rare things, the finest things

in a gravel lot at a               
                    jukebox joint the

oysters are crisp. and we                     
                    sip their flow

white wine and white wine and we                  
                     tip our cups

and crab leg snow.    the                   
                     butter runs down our fingers.   onto our tongues.

my bared foot is on your thigh and
                     your thumb strokes my sole. and

the hollow of your neck holds the perfume 
                     of rosewood and vintage leather.  clean laundry.

quarters are stocked and piled and                
                      is this the song

on metal chairs pulled closer    we vibrate.    cecelia and                              
                       making love...    and you purr.    and i purr. 

there is that purring.
 
later we will exit this                 
                      and slip back into our nights.   


******

so, sometimes, if i'm really seeing, i taste and smell and feel and hear that the moments are nothing less than a song.  and sometimes, i know that what that song is, is all of it.  everything important is right there.    

yes

you brought me to your hothouse
with walls of glass       without a lid
and i grew up again
to opened.
aloud and savored bliss
 
you sun
shone citrus on me      
yes pamplemousse   yes
jaune citron.  i yes.

shine on.  i'm climbing this stem thorn by thorn.

these are the daisies and defeat wrestling on my front lawn weedpatch

my angel baby,

when you were born it was with those long papery impossible to cut sharp dangerous infection carrying cornea scratching fingernails.  i was supposed to use scissors or my teeth to trim them, according to baby books, but my teeth didn't work and i was afraid i would just tear into the quick and since i've never chewed my nails i really didn't get how that whole thing worked and i didn't know how to use scissors to trim nails either.  despite the books i used the same nail trimmers that i use on my hands, because the little tiny ones in the drug store are so small that i couldn't control them well, and didn't want to slip, and hurt you.  so in the end, the first time i cut your nails i also cut your finger and you screamed bloody murder and we both cried.  i immediately began to breast feed you, and you settled in with hics and smuffled sobs, but i couldn't forgive myself, so i sat in the rocker he gave us, and called grandpa.  i was 32 years old and called my dad and sobbed to him the story of my first official maternal bad deed.  i wailed that i had betrayed your trust.

i was so young, angel baby.

grandpa did not laugh.  to his credit.  he just said it would not be the last time i would try my best and betray your trust.  this caused me to stop crying, because it made me think.  you are 11 now, and i'm still thinking about what grandpa said.  is this my last contrary act toward grandpa, the process of proving him wrong, or is this thinking just my ongoing response to his statement, a way to live other than how he told me it just will be?  

i say and try to show, all the time:  i do not to lie to you.  and i will always be with you, behind you, and for you.  those are my promises-- and that i will always love you.  those are all i have, all i will offer in the way of promises, and you can trust me with all of you. 


-----

in a different city at least a half an hour away, and at the time of the earthquake, you were home alone with the others while your dad and i were at a therapist's having a non-healing and not-even-palliative session.  i sat on that plaid couch and could feel my ribs being sawed separate, and everything soft inside me being bruised.  ransacked.  i heard the rumble first, and thought it was a semi truck driving by, but then i felt the vibration along with the roar, coming from below me.  it felt like the earth was vomiting and i knew immediately that it was the natural outcome of my state--my vibe caused the earth to quiver.  when the bookshelves started essing i saw it was not my rage.  not unrelievedly,  we realized it was an earthquake.

i had let my cell phone battery run out, and the land lines where i was didn't work now.  i was glad you wouldn't know that i had let my battery run out--if the land lines were out at home there was no way for me to reach you even with a charged cell.  i was already feeling the guilty mother thing, and didn't want you to see my shame.  but, regardless of reason or fault,  i couldn't reach you.  i just hoped that the quaking hadn't reached home.  i just hoped you were all still playing wii dance, and continued with the hopeless task at hand.  sitting far apart, and unable to reach one another, in our family of 5, our natural disasters that day were all distinct.  each of us had our own reality shift, and in some ways the only thing in common was the time and day.  in other ways, the altering was universal. 

