Already the Heart


The spinal cord blossoms
like bright, bruised magnolia
into the brainstem.
And already the heart
in its depth — who could assail it?
Bathed in my voice, all branching
and dreaming. The flowering
and fading — said the poet —
come to us both at once.
Here is your best self,
and the least, two sparrows
alight in the one tree
of your body.


A. V. Christie
The Housing

This photo is of Sheldon's Point, Gallina NM

Florida Visit




Here's a few snapshots of the family from our Florida visit for M.'s birthday -

Click on the slideshow to start - or double-click to go to the web album for full screen images or to see other web albums.

For The Time Being

My father, my son—
institutionalized, both—
for the time being—

The lad is in rehab,
he’s checked himself in,
brought to a halt on a broken leg,
run out of road and out of time.

He thumps on his crutches
through Turquoise Lodge
and coerces nurses
to carry his coffee.

Leaving childhood at the door
to learn the language of recovery,
he strives to come out clean—a man—
in forty days.

The haze slowly clearing—
for the time being—free of demands
beyond his own healing,
he sleeps like a baby.

A new life awaits, outside the gates
as he works the steps. Lifting sober eyes
to gaze at Canada geese, honking
south down the Rio Grande
almost too high to see but only just imagine—


The shining days ahead, stepping out
into towering shadows in November’s
sudden brightness—yellow leaves
dancing in the wind—he says—

“I’m fine. Can I go home now?”

But he isn’t going back yet—
not for the time being—
to the home of lost childhood,
where the family lab is laid to rest
on the last golden noon
of Indian Summer.

For the time being, my dad’s
in a home—not his own—
at the end of the road, at the end
of Maine where nurses speak French,
a language which he does not
understand.

He roams the halls of Borderview
on swollen feet, cranky and demanding,
pushing his merry-walker, getting
his days and nights mixed up.

He eats his pudding, takes his pills.
The days, the years, the decades blend.
My sisters and I are interchangeable.


He waits for something to happen,
wonders if it’s time: for the time being.
Nurses feed and change him, keep him warm
dressed and dry, and so he asks—

“I’m fine. Can I go home now?”

But he isn’t going home—alone
two years now mom is gone—
the little house in Caribou was
sold to pay the freight for this,
his last resort. His term
is terminal at Borderview.

My father’s lost his glasses, but he
hears the geese fly in from Canada—
turns his white head eastward, peers
down the frozen St. John River—

from the edge of one life to another—
across the fog-veiled border
where winds cut to the bone.


Linda Weissinger Lupowitz

For those who care to know, this is now an "old story" and we are happy to note that time goes by and things do change. Childrens do learn.
L.

Corrales Bosque Rope Swing: Finis

 

Corrales Bosque Rope Swing: Finis

Yes, it's true. The old rope swing is gone. The cottonwood that held a thousand summer swingers is down and out. But...I see someone has strung up another rope swing, a little ways north.

Swing low, sweet chariot!

Corrales Sweethearts


These are my favorite scarecrows, of the many strewn of straw along Corrales Road, they are in front of Victoria's Harvest.

I also like this pair of scraggly lovers, though their day is long past.

K-Mart Beauty Potions

BACK INTO HERSELF

A billion times God has turned man
Into Himself.

You stand in line for the
Highest gift
For His generosity cannot end.

But best to bring an instrument along
While waiting in the cold desert

And make some dulcet sounds
To accompany the palms’ swaying arms
That are casting silhouettes
Against the sky’s curtain
From our fire.

Remind the Friend of your desire
And great patience.

A billion times God has turned man
Back into Herself.

We all stand in line
For the highest
Gift.



Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master,
translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Amazing Grace

(for Liam Knight - August 28, 1992-January 6, 1999)

When we've been there ten thousand years
bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise
than when we first begun.

You all know the words to this song,
said Evelyn, coming forth from the piano
in San Ysidro church, filling now
with tearful mourners to the santo-painted
walls, leaving the aisle clear to roll the little casket,
for it was the funeral of a child.

