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flame in the snow



Last Updated: 7/3/2009

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Sign: Scorpio

City: Our Fair City
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Sunday, June 28, 2009 

Category: Writing and Poetry

there were such a place
where I had gone to hide

on a patch of warm white sand
by a babbling stream
guarded by twin pines

a white crescent smudge
in a stainless blue sky

the fever of you in my blood
the fever of you in my hands

the moon tingling in my palms
snow-bent alders with newly-minted leaves
wild yellow snap-dragons
purple wolf-bane

the white-thorn blooming late there
by the mountain-lake

a pair of eider ducks
chattering in the rushes

if

you had been there
I would have asked you to tell me about them




8:07 AM 
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Sunday, June 28, 2009 

Current mood:calm
Category: Writing and Poetry

forgive this not poem

sometimes I can't re
member what my own name is

let alone the end of this
whatever

when those who have had
conscience bypass surgery
look at restraining orders
as if they were flaps of toilet paper

when hansel and gretel
visit the gulag
of the chocolate lolly pop monster

if you spit on your mommy
we'll buy you a toy
if you hit her
we'll buy you two
if you tell the nice lady your sister is poking you with a knife
in your you know what,
we'll buy you three

remember to put the baby oil bottle away, poppets
we'll be late for our walk with the monsignor

please excuse my attempts to escape
across country
or into a trance

even if I reach into my spleen pocket
there is nothing inside there that would help me

nothing to say except

Mater Bozhia!
Panaghia!
Mother of God!

Mater Bozhia!
Panaghia!
Mother of God!

Mater Bozhia!
Panaghia!
Mother of God!



pomiluyi menia greshnuyu
have mercy on my shortcomings







4:09 AM 
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Saturday, June 27, 2009 

Category: Writing and Poetry


The highway and the trickling runoff from snow-melt hurried down the mountain fastnesses, those that tower over the clusters of lupine and wild columbines on the way to the city of Valdez.

Arriving in the small and sleepy terminal town, the couple stretched their stiffened limbs and watched a pair of myrre-birds circle at the river's mouth. Around the dark waters of the bay, chiseled peaks loomed close the edge of the rocky straits, which can be a treacherous place for a ship if the pilot is drunk and falls asleep at the wheel.

The further the man traveled from his mother, the nearer he seemed to come to himself. He took the woman's hand and they walked to a small cafe, where they shared a fish sandwich.

During the return trip, he developed a spasmodic enthusiasm for stopping suddenly and assembling his tripod, so that he could capture what was visible of the Wrangell Mountains at the lip of the Copper River Valley, the emerald green of Tazlina Lake, the dazzling panoramic vistas that surround the Matanuska Glacier.

They ate in a subalpine meadow above a series of meandering lakes that might once have been an ancient river, where the huckleberries, blueberries, cranberries and crowberries were in bloom. Several blackcurrant bushes had sprung up on the edge of the meadow, where they luxuriated in the seeping mud of a spring.

One of the first things he did when they pulled into the driveway was to open the back of his camera to retrieve the film.

"Yebenno...!" he muttered a few choice syllables. He had forgotten to load the apparatus with a cartridge. "Let's go!" he exclaimed, and took her to the river near their house, where he had her pose for a photo in front of the North fork. For his efforts, he wanted to see immediate, concrete results.

At home his face began to change, the locks and the deadbolts sliding shut in tandem with the clicking of his jawbones. Over time, she would come to know this look, it appeared when he would creep up behind her while she washed the dishes and he would, seemingly as a joke, grab her wrists and bend them until she gasped, cackling while he intoned, "Just one false move and I will snap your bones."

She did not yet know that she would follow him further and further into the labyrinth that was his mind until they reached the place where he would threaten to kill her if she took the child that she bore to be seen by a physician, and that if there were any deviation in the development of his offspring, the fault was hers alone.

But it was a fact that she escaped that maze, that the boy was placed into the care of many doctors and therapists, and also that the only memento that remained from that journey was a single photograph of a woman advanced in pregnancy, hair a bit disheveled, standing as straight as she could in her condition, elbows akimbo, palms lifted to face a cloudless sky, with the hills of home solidly at her back.