at home you felt the shaking and all our paintings slid.  books fell and glasses skittered.  you were frightened.  you were calm.  you took the younger children and the puppy outside and to a neighbor's.  they had you all in and gave you snacks that you are not allowed to eat, and hung out with you until i arrived home.  telling me about it the next day, you told me how their attic was crammed full with christmas decorations, and i interrupted--you were in their attic?!!  and you looked at me with eyes bored, annoyed, and filled with my idiocy, and said:  of course!  we don't have an attic so i had to go into theirs.  i had to discover it, and when i asked they said i could.  there was this string hanging down, and i just...

you are so young, my angel baby. 

that was ago, and today i'm thinking of tomorrows, and how i am going to talk with you all about what is coming.  i'll be the one telling you.  i have conversations in my head and i try to anticipate how you will each be, since i've known you so long.  you, angel baby, will be stoic, and logical.  and afraid.  but you never back down in the face of afraid, and so i will have to be vigilant in my attention to your need, as it slivers forth.  cookie face will be sad that what he knows is changing, and my moon faced girl will cry, and will further develop her aversion to and mistrust of marriage.   i try to key out exactly how i can give you each, during those moments, a feeling of still being secure, and what i can say to let you know--you must know--that you are secure still, i will always be here for you, behind you, and with you.

but i think of the earthquake day.  i think of all that you and i discovered.  about attics and promises and security and strength and

angel baby:  i have tried so hard to prove him wrong on this one.


*****

october 8 is my dad's birthday, but he is long gone and so celebrating with him doesn't happen so much as celebrating him in my mind does.  our relationship was quite tempestuous, with dramatic ups and downs, a lot of downs, and they seem to be on my mind a lot.  anyway, but also especially since i have become a parent--a flawed, trying, failing and succeeding not super- not shitty- but rather medium mom.   i seem to react to him differently now, and yet, i still seem to react to him in the same way, as well.  now a mother, always a daughter.  

an open letter to readers in the distant future.

2011


hello future reader: 


maybe your life is centuries after the end of mine, and i wonder about you.  right now, in 2011, parts of humanity see the human race (as we know it) as the product of evolution and luck--and there are many who deny that, and believe in creationism (look it up—it’s a big deal here, now).  that is not why i'm writing, though i do find it moving:  understanding we are just the lucky ones--the ones that survived.


there are many things you must wonder about us, absent any direct instruction and relying upon your own interpretation of those traces of us that you wind up finding.  so i want to tell you one specific thing about us.  but first:  do you have love?  it doesn’t seem particularly relevant, love, in terms of reproduction and perpetuation of the species—maybe by the time you are reading this, love will have been selected against altogether… . do you know romeo and juliet? (look it up—it’s a good one).  basically, (spoiler alert) familial and romantic love can, tragically, lead to death—so you know, it could happen that over hundreds, thousands, millions (?) of years, love will have been selected against.  by the time you are reading this, perhaps a biological weakness has died out, a behavior that jeopardizes survival of the species has become unviable and vanishes: and so your lovelessness is an adaptation resulting from selective pressure and competition.  anyway, maybe it has, and maybe it hasn’t occurred, but (perhaps hypothetically):  do you know what it is like to lose love?  i'm going to give you some direct instruction on that, because it is very important.


i am sure you must have found documentation of the kinds of love we feel now, in all of their variety.  people are becoming more comfortable discussing the ins and outs of all kinds of loving, which is a step forward for us--at least in my opinion.  and if you have love, you probably have love falling apart, but you may crumble in entirely different ways than we do now--and if you don't have love, then how can you know the crumble at all? let's explore the crumbling.


so this is a story of love falling apart in a very 2011-human way.  it may or may not be fiction (do you know fiction?).  it is written for historical documentation, and whether it is ultimately fiction or not is irrelevant—this is a good description of heartbreak in many--but not all--parts of the world these days.


