photo by Buzz




PULSE TO PULSE

For Linda
4/5/2009

1

Pulse to pulse
Poet to healer:

Page after page,
We turn.

Heal me, poet
For I have sinned

I’m a failed metaphor -
Mixed and confused,

Dangling with wronged participles
Unmodified in contraction.

Scribe me the ways of your
Commas and apostrophes

To pluck the thorn from my i ; wrench
The wretched semi-colon from my guts.

Not to misspell my hyperbole,
For willy-nilly we writ

The run-on sentence of children
While wee infinitives split.



photo by Buzz

2

You were the hottest
Haiku I can imagine
Drawn from pause in flame.


The pulse is our meter & our meter
Has been running a very long time.

Sly simile turned my phrase.
We scrambled up some um^lauts,

Sowed our Tao like synonyms
Tilde’d at windmills, too.

Backspacing speedbumps
Idylling through question marks.

Monkey business froze that rime,
Gibberish spoke no sense

Red ink, a sober wine,
Drunk a deadened tense.

3

My spine, your heart
Torn by paper.

Hollow bones hold heartbeat,
Knead dough for Lobo’s crust

His scratch bleeds your pockets,
Renders hole in trust

Two hobos pay their freight,
Tender gold from dust.

The quatrain’s left the station.
We’ll lay tracks again mañana

Tin spoons spin smooth in coffee,
Stir some mojo from that cup.

Coyotes cleared out henhouse:
Twenty years ain’t near enough.

Days stream the scroll,
By night we crease time

Verse etches water,
Wave into word into light

Pulse to pulse
You meet me.

Buzz


photo by Buzz

Blossoms on Bird Bath




plum blossoms ring the
shining rain mirror whose depths
reflect the whole tree

Lessons From Geese


Watching birds in the winter on the Rio Grande is one of my favorite pastimes.

We have sandhill cranes, mallards, blue heron and geese down there just hanging out.

Once a man asked me if it was legal to shoot a fat Canada goose for supper. I told him no, I didn't think so.

I am reminded of those " Lessons Learned from Geese": Community – Cooperation – Common direction – Uplift those who follow – Honk encouragement – Accept help, Give help to others -
-Get back in line
…Keep to the Left (…just kidding)



I am honored to be a Guest Writer on the collaborative blog, redRavine.com with a piece called "What's Happening to the Bosque?" -- my personal experience on encountering the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fuel load reduction project, which is cleaning out underbrush and inevitably destroying habitat in the Corrales Bosque Preserve. Check out the project scope here, if you are interested.

The post is on redRavine February 20 2009
redRavine.com

The article is also published without photographs in the Corrales Comment as part of an issue about this situation. Please comment here, if you like - that would be appreciated. Thanks.

Baby




On a bright golden afternoon in November, I was down by the rio, and met a man walking his bird.

I have seen some unusual things in the bosque before - a guy on a unicyle, tandem bicyclists in matching outfits, llamas on leashes, a triplet-stroller, a Great Dane as big as a horse, a draft horse as big as a house. But I had not met a man walking a bird before this.

The bird's name is Baby Girl - and she was excited by the sounds of geese and ducks and cranes at the river. Her owner, Tim, told me about her - I wish I could remember everything he said.

Baby can't fly. She is an African Grey Parrot, and like many of her kind, she was captured in the Congo, and her wings were broken. She was put in box, along with hundreds of other enslaved parrots, and shipped across the sea. This practice is of course illegal, since the African Grey is a threatened species, and importation of wild-caught parrots is prohibited for the pet trade.

Nonetheless at least 20% of the global population is taken from the wild annually.

When Tim adopted her, he says it was like taking on the care of a 3-yr old child. She understands many commands and phrases and is as intelligent as a 6-yr old. (See this clip of an African Grey Parrot talking - they are able to mimic human speech incredibly well: Einstein Baby lived in a cage for 19 years until Tim started caring for her, and taking her out for walks.

That same afternoon, I saw this freshly-dead animal on the path. It's a long-tailed or bridled weasel. I wonder if it had escaped from the north beach area that has been cleared out by the US Army Corps of Engineers in a fuel-reduction project. I was sad to see this little guy. I was inspired to write a photo essay about the bosque clearing, you can read it here.

That very day my sister-in-law fell and broke both ankles.

Ana on the Eighth Night

We had a wonderful mostly relaxing visit with Ariana, Jody, Noah and Toby, Sion Ben and Max, together, in Omaha this holiday season - it was a White Christmas and a bittersweet Chanukah. Aren't they all?