9:58 AM 
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Friday, June 26, 2009 

Category: Writing and Poetry


while waiting in line at the food bank last month
I clung to my copy of, "The Hebrew Goddess"

and bushy-beard nearby
thumped his Bible-verse encrusted T-shirt,
laughing, "that MUST be a work of science fiction" ...

his wife, a woman whose skin was the warmth
that a toasted almond could only dream of,
admitted that she could barely read
and so we danced around the subject lightly
while I drank in the black butterflies on her manicured nails

the next lady in line spotted my amber beads
and I recognized her worn headscarf
and words whispered
in Ukrainian
and Russian
and even Chechen
to the elderly woman next in line

we all get hungry

the next month,
by some coincidence
the same head-scarves and I appeared
on the same day

still hungry (when will we ever learn?)

they nodded at me and weren't surprised
when I told them good morning

but Marfa was impatient
she got pushy and kept asking if her food was ready

they gave me mine first

I wouldn't leave until I had made sure that the Filipina
handing out the loot
hadn't forgotten Marfa

and then I cautioned her:

don't get upset
they're nervous

we're all a bundle of nerves
every one of us

and then I scrunched my bags together
and trundled them safely to the car





4:14 PM 
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Thursday, June 25, 2009 

Category: Writing and Poetry


Some unseen hand had kneaded these hills while they were still hot, allowing them to cool in sharp, spectacular disarray. Between the tufts of green that became ever brighter in shade as they descended, and clung precariously to canyon walls and cliffs, gray ribbons and slashes of rock layers peered through.

From a distance she could see the swath of melting snow that wrapped the mountain-side as inevitably as the strands of a shroud, and as they neared the place, again she was overwhelmed by an implacably ineffable wall of cascading sound. This place seemed to be at once the birthplace of voice and the silencing of all words. They parked almost directly under Bridal Veil Falls.

He twitched in a fitful dream: he was in Odessa again with Uncle Goga. He had made his way to the the street where he and his uncle had once removed a cobblestone together for a lark, and there it was, gaping, like Goga's missing front teeth. He grabbed his leg suddenly and she wondered if he were in pain, remembering what he had told her about shattering his ankle and walking on the broken bone for a year without having it set.

How could he sleep beneath this endless droning? The expanding size of the baby, and the accompanying strain on her body, had already begun to train her body for sleepless nights, but this aqueous pandemonium,  pleasant at first to her senses, began to verge on the unbearable. She thought she could feel the shape of the baby's haunches under her hand, and the pressure of his feet against her ribs.

Sleep was not an option for her, but she could always wrap herself in a cloak of thoughts and attempt to rest within their protection.

A woman's body, she mused, often colluded with her heart and acted against her mind. It saw a man with a vision that was not of the eyes but of more deeply woven strands, not like a man might stand, seeing himself reflected in a clear pool in a wood between worlds, perhaps enamored with what he saw, but as the imprint of the reflection beneath, at its nadir, and there the collusion might manifest itself as the desire, or even the compulsion, to reproduce.

She had thought there would be no more children in her life, until he had invaded it with his much-needed aid, his kaleidoscopic music and his marzipan visions of building a home together, of creating a tribe of musicians. She had, wisely or not, laid bare her former life to him, and described her circumscribed existence, so that he knew how terribly hungry she was for any hint of creativity.

And in the ice age of her mind she did not yet know how that might affect the dark and throbbing blood that coursed through her veins, how he, staring at her with eyes that transformed from hazel almost to blue, would begin to speak to her in language that wheedled at her crux and gist, and then there could be no turning back from that spiral. There was now no thing that was more immediately, intimately present to her than the undulations within her womb, so varied that, for all she knew, volcanoes, galaxies, sea-serpents might be dancing there--or merely the movements of something small, fragile and precious, that were causing the friable lower muscles of her abdomen to spasm from time to time.




11:20 PM 
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Thursday, June 25, 2009 


the sea is not always
blue

a pinch of glacial silt
obscures depth

an imprint
on a rippled curtain

the one with two faces
speaks from both sides
at once

when the heart of a child is
caught in a net

the skin of a silkie
stretched out on the rocks

the doors are left ajar

beneath the ocean floor
a molten metronome-pulse

Ursa Major
stands sentinel

O batter me up
unhinge me sing me
throngs of electric eels,
fire ants, yellow-jackets

O opaque malevolence,
forswear safety, slither
before
the fire-brand


10:17 AM 
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 

Category: Writing and Poetry

For a few minutes, the only sign of his presence was a wisp of white smoke curling out from behind the truck. He emerged and started up the path to the glacier. On the way he picked up a rock and put it in his pocket. Any rock had the potential to contain a fleck of gold, did it not? The lists in his head kept repeating themselves. She had signed the mortgage on the house. They had moved into it. Even though it was not much more than a converted garage, it was real estate, and property was the backbone of the Plan.

