Moon Eyes

Seven minutes: My eyes have changed from gaudy kaleidoscopes to half-moons

that witness the world as a dream.

There is an angel in my hair

who guides my fore-thought, my wisdom,

my knowledge of body and the pearls

that rest within it.

Enigma angels offer questions

and warn me of

my Pharisee tendencies,

my judgmental stance,

my narrow focus at the hem of

the Jehovah angel, who has sternly restricted my breath.

Have no fear for there are flowers, and the devil with the pitchfork

is small like a gnat.  Mama Angel love me, make me feel loved and blessed.

Make my moon eyes trigger the flowers.

Purple Cashmere

Seven Minutes:

My present today is a nubby purple cashmere sweater that has been regulated to pajama wear.  Blazing hot sun disappeared and it’s cool again.  I would love to live where the weather never saw ninety degrees, much less 110.  Give me fog and wool sweaters, a knit cap, drizzle.  The type of weather where a hot bath is appreciated.  The long cloudless summer is approaching.  Sometimes cumulus clouds appear on the far mountains on the other side of the lake. But here, it is endless blue skies from June to October as a rule.  Monotony.  The rattlesnakes are coming out as they do each year at this time.  It’s common for one or two to be seen at my school.  Friends are reporting their presence at their homes.  If you walk at Anderson Marsh, you can hear them in the rocks in the early mornings.  They could be the rhythm section for a mariachi band.  Trato de apprender castellano en mi coche en la manana cuando manejo a trabajo.  The nice lady and man with the beautiful Spanish diction never get frustrated with me.  I feel my head is very small.  My brain is at least.  But I need big hats.  So I’m back on that drizzle day in my large comfy cap walking along the beach with my hands in my pocket and breathing.  I can wear my ratty purple sweater.  No one will care.

What is My Present?

Seven minutes:

What is my present?  The leafy maple outside my window?  The sun casting its last light on the trees lower on the hill?  They had warmed with gold light just before I wrote the last sentence, and by the time I typed the period their illumination vanished.  Six seconds of splendor as the sun descends behind the mountain.  Is it the slight pain I feel in my back as I sit here?  The tightness of my legs?  Or is my present in the breath and striped fur of my tabby cat stretched along my thigh?  The open notebook next to her?  The feelings of frustration in trying to market a book? I saw one of the pileated woodpeckers for the first time today, though I’ve heard their hammering for over two weeks. That is the present I want.  Writing thoughts and making images, that is the present I desire.  Selling and searching and looking at Amazon rankings, not.  My present is my struggle with faith.  The laundry in the dryer and the new load to put in.  In hearing my husband’s car door shut and his feet on the steps. The opening of the door as he comes home.  The opening of the book I plan to read tonight.

My Heart is at the Window

 My heart is at the window.

I lean with longing on the sill.

I am at the edge of expectation,

Waiting, waiting

to see the future form, the grace

I have wished for, the humble steps

of hope, the whirlwind ready to kiss my cheek.

My heart is at the window,

I have been here so long,

the horizon has been hidden by the leaves’ ornamentation, by pages of years, by my too small courage.

My heart is at the window.

I pray that love sweeps down the lonely road

and breaks open my heart, so sadly patient,

into the seizures of a streaming sun,

shattering me into the light that taunts my vista.

When I Was My Grandmother

Seven Minutes . . .

Last night this strange feeling came over me that I was my grandmother Parala.  Never knew her as she died in 1922 at the age of 42, mother of Lois, Leslie (my father), Mary Ruth (dead at two), stillborn babies, and my Uncle Darius who is still alive at 93.  I saw a post card she sent once when I visited my uncle.  She signed herself Para.  I decided her mother was playing with language and came up with her name because they were sounds she liked, like a song.  She had a hard life, wife of a sharecropper who made moonshine, who wore her husband’s shoes, who saw her children die, who moved to Detroit and didn’t last long.  Did she miss Arkansas, and Mary Ruth, where the legend said she planted a white and a red rosebush at her child’s grave that never stopped blooming? The child whose head made a feathered crown on her death-bed.  My father, 12 years old, 1918, having quit school to pick cotton, remembering he did a somersault in the fields hearing the news that World War One had ended.  All in one  year, little sister he could not talk about even as an old man.  Was it the flu? No money for a doctor.  And his grandmother, Sarah Winn Johnson Eason, who buried half of her dozen or more children, whose life stretched out to old womanhood.  As a young woman in Mississippi, she buried a child and gave birth to another two days later.  I have Parala and Isaac’s wedding picture when they were both fresh and young.  I have his eyes and her thick hair.  The other two pictures I’ve seen, she has become this Grapes of Wrath woman, so thin and weary with life.  And I had this feeling last night that I was her and walked in her thin dresses and loved her children and how that for all them, save my uncle, did not save them from the darkness ahead of them.

Galaxy Girl

There is a question next to her,

a small dog’s face,

loyalty to what she carries,

a cluster in the sky.

She is a new constellation,

lead by nebula light

and a galaxy brain.  ‘

Shy girl hiding her face beneath stars, exposed with her large naval,

all the dark matter of her belly, the crook of her arm, womanly hips.

I am in love.  I believe she would carry me to the dimensions of dreams,

through the night as minutes pass.  Call her Midnight and be done.

Sad Elephant

  Sad Elephant (seven minutes)

The winged insects flew

in from another world.

My stomach churns diamond shards

but my tears only drop red paint.

I step into the desert half crazed and wary.

