a plunging stone

Though I scrubbed my feet

with myrtle and mint,

I did not make it to Chicago.

The caterpillars

of Black Swallowtails

work the rue,

and I,

I watch.

I watch as the day

Coltrane-rolls into afternoon;

Miles in jodhpurs, perhaps,

a white oxford shirt

half untucked,

leaning in on a single bright note—

a gooseneck lamp bent

over a desk of

whiskers and polka-

dots and moonbeams

through years

of eventides.

years.

White Peony

Westerland Rose

The Addict and Me: Part One

 

If I think of him as an addict, then it becomes clearer and I can let it go; I can let him go, a little bit more, a little bit more . . . .

The first time I experienced him having a relapse, I saw it coming.  I saw it coming from miles and weeks away.  I am, occasionally, a very regular keeper of a journal.  I was mulling over his issues in my journal (OK, obsessing), and I wrote:  He is going to drink. If I was writing in my journal that he was going to drink, how much stronger was it in his mind?   I didn’t even know all that much about alcoholism, but I could see his issues colliding and compounding and the easy answer was there.  A straw cropped up and the camel’s back broke. A hurtful email arrived.  He got it on a Friday night and shared it with me over the phone, and I spent the whole weekend fretting about it.  I did.  What did this have to do with me?  I worried.  I hoped he was talking to his sponsor, I hoped he was talking to someone.  He sure wasn’t talking to me.  And there I was, waiting by the phone.  Frustrated with myself, but doing it anyway.  Damn it.  The positive for me was that I wrote a poem.  I decided that if I was going to sit and wait for a phone call that I might as well write something.  And I did.  And I liked it.  A lot.  It was Bird in a Box.  I think now that it might be a crap name for my blog, but at the time I was really enamored with the poem.  I made something out of frustration.  I made something in spite of being frustrated.

OK, so he didn’t call me all weekend.  I knew he was in trouble.  He sent me a brief message late Friday or early Saturday morning that he wanted to talk, but he never called, messaged, nothing after that.

He called me Monday night.  He seemed a little odd, not the warm soul I knew, but someone more petty, more paranoid.  He was living with family members.  When they came home, all hell broke loose.  Our phone call was interrupted.  He called me back later to confess that he had been busted drinking in a house where there was zero-tolerance.  It was surreal.  I was on the phone with someone I felt I knew well, yet had never met, and suddenly felt I didn’t know at all.  I knew that a relapse was a possibility, but from 1,000 miles away, it felt like, well, 1,000 miles away.  He could have kept it from me.  He could have been drinking all along.  How would I have known? 

What I did know was my reaction.  I saw myself being sucked into this drama; spending whole weekends, lifetimes, waiting and worrying.  And for what?  I knew why we weren’t together:  his addiction would eat me alive.  I couldn’t help but be sucked into that vortex, because that was my nature, that was my idea of love.  And it would do me no good.  I gave it a couple days of thought and then told him straight up:  We can’t be together because your drinking problem would swallow me whole.  I was shaking, but I had the courage to speak my mind.  It felt good. 

It’s three years on, now, and I’m still trying to make the break.  I don’t know why it is so hard.  I didn’t let go, for one thing.  I didn’t step away from that vortex.  I kept hanging on, hoping for something.  A year later I went to visit him.  We had made a little break from each other after the public relapse (private ones had occurred prior).  He re-committed himself to AA and staying sober and stopped talking to me.  After a year and a half of regular contact, it hurt.  I tried to bargain with God.  “We can be friends!”  “I know how to do this.”  “I’m not going to get sucked in.  I know my boundaries, how to stay safe.”  But, no dice: I got to live in my own life, and he, in his.  But my life was in turmoil.  In the space of two years, my long-term boyfriend left me, my mother died (my father had passed two years prior), both my dogs died and I was on the edge of losing my job.  I felt as though everything was flowing out and away from me.

In a therapy session, I had a vision of flying over mountains and feeling wonderfully free.

On a moonlit walk, it occurred to me that I could fly and go see him in the mountains.

I could just ask.  What would be the harm in asking?  I wanted some kind of comfort in my life.  I felt so lonely and abandoned.  I had made this friend and shared all sorts of deep confidences with him.  Couldn’t I just go see him once?

I thought I was following The Four Agreements:  Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want.  I sent out my request: Dear _____, Can I come see you?

Ah, but what did I really want?  My mind was muddled.