Mama had moved into the brand new three-bedroom home that he bought and used as bait. What a good actress his Mamanya was, this time she had created the illusion of being homeless and friendless, because her other son had moved into the condo that she purchased, and he had taken pity on her condition and given the house to her, instead of moving into it with his new family. That was two houses. Three, or four, counting the home his brother planned to buy. There would be more.

Something like pity stirred in him when he looked at his wife again. She was reaching to touch the edge of the melting mass, which drip, dripped into a chilly-clear stream that flowed inevitably from the foot of the glacier, like the drip-drop of pennies from his wallet. He was able to shake off any thought of compassion at that image. With long, slender fingers, he reached into the stream and brought a column of water into his palms, and splashed his face liberally. Hazel eyes gaped cavernous, ravenous between his fingers. He knew that she loved him by the way that she stared at his eyes, but he could not let that sway his resolve.

She was returning. He held his hand out as if to help her down the last step. He remembered, he was supposed to be playing the role of a gentleman. He was glad of the break from work, from staring so much at the computer screen that sometimes he lost his eyesight temporarily, and most of all, he was glad to have a break from Mama. Yes. That was very good. Mama could be a bit tiring at times.

The flow of the river near the road had abruptly switched its direction at the top of the pass. The color of the water changed, it was almost green in some of the more still pools that formed behind clumps of beaver dams.

She felt the ring on her finger. This was the first time she'd ever had a honeymoon, and that, she thought, was positive thing. Now that she was married, she would no longer have to endure the scorn of her boss, a pastor's wife, who reminded her almost daily that she had been living in sin.

The descent would be more abrupt than the ascent had been. He said they would reach the falls by evening. She made him a sausage sandwich.

He smiled, a ripple that lit his craggy features into something resembling charm. He reached for a CD and put it into the machine.

The interior of the vehicle began slowly to be permeated by the tinglingly surreal abstract sound-imagery of Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene. The muscles in his cheeks relaxed while he allowed himself to escape, momentarily, into the music. She liked the music, too, it made it easier to breathe somehow.

A sliver of gravel flew out from underneath the tires of the Suburban as it left the parking lot, arcing in its trajectory until it landed in a ditch with a soft plop, near the saffron-tinted faces of a sand-loving cinquefoil.



1:11 PM 
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 

Category: Writing and Poetry
This baby wanted to be carried high, higher than any of her other babies. When he jabbed at her ribs from inside his invisible universe, she made it into a game, to guess whether it was an arm, a leg, or an elbow pressing against her lungs. Breathing had become something that she had to concentrate on, to do properly. The pressure on her navel had transformed the normal indent into a series of whirled extrusions, a purplish-bruised flower. She could feel the ligaments shift and pull across her hips, and when she stepped a certain way, there was a slight twinge of the sciatic nerve in her right leg. That was one advantage of the baby riding so far up--less sciatica.

She glanced at the glittering steel pipe that threaded across the green landscape, punctuated by red supporting poles at regular intervals, and imagined how the hot, raw crude, life-blood of the entire state economy, churned in its center. In a place far, far away from the populated centers, from the McDonalds and the Starbucks, men sat in front of outdated computer equipment, no doubt, in those stacked double-wides, and were forced to tolerate this indescribable din, 24 hours a day. She was glad to return to the vehicle, and breathed admiration to anyone who could stand to work in such a place.

It was an enormous relief for her to be able to spend a few days when she was not working, not rushing from the office, to daycare, then back home, not worrying about bills or whether an accident would cause traffic delays. She sucked in the views through the cracked windshield with the hunger of a person famished for the sight of green valleys and braided rivers.

The road toward the mountain pass began to be surrounded by markers without any symbols on them. She knew that patches of unmelted snow would appear sporadically as they gained in elevation. The accumulation in winter was sometimes more than 20 feet; drivers felt as if they were maneuvering through a white tunnel. When the huge D-9 tractors plowed the roads, they used the markers as guides.

As they drove up to the mountains, the slate-tinted streams followed gravity and flowed as if meeting her gaze head-on. She drank in the shapes of the rocks, the changing trees: cotton-woods in the lowest places, then bottle-brush shaped swamp spruces, a few aspens, alders, and finally, no trees at all, just stretches of ever greener and greener bushes and shrubs, and sharp, blue-gray rock outcroppings.

