Trying to figure things out...

...is not one of our slogans, I was told.

Why do I ride?
It's lonely without good curious rider friends,
curious about every part of riding. 

Why do I read about architecture?
And the British Monarchy.

Why do I wonder and puzzle over relationships?

Who will call?
Tell me lots of fascinating stories about horses 
and do I want to go riding with them.

Is the purpose to work towards
anything besides improving my skills?
There is only so much intimacy with horse and trainer. 
So solitary, though intimacy is what I crave.

Round and round the arena.
Getting a bit better at balance and posture.
But is there more? A point?

I think this has something do with this year's many endings.
Dogs, trees, hair color.
White hair has me trying to recognize that woman.

And figuring things out leads me astray;
weak with obsession, it pulls me in again.
Shaky hands are proof of failure to comfort.

Baby holds my heart, but she cannot be my all.


I thought I heard a dog sigh tonight.
There was no dog.
There were no children to help with the Christmas tree.


...

Hoarding wonderful things.

Too much things fill my house 
just like my House Dreams, 
just like old memories
filled with people, 
antique toys
and dusty 
furniture. 

Still, there is something 
about each thing 
in my house 
I love. 

Whimsy
Color
Aesthetics
Nature
Odd uses
Childlike
Memories
Beauty
Education

Too many things to contemplate as much as I'd like. In an ancient apple orchard estate lies a fallen gray branchlet on new sandy white dirt just uncovered by a clearing machine, wrapped with attached lichen: two kinds, near dry crinkly rattlesnake rattling-grass.


A handed down whale tooth sketched with marine scrimshaw, an enormous tooth from a mouth so big as to be unimaginable; whether old or new, I don't know; keeping me wondering in who it had resided.


Old lady relations' laced and tatted bed spreads, perhaps homemade, and huge starched linen sheets, whiter than the full moon, made when mattresses were wrapped with only flat sheets, lie folded in the closet for 30 years.


Chopped off whiffs of white, red and blond tresses, dear to me as those upon who's heads they grew, a each wave of hair tied with a ribbon, in a small monogrammed, glass box. these stay.


How can a person yearn for minimalism with these treasures, piled and packed away, saved for best but never be used or touched, or even found? 


And today I brought home a thin, slightly warped, faded old biography of Stradivarius with a cover of now-gold-red; fifty cents of clutter. Fifty cents bringing times of contemplation and information. A treasured heirloom it becomes, call it disorder or not, how do I let it all go?

Crashing the Party without Me

I remember you crashing the party without me.

How absurd to have a party for only the adults, the children are not invited, when the children are twenty to thirty. It's for their father. This prejudice is locked away in brains raised that way. Careful seating to keep Society balanced. No intellectual curiosity, no leaving the generational presence. I thought we had rebelled, sick of the veneer.

Irritated, drunken welcomes for the interlopers, slurring words, wobbling hugs, breath in their face. Would they remember, "I just love you!" because they would mainly love in stupor?

Then I felt left out with doubt and anguish of do they love me. Now I would stride home and close the front door and head out the back to garden in the cold rain, my fresh breath in puffs.

Off Balance

Yes, I leap because I cannot walk.
I smile because that face of mine cannot.

I quickly sit at the empty table with expectation.
I know who will come!

My beloveds.

They'll order something egg-ie they tell me,
if that's what I'd like. With coffee. I wait.

Youth sees me. And Youth is impulsive.
And youth struggles mightily with the way it is, mightily!
Youth fights for rights, thank goodness, 
because I think youth must find solutions to wrongs.


Someone old said I am a youthful elder.
Old age defined so tactfully.

So move, I'm told, there are 5 before me needing that table.
It is their right because they are first, he says.
Youth scouts the room and scolds, fights for rights.
Shames me.

My pleased self stutters to a stop. Confusion is the new friend of my youthful-elder mind I now can see. Deafness prevents me from hearing his reality, his vision, and because I'm old I sit in that confusion, alone, un-hearing. And I see the room blur.


Reality and understanding has always been my false god. But it leaves me now. Can the real God let me lie here alone in the blurry confusion? Defending girl. I thank that very God that you are here; you step beside me. The world doesn't spin as much for you and now me with your presence. You are solidly on the oak floorboards, assessing the situation. 

I am not part of that party, you say, there are not 5 in that party.