He called me.  After a few months of silence, I heard his voice.  He was amenable to me coming to visit.  He sounded excited.  There were details.  He wasn’t sure where he was going to be living, but he had a new job and things were going well.  We could work it out.  We could have fun.  I felt my heart as I got off the phone.  I was excited.  I had forgotten the way his voice made me feel.  Oh, dear.  I was in trouble.  I didn’t just want to go see a friend and get a hug and a “there, there.”  I felt my heart saying, “boom shaka laka.” I wanted Love.

Bird in a Box

In the locker room

Where God cannot see,

In the dark corner,

Tube-socked and tank-topped,

Curled on the wooden slats

Pressed against the drab,

The cool of green tiles,

I’m shooting up longing.

I’m sucking in long

Sweet pulls of desire.

Nobody knows this.

Nobody knows me.

Even God cannot see

God God God

I close my eyes,

Expecting a harpsichord

Or the thin brass tines

Of a music box painfully

Grinding out Mozart:

Pling dah dah ding tra ling.

An emerald and citrine

Crusted wren will pop

Stiffly unfolding up

Spinning mechanically

Stretching in measures:

One wing two wing

Good-bye.

Back into the box.

Clapped shut.

Instead, I’m caught in a luminous diorama,

Painted brightly with thick washes of gouache.

The deliberate notes of a samisen are plucked

And drop soft as pollen,

Sweet as plum blossoms

Slowly unfolding.

In the melancholic stretching silences

Snow melts, rills fill, sap traces upwards.

Flurries of pink crab apple petals

Scrunch together on scabby

Blackened forked sticks,

Poking the blue cornflower sky.

A white crane kimonoed woman,

A pale spirea abloom,

Demures

And pulls from her silken sandalwood folds

A warm peach,

Offering it to me across the stream.

Barely blushing,

It opens in my hand so easily.

A cockatiel rises from its center,

Pale olive and sulfur dusted

He lights on a naked branch above me.

“He knows your secret name.

Call him to you

And he will sing it.”

But I fear his sharp beak,

His strange snail-curled tongue.

His scimitar claws

Will bloody me.

He will tattoo his name on my lips.

I cannot hold out my hand

As he chips closer,

Questioning in rising tones,

In little hops

Down the branch:

please

please

please

it's not that I don't love you

I’m in my parent’s bedroom

the house is on fire

the phone is ringing

I know it’s you

but cannot answer

not now not now

it’s not that I don’t want to

it’s not that I don’t love you

but the house is on fire

and I have to get out

and I’ve forgotten how

the door is latched,

it’s latched and I’m paralyzed,

forgetting how things work

how to open doors

how to free myself.

once I fell into a strange

seizure on my mother’s side of the bed

she came to wake me

but I couldn’t move

I spoke, but my words were gibberish,

a glossolalia from the other side,

the place of peeling birches

and red roots

that dragged along the mossy banks.

she was terrified

and I was trying to tell her that I

was ok

I’m ok, Mom.  I’m ok.

she said that my eyes were open

but rolled back to whites.

my brother is outside

he’s telling me to lift the latch

a bit incredulously,

Duh, lift the latch.

mockingly, but scared for me, too.

you’re doing it wrong:

Lift the Latch.

and there it is

that rusty hook

how many times did I shift this

dark crook out of its eye

just unthinkingly

a mere finger flip

to get to the back porch

swinging the screen door out

to the trumpeter vine

to the garden

to sit with a small bowl

of new strawberries

that I had easily lifted

from their sand.

Carte Blanche

Carte Blanche

December and white roses~~by the armful they come.

Pale pleated heads; one word and they fall,

laid on pillows lithely blushed pink,

soft petals fragrant like freesia or lilies.

I am calling your name,

longing for your snowy lawn,

the crisp collar undone,

the cuff that holds your hand

gently grazes the luster of my brow.

Slipping silk down my cheek.

you breathe lotus and peony

with undertones of amber,

sweetmeats and halwa

from the street stalls of Constantinople.

But we are ghosts at sunset,

blue-veined gauze, fragile and easily torn;

floating fading promises tumbled to the ruins,

the old wood and boulders of Sope Creek,

crashing to the Chattahoochee

rimmed with hoarfrost,

but still flowing turbid & broad.

And there we loose our souls,

let go the bouquet of osmanthus

and spider mums that spin and splay

to ever darker gray eddies and disappear

in distant mists.