Amazing grace, she sang then in her
valiant soprano, and I sang along
a line or two, then trailed off, hushed
by solemn silence of the crowd.
We are all too stunned to sing.

I never knew this child, although I had
observed the father with his sons;
an ordinary outing, only weeks ago,
before this unhappy new year.

I don't know why I memorized their faces,
how their bodies looked like Al's,
but that their open eagerness appealed to me,
now that my own have grown into a world
of deep complexity, predicaments
I never dreamed I'd face. Raising boys to men--
a thorny task, not wholly spiritual.

It makes no sense, though we might know
the facts of it, how it happened that
a small child playing under scaffolding,
commonplace tool of his father's trade,
should lose his life--when on that very plot
of ground, not many years ago another smiling,
smaller boy fell down beneath the turning
tires of his father's truck--and was lost.

Two fathers here, and two sons gone, and now
this white-robed Father celebrates the mass
of resurrection.

(Might Sam have reached a hand to Liam
and pulled him through to play
in the fields of the Lord?)--
such thoughts unsaid this day--

Still I recall the burial of another
tiny boy in San Ysidro cemetery.
Emily had nearly thrown herself
into the grave with the fuzzy blue box
that held her beloved grandson,
who leapt from life on an electric current.
Vincent was the arc grounding his soul to the earth--
a storm, a puddle, a short in the circuit--
this is the puzzle left to the living.

Hinder not the little ones,
but let them come to Me, intones the priest,
likening unnatural deaths of children
to the Father's plucking of a rose in the garden
of sweet life, too soon to bloom.

Let them come, we nod,
but let them go--no.

It makes no sense, we cannot be assuaged
by reassurance that the Mind of God knows all,
so this is meant to be. A mother knows,
a child is much more than a rose.

Linda Weissinger Lupowitz 2000

MOM’S XMAS IN MAINE
--taken verbatim from a card sent to me by my mother
after “retirement” to Caribou, Maine


Dear Linda,
I simply can’t
get the pkgs. out in time,
they aren’t even gift-wrapped!

The house isn’t decorated,
the tree’s not up,
there are no drapes in the LR
and no blinds in my BR
(they’re ordered but still haven’t come.)

I have only 2 kinds of cookies made
& today I broke a big bowl in the kitchen
& pottery shattered everywhere,
& the cat’s driving me insane!

My cleaning’s done
& my cards are all sent.
Two neighbors brought me wreaths –
I hung one on the front door
& one on the window
(outside – it’s real pine
or fir or balsam
or whatever.)

I have 2 doctor appts before Xmas
my BP is 200 over 95
& I’m supposed to be having the dinner this year!

Merry Xmas!
Love, Mom

P.S. Don’t cash this
till after Xmas.
You’ll be able to buy
twice as much.

Mountain Wing Suit

Now I know that anything is possible.

Jump off the Edge!


http://www.biertijd.com/mediaplayer/?itemid=4262

Hey school swim-girl

(not that I'd say hey
or anything)

Quite truly amazing

the technique you
display

while not displaying

flesh

beyond
long swimmery legs

as you deftly
slip out

of those
pointy boots, those

tight black jeans

with the
glittery belt:

Whoops! there's the

undies --

slithering up & down
the oversized hoodie

somehow to emerge in a
sleek
spandex
swimsuit--

modestly: perfectly
intact.


That's me: the brazen woman

dripping naked on the
bench: who might could be
your grandma's age

Burt's Bees lotion
creaming into wet pores

swinging breasts and dimpled thighs
exposed freely

for no concern of yours:


skinned alive.


11.13.07

I have been enjoying visits to redravine.com
Recent posts by ybonesy were "doodles" of her thoughts on the airplane.
They hit the spot for me to start thinking like that.
I have been writing way too much seriosity. A little doodling is in order.

I saw the Bill Moyer's show on Rachel Carson, quite accidently, a while back.

The art of Chris Jordan is stunning stuff.

And I wonder, how few the crows. ...How many the cell phones.

