Blue bird

...
This morning a blue bird with tangerine belly splashed in our terracotta bird bath. Our summer sneaks closer with this first visit in how many years? Too quick for a photograph, but here nonetheless, providing hope for longer days. Summer teases with a bird this morning then with a black car crash on our road this afternoon.

They say he was teasing. He teased and she swatted his arm and drove off the road, skipping like a stone over the ditch in a dust cloud. She drove between the neighbor's fence and mail box, a mere 6 ' wide, over the neighbor's driveway, and even past the 3' diameter redwood; next flying over our driveway, through the corner fence into the maple tree. Somewhere in that flight the airbags go off and then they climb out.
...
The horn honks insistently.
"What is that sound?" I ask.
"A stuck car horn." he answers.
...
Not until a phone call 10 minutes later did we wonder why and realized a car was in our tree.
"Maybe you should go see." I say.
"Why?"
"Because maybe it's something we should know. Do you want me to go with you?"

"Whatever you want."

"That's not an answer to my question.", I insist, "If you want me to go with, you could say, 'Yes, I want you to go with me.' "

"Ok, fine."

...

I stop mid next sentence, having found this an abrupt solution to my shame at talking; talking past anyone's comfort, anyone's interest. I hear myself and feel a fool. I want go back a few seconds to find a fine place to stop, but I continue on, hearing myself again and then again, finally I just shut up in an uncoordinated way. ASAP.

...
Crashes on Bodega Avenue are endless. Hard to believe no one realizes it's dangerous driving home from the beach. Hard to believe they are driving home near our home, but not near enough their destination to have energy leftover from the thrill of a romantic sandy walk. Not exhilarated enough to keep the sunny, afternoon drowse at bay. No, just far enough away for beer to really soak the veins, slowing reflexes just as age will do later on. Young doesn't know what slowing is.
...
I misread the bumper sticker and offer a prayer, fool that I am. Who am I besides a fool? A naive optimist, a lover of people, seeing the accident in a heartfelt rosy light. Dramatic concern expands my pink heart, my wide open caring heart, beating fast. Children, young adults, fair and fresh, sat on the up-heaved redwood trunk, shivering in it's shade. One van had stopped at the dust flying, and left. Minutes later a sailor parked across the road, "I'm trained, in the military." He notices and records, this you can see in his tanned blond crewcut. Then the cross the road neighbor who is as polite as the others at her house are not, even 25 years later. I read a ribald bumper sticker and misunderstand.
...
Huge, looming red chrome trauma trucks from the station down the street power to the scene five minutes after everyone left for the next shift; now called back, never having understood the honking horn. Walkie talkies communicate something. I talk too much to too many to communicate also, fool that I am, most foolish of all about the prayer, but plenty foolish about the need to know and tell while medics brace necks. Foolish enough for my own pink face to walk away, fast, into the house. The horn stops honking.
...
Today's paper tells of a Brown University student who took a semester at Jerry Falwell's college, politely, carefully documenting in a notebook in the bathroom stall. He is forgiven by understanding and patient, likable students when he returns, though not by those that be. He writes an honest book, telling all in a fair way. He thinks he may become a church goer. He knows not to offer to pray for drunk drivers who eat so much salt water taffy that it falls, pink and white out the passenger door onto the oily dirt near our maple. Myself foolish enough all these years later, still seeing in my mind salty Pacific water filling a candy cooker at the beach.
...
At our house, CHP talks while writing up, while we clean up.
...
"Suspended license."
...
Implying no insurance for our roadside fence destroyed in sharp redwood pieces in the dumpster. Red at the breaks and grey outside as aged redwood boards are wont to do. Red wood so old, we don't even know.

...

Heat and Horses

...

Two days too hot for two-bits riding even though the body craves the burn.

It seems weak to skip what you crave, but to pay with dizzy, panting illness places doubt on the thing. Shivering shakiness doesn't even out the playing ground, doesn't pay the price of loving to work that horse and self.

Even wet hair, neck, armpits, even reflecting helmet, sunscreen, shortest sleeves, even wishing doesn't keep wet skin to an even 98.6, not even bits of shade to share in bits. Not even tacking up in the cooler barn.

If wishes were horses, they say; if wishes were horses what a wide open plain there would be; full with horses running past, for I wish to be running with them, racing while sun and muscle and brain burn in health.

These degrees:
95,
100,
101,
pull reins, pull them to a stop; stop craving.
Flimsy thermostat breaks down til the day that weathermen say,
"Today,
go ride for today!"

...

Cold, Empty College

...
I remember a poet wrote, 'I put my love on like a shirt, my arms pushing through sleeves, hands slipping out cuffs. I put my love on like a shirt.'

