There isn’t a right answer. There just isn’t. The game show where the bells ring and the points go up and the confetti falls because you got the answer is a lie. The preacher who would assure you of how to attain salvation is making it all up. The doctor who knows just how to fix what ails you will be sure of something else tomorrow. Every choice will wound someone, heal someone, build a wall and open a conversation. Things will always happen that you can’t foresee. But you have to choose. It’s all we have—that little rudder that we employ in the midst of all the eddies and rapids, the current that pulls us inexorably toward the sea. The fact that you are swept along by the river is no excuse. Watch where you are going. Lean in toward what you love. When in doubt, tell the truth.
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
They are warming up the old horrors, and all that they
say is echoes of echoes. Beware of taking sides; only watch. These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little jour-
nalists, but the governments Of the great nations; men favorably Representative of massed humanity. Observe them. Wrath and laughter Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert And look for God—having seen man.
The cottonwoods are flinging themselves outward, filling the air with spiraling flurries, covering lawns in deepening drifts. You could not call this generosity. Like any being, they let loose what they have in order to survive, in order that their lives might continue in a new year's growth. The more seeds they send out on their lofted journeys the greater the chance for their kind to flourish. There is no hesitation. No one asks how much they will give. Without words they know so clearly that everything depends on what we call giving, that which the world knows only as creation.
Surely the earth
is heavy with this rhythm,
the stretch and pull of bread,
the folding in and folding in
across the palms, as if
the lines of my hands could chart
a map across the dough,
mold flour and water into
the crosshatchings of my life.
I do not believe in palmistry,
but I study my hands for promises
when on one is around.
I do not believe in magic.
But I probe the dough
for signs of life, williing
it to rise, to take shape,
to feed me. I do not believe
in palmistry, in magic, but
something happens in kneading
dough or massaging flesh;
an imprint of the hand remains
on the bodies we have touched.
This is the lifeline--
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
making the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.
The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?
You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless nor ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?
Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing as they dance?
The autumn feels slowed down, summer still holds on here, even the light seems to last longer than it should or maybe I'm using it to the thin edge. The moon rolls in the air. I didn't want this child. You're the only one I've told. I want a child maybe, someday, but not now. Otto has a calm, complacent way of following me with his eyes, as if to say Soon you'll have your hands full! And yes, I will; this child will be mine not his, the failures, if I fail will all be mine. We're not good, Clara, at learning to prevent these things, and once we have a child it is ours. But lately I feel beyond Otto or anyone. I know now the kind of work I have to do. It takes such energy! I have the feeling I'm moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently, in my loneliness. I'm looking everywhere in nature for new forms, old forms in new places, the planes of an antique mouth, let's say, among the leaves. I know and do not know what I am searching for. Remember those months in the studio together, you up to your strong forearms in wet clay, I trying to make something of the strange impressions assailing me--the Japanese flowers and birds on silk, the drunks sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light, those faces...Did we know exactly why we were there? Paris unnerved you, you found it too much, yet you went on with your work...and later we met there again, both married then, and I thought you and Rilke both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness between you. Of course he and I have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous of him, to begin with, taking you from me, maybe I married Otto to fill up my loneliness for you. Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows, he believes in women. But he feeds on us, like all of them. His whole life, his art is protected by women. Which of us could say that? Which of us, Clara, hasn't had to take that leap out beyond our being women to save our work? or is it to save ourselves? Marriage is lonelier than solitude. Do you know: I was dreaming I had died giving birth to the child. I couldn't paint or speak or even move. My child--I think--survived me. But what was funny in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem-- a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend. I was your friend but in the dream you didn't say a word. In the dream his poem was like a letter to someone who has no right to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don't I dream of you? That photo of the two of us--I have it still, you and I looking hard into each other and my painting behind us. How we used to work side by side! And how I've worked since then trying to create according to our plan that we'd bring, against all odds, our full power to every subject. Hold back nothing because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies in the things we used to talk about: how life and death take one another's hands, the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt. And now I feel dawn and the coming day. I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel it is myself that kicks inside me, myself I must give suck to, love... I wish we could have done this for each other all our lives, but we can't... They say a pregnant woman dreams her own death. But life and death take one another's hands. Clara, I feel so full of work, the life I see ahead, and love for you, who of all people however badly I say this will hear all I say and cannot say.