This (below) is from Leslie's Blog

**I posted this a month ago. It needs to come to the front again.**

I have been saving a Bill Moyers’ Journal program about the one person play about Rachel Carson for a while now. I finally sat and watched it. Aside from it being a fabulous program about the play, there was a quick article at the end about Chris Jordan, photographic artist.

I have to showcase his art. It is amazing, horrifying, truthful, provoking.

Here are some links about Chris Jordan. Worth a jaw dropping look.

Running the Numbers

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09212007/profile4.html

http://www.chrisjordan.com/

Paper Clips Project

The Woman Singing

Thrilling to an audience
of toddlers and dogs,
this is the woman singing

who has not written her mother,
who has not written a poem,
who has not written out the bills
or the letters to the editor.

She has made no calls today.
She is singing to insects, to tumbleweed.

This is the woman singing
intending a clear note shot to heaven
or the sound of petals falling.

The woman whose voice
falters full in the throat
in fear of an ear that might judge
the uncensored sound.

A walker among beeweed,
puller of burlweed, I am listening for
the cadence of my own true language.

Is that mother's trilling tremolo
suburban soprano, vibrating dust motes
as she dancing, dusts?

I can hear it in the womb walls.

In my everyday voice, the trembling threatens,
Breaks through, edges outward hopefully,
You sound just like your mother.

This is the summer my daughter is five.
She rides a bike, dives like a seal,
her teeth loosen, limbs lengthen, emotions
overflow.

This summer a hummingbird
flew into our house, a sudden gift.

Iridescent voiceless wonder, stilled, scared,
we stare to share a moment, then release him
to a free sky.

He is gone in a whisper.

My son is gone in every instant,
returning, laughing, changed in some
essential way
each day.

In these curving walls alone, a silent miracle.
Tracking my dusty footsteps, keeper of the guard
our old retriever, follows me everywhere,
clicking nails scritch scritch the bricks.

No wet sandy feet run over rugs, no muffled screams
from closets, I am alone, alone
in concert.

What is that sound I hear arising--
I never could remember lyrics --
Is there a chance I could be getting better at this?

Housework is a song,
maintenance
is the singing of one phrase
over and over

Dark plums of summer,
my children ripen and resist me.

Leatherfooted, bruised and brilliant,
crying bursts from them easily,
a spilling seed of woes and thorns,
freeing them to play, becoming sunlight.

Their hair turns white, vocabularies thicken,
voices multiply and multiply.

I squat in the hot sand,
puller of prickly stalks,
waterer of desert flowers.

This is the summer a new life takes root in me.
What is that sound I hear arising--
wakening the woman singing,
singing in her own true language.

What if I were to pull you out like a weed,
this seedling imploding within my life, within
our lives together? Shocking fertility,

I wish to become a garden, composted into yielding--
but I am dry, split apart like a seedpod
too soon before the ripening.

I cannot hear myself think,
I am listening for my own voice
to tell me beeweed from burlweed.

My husband's head is in horses.

He reaches out a hand, a healing pause;
we wryly contemplate our swelling future
in the pounding silence of our separate thoughts.

I wish to be like one thing with him; our eyes
meet across the kitchen table, desolate.

Is this what we were meant for?
Something else, beyond suburbia, the sand,
the stable flies...the sweat, the sun.

It is our hope we hear arising in the night,
that shivers between us, sleeping pinned together
by our dreaming offspring, all that remains
unspoken or unspeakable, out of our control.

It is the love and the gratefulness,
the love and the gratefulness
that is the song sung to insects,
to tumbleweed, to sleeping babes.

It is the song in the night
in the safety of arms
the small song arising from the heart

the large song exploding to the wilderness,
the one no one hears, the unspoken song

that the woman is singing.



