G I only felt safe to express my self if my eyes balls were floating in vodka.
F So Ted began to find my penchant for self-expression embarrassing.
H Pretending he did not know me and my arms reaching up for the acceptance of the sky.
Y But the sky, she understands my voice must be let out of her cage.
C Even the moon was calling me to dance in the middle of the street and accompany my own steps with my own music.
Z Her call more magnetic than someone who wears a tie to work.
A I do not remember the genesis of that particular fight.
I don’t actually remember the prompt on this one…Holly was full of secrets. She was full of misunderstandings about herself. Well her cats are full of secrets and her walls and all of the coffee mugs in the cabinet. She is full of green secrets like plants that growing inside her and every tendril of the plant is the way an idea grows, more like molds when it does not see the sun or have access to the air. The purging of her secrets was like a rite and she the only initiate. Her friends would gather around the coffee table in front of the kitchen windows that were painted shut with pure white paint. The sun shining through a wine bottle full of food coloring placed rainbows on the table and over the hands of each woman. So Sidney’s hands were purple and Mira’s hands were honey colored and Ally’s hand were sienna and Kathy’s hands were blue like the sea in a postcard for an island. The ladies like to dish, everything, onto the counters and the walls and the high ceilings. They were lightweight and only the colors seeping through the windows kept them from floating up to visit the cobwebs on the ceiling. Holly was heavy. Weighed down by her moldy inner thoughts. Pinned in by her fear of being exposed, like the brick on the outside of the house that Jessica always said needed a coat of paint and maybe a lobotomy. Holly was afraid that her insides were like the snow tires under the mud room or the old doors and random boards under the mud room where stray cats lived, like the ornery, orange cat she had named el Diablo for the way he treated her own Sophie with the soft white fur on her belly, who sat inside pawing at the safety of the window, Holly feared that her insides were ugly and unsightly and what she really needed was a good spring cleaning, a trip to the dump, a lobotomy. She feared that she was beyond being understood, so far beyond that she needed a complete separation from she current self. Inward she screamed, outward she pruned the single rose bush in the front yard. The only plant she had energy for. The only plant that was thriving, with beautiful pink buds and verdant leaves, so beautiful that no one minded about the thorns. That the thing that roses have over everyone, they are so beautiful no one minds about the thorns.
Started from a line “come into animal experience” but really inspired by one of my students…Come into animal experience like the flailing, smiling,
wild, watchful child who cannot communicate.
See him suddenly lie down in the middle of a cold
tile floor and stare to nothing. Feel lucky you are cursed
with love and hate and all the things he is not even aware of.
But Clap child clap, clap your hands at new, shinning objects,
push buttons, kick soccer balls and pull fire alarms
so every one will know with a blood red howl that
you have discovered something new.
Stare at me again, so I question if
you know who I am after all this time.
Please look right into my eyes and
make me think you are trapped inside
your normal looking body, then come centimeters
from my face with a smile as wide and unfailing as
a dolls for minutes on end and make me think that you love it.
Giggle for an hour and remind me of joy that cannot be tempered by others.
Sing child sing, if that is in fact what you are doing
when your voice raises in pitch and glides over sounds
like a bird skimming the tops of oceans
waves that are temporarily flat, staring at
his own reflection at the intersection of sunlight and water.
Plug your ears child, yet again, to hear the sound of your own happiness.
What is written on the body…My uncle John, giving a sermon about women to the boys, says the curve at the small of a woman’s back is where grace sits. I picture grace to be this tiny angel with magnificent, crystalline pink wings and a coy smile, fluttering, always threatening to leave unless someone holds her there.
When touched there I do feel graceful, contained, like I can be easily controlled by this person who has figured out how. But this person who knows grace, has looked into her blue, blue bathtub eyes, who knows me and knows my center of gravity does not sit in my hips. Who knows I am sensitive and ticklish to the lightest touch. Who knows I have a scar instead of a birthmark, an squiggly black line without significance in any language instead of tattoo. Who knows that my back is a canvas, who knows the contours and sensation of thick, thick paint of the bright, bright orange flower and the black, black calligraphy letters and who knows who knows what is written on my body, that meaning etched into it down so far, so deep, so low are notes the voice is unable sing.
