winter, mid-morning

I spend the morning

thinking about us, about Jesus and stones and the way the birds watch me, through

the window covered in raindrops and barely breathing through

the mist that covers this ground like a fat hand sliding down a curve of thick thigh

that’s what the ground is here, all hips and legs and tush and

fingers that reach

into the underworld, dropping

things, cedar branches and doug fir that whines in the wind

there isn’t much to write, except for the slow drone of the storm, riding out

on the whitecaps of the river, over and over,

slow and fast and turbid

antsy

alive

alone, the sun drops out of the clouds for a ‘howyoube’ before sucking the light up like

there was never any before

this is the stormland, and your voice and face and thoughts provide the company that

the swallows lack and fail to give me on sad mornings like these

Hermes

or, In Other Words, Dealing With the Archetype When it Shows up on Your Doorstep on Otherwise Lazy Sunday Afternoons

(for Rebecca Diggs.)

Hermes is in my room again, shaking up all of the snow globes

Florida is covered in a mass of shimmery white flakes, Mississippi

looks to be in the blizzard of the millenium

and Dallas Fort Worth Texas never knew what hit them

and as he puts them down

dangerously close to the edge of the sink

he grins THAT grin

which maybe says

I know something that you do NOT

or maybe says

it ALL IS pretty damn funny, isn’t it?

but really says

NOTHING

because he’s Hermes and I’m human and I

often

don’t know what the hell he means

He sits on the bed with the orange comforter and the thick buckweat pillows

he perches on the back of the chair

he follows me relentlessly from room to room as I try to get focused and write things

he wraps his arms around my laptop and presses all the wrong keys and is

all in all, without a doubt, a general and

complete

and constant

and utter

nuisance.

but.

but I can’t help it

and before I remember to stop myself

I’ve gone and asked him again

OH Hermes, won’t you please tell me just one more story?

and he sighs THAT sigh, liquid fire rolling off the tongue for which

perfect symphony

all those wars were fought

He rolls me up into his head, tucks me into his mouth for safekeeping and steps

right

out the window

smiling

feet first

guided by those fantastic flying shoes.

Jesus and the Redbull

*Longer piece today, and fiction. 

 

 

 Jesus is in the kitchen again, asking for a Redbull because I won’t give him a Corona. He smiles lazily through the service window like he’s forgotten how to stop and relax his face muscles back into their neutral position, and gestures at me like a stoned traffic cop. Slow, slack hands followed by fastfast thumb and eyebrow punctuation; this is the road to take, your lane can go. I can see his bloodshot eyes from where I stand five feet away between the bar and the kitchen in the no man’s land of the service station, where I’m hiding behind the oregano and red pepper shakers and the fifteen bottles of doom-scented parmesan which the customers can’t seem to get enough of. I’m trying to avoid the bar and most importantly the bar patrons, for they are sassy today and out of my range of patience. Jesus is still smiling at me; I’m in his zone. His eyes remind me of a bloodhound’s. His hands, now at rest, are drooping like jowls, like paws over the silver lip of the service window that separates the underworld from the front of the house in this two bit dive bar at the base of the mountain. 

“Redbull!” He hollers again, lifting his arms at the elbows in a supine gesture of prayer. Of course, I’m about a half second from giving in, and he knows if he just keeps asking I’ll crack like a walnut. Every time. 

I hand him a can from the stock fridge. “Dude, you have a problem. Last one.” His response is in Spanish, which I cannot remotely comprehend. In fact I barely speak French, a statement that pains me as I studied it for nigh on a hundred years, verbs and conjugations and random y’s hanging out like wacked-out hippie middle names. But Spanish remains beyond me, a testament to the inability of the brain to gel around a new language past the age of 8. I’ve been working in the bar awhile now, and the only word I know is a dirty one. It often seems appropriate here. 

Jesus’ smile gets impossibly wider, his response punctuated by his hands flying up towards the can like euphoric birds set free from tight cages. One hand stops the imaginary traffic and grabs it. All will be quiet in the kitchen now for a little while, so I wander back to the bar zone to polish things that I’ve already polished, and to watch the skiers try to kill themselves as they hurtle at light speed down towards the base lodge. 

Jesus listens to the dirtiest rap I’ve ever heard. It’s in Spanish but the curses aren’t, as if the artist really wanted to get the point across, that he was serious, dammit, and he was going to make sure people in at least two countries knew about it. The customers can’t hear it but I can, and it never fails to make me blush. Which, I have a suspicion, is why Jesus turns it up on lame ass Tuesday afternoons, when most people who have real jobs are at them and not on the mountain, and the real accidents, the sad accidents, happen somewhere above 9,000 feet and keep people away from drinking until Wednesday evening. A Tuesday morning is littered with the occasional Bloody Mary, but most saunter in at lunch time and have a pint or three. At altitude. Which makes driving a bad idea and skiing a ridiculous one but gives you the confidence for either. The good news is that it makes the falling much more fun. 