Linda Weissinger Lupowitz
Corrales, New Mexico

remembering andrew

i am a warrior
i am not at war
i am seeking peace.
i work for peace.
peace for us all.
peace for myself.
my struggles are your struggles.
my success is yours also.

i am a warrior.
the opponent is unseen.
i am a warrior.
the victory is not celebrated,
but felt.
the battles are bloodless
and brutal.
i am a warrior.
honor is my currency
and merchandise.

you are a warrior too.
your work is defined.
you proceed each day
until the sun drains you
and the moon cools you.
we all work together
as the best warriors do.
there is no war,
there is only living.
suit up!
time is passing.


Andrew Nagen
d. 8/26/2005 Corrales NM

 

My Feathered Friend
Tales from the Land of Entrapment

Recently I've been asked where I got my name, chickenlil. It goes back even further than the late nineties, when I first saw the CTs that criss-crossed bright blue New Mexico skies until they were white and strange, so I ran around like my head was cut off. I gradually regained perspective, but still wonder why so few look up, and notice that the sky is falling. It's falling.

But before that, it was those damn roosters.

In the '60s we protested for peace--now we'll settle for some peace and quiet.

Our home in Corrales may seem peaceful, but with the whizzing traffic at the road and the barnyard cacophony in back, it is rarely quiet. One morning a houseguest emerged from his bed with a puzzled look, asking, "Is there a zoo around here?" The cows' moo-ing out back sounds like an elephant mating call.

Our second-story bedroom door opens onto a deck facing west to the irrigation ditch and the rising mesa. You can hear everything all at once from up there--those cows, horses, burros, goats, sheep, yowling tomcats and howling coyotes, literally.

Bullfrogs and crickets throb through summer nights occasionally pierced by the eerie feline cries of peahens. Church bells bong on Sunday morning, while hot-air balloons hiss and drift over the field, accompanied by a chorus of barking dogs.

Mornings we awaken, depending on the season, to honking geese, raucous crows, chortly finches and sparrows squabbling; the strange and wonderful sandhill cranes cruising by; woodpeckers working at the eaves, or cartoonish roadrunners chattering, challenging a watchful cat.

Sometimes I lie semi-awake in bed listening for my favorite bird, so small I've never seen her, yet she returns each spring with her distinctive song--a long story with a question mark at the end. She arrives with a big voice about the time the apricot trees burst into blossom, alive with an industry of bees.

Other days are not so pleasant--rude awakenings to the sounds of my neighbor's recreational bulldozing, incessant beeping front-end loaders and backhoes scraping, chainsaws, road construction and heavy equipment hitting it hard at 6 a.m.

Neighbors on both sides have kept chickens for generations, and their roosters in particular make a definite statement about "country" life. We never had chickens.We once kept some Easter-bunnies who became warring rabbits in a sad hutch. As pets we had cats, dogs, gerbils, fish, even a horse-- but poultry seemed to be a step further into farming than we were ever willing to take.

At first I thought the little family of next-door free-range hens were kind of cute when they came to visit, buck-bucking around my garden, lending a bucolic atmosphere. But then they ruthlessly scratched up my seed-beds, sending flowers flailing and bulbs upturned, leaving curious oval-shaped depressions in the dirt. (No eggs, however!)

So, when I shook my rake at Patty's prize rooster, who was proudly stalking my cat and intimidating my Labrador retrievers, I meant only that he should run under the fence straight for home.

To my complete surprise, he flew at me!-- stabbing black-and-blue punctures in my tender thigh, newly exposed in shorts for the tanning season.

I decided at that moment I didn't like roosters very much at all. In fact, I had the urge to kill.

Manuel's chickens to the north would stay on their side of the fence, but the rooster in charge over there had the unfortunate habit of sleeping in a tree at night and waking up way too early.

My friend Sonja speculates that roosters are genetically coded to crow at sunrise, but they often mistake the morning star on the horizon for the breaking dawn so when a beam of light hits their tiny brain, they go into full-freak.

In the case of this particular cock, he could be triggered by the lights of a passing truck or maybe a UFO, and the full moon was grounds for an all-night songfest.

I begged Manuel to do something about it, but he only shrugged. The rooster refused to sleep in the coop with the hens, like a proper chicken. He liked to roost in the cottonwood tree. What could he do? I suggested the frying pan.