assuming you do not have love, i’ll tell you:  love starts out like a baby being born.  (i don't know if you know what being born is, or how you reproduce, and if i start getting all side tracked with explaining all the back story of this it'll take me forever, so forgive me, please.) the moment the baby begins living outside the womb, the reality is that this freshly baked newborn is drawing closer to death.  that is how love is--it's the birth of a new being that has a life and a lifetime of its own, and the joy and elation and exhaustion and overemotion of the two beings who produced this bundle of joy simply spill out at first, and then slowly settle down.  between the two lovers there is still much happiness as their love-baby grows and matures, and there is little disruption in that happiness.  and then one day, one of the two people in the original pair comes home from work and swipes his finger over the towel bar and announces that the other one missed a spot while cleaning.  and there we see it:  the aging of the love.  the first tiny teeny little crazing has happened--very faint, very trivial, but there. 


and, if the two are still together after that little event, there is more happiness and more crazing:  between the lovers, the lacks are spotlighted:  one is a poor role model for the children, one is falling down on “the job”, and the insults and the coldness grow and then one day, one finds the diary of the other and reads it,  and the aging turns in to a physically disabling illness, and professional help is sought.  and the treatment sessions occur and occur and occur but are, it seems, powerless against the dis-ease that has settled in the bones of that fragile body of love.


and then one october day, during a particularly bad marital counseling session, one bemoans a lack of respect and the other one yells that he is doing all the heavy lifting and she is not carrying her weight in their common daily life.  and he is sick of her excuses.  and he strides from their session early, slamming the door.  

now, at this moment:  their body of love slips into a coma. 

(do you know coma?  it is the state of being there, but not living.  existing.  and with a coma, eventually there will have to be a decision made:  to pull the plug, or to keep hoping and waiting to get the body to come back to life.)


so the love is in a coma.  and on this very day, after so many years of nurturing that body, trying to feed it and attend to it and keep it healthy, on this day she leaves the therapist's office in a state of shock, because she had done everything that she could and had given her best to make something strong, and after all this lifetime of that, she saw that body lying there anyway, and saw that she had never been enough.  but she was yet not willing to pull the plug on that thing she had helped create.  it was too soon.  instead, on the drive home, she unbuckles her seat belt, presses the accelerator, and points the car straight at the concrete wall made by the freeway overpass above her.   then she pulls herself back on track, after an image of her kids flits through her head.


it turns out she herself isn't hospitalized, though her doctor wants her to be.  she insists:  she can't be:  there are kids to consider and other important things, and so with two medications (big for remediation of all sorts of things, in 2011), and in two months she drags herself through two major holidays, four birthdays and the requisite parties--that she plans and executes, two visits from out of town family (hers, then his), and fills the roles of santa and new years eve festivity planner.


and no one around her knows that she is a shell.  everyone is happy and well fed and entertained and no one even notices her absence.  (this is significant.) she slips away for naps a lot, and she doesn't laugh ever during this time, but she holds it all together superficially, and no one sees the difference (this is significant.)   and then in the first days of january, after all of the important things have taken place, she collapses.  eventually in february she gets to her knees again.


and this is when she admits:  it will be this relationship, or it will be me.  and she realizes: it isn't going to be me.  

so, she has decided, and the plug is pulled.  the love-child that had fallen to coma is now, and at what appears to be by her own hand, just a corpse. it doesn't make it easier for her that she made the call.  in this case the line between life and death was a formality.  it was an announcement. 


so, can you see the lifespan of love?  its growing up is a slow process, with fits and spurts of polish and ragged edges, just like the life of a person now is.  and its end is as the death of a treasured person is, viewed today, as well: first denied and then wished and worked against, and then sudden.  and irrevocable.


and so you see how it worked way way back in time, for your human ancestors.  not always, of course, but in some cases it was definitely like this.  although in this story the she pulled the plug, in some cases the he will have, and in some situations both parties just wander away from their love and it withers and neither care.  today there are as many forms of betrayal and endings are there are loves and beginnings, it's true. some love-bodies last entire lifetimes, until the pair die a week apart, because the one left behind can't live on without his or her sweetie pie (not a food in this case, but rather a 21st century term of endearment).  but i can vouch, personally promise you, that sometimes it was exactly like this.


what are they like for you, the stages of life for the bodies of love? at all similar?  (i am really not at all sure that love hasn't been selected against.)

i’m sorry:  it turns out that this is not a description of the particular crumbling that can be experienced in the loss of love in the year 2011, of the grinding of the spirit that occurs as love ages, and the pulverization of the spirit that happens when it dies.  rats.