I read this in college, a book of poems for an English assignment, presented artistically in Art College. We were free to choose a final paper subject for which I chose ravens. I read and wrote, fascinated and surprised, bird secrets unraveled, brand new information linking to my rich understanding of natural history. From a childhood at the beach, I knew where Kingfishers sat on wires by Highway One, scanning the lagoon shallows, grey blue. Small with strong, pointed beak, prepared to spear an evening meal.

Later, an adult, I tossed that raven paper along with all creative endeavors of the time. First I sliced and burned college canvases of ironic wide-eyed empty faces and romantic spirits living in acrylic bubbles. Canvases transformed from young pride to poison by an admiring artist bastard father. I cleaned that era to sparkling emptiness as if the darkness could be neatened.

Father and Mother delivered my student self to college. Leaving me to fearful newness. I craved freedom, I saw art becoming mine, not just his, not just the family’s. Now my perceived future included me.

The expected excitement turned suddenly. That one year of Art College (now called University, I wonder why) was all I could do. Scared to death by each purchase of brush, pencil, jar of oil, I flopped like a caught fish on cement steps trod by art students from important generations. What daring to think I belonged. By way of the dorm room door I entered into dark pain, hollow, floating, brittle. My roommate left with her older lover, leaving her empty bed for curious parents. Loneliness and an aching heart tore me out of my shivering self.

My own childish love was gone to sea by way of the Navy, by way of opiates. How stupidly I waited loyally. Suffering love was the only sort familiar to me; loving that hurt. I felt sudden death of young passion that had wrapped so closely I imagined I could button him up around me like skin. But what kind of love is a shirt, dead beaten linen, a plant that no longer draws moisture or minerals from field nor energy from the sun?

That deep night of college tipped me onto a black rock, like a maiden in myth, left with sea pounding around, long sleeved skin wrapped tightly against the bone. I kept myself in the wet cold, with only that skin-tight linen shirt, denial roughly clinging. A cold college coed died on her dorm room rock from silence and aloneness, a living hell now understood as chemical imbalance. Imbalance from DNA or soul I don't know. I just knew I couldn't pull enough oxygen from thin sea air. Oxygen, from roiling sea, was useful to gills only, a flooded cold breath. That first semester, a freezing storm blew long, with tide pulling life far away, good for oceanic fish but not far away enough for my release.
...

Now My Hands are Ugly

My hands are old.

I saw the future when I was younger.
When I was very young, I saw the hands of my mother and grandmother.
Big hands, but not so big, just big with apparent bones. Mostly big knuckles, ropey veins that bulged like veins pushed away from muscle of a thick body builder. Bulging like there is no room for veins between hard muscle and skin, so as the skin must give way, veins, strong with life, pump anyway.

My hands were always odd. I hid them in long sleeves. Sweaters, button down oxford cloth girls' white blouses. Constantly pulling at sleeves, hiding hands, I hoped, "Don't look, don't look, don't look please, people, don't look." Pulling long sleeves longer. From grade school to college, to married, to now; old. Boney. I was boney, skinny, knuckley. Then, before now, those hands were not too big. They were small as I was small and petite. A child not yet gaining height or length, or leastwise not until after youth; then arms and legs dangled past hems.

My mother's knuckles grew large, the bones of her fingers still narrow. My mother turned her rings, twisting them back from their slippery upside down place. Diamonds in spidery, silver-gold, a heavy domed setting like a muffin top, they turned around again, and she was forever twisting rings back. Many times her first pointer finger scrubbed the thumb's webbing, at the knuckle at the base of her thumb and now I do the same. Now I think of her when my hand curls to a soft fist.

My hands reach towards lost mother and grandmother. I watched them age, always youngish, beautiful, but hands accelerating into swollen old hands before they were old. My hand veins bulge, my knuckles grow, my ring no longer comes off without sudsy warm soap to assist.

"You look so young, too young to be your age.", I'm told. At 12 I looked 6, skinny, awkward, with boney hands. At 59, I look young with hands of an old man. My mother's hands, and her mother's. But my father's mother had lovely old hands, pearl smooth, holding violin while singing a ringing high soprano; who loved her namesake granddaughter, fussy and delicate as she was. Delicate as I am inside, rough hands or not.

...

Don't Throw Me in an Arc

...
Don't throw me in an arc, like a sea anemone stretching out its arm, its tentacle, to reach a bit of flotsam or jetsam in the rocking, glassy green tidal water, on its slate rock, gripping. Don't throw me up and out over the sea water, big sea waves reaching even above your own waist, threatening my little girl self's feet grabbing for purchase, unwanted screams leaving my throat. Don't take me out past the waves even though you saved kids from drowning and were declared a hero and here your feet stand firmly on the underwater sand.