They stopped near a huge, hanging glacier to rest, and she waddled up some steps and then up a path strewn with chunks of slate. Along with the other visitors from various countries, she felt a craving for the touch of ancient ice.


4:11 AM 
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009 

Category: Writing and Poetry

She was a train that he had diverted. He would be a real hero to the whole starving village, which had gathered, waiting, just behind him in the woods. He and Uncle Vova had pulled out their knives while the guards were sleeping and had taken care of them quickly. He patted the Bowie knife in the pocket of his green plaid shirt.

He and Vova were going to show those Moscali! They would snatch every last bit of food off the train, every bag of grain that had been stolen away from their native chernozem, and then they would remove the gag and blindfold from the only man they would leave alive, the engineer trembling on the floor of the cabin, and they would tell him to take the train to Moscow and not look back. He would probably jump off of some bridge along the way, but that wasn't their problem.

And then Babushka would bring out the apple wine, and they would have a real party!

He leaned over the viewing scope, erected in the center of the postcard-perfect scenery, pretending that it belonged to a rifle. He peered at the stacked modular units parked in the center of the almost tree-less tundra, and then focused on the twin jet turbine engines suspended high above the pump station, the source of a wall of noise that blasted through both his body and that of the woman, whose sigh was inaudible as she brought her right hand up to her taut abdomen, grimacing.

A half-circle of silvery pea-gravel surrounded the crescent-shaped enclosure of fragile, verdant mosses, dotted here and there by scrawny black-spruce spines. A handful of dehydrated wine-red lingon berries, left unpicked from the year before, clustered near a lichen-encrusted chunk of moraine. An orange boletus burgeoned between the toes of a slender green-gray aspen bole. A pungently sweet scent emanated from the almond-shaped leaves of a Labrador tea bush.

He blinked, and stared at the woman's rounded torso, which contained the prize that he had promised Mamanya.

to be continued

1:58 AM 
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Sunday, June 21, 2009 

Current mood:  blessed
Category: Writing and Poetry

When I read Ingrid's words,

I hear hymns of praise
to life and love,
to leaf and tree;

each word throbs, each phrase hums,
each page thrums

with the Song of her Heart--

I hear it
so clearly
sometimes there is the need to pause,
to catch my breath at the intensity,
the sense of her expressions...

So, when I step out-doors,
remembering this new Friend,
I wonder at the seeming ease
with which she spins her lively tales

and think: if she were here with me,
how we would nod and smile
at that jogger in his plodding paces,
and share a pleasant silence.

With half-closed eyelids, the path passes
beneath my bare-toed padding sandals,
I breathe in relief and exhale the bliss
only a harried parent could imagine--

no little hands, no shrill demands,
only this moment, now, the levee, my feet,
a glimpse of a neighbor's fountain,
of gardens half-hidden by rows of pines.

A kayak, slicing smoothly,
a sliver of red ocher, propelled
by the rise and fall by a flashing pair
of double-sided paddles.

Wild mustard, flowering for the second time,
a bit warily, more thirsty, delicately wiry,
an unfamiliar yellow aster pricks me painfully,
young hawks shriek on the opposite bank.

I strain to reconcile the names and faces
of a jumbling multitude:
wizened scrub-oaks, mulberries,
sheaves of trembling basswood leaves,

half-shells picked clean of their nut-meats
by twittering gray-brown squirrels,
a flash of red and green -- is that what I think it is?
and down the bank I clamber --

is that an ash-tree already berry laden?
no; it is a bush-sized beach pea,
scarlet blossoms dangling curiously,
nearby, a pungent eucalyptus.

I turn and shuffle back to "my" muddy beach,
and remembering Ingrid's images--
a woman's wisdom wisely shared--
RELEASE all of my treasures to the welcoming wavelets

and then,
my hands are empty
and open, but still curious.

I spy a radiant flash of cornflower blue
which wends its way along the bank,
a cerulean wheel with spiky spokes,
with a buzzing, striped visitor.


She inspires me to speak
of what is concrete and alive,
growing, expanding,
to be a voice for the yielding wild ...

and so, "heartssong" ...

today

this tune

is for YOU...




http://www.myspace.com/heartssong


love,

Flame









12:12 PM 
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