but really, future reader, i am too sad to describe that, now.  you'll have to find a different artifact.

sidewalk mary/or: the american dream

humbly, i am teaching my children that sidewalk mary is a person
with a whole life, a whole story, and the story is important,
and because she is sitting on the sidewalk every day in
sticky heat or dripping sky,  car exhaust and
dust

doesn't mean she is insane.  it means she is dusty. 
hot.  sticky.
that she has a moustache does not mean
she is insane.  or unclean.  or a man.
that she is surrounded
by teddy bears and is always
rocking one on her shoulder, patting and

rocking to    rocking fro
rocking to    rocking fro

means she is rocking her bear, and maybe she loves it.  she was a child once
just like they are and they love their stuffed bears too, right? 
who can't sleep without doggie?  maybe she has no one else to love.  we
talk.  we explore. 

and maybe we could take her
a root beer, on a hot day
or a cocoa, on a cold day
and take her a new teddy. 

let her know we see her.  that she is. 

at first they think i am maybe making valid points but still
--cynics the bunch of them--
who but the insane wear a moustache when they are a woman,
or sit on the sidewalk every day? 

but my children are learning compassion, and relativism. 
that we all do not live the same way.  they have come to think this
teddy and drink idea is a good one.  they wonder where sidewalk mary is
when we drive by and the corner is unoccupied.
what about taking a few of the cookies grandma sent us?  let's sit with her, they
say.  tomorrow, i say.  i'm happy they have good will.  they are generous with
their love. 

but i am afraid that when we sit by her, she will pull a knife on us.
this is the part i do not tell my children.

finishing up

i have just finished a piece begun ago, dated september 24.  check it out...is it ginsbergish?  what was the essence of the beat movement anyway?  --to stick to rules and patterns?  i think not.  so fuck it.
this one is me-ish.

what a learning process.

do not confuse them (sex and love)

this,  fadeless.

today i missed your hands.

and...about honest writing...

In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

                                                                                       ---John Steinbeck in a 1938 journal entry

end beginning middle end beginning... (after ginsberg)

in the end:
with raindrop style we shattered stone                   

the cankered guts   the brittle bone

of us whelmed.  gush    unclothed     unknown

in the beginning:
we were for each the other's Ruth
wild blankets covered spurring truth
abroad we danced with purling youth
traced river reach and rush and ebb
too,  surge recede   too, dry stream bed
conviction crocheted   spindled web

in the middle:
elaborate lacings tat by claws
stitched up our failings   netted flaws
gripped all our moonlights   all our dawns.
awake asleep in numb and sting
cold beast infested plainer things      
froze fly condensed to seep and cling

in the end:
i could have knelt   i could have prayed
on slated floors     i could have stayed
but faith was gone.    love came too late.

now: 
             blast implode    multiverse                 
anonymous   surrounding    first
on planes of string uncurled, emerged.

oh hello space:   you lift me high
and gravity throws down my sighs                              
in starry soup   this all    divine



*******

i thought i'd give it a swing and experiment a bit after reading some beat stuff and allen ginsberg telling his truth in a strict rhyme scheme, which i found odd and interesting.  so, this little scrap above is my interpretation of (one of) his styles.  i am not accustomed to working within the scheme, and find it tedious and near impossible to express without the rhymes sounding completely contrived and idiotic.  i thought it would be nice to get out of my voice for awhile, and this has turned out ok, but i don't really dig it much.  i don't think it sings.  oh well.  **you play you win you play you lose you play.**


also, as bob dylan did and said, he only practiced during concerts, so what people heard was his working away toward something new.  i think i like that, too.  i will probably be editing this poem after the fact, so this dog may have its day yet.   or not.  ha!