Think of my self as a healing and soothing image…I am the moon. Holding my granite heaviness with a steady, measured breath, stationed in the sky, living among stars, seeing everything, seeing mountain peaks and evergreens reach for me. I control the seas sculpting the contours of the earth. With every crash of the waves, Polishing stones smooth enough to hold in your hands when you are worried and skip across glass flat waters when you are carefree. Taking out my anger on lifeguards and retirees with beach houses, drawing the sea back in on itself each night at low tide to caress the life with in for those who wish to know it. Shining light on the most deserving waves, bobbing along on calm nights, hearing the waves lap against the ever-changing shore as if it were the soothing cadence of my own heart. Every night putting to bed millions of children and parents and lovers and lonely hearts.
Every month hiding myself in comfortable shadows, then remembering my right to a second chance. Renewing as a matter of course, tiptoeing out of the shadows to illuminate my brilliant wholeness. Again, and again, and again, and again.
There were none of his kind around there anywhere-Sharon OldsWhen my father is listening to jazz or blues or rock, anything with a drum kit or an electric guitar or a piano or a voice that cries with out releasing a drop of water down a single cheek, he clinks his wedding ring against his glass. So the ice in his glass of tequila or vodka bumps together to become another instrument, faint, like a breeze running through a delicate wind chime or metallic bracelets writhing on my mother’s wrist. It is the tiny pin of rhythm, the narrator of every genre of music I have ever heard, observing changing the act itself, some men on stage making music and a man in the audience making music, playing against each other, making a new song. It is his wedding ring scratching the much larger glass and the glass scratching the gold ring. It is the needle of a record player bearing down on a deep black groove, both needing the friction to make music.
Words you know by heart…
This is my letter to the world who never wrote to me
The simple news that nature told with tender majesty
Her message is committed to hands I cannot see
But for love of her sweet countrymen judge tenderly of me. -Emily DickinsonThe child does like the smell of the first raindrops,
Because they are new, and he misunderstands newness because he is new and he does not yet know how new he is,
So the rain breathing its first breath is like a rose bud clicking open,
Gasping for air with the shocking freshness of something that has been sealed, the new rain is also like the slow, cool in and out of a baby breathing in your ear. There is a majesty heralded in the first few rain drops which may be ending a drought or just another Thursday, but it is nature’s perfume, she is dressed up again, with dangly earrings and new shoes and a new dress and new stockings and a new hair do for yet another beginning.
Writing off of shells…The shell is hard and white on the outsides, with edges that look like the peaks of fresh whipped cream when it is ready to serve. The inside is lightest, newest pink, the delicate, exposed underbelly of frail creature that must be protected. I wonder what would happen if I threw it down on warm, terra cotta tile, would it bounce, would it break into a few large puzzle pieces, or would it shatter, leaving tiny pieces to live in the grooves of the kitchen floor. What would happen if I put it in a tree to live, a great, large oak with branches drooping toward the earth like tired arms. Would a bird makes it’s home inside her curvature, fill it with straw and feed her babies there? Would a squirrel be still for just one second to listen, for the only time in his life, to sound of the sea? Would a frumpy, brown acorn get jealous, fall on purpose and with militaristic precision to knock the shell back to the dirt, which is probably close enough to sand? What would happen if I put the shell in a snowstorm? Would it be preserved for eternity at sub-zero temperatures or would it crack from the cold? Would it remember the sun’s fondness for beaches, San Diego, Sydney, Biarritz, Aruba and become nostalgic for home? Would it rest comfortably on a pile of fresh snow, enchanted by the sparkle? What would happen if I gave it to a child? Would he discover for himself the sharpness of the spiny, milk colored outside of things and the smoothness of the pink inside of things? Would he treasure it, keep it on a shelf forever? Would he be curious enough to hold it to his ear? And would he learn the ocean is so expansive it can reach him in Illinois?
From a list of compiled verbs and nouns…Pearl swirled her hair into a curl. Furling up with cringing fingers and hurling up with dainty arm her tresses like the whirlwind romance of a young girl and a man with a certain amount of burl. And shackled to her shocking hair do was a sobering clue as to why she had become an angry magician now put in the position of scrubbing and scowering the floors of a castle owned by a princess who spat out her gum at a wild phantom and let out a rant that I can’t repeat.