I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains' enormous spaces around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love your life has never allowed. I know you are reading this poem by the light of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide while you wait for the newscast from the intifada. I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers. I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious. I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand because life is short and you too are thirsty. I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
Before the days of self service, when you never had to pump your own gas, I was the one who did it for you, the girl who stepped out at the sound of a bell with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back in a straight, unlovely ponytail. This was before automatic shut-offs and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank, I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas backed up, came arcing out of the hole in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts,
belly and legs. And I had to hurry
back to the booth, the small employee bathroom
with the broken lock, to change my uniform,
peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin
and wash myself in the sink.
Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt
pure and amazed — the way the amber gas
glazed my flesh, the searing,
subterranean pain of it, how my skin
shimmered and ached, glowed
like rainbowed oil on the pavement.
I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,
for the first time, in love, that man waiting
patiently in my future like a red leaf
on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty
that asks to be noticed. How was I to know
it would begin this way: every cell of my body
burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me
Donald Trump was elected America's president. Donald the dumb, the racist, the sexist, the king bloviator, the tantrum totalitarian.
I knew America was racists and sexist and skeptical of education and nuance. I've seen it work against me as a professional in a profession that's all about nuance.
But I wasn't ready for this. I thought more of us stood on the side of acceptance and of striving to be better and know more and do more for each other and for ourselves.
I am sad and angry and confused. I think it was a Washington Post article by a University of Wisconsin professor that explained Trump's win as a lash-out from rural America that sees all the power and money and voice shifting to cities. As a planner, I should have thought about that. I didn't.
Because my education also makes me aware of a vast constellation of factors converging to make that the new reality, and none of them impacted in a positive way -- in fact only in the most undesirable ways -- by a Trump presidency. I only see his leadership working out well for other brainless billionaires and for white supremacists.
And my fear and anger at empowering Trump's hatred and ignorance has completely overshadowed my sorrow for Hillary. I wasn't her biggest fan. I, too, lost sight of her accomplishments and her incredible competence because of media reporting. I let her husband's slimy behavior overshadow my opinon of her as a woman in her own right because she seemed to have made a calculated political move to stand by him to consolidate their power and influence -- stronger together, as it were. I judged her as a wife and still wish she would have divorced him when the worst was known. But I recognize and admit that I know nothing about their relationship or their marriage or their partnership. And I recognize and dislike that my instinct to judge another woman for her behavior with her man led me to overlook the solidarity we have -- should always have -- as women.
I'm enormously sad for Hillary. And all the little girls who were ready to see in her presidency a symbol of their own worth and potential for leadership. I love hearing about how much Hillary was respected by her staffers and colleagues. I'm interested in what she will do now.
I wish I could write her a thank you note for standing up for us. For her years of leadership. For her strength and smarts and steel. She will forever remind me to be a better woman, a better person, and a better American. Stronger together. All the way.
Sunday, June 05, 2016
Within the past two weeks, I seem to have hit my limit as a professional and then today as a mother. Having taken on a task that posed so many challenges that I have grown into with power, if not always grace, running at full tilt for over a year has taken its toll, and this week, I fell down sick and stayed there for days. Got up very very very behind in the race to finish before the political landscape changes and the aligned stars are replaced with less supportive or more petty lights.
And today, I missed my girl's first time on a bike, off at work to try to catch up on filling the financial hole that we are digging ourselves out of, having bought a new house to give each kid a room. By the time I got home in the evening and went out for a family bike ride, it was her second time - old hat. She breezed onto the bike, and I felt the breath of mother-need knocked out of me. Only to feel the weight of it crash back onto my chest when she dissolved into somewhat hysterical tears almost immediately when she got too close to the middle of the street.