**added sunday 9/25--
one of the things i want in my writing, beyond the obvious, is to create something that can be universally understood, without spelling things out so specifically that relating to the piece--not liking it or admiring it or hating it--but relating to it, is only possible for a few.  everyone can have an evaluative opinion based objectively upon some established standard, or subjectively, and upon their own aesthetics--but relating is something completely different.  if a story of rags to riches is so specific that it may appeal to some in an observational way, that's nice.  it's nice to get a different vantage point of the world.  but if a story of rags to riches is told specifically and generally enough, everyone should be able to find some angle or some part of it that is theirs, and they should feel recognized.  this is difficult to achieve--often people assume the work is autobiographical (of the writer, of course) of one person, when what i am going for, at least, is a work that is autobiographical in a more universal sense.

so, all that said, my pieces succeed or fail toward that end, of course.

and, with all that said, i ask you:  what is this particular poem, above, about?  you can think about it yourself awhile, then i will give you some multiple choice offerings.  think think think think, now:

a)  the falling apart of a team/group of some sort--baseball, PAC, book club
b)  two people breaking up/coming apart
c)  soldiers in some theater of operations far away or close to home
d)  existentialism
e)  the aging process
f) none of the above
g) all of the above
h)  faith

**added later pm 9/25--i'm continuing to revise, and change this thing up, and am getting closer to "can do no more--for reasons of skill and will"...

***added 9/26--i am so done with this thing.

****9/28.  ditto the above.  maybe really, this time.
*****much later 9/28.  ug. ug. ug.  i may be done but this thing isn't.
******10/1.  i do not think i have ever hated anything i have written as much as i hate this thing.  a curse upon it, a pox, i give it my evil eye, HexHex!  i abandon this effort now, having lost the battle, and maybe will return later to wrestle again.

10/2.   i am done.  i am happy (-enough).  i couldn't stick with his style completely i felt like i was strangling.  i changed it a bit and have learned my lesson-- i should not try to shake my voice.

sabine's poem, april 2011--(3rd grade)

do you ever think,
do you ever glide?  i do
and here's why:
i live like you
in my heart
but deep inside i have
my part.
i keep my talent to myself
but you my dear, you're just an elf.


---------


of course i am a proud mother who thinks her children are Brilliant, but aside from that, i love the innocent confidence, and the deep, revealing truth that she shares in this poem, and which may be said to be universal.  she had written this in her diary, but brought it out to show me today.  thank you sabine!, and:

that's my girl!

to stay asleep

not awaited not invited.  deep
indigo, deep night.   and sweeping
in they come.  unwanted from behind the bed
unwanted from below.  or from the
very in of it.  unwanted.  from the diagonal distant
familiar place.  the stark place,  from far.
from far too close to see.  from far. 

the monster hiss, the seethe
knobby and plain.  and true

with ears and eyes:
mine is a zenith horizontal. 

an already.

diagonally distant.  far. 

pay attention,  i think
in the middle of the night in 

the middle of the mare 
of me i
know:

i want my zenith. 

jumpstand.  and
not awaited not invited visions
damn and visions dark.   and sweeping
in they come.

those feral figments:  the old        
the done.

that flailing mahogany phantasm, that fabled
white inferno.   awakened   

from it: the smiled upon, the understood
the bloodless itchy-warmth.   comfortable. 

lilifed sanctuary.         flat-lineation and
jumpstand.  and it is morning.

at the edge, I'm facing the blaze. 

a faith to spell me back to myself

many personhood-central things along the curl to here i have lightly, or not so lightly, lost.  or tossed.  and as with all nows, this now will vanish and is really nothing but a single flashing, a bulge of possibility with little information as to the direction of next--of the zing.  and like all the others, this time is one for a bit of retrospective tracing and a lot of opening up to the unmapped.  (is it real, this moment, or is it just momentum?)---during the zip between then and next we carry memories, and happily today i stumbled upon this one, in a conversation, this not-lost thing, and re-realized my religion.  and that i do in fact believe its creed.  and practice it. 

i try to assure people that i really Really am calm, i really Really am ok, even if along with the losses-- desired or otherwise--i am sometimes crushed,--but how to translate above that fact the gains achieved alongside, and the sigh of relief upon recognizing oneself, again, still, and/or maybe despite? and that that is sometimes all that matters. 

the following articulation, this quote, comes from Jeanette Winterson, a contemporary author i favor.  i have it tattooed on my bloodstream, (my only tattoo) and have had ever since i discovered it in the early 90's.  it is from her book The Passion.   when i read it, it may have been the first time i have felt recognized, or reflected somehow.  (i've made friends and have maybe lost them over this book...--it is an important part of my story.)