After work, Jesus emerges from the underworld and lopes to his favorite stool at the bar, flopping all 5 foot 6 of himself down beside the counter. Propping his back on the center column, he leans forward to survey the room, one hand on his thigh, one elbow on the other. It’s almost empty, a couple of stragglers amidst the detritus of gear left by friends getting one last run, and it’s going quickly dark outside while the neon lights buzz with the sound of an acid burn from the walls. He’s still in his work uniform, black button-down short-sleeve pulled out over the mandatory checkered chef balloon pants and what appear to be black slipper socks with scuffed white rubber soles. 

I’ve seen Jesus in the kitchen by himself behind the ancient pizza oven, a mile of tickets above him while the printer spits out a continual stream of noise from the three cashiers and two bartenders. He moves like a ninja, cheese and mushrooms and green pepper vegetable bits flying all around him, steak parts, chips, unidentifiable sandwich stuffing being rhythmically shoved into the creaking conveyor belt that keeps the back room cooking above a hundred degrees. I’ve never seen Jesus break a sweat, let alone look frustrated. Sometimes in the midst of it, he’ll stop and calmly switch the music on his bright pink ipod, jumping back in a second later at the same lightning speed.

When he sits down, he’s wearing the same expression that he has in the kitchen when chaos is erupting around him: a little happy, a little bored, a little distracted. I wonder if he knows he’s a badass. “Corona!” he bellows down the bar at me, whacking the red laminate countertop with the flat of his hand. 

“Take off your freakin’ nametag!” I bellow back. It’s company policy not to serve anyone wearing their ID and I’m being watched right now by the two blinking red corporate eyes positioned above my head at either end of the bar. They can’t hear what we say to each other, though they’ve been threatening to add in a voice feed for years now. I can’t imagine how dull that job is, watching the seven hundred rooms of a ski resort and all the people who think they’re under the radar, breaking the rules and getting busy behind the ski check. Jesus smiles, wordlessly slips off the pin backing and proceeds to remove his button-down for good measure, leaving it balled up on the counter with the name tag on top. In his white undershirt now, he hunkers down, elbows on the counter, hands crossed, eyes on nothing much, waiting for me. I pass him the bottle, a salt shaker, and three slices of lime on a napkin. This is our evening ritual. He shakes salt on the first lime, pops it in his mouth and takes a long pull. He asks something in Spanish that sounds like a question; I don’t know the words but I usually get the gist. 

“About 500 in sales. It was a slow day.” I say.

He nods, it was a slow day. Another lime, another pull. “Spanish. Spanish-spanish-spanish-spanish?”

“I’m coming in at ten. You too?”

Sighs. “Si.”

Lupé ambles in awhile later to meet up with Jesus, his brother from their mother’s ‘man on the side’ they tell me with big grins in explanation of the fact that they look nothing alike. Though sometimes when they smile the similarity is striking, especially in the crinkle of skin around the eyes. Today Lupé looks pissed, but he always looks a little pissed on bad days, and he works in the underbelly of the mountain whale where bad days are the norm. He’s shorter than Jesus, reaching maybe to my shoulder but has enough personality to make up for it. I think it has something to do with his crazy gang past and subsequent reformation, or so he told me one time as he was bandaging my bleeding hand up from a run-in with an insolent wine glass. I’m useless about blood, it’s gooey and it gets everywhere and I hate the taste. I’m not much a fan of leaking, either, and the knowledge of pathogens making their way into the inside of my being are enough to leave me dizzy, and well beyond the point of ability of dealing with it. Usually I just stick out the wounded body part until some kind soul takes pity on my useless bloody self and bandages it for me. Lupé, as I found out that day, is fine about blood. Taking my hand in his, he worked quickly, efficiently, laughing at me as I provided him with the whiniest impersonation of a dying animal that I could muster. “How do you DO that?” I asked. “How do you DEAL with the BLOOD? It’s sooo ooky!! Blech!!ich!ugh!!” “Well,” he replied, “it helps if you’ve been stabbed a couple times.”

 

Lupé’s command of English is perfect and he curses like an English professor gone rogue into Mexico City, enunciating every syllable like he really loves the words. He’s surprisingly quiet around most people, though he talks to me because he’s known me so long. And I’m nice. There aren’t many jobs where we live and the service industry of any small tourist town is where the money is. We’ve come to be friends over the years, he and his brother from LA, me the white girl from Vermont; the lost souls of the food and beverage department, warily regarding the snow fall outside, thinking about the ungodly commute it presents, and bonding over the practical matters. Life and Corona, lime wedges with salt and our mutual hatred of the wicked customers, the bad boss, the good boss, the useless boss and the other five bosses of whom we know nothing. This is our self-contained universe where the pizza oven never stops and we are never wrong, though we are likely to say otherwise because we are paid to do so and it’s the easiest way to placate an irrational human who has just paid 28.75 for some dough with Sysco cheese on top. Later this evening I’ll count up the money and tip out Jesus the pizza ninja, our very own representative of the faith, and give the brothers a ride home, as Lupé’s Escalade stays in the garage where it can remain kept and shiny. We’ll be ranting and venting and carrying on like we mean it until the cloud line breaks and gives us a perfect view of the Oregon sky, and each of us separately will have that fleeting sensation that though there might be something else to this life, this really isn’t so bad at all. 