We are so grateful for everything, all is well. Many blessings this year.

See the photos here: Holidays 2008 Tonight is a huge full moon, stunning sight to the north of the Sandias.
Happy New Year 2009 - to all.

Spoiler Alert: Cute grandchildren Pics. No kidding they are really adorable! We had lots of fun with them, just playing, enjoying the gift of the moment.

P S Michele fell and broke both ankles November 18 - She is healing remarkably and doing very well! Send her an email miclupow@hotmail.com

LiL

I found this poem accidentally, and it calls to me to post it, which brought me back to updating this blog, which I was neglecting. I want to bring some of the beauty back from the workaday world. This poem reminds us of our options and asks us to be grateful for all of it.

It's called Waiting for Lumber

WAITING FOR LUMBER

Somehow none of us knew exactly
what time it was supposed to come.
So there we were, all of us, five men
at how much an hour given to picking
at blades of grass, tossing pebbles
at the curb, with nothing in the space
between the two red cones, and no distant
downshift of a roaring truck grinding
steadily towards us uphill. Someone thought
maybe one of us should go back to town
to call, but no one did, and no one gave
the order to. It was as if each to himself
had called a kind of strike, brought a halt,
locked out any impulse back to work.
What was work in our lives anyway?
No one recalled a moment of saying yes
to hammer and saw, or anything else.
Each looked to the others for some defining
move—the way at lunch without a word
all would start to rise when the foreman
closed the lid of his lunchbox—but
none came. The senior of us leaned
against a peach tree marked for demolition,
seemed almost careful not to give a sign.
And I, as I am likely to do—and who
knows, but maybe we all were—beginning
to notice the others there, and ourselves
among them, as if we could be strangers suddenly,
like those few evenings we had chosen to meet
at some bar and appeared to each other
in our street clothes—that was the sense—
of a glass over another creature's fate.
A hundred feet above our stillness
on the ground we could hear a breeze
that seemed to blow the moment past,
trifling with the leaves; we watched
a ranging hawk float past. It was the time
of morning when housewives return
alone from morning errands. Something
we had all witnessed a hundred times before,
but this time with new interest. And all of us
felt the slight loosening of the way things were,
as if working or not working were a matter
of choice, and who we were didn't
matter, if not always, at least for that hour.

Mark Turpin

Listen to Mark Turpin read "Waiting For Lumber"
Slate.com


Go NOW to Favorite Poem Project
Americans Saying Poems They Love

Also, please go to RedRavine Keeping the Faith - by ybonesy
Beautiful photos and thoughts on healing and collective consciousness

From Savannah - Tybee Island - Sept. 2008

From Savannah - Tybee Island - Sept. 2008

unreal children

Blinded, the soldier
did not bend to read
the braille, machine gunned
in soft bones.

Nor did he feel or hear
a blood wet wind
blow the jungle red
and curse his human soul.

In cold calm, he dreamt
of a white jeweled continent,
where real children
danced on blonde cement.

And did not fall,
and did not melt,
like little yellow pools
in dark rice beds.

Judith Soucek Ritter 1970
for veteran's day, from the works of Judith Ritter
A New Cold

Top Cat

This is so strange, I guess I had some weird code button turned on - but everything I have been typing has turned to symbols, I have NO idea what the bleep they are...
Anyway, it stopped, so...Here's the neighbor cat that perched on the old Honda motorcycle in front of Sion's apt. in Tucson...and here's some more photos from our brief visit to Tucson - Sion is doing great, we had a spectacular scenic drive and a good visit with him, us and Max-
-See photo album HERE - Summer 2008


PS the problem seems to be that my posting page has turned inexplicably to Arabic! I have no idea why or what to do about it!

Local Color - from the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

These beautiful images are among many posted by ybonesy at redRavine.com, chronicling her trip down the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, while traveling on business last month. Please, go look at the photos, there are too many to post here...Check it out here - redRavine - Local Color - images from the Mekong Delta. Very inspirational!

A Measuring Worm

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.


It's as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn't know it
He will soon have wings.

And I, too, don't know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.

Richard Wilbur
The New Yorker

This guy was eating my tomato plants. He's history.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Mark Strand

See the rest of the photos from
Indian Rocks Beach, July 2008
Click here for web album - Just
sampling of our days on the beach
this summer...

Noah and The Buddha


This photo of Noah and the Buddha was taken in 2003, in North Carolina.
It seems a fitting introduction to a post I contributed to redRavine.com -- I was invited to be a guest writer for June 2008.