You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.
It’s the playing that’s irresistible.
Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love,
what you risk reveals what you value. 

right this very moment, as you are reading this, you and i may be friends or strangers.  in either case, you know me now.  

the strand running through each one

crouching on the strand,
forming definitely one brick.  and one brick

patting the shit and straw
into rough evens, and fathoming
the sun.  dream bake turn bake dream turn bake turn to dry.  and hard.  strong.

some bricks break.  and
not.  saving one and one

rain no sun no straw.  double-dutching a puddle.  there is
drought no straw no water.  hide and seeking the dust.
there is no shortage of shit.

in plenty in even bright, measuring
mix the champagne and haunting.

bricks coming slow next to that tongue of questions:
of traveling snakes and god and.
one and one     saving them.

sweating in
steeping in the biscuit rose and in the stink 
creating magnificent castles

take. 3.

then: sit on that red shag carpet or lie on the bear rug spread eagle on my stomach with my chin resting on the head of that poor dead bear’s and  i would watch the zenith. the thing that i remember about star trek (tos, now) on that tv is that dr mccoy was crabby-compassion and had that polaroid camera looking thing and could detect disease. from the outside,  scan people and then with fancy sonogram laser unnamed beam and through their clothes, cutless, germless, would heal them, and no matter how bad the diagnosis, no matter the nature of the injury or the freaky composition of the poison,   bones who was left with nothing but his skeleton after his         could treat almost every broken. and after a few hours or days all would be well.  or   well enough.  kirk still had the blue eye shadow problem but that was small in comparison to the        cases mccoy was able to cure.  now: i picture i am standing in my kitchen with fabulous hair wearing too much blue eye shadow and a zippy black catsuit and with command. i call into the retro modern brooch high at my shoulder, urgently but calm.:  McCoy!  Quickly! The Kitchen!  and then bones is transported from the enterprise or the unknown territories right in to my house despite mistrust, of the whole transporter contraption and runs to me with his migrating geese eyebrows and starts to take out scanner c or something and i turn to him and put aside my jigger and look at him. and say:  just fix me here.  here is where it hurts.  and i point to my weakly fluttering wings and he grimaces a bit and with his hair loosened flailing mahogany, like a white inferno. he ministers to me with his gun of medicine and i wake up. in some sickbay.  scarless..  with an edelweiss engraved brass cowbell on my chest and a terse mccoy patting my hand tenderly reluctantly understandingly, and saying:  i'm stepping back. now.  just      this if you need me.  but i don't need him any more.

scene 1 take two

then i would sit on that red shag carpet or lie on the bear rug spread eagle on my stomach with my chin resting on the head of that poor dead bear’s and  i would watch the zenith.  the thing that i remember about star trek (tos, now) on that tv is that dr mccoy was crabby-compassion and had that polaroid camera looking thing and could detect disease from the outside,  scan people and then with fancy sonogram laser unnamed beam and through their clothes, cutless, germless, would heal them, and no matter how bad the diagnosis, no matter the nature of the injury or the freaky composition of the poison,   bones who was left with nothing but his skeleton after his divorce could treat almost every broken and after a few hours or days all would be well.  or   well enough.  kirk still had the blue eye shadow problem but that was small in comparison to the severe cases mccoy was able to cure.  now i picture i am standing in my kitchen with fabulous hair wearing too much blue eye shadow and a zippy black catsuit and with command i call into the retro modern brooch high at my shoulder, urgently but calm:  McCoy!  Quickly! The Kitchen!  and then bones is transported from the enterprise or the unknown territories right in to my house despite mistrust of the whole transporter contraption and runs to me with his migrating geese eyebrows and starts to take out scanner c or something and i turn to him and put aside my jigger and look at him and say:  just fix me here.  here is where it hurts.  and i point to my weakly fluttering wings and he grimaces a bit and with his hair loosened flailing mahogany like a white inferno he ministers to me with his gun of medicine and i wake up in some sickbay.  scarless.  with an edelweiss engraved brass cowbell on my chest and a terse mccoy patting my hand tenderly reluctantly understandingly and saying:  i'm stepping back now.  just ring this if you need me.  but i don't need him any more.

thank you for coming to my sight

i am so happy.  look what came to me today!  a beautiful, beautiful present--

being looked for
being seen
being responded to
and music that soars to match. 