Because I am Asian, you think I am with that party, you make it a party of 5 Asian faces with me in it because you are seeing only what you see, not reality. You see only my FACE and put me in that party; not with my husband, mother and father. Step back. 

With a beautiful look, she communicates. 
Step back, she says.

here it is

...
the little stumbles, nothing much,
just a softshoe shuffle to the side.

except if the shoe is heavy,
then you'd hear a quick step
though no step was planned.

first it was an accident, two really,
a little bit of trouble seeing the sudden stop ahead.
then a bump into a door frame, a wobble.

hanging onto a horse makes my legs strong.
I walk faster and yet not surer,
no way to predict the gentle sway that's coming.


~

you leave

...
you leave me.

I'm here you're there, too far to hear,
to hear your curls.
Nor your shoulder with freckles.

I suppose it's time. I never left.

Transparency was clouded.

Now such clutter surrounds what I think is empty
like seeing though ice,
light and darks
but no composition enough to recognize
when you left.
...


..

early

...

that dark damp

presents with a low, water-dense fog

which will, lifeless, hang limp later,

things are damp; waterlogged in high pressure, even in low precipitation.

a back field, concrete hard, inhales as the damp seeps lower, topsoil deep.

short, stiff, mowed grass blades, platinum wet, wake their chlorophyll for day, dark though it is.

that's when soaked songbirds think about seed left behind,

early day grogginess notwithstanding.
...

You really think you are alone, but you're not.

...
You know the words even if your argument condradicts:

"...there is nothing new under the sun."

 Ecclesiastes 1:9-14.

How isolated we are sitting cross-legged under the hot Spring sun while birds dart by, suspicious of us, of an unknown thing on the ground, suspect, with flapping bright pages open in our lap.

Too bright to read, too dense to break through the next door wall.
Silent soundproofing fills the air.
Don't say it.


No one else says it, so don't you say it. 
No one sits despairing but talking.
Because they would have told me...
...I despair like you do.


Angels answer my cell phone.
We despair, too.
We have.
We will.
With you.

We are despairing in groups together, holding hands while birds battle their foes, yet build nests with long strings of horse hair from a tail beaten and twisted in a windy pasture until it flew to my hand and I to the yard and then to the bird.

...

do you wonder,

...like I wonder?

Wonderings burrow in like hibernating chipmunks. 

They'd zipped here and there in the meadow, entertaining watchers. 

Perked up to listen, then laid low to hide. 

Prey searching for seeds while predators watch for their little meaty selves.

Cold's demands push prey to bury; bury themselves down deep in the dark white ground.

Like this, wonder sets in to infection.

Beginning as quick looks,

ending burrowed in 

as a deep redwood splinter stuck half way under a fingernail.

Obsess if you'd like.

When the splinter emerges;

Because it will.

it leaves its red wounded mark from entrance to exit with no timetable for man or woman.

Not personal, just microbiology.

White blood cells work endlessly to pull away dead, dying cells.

...

waiting and forgetting

that's what I'm doing.

...
wait for the end of the week...yay, it's Friday!

wait for payday (and forget to p/u the receipt)

forget people on my list.

forget which of the offspring do not like coconut, do not like crab.

forget my favorite song before the Beatles, although it may have been Rawhide.

wait for love, wait for peace.

I'm waiting and I hope I never forget how

...

oh, the blunders

...
While sitting, caring and smiling, 
my thinking drifts away; 

snapping back with a shattering blurt. 
...
The mouth is as clean as what comes out, not what goes in. 

This explained why outward laws were no longer necessary. Jesus knew what is in our hearts is what God seeks.

Laws were first, 
but then thinking became more important: 
loving, believing in, caring for
and hoping; 
all of utmost importance though essentially invisible.

No stone messages to remind. 

Who can be perfect?
God.

Who can try?
Me.

Who can try and fail, 
stumbling on the rocky steps
skin tearing from my shin?

Me, wiping away the blood.


I do love fiercely.

But what comes out of my mouth 
sometimes trips and stutters. 
Why can't the mind stick to hope 
and care and sweet love?


I don't know who knows, 
but I will continue to follow 
along the fragile, skinny, snaking path; 

with wind blown behind me 
disintegrating where I was. 

I drag my body along,
like a camel following something, 
anything, in the Sahara. 
...