Don't throw me up, up from the lawn, solid and kelly green. Don't throw me up with your strong arms, strong enough to throw, but possibly not to catch. Up, too high above the manicured lawn ringed by roses and dark clean earth, no grassy weeds hiding the smooth clay. Up, too near the sun.

And please don't throw me up from your shoulders, your strong, warm, hands reaching fingers around my middle, grabbing my waist over my little girls' one piece suit. Lifting me into the clear reflecting aquamarine air while pool waves lap, me dripping with sparkly tears slurping down my sides. No, not up above the tiled hillside pool, high enough to know distant neighbors are doing only God knows in their yards. Don't throw me up above our pool. I'll scratch out my thin arms. Don't toss me up where my tummy tightens, my back goes rigid and my legs churn like sticks..

Do not grab me and throw me onto the mattress. That soft mattress on springy springs, soft enough to catch me with little bounces. The bed where I sleep worried, waking so often I don't know I'm not sleeping. Waking in such velvet dark it could be back stage behind a heavy curtain waiting for the play to start. Don't toss me, my stomach acid with terror, fear for the fall.

The child me often wakes to find myself lost on that bed. The headboad, in the pitch dark, lies away where my hands can't reach. I flail like the girl Patty Duke as the girl Helen Keller for the headboard now seemingly gone. I turn to the footboard, low, patting hands on the bedspread reaching for direction, now truly lost and fearful of a thump onto the cold floor, I sit frozen calling for my mom.

I'm unseeing, but creeping down the hall, not knowing I had slept. I call, "Mom." and open the ajar door, eyes focusing on the mother pushing back the covers. My mother lifts up her wolf face, a monster face that did not relate to the family canid I later grew to know. A face that stays glimmering in the night, fading as I wake, sitting, again on my bed in the dark, lost on my own bed, reaching for the edge, shaking, fearful of falling off into what?

Please, don't ever throw me onto the bed.
...
....

Blowing

......
Up to 50 knots, I'm told.
Wind advisories. Radio stations making sure I worry.
My mind sees whitecaps roaring over black bay waters.
Hoping seafarers are safely tucked away in home harbors.

The maps of wind and clouds swirl over our planet appearing as geometric cloud cover, turning this way and that, hurricane twirls stamped steadily on blue, evenly displaying wind when wind is invisible.

This one strip goes westward, the next row east.
Like currents in the ocean, a misty pattern appears as if fog of our valley was drifting in from the shore nearby, drifting always east, rarely off shore. Links of white chain twists cover our blue ball.

The off shore winds, the Santa Ana, hot from the south, come with destruction occasionally, the wrong way blowing, confusing our temperate zone. Do birds work new muscles? Fighting to their roosts? This house stands in the way, taking a beating from a new direction. The ravaged walls, losing paint, facing west take a break, while the eastern brace bravely.

See the patterned windy belts lying neatly on this latitude following this direction then that on Hubble's camera viewfinder? Geometrically, even and steady?

Back and forth like currents of sea water taking sealife to krill and floating islands of weed and schools of tiny fish.

The sameness carries on as the atomic clock ticking will do; squeaking, emerging from old speakers of decade-aged ham radios. Called boat anchors, because they are so heavy with their tubes and capacitors and steel covers. Their radio waves reaching out, searching for magnetic paths in the air. Are they even like currents or crazy like sunspots? Like x-rays shooting from our star, through the sky and out through our very bones?

Signals blow above hearing or below. Hearers ears turned towards sound unseen. Will antennas help steer the screeching universal time signal, blunt beeping; tuning the boat anchor? How is tuning even possible. Radio men with the patience of a strong Santa Ana wind. Blowing steady for a time.

...
......

If Love was a Melon

~~~~~~~~~~
If love was whole it would be round and firm like a melon.~~~~~~
Cool and strong, it would be sweet as syrup but only if truly ripe: and it would sparkle 

in its juiciness. Ripe as a melon is passionate fruit. It gives to a touch, but not too 

much, and warm as well, sky green on its withering vine softly laid on powdery dirt. 

Damp, dark chocolate soil, 60% cocoa, first breeds life into the seed. Softening the dry 

teardrop. Following come pushing roots like fingers and next leaves reaching up, deep 

green with lightly hairy stems unfolding. They grow, now revealing soft pollen-yellow 

blossoms. Afterwards leaves enlarge. Together they produce, and then they wither, 

losing their deep hues to let the melon come to be in a hoed row under the Sonoma 

sun.
~~~~~~~~~