"hi, suzanne!

i attached a song in response to your visual images.  if you look closely - real closely - at the wheat field, you will see..."
 




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg0vHnk9_28&feature=fvst

**very important, if you go to this link.  close your eyes and listen.  do not watch. 



what an honor, what pleasure.  i feel like a drunk in a midnight choir.  with a bunch of others kind of different but kind of the same.

peter, again :  thank you.

she's not dead, jim.

then i would sit on that red shag carpet or lie on the bear rug spread eagle on my stomach with my chin resting on the head of that poor dead bear’s and  i would watch the zenith.  the thing that i remember about star trek (tos, now) on that tv is that dr mccoy was crabby-compassion and had that polaroid camera looking thing and could detect disease from the outside,  scan people and then with fancy sonogram laser unnamed beam and through their clothes, cutless, germless, would heal them, and no matter how bad the diagnosis, no matter the nature of the injury or the freaky composition of the poison,   bones who was left with nothing but his skeleton after his divorce could treat almost every broken and after a few hours or days all would be well.  or   well enough.  kirk still had the blue eye shadow problem but that was small in comparison to the severe cases mccoy was able to cure.  now i picture i am standing in my kitchen with fabulous hair wearing too much blue eye shadow and a zippy black catsuit and with command i call into the retro modern brooch high at my shoulder, urgently but calm:  McCoy!  Quickly! The Kitchen!  and then bones is transported from the enterprise or the unknown territories right in to my house despite mistrust of the whole transporter contraption and runs to me with his migrating geese eyebrows and starts to take out scanner c or something and i turn to him and put aside my jigger and look at him and say:  just fix me here.  here is where it hurts.  and i point to my weakly fluttering wings and he grimaces a bit and with his hair loosened flailing mahogany like a white inferno he ministers to me with his gun of medicine and i wake up in some sickbay.  scarless.  with an edelweiss engraved brass cowbell on my chest and a terse mccoy patting my hand tenderly reluctantly understandingly and saying:  i'm stepping back now.  just ring this if you need me.  but i won't need him any more.

flying home

                                       
                                           the
                          e                                   w                                                                                               

                e                                                         h                                                                            

      s                                                                           e                                                              

                                                                                             a                                                            

                                                                                                      t                 f         i        e   

                                                                                                                                                   l

                                                                                                                                                            d

                                                                                                                                                                  s

         g                                                                                                                                                   
                   r                                                                                                                                      t       e
                            e                                                                                                                     i
                                     e                                                                                                    h
                                               n                                                                    or          w
                                                           or              g                            d
                                                                                     o           l

                                                                                                                                        r       o
                                                                                                                 d.            b                     w        
                                                                                b                        a                                                 n.
                                                             d                         r         e
         r                                               e

                  o                                       t
                          a          s 
                                                                                                  s.                               and            those  
                                                                                         e
                                                                                 i
                                                                        r
                                                              o
                                                    m         
     those              m            e              
                                                                                                                                   n              t 
                                                                                                                      i                                       s          of

                     r         o         l          l          i        n         g                  h                                   
                     



                                      d         u                  
                            r                              r
                  o                                                 o         y.
       c          
                                           
                                   

                     
                                                               e          d          
                                                   t                                          i
                                        l                                                                n
                                                                                                                    t
                              i                                                                                               r
                 u                                                                                                                    i         g       u        e      s.
    q                                    

                                                 


                                             s          o                                       t       u                                
                                    a                             n                                              r                       
                 s        e                                                e       d                                     n       i
and                                                                                                                                          n        g        s.




                 d        i       z        z         y                        s         h        o          w
                                                                                                                           i        
                                                                                                                                       n            g           s:         of

                                                                          

 Fertile Soil.    
           Spikes And Blades.


___________
___________