The poem is called The Face You Wore Before You Were Born -

You can visit redRavine and read it here.

In the Summer of Moths

For Alice Woolf (June 18, 1916 - June 3, 1997)


Yours were the hands,
purple and knotted
striking the keys to
make music from memory.


Yours was the voice
weaving memory and myth,
croaking the stories we
craned our ears to
hear,

ready to laugh with
you, Alice.


Eighty years of life
you aimed to conquer--


Frontier girl,
long-jumper,
rule-breaker,
horse-breaker,
bone-breaker --


Fast as a hummingbird,
silvery as your weight of
turquoise jewelry

until the weight of
pain would slow you down,
you never missed a trick, Alice.



Nearly Christmas eve
you missed a step,
body and soul plunged
down the dark stairwell,

breaking almost every
bone but not your spirit, Alice.


Through the narrow
rabbithole emerging,
pinned like an insect
to the hospital bed

Stubborn butterfly, you
willed your promised freedom
from the white cocoon.



Crucified woman, cast
in a halo crown of thorns
who freed a hand to tear the tubes
from your own throat
while your guardians slept?



You would breathe, and
you would arise.



Trusted healing hands
would hold back death
till it be merciful,
and swift.


No thunderclaps or
lightning, on an
ordinary day

you stopped the world.



Did you dream of riding
bareback through the
aspen,
racing to the ridgetop
of the ranch,
ageless matriarch of
wonderland?


Sky-wide your heart,
yet could not hold you
longer,

June-Bug Alice, this
summer of moths,

You were drawn to the
light.

Linda Weissinger Lupowitz


(Alice B. Woolf, 80, passed away on June 3, 1997.

She was a teacher, artist, musician and rancher who lived at Circle A Ranch in the Cuba, New Mexico area for 45 years.)

Here's a new rose in the courtyard, only hours in the full afternoon sun...

This is Apache Plume, it came up from a seed on the side of the driveway...now it is huge!
The yellowflowering shrub at the end is Spanish Broom, blooming madly this year giving us fragrant swoons. Russian Olive smells like orange-blossom, and the roses are very late, but the cotton is flying and god knows what is burning our eyes.

The rest of the photographs were taken at the same time here looking east at the Sandia sunset, though the clouds have been "feeling lucky" and are a bit brighter than natural, but still it comes close to the imminent sense of them - flaming ...awesome.

 

 

 

 

 

Windy Point - Mount Lemmon above Tucson, Arizona

Kicking Out My Son

1

Having kids is so much fun
Today I’m kicking out my son.

2

Oxen-ringed, spiked canary-
golden, pierced with pins
and banded like a bird:

Wounded, who knows
how, by whom?
Spoiled, they say by me—

Now his handsome face
is sorrowful— red-brown
break-dance rug-burned
brow—red-brown eyes
bruised by sudden weariness:

He knows we’re serious.

*

Nights half-listening,
half in lucid dream for heavy shoes
to scuff the creaking stairs at dawn,
then down the hall to piss:

I sleep if I know this.


*

Nights no tires crunch the stones,
rousing dogs to bark, back-door
banging in the frame—

Ears ringing false alarm, I call his name
in morning’s glare, and there—
No body in the bed, no blinking on the phone:

His fate unknown!


3

Past shame, past struggle of my own
somehow I’ve grown, somehow
I’ve brought forth progeny, and now

I doubt my purpose in it.

4

Knocking in the chest, a mother’s heart
beats to spinning nights her children roam,
under raving stars, up way too late

Trance-dancing neon mine-fields,
testing the waters and the fire-waters
uninitiated, thirsting flight or fate—

*

I cannot tolerate

breaking into sweat while
safely shrouded in my downy nest.

I need my rest.
*

The sleepers snore who share these walls,
their breaths meshing in the halls, the dogs snore
and all ignore my useless fear, as bitter as beer.
At every step,

Every step in this house squeaks.


5

You underestimate your own
colossal vulnerability:
My fear that if you leave this nest,
you’ll die.

We cry and cry.

*

Fledgling bird, new wings
still wet with dew—

And yet you flew!



Linda Weissinger Lupowitz 2002

This poem is posted to mark the end of this period of time in my life, and to wish my son the very best in his journey to healing. He has been gone out of town since October, living in a "foreign country" - Tucson - and our recent visit was a wonderful reunion. So far, it's all a blessing. One day at a time.

(See also Bill Urell's Addiction and Recovery resource - a very funny and honest video here and check out Spiritual River as well, here.