So Pearl scrubbed and scowered the red brick floor covered in honey colored light that might disappear before night as the daffodil sun that had just begun to bring her joy fell from the sky like a child’s toy. Then the princess drove Pearl to rove the green hills looking for cloves, green ones or garlic, rosemary or parsnip, to tantalize her lips and go straight to her big hips ambling through apple groves. So Pearl did the bidding of the unwitting princess, painting her toenails and saying her hails to Mary while planning to marry that flailing, pontificating dunce of a prince from the next province. Merl had seen pearl threading needles and treading lightly behind the hapless princess, wondering what might bring a girl such as Pearl with floral garlands in her hair to a moore on the shore of a childhood lore.
Lemon verbena leaves in an envelope…I don’t know plants, but I’ll bet that is lemon verbena, or I’ll pretend it is. Verbena such a lovely word to say it touches you softly, like a lullaby and the fragile air of dusk. However, the lemon smell is so pungent it is almost like lemon floor cleaner, lemon pledge, Mr. Clean lemon, something of the kind, the kind of lemon that makes you dizzy by walking into a room where the floor is still we with the citrus scent of it. For me, lemon verbena is the smell of Gone with the Wind, my favorite book of all time. Ellen O’Hara wore lemon verbena and this was Scarlett’s most enduring memory of her. I can smell that touch of lemon that even now makes my mouth water with the anticipation of something so sour. The saliva ready to protect from something I want yet fear. Like tickling, it makes you smile and laugh and twist and squirm and the whole time you are saying no stop. When I bite into a wedge of lemon my face contorts as if I hate it as much as I hate cooked spinach, but I always want more lemon. It is the scent of lemonade, of summer, of memory. And even though she was not technically real, it is the perfume of Ellen O’Hara, the portrait of grace and decorum. But I suppose I am doing what Scarlett did, what young girls so, romanticizing something that isn’t at all romantic. Scarlett thought the war would be romantic, getting married, having children, well I suppose it never occurred to her that things might not work out in her favor. Just the way it never seemed that lemon juice would eat a way at your tooth enamel and your teeth would begin to rot out of your head and now you will have the ugliest smile in three counties and not even the one armed Monroe boy will marry you and then where will we be. Probably drinking spiked lemonade on a veranda held up by crisp, white, Doric columns, trying to recall the Battle Hymn of the Republic to a chorus of crickets chirping and my own creaking and squeaking rocking chair, the one my own mother rocked me in as a child, smelling of thick, creamy department store lipstick and pressed powder.
In this exercise we pulled two medicine cards out of a deck and started writing based on which ever or whatever inspired us about the idea on the card or the image on it…
Medicine cards, release and opposites…I tried to drink you away, but now every time I look at the juice of the aguave plant, honey colored and just as sticky, wearing a prom dress name tequila, all I think of is you.
I tried lighting a candle, a pink healing candle with a silver, heart medallion tied around its waist with coarse rope for a belt. But that tiny finger of light, that tiny, pink kittens tongue could not lick my face fresh. And now your face is in the flicker of every tiny flame. I suppose you are like Rome, an empire that fell such along time ago, but if you visit you can still trip over a chunk of the Coliseum if you decide to visit.
So I went to the top of a mountain, where there are no buildings, where the air is thin and it is harder to breath. I tripped over rocks, cut my legs on briars and the sun scorched my face red like the sunset. The sun sets more slowly up there, smudged rainbows even on the haziest days, but as dark approached I remembered how you said the stars were just holes in the cloak of night, to remind us that day was coming.
I tried putting my feelings in a bottle and placed it, hurled it like a javelin into the Pacific Ocean to burden someone in Japan with my thoughts of you, to wash you up on the shores of an island that doesn’t speak your language with little hope of escape. It was a green bottle with each speck of the white label painstakingly picked off so what kind of bottle it was would not affect what kind of bottle it would be. But it was after noon, late afternoon when the ocean yawns, stretches out her legs and back you came in a green bottle I sealed with the wrong size cork. The ocean spit you out and back onto my sandy shores just as I was whispering your name into the wind. She’ll carry it away for me, she promised. She’ll take you to the top of that mountain to see everyday end a different color.