I was a dandy but now I am old

and heavy with stars, scars on my skin.

I look for the palo verde and hope for healing.

My tears become little men

who pick the palms.   I’m leaving the wild ocean

for temptations of rocks and yellow sand.

I am blessed to wear elephant shoes,

but I grieve the water wings

I leave behind.  Cacti rattle hymns

for the predetermined God, the One who lives

in arid spaces.  I’ve gone to listen for him.

The ocean was too noisy.  My birth jungle brims

with confusing myth.  My tears speak of the wild gifts

buried within my heart.

I pray erosion will uncover them,

the crazed animals, dear unformed art,

the unknown blessings.

Breaking Rules, Breaking Through Feeling

   I’m breaking the rules.  With Intuitive Painting, or the Zero Point Painting, sharing work is discouraged because the practice is more about process than product.  My teachers say that comments, either positive or negative, may have an impact on what wants to arise from within.  If someone says they like an image, it might stop the painter from modifying it.  Up to this point, though, I don’t feel for me that’s the case. Now with writing . . . watch out!   But I’m freer with painting.  What is powerful for me is to watch my own judgments and feelings about the work.  There’s a tide that I experience as I paint.  I may loathe an object, be disturbed by another, fret over my ability to paint something inside me that wants birth.  Michelle Cassou says we need to stay with our discomfort.

It’s a powerful lesson because that discomfort does transform if I let it be.  I’ve done this enough to know that images or “mistakes” I absolutely hate when they first appear end up what I treasure most.

Being connected with the brush means being connected with myself.  As I worked yesterday,  I was obsessing over her face.  I still do not like the nose.  I wanted both eyes bright, but no matter what I did the right stayed dark.  During the last-minute of class I applied the coat on the two lighter triangles and now, at least at this moment, I don’t want the eye the same shade as the other .

My teacher observed my spending a lot of time dabbing the paper with my brush.   See the line from where the Mama Angel is emerging?  She suggested I make strokes, feeling the paint, feeling the movement.  This line was the first stroke I did.  Speaking of tides, I immediately felt my bottled emotions come up.   As I drew the Jehovah Angel in the left corner, I started having an anxiety attack.  More emotions, and they emerged through moving my hand, the color of paint, and because I was beginning to breathe.

I’m working on a novel I put away years ago about the nature of Hell, which I really should pluralized . . . literal ones on Earth, the fantasy hell my characters fashion for the afterlife, demons, redemption, angels.  Hell was very a literal place for my quasi-Southern Baptist parents, and I worry that my more traditional friends make judgments about the state of my soul.  In the past this has kept me quiet about my less than fundamentalist beliefs.

So, being seen, being judged, the dis-ease of being worried about, a track record of  feeling I don’t express myself well when I speak and am confronted, and BAM! Panic, anxiety, a wonderful demon Jehovah God is born, but one whose heart shows my real feelings about the Divine.  The source of Love who we have made into our own vindictive, angry, jealous projections.  Here’s a judgment: the panic is actually a good thing because it shows my need to feel.  I have a very hard time crying.  The tears almost came as I painted.  They’re all suppressed as I write once again.  But that’s the path I need to open in me.  To allow feelings to blossom, to be okay with being afraid of their power because that is where I am. Stay with the discomfort, eh?

There’s the fairy angel, the enigma angel, and the Mama Angel, the last to appear.  The flowers in her hair came late as well.  I worked on her for about three hours, and when time was up I groaned because I was in a place where I was feeling and alive.  She is not done.  I’ll take her back next month.

Superlative Wings and Adjective Birds

When I started the Heron’s Path’s blog, the idea was to use Clive Matson’s writing workshop exercise of Writing the Present for seven minutes a day.  The blog morphed into other things, but I think it is a good practice and it’s time to return to it as often as I can.  So,

The straw mermaid on the mantel stands next to the three stone houses.  My eyes sting though there is no salt in them. The house hums.  Spring is the hardest season for me.  Small words are all my hands can hold.  I am held by fifty small hands of children.  Adverbs are the angels in our minds.  Superlative wings and adjective birds.  Cubes have twelve edges and six sides.  We dust ourselves with the mixture of pencil shavings and tears.  We dance and stumble.  Recite our tables and carry ones to infinity.  We talk about dimensions and time and space.  Ask Einstein questions and tell lies.  Our hula hoops are crooked zeros after months of play.  The girls are all mermaids and the boys become Atlas holding up the world.

Guest Blogger: Robin Fogel-Shrive Across the Universe: Fifty shades of gray matter

 

Across the Universe: Fifty shades of grey matter

As an English literature major and regular reader of what I consider high-end fiction and literary non-fiction, I surprised myself and my friends recently when I borrowed the first in the Fifty Shades of Grey book series this summer.

Justifiably, I was curious as to the reading furor this series was creating, and, I could also claim the need for one to stay abreast of current cultural literacy, but truth be known, I was hooked after the first chapter in book one.

My best friend in San Francisco, whose copy I snuck for that first chapter, exclaimed, “I just don’t see you reading this book!” as she headed off to her mass transit work commute, book in tow.

I couldn’t wait to get back home, as I knew that the women in my spin exercise class were all reading it too, and I was ready to establish my name in the borrow queue (you might gather that purchasing the book would have been slightly damaging to my ego).

I found myself rushing this sweet woman in her 70s, who had the copy in her possession, to please hurry and finish. She said she would have it done by Wednesday. Oh