 

   

   

Muse

I thought, that when you knocked, you would rule me
I thought, and despaired, and angered, and raged
but you (you devil angel devil)
just laughed (mocking trusting willing)
and shuddered (oh god me why me, not me)
and waited (just enough, oh forever)
and I came, willingly, to spend my two silver coins at the roadside stop
on the riverside to painting redemption

Minotaur

and in the labyrinth

he hated himself

in the dark where he would die

he hated himself

he abhorred himself

he sat in that dark

that familiar dust and dark

and heard his mother’s cry

and his own, echoing

 

 

they were slaves, these pieces of sound

 

his cries and those echoes and the small fleshy

 

heaps of fear on which he feasted

 

he hated himself

 

and was glad at the moment of the hands on his neck

 

felt like the first embrace 

 

the labyrinth had ever given

 

the world had ever given

 

the dark and dust and hate had ever produced

 

just for him, given

 

the hands on his neck

 

and the iron taste a beauty in his mouth

 

no water for him

 

no sky for him

 

no doorway for him

 

until the blessing of hands on his neck

 

led him out

 

 

 

More poetry…no titles.

Part 1

we cried together, grew our 

strength in numbers and found our loud in sobs, 

broken teeth, hair, blood

(always the blood

never a poem without the blood)

until there was nothing else but to stare at the leftovers and understand for awhile. 

 

 

Part 2

I have bitten back the bile that has threatened to clear my throat and rob me of my thoughts and I said

I said your name, all vowels and consonants and links to a past that is over 

that smokey afternoon, those vowels spoken then, those consonants on the morning

after

and all that we are is a gray day waiting to happen, all that we were 

 

of course I’m paying attention.

 

 

Part 3

in the middle of february and dizzy with regret and plans to take out your king with my pawn

Whales/Poem

more poems for this delightfully dreary April morning…

Whale

 

it was this once, my dearest ones, my blessed foolish companions, that we, 

called forward

a pod of savage whales to that mystic mythic seaweed-riddled beach

with bellies full of fish and the black rubber of fins and feet 

born of dreams and lovers and the ideas we so often leave behind

 

here, let’s rest, we all say, 

and the white beach is a thought that looks new and exciting

 

this is the once.

and you are the one who holds my form, brushes quiet against slick skin

mine. You are the one who lends yourself to my limping frame, 

all through these skinny waves

dreaming together.

 

this once, as when I spat back out Jonah, and Ahab, and all those pretty initiates with their pretty hands

and groaned like a monster, furious, desperate, 

  lolling back in the water with my wild eyes and unforgiving teeth

and you hummed a single song to me, a single thread of naming

and the sand dropped away again to reveal nothing

the deepest nothing 

 

the beach wandered off.

picked up its old swim trunks and abandoned bottle caps and called it a day

 

it was this once upon a time, a moment of couldhavebeen immortalized 

by thrashing of bodies unaccustomed to soil and the terrible 

righteous fury of air moved only 

by the gasps of survivors in the endless attempts 

to remember what it was to have legs, lungs, 

toes and fingers

that would push out of the sand growing fur and long strides and join 

into the forest to run delirious against the cool face of the moon 

again, singing songs undiluted by the molecules surrounding them

 

you whispered 

no, come back to me, I know what you are, if you have forgotten I will tell you again.

 

and your current is stronger than my resolve.

we slip away 

leaving nothing but the glossy footprints of bubbles

the indifferent braille of the ocean the only mark of our passing time

March/Poetry

So sometimes I write poetry, and sometimes I write poetry instead of doing homework. This poem is a lot of that, but then I used it during my most recent presentation where I talked about god and Aztec sacrifice and What Is Up With That Whole Eating-People Bit Anyway. It seemed fitting. 

 

Love Song to Death

 

And once I died

as if to say Death took me, 

and held me, 

and made me understand.

and furious

  I relented, 

gave to him

this form. I became quiet 

again, or something that cannot yet be known

that other universe weaving its precious ochery timbre from between 

while those white fingers tightened holding mine, those crackling bones 

that clutched me closer, beloved, 

who scraped and tarried against the breath of that thick skin of

that    separate soul.

 

I, so tired 

of the sound of my own ‘I’

dreamed of living again, held safely between these jaws and fangs and 

terrible burning tongue, dreamt of blood and flesh and my own mouth 

and was spat out, 

this little piece of me and all those other gods, 

those lightning creatures from before, 

glistening, covered in sweat and new 

we cried out once for being born empty handed 

and glad, in the face of such appalling truth.