We rode three blocks to a park. She fell once. She must have cried 4 times. When we got to the park, there were more hysterical sobs, and I found myself watching her almost as though I was out-of-body, as though she were a stranger and no one who I had any idea how to help. There's the start of a new learning curve! Like the swirl of yellow bricks that start a nightmare journey in a world suddenly in vivi-color, if not rational on any level, there it is. Where she's not just my kid anymore but this bundle of self-referential anxieties that have very little to do with me. That I have very little power to dispel or untangle. And I only just barely rose to the occasion, making it about learning a new skill, being patient with herself, looking for the fun. And when she finally laughed, smiled, found a bit of fun, I kissed her cheek, told her I was proud of her. That I was the most proud that she had calmed herself down and relaxed into fun. I'm proud of both of us.
Sometimes I get so nervous when I speak
I can feel my heartbeat in my tongue.
And my heartbeat talks faster than an auctioneer,
but this is the last place
I would ever try to sell something from.
When I get really scared
I imagine my enormous grandmother
is standing behind me
with her pipe-organ arms
hugged tight around my chest.
She says, “Listen, I know you’re running your mouth
so your mind can rest.”
Now rest
is no broken levy staring up at the water.
It is the bite marks a mother left on the hurricane
while her daughter climbed to the 9th ward rooftop
to spray paint, “We are still here, y’all.”
Yes we are.
While some days we may barely get our feet wet
most of the time we’re gonna have to wake
and shake the tidal wave off our etch-a-sketch
to make space for the notes
of a brass-knuckled saxophone
carrying the tattered hope
of the ocean’s prayer.
All these words
are just paper boats praying they can get there.
Tell me we will get there
before we come up broke,
believing that people, like levies,
have to hold themselves together
when often it’s our falling apart
that gives us the grace,
that makes sure no one ever
builds a condo over our broken open hearts.
Two years after Katrina
I found a sea shell
beneath an oak tree in New Orleans City Park.
I can still hold it to my ear
and hear the song the folk singer sang
that night she left so much blood on her guitar strings
and I knew I have never been touched right,
knew we could be instruments
if we could just let our kite strings
get tuned to the lightning tonight.
Tuned to your thunder.
I am already shaking like a matador’s hands shook
in that 1906 California earthquake
when 28,000 buildings fell
and the people said, “When 28,000 buildings fall
do you know how many walls are no longer there?”
All they had left between them
was the gospel salt of their sweat,
as they carried each other from the rubble to the street
where each night they carried the piano
to be played by a new refugee.
Some wishes can only be made on the stars’ dust.
I know most of the time my shine
cannot hold a match to my rust.
So ask me about the rain.
I will tell you my mother says, “The thing
about wheelchairs is they keep you looking up.”
Says, “Forests may be gorgeous
but there’s nothing more alive than a tree
that learns how to grow in a cemetery.”
So when my grandmother died
I started wearing her thimbles on my fingers
when I’d type these poems,
hoping every key I’d type
would sound like a footstep of someone coming home,
the way my friend came home from Iraq
and named his baby daughter Viva.
We have all fought for our lives
more than we know,
survived our own questions.
How can you grieve a poisoned sea, a bleeding gulf?
Can even the moon handle that kind of gravity,
that pull to surrender?
I say science can split an atom.
But what if Eve could put Adam back together
by reminding him the garden is just a seed
sometimes so small it can fit on the tip of your tongue?
Say, “flint.”
Say, “spark.”
See, this is me hitchhiking with a green thumb,
hoping to grow something in the trust
of letting y’all pick me up
‘cause today, trust me, I was falling for the wreckage.
So remind me
the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.
Plant my feet in the one thing that flowered
when everything else erupted. Usman,
an immigrant from Pakistan,
could not stop saying, “Brother, Brother,”
to the Jewish man whose hand he held
down ninety-eight flights of stairs
to escape the fall of the Twin Towers.