Roosters are just part of life in the country, he chided me. If you don't like it, move to the city, with the sirens and the traffic. See how you like it there.

Yes, I said, here in the country we have car alarms, firetrucks, bulldozers and backhoes, burning garbage, chainsaws chopping down orchards, and frickin' chickens too--the worst of both worlds!

Oh well.. I might have adapted to the nocturnal disturbance, as my husband did: he'd sleep through anything, after years of night-waking children crawling into our bed in the wee hours, but the anticipation of the constant cockle made my dream-state hyper-aware.

Without the door open to the air, we would surely suffocate. My subconscious mind only pretended to sleep, waiting on edge through the silent night, listening for the first horrific roostering to rend the deep darkness.

Then--repeated and repeated at random intervals so, as the sky slowly brightened, my mind sought hopeless solace under the pillow, expecting, and yet each time shocked anew by the awesome death-throttle emitted from the skinny throat of this unrepentant creature. Cock-a-doodle-doo is an inadequate expression of the rooster's power, which seemed to condense all the angst of the world into one ear-splitting expletive.

I contemplated the meaning of this persistent alarm in my life. Why did I have to endure such abuse? Years of lack of REM sleep made me singularly irritable.

I realized one winter morning just what this bird was saying to me, simply: Wake up! Wake up!

It was New Year's day. I awoke in twilight to a familiar refrain. I stood out on the deck, squinty-eyed, to witness a rare sight: the nearly full moon glowing huge on the western horizon, setting into a bank of low-gathered clouds tufted pink with the flush of dawn. Moments later the moon was gone, dropped into the chill grey of an ordinary morning.

There I observed my nemesis, crowing in the barren branches of his favorite tree, and I saw him fully for the first time. Dirty-white, scruffy bird, he turned a red eye to me and we surveyed each other in the sober light.

Then, with a rousing bloody-murder cock-a-doodle, he buried his beaky head under a wing and shuddered, nestling in for some shut-eye after a long night.

I thought briefly of my son's BB gun within reach in the next room, which I could have aimed at the heart of the beast. It would have been an easy pot-shot to blast that bird right out of the cottonwood, but I calmed my impulse, and made a fake gun of my index finger: POW. You're dead. I considered that this rooster and I had some kind of karmic pact, and so I made peace with my feathered friend.

This too shall pass, I sighed. I would have to let it go.

I don't know what happened after that day: I never heard that bird crow again. Perhaps he met his fate in the posole pot for a New Year's dinner. By spring, the hens were history too, having lost an encounter with Richard's wolf-dog leaving only downy white feathers floating on a breeze, caught on the chicken wire fence.

Most mornings now I hear roosters crowing along the ditchbank, sweet trumpets in a distant dream. I turn over gratefully to go back to sleep, knowing I might be missing the brilliant dawn, the setting moon casting cool light across the frosted meadow.

Here in Corrales, today at least, it is the best of all possible worlds.

We Are Not Dead
For Kadhim Kaitan

To no avail the doves cooing—
Our delights are cellars
And our time is ash.
We go, every sunset, to the river
Carrying the coffins of our days'
Polishing our teardrops
And shrouding our fears.

We are not dead.
We still have the tearful embrace
Of sacrifice.
We compose our features,
Bandage our calendars,
Our disappointments,
And,
Under a spider's tent,
We still have the right
To conquer the city with kisses.

We return to our hospitals
Lighting lamps of regret
And reciting our elegies.
Our lifetimes are paper boats
Pushed to the waves by the hand of a trifling child
Where, fold after fold,
The sea takes our dreams
And wraps them in weeping.
Our lifetimes are withered leaves
That launched an attack on the sun
And fell in flames.
The fire now licks at our names,
Sewn together with splinters.



Munthir Abdul-Hur
translated from the Arabic by Sadek Mohammed

Atlanta Review
Spring / Summer 2007

Tobin Robert Strong