Right now, that is the only hour I will set my heart to.
The moment we realize sometimes
it is the metal in the wind chimes that reminds us
how soft the breeze is.
And maybe my grandmother only believed in Jesus
‘cause she believed He came back
wearing that whip on his back like a halo.
Either way, this world
has picked me enough times for its madness vase
for me to know sanity is not
running from the window when the lightning comes.
It’s turning thunder into grace,
knowing sometimes the break in your heart
is like the hole in the flute.
Sometimes it’s the place
where the music comes through.
[Performance by Hakim Bellamy, Angela Herrera, and Mikaela Renz-Whitmore starts at minute 17:17]
V.B. Price: City at the End of the World on Colores
In an over-urbanized world, in which over half the population lives in cities, if a little town like Albuquerque is going to compete in the urban marketplace of the future, it must protect it's greatest asset, which is its rarity, it's individuality, its uniqueness.
In the future, choice will be key... There will be so many urban environments, there will be so many human beings, that the places that maintain their essential character and their respectful relationship to the land will have a tremendous advantage over all the other urban environments that don't.
Our challenge in the next 20 years is not to go for short-term, cheap-shot profits but to hang onto our essential character and beauty.
...
Even with all that's happened to Albuquerque since the war, we are a beautiful place.
We still have this landscape, we still have the river, we still have the volcanoes, we still have the mountains, we still have the bosque, we still have our people.
We are a unique environment, and we are an endangered environment.
Unique urban places are endangered places all over the world because of a globalizing commercial culture which want all of us to be the same kind of person so it can sell things to us.
Urban environments not only contain people, contain cultures, they shape them. When you have a place as unique as ours, with different kinds of populations and different kinds of cultures intermingling, this is not a place that's easy to sell to. What some people want to do to us is to flatten us out, make us like every place else. That's why we're in danger. Culturally, we are in danger because rapid growth is swamping us, not necessarily with careless or uncaring human beings, but with huge number of people who know nothing about this town, and who more importantly have been told nothing about it by our leadership.
The collective myth of Albuquerque which used to be so present every place we went... When I came here in 1958, I met person after person after person who was proud to be a New Mexican, proud to be an Albuquerquean, who would tell you at the drop of a hat why they loved to live here, who understood all kinds of things about this place. Now you hardly meet anybody who knows anything about it at all. Now's that's going to happen, obviously, if you have massive, rapid growth like we've had.
But there's only one way to counteract that, and that is to have large-scale, persistent educational efforts on the part of all of the schools and all of our elected leadership. And not just the kind of slogan-eering that goes into skiing and the Balloon Fiesta. You have to talk about real things, real human beings, real neighborhoods.
...
How carefully and respectfully we try to keep the connections to the past alive is the degree to which we flourish as a town that knows itself.
Its originality, its individuality, its personality as a distinctive, eccentric town in the southwest is very close to being lost, and once you lose it, you never get it back. Endangered cities that have worked to preserve their connectedness with the past have realized that their towns have grown geographically, and that the farther from the center that their towns have growth, the farther from the past they have also grown. Town that have maintained their identities have struggled to keep the historical connection with the past in their downtowns. We've struggled to do that, too, we've done a fairly good job of it.
Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.
The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change.
The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same.
All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.
The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.
My help is in the mountain Where I take myself to heal The earthly wounds That people give to me. I find a rock with sun on it And a stream where the water runs gentle And the trees which one by one give me company. So must I stay for a long time Until I have grown from the rock And the stream is running through me And I cannot tell myself from one tall tree. Then I know that nothing touches me Nor makes me run away. My help is in the mountain That I take away with me.
Earth cure me. Earth receive my woe. Rock strengthen me. Rock receive my weakness. Rain wash my sadness away. Rain receive my doubt. Sun make sweet my song. Sun receive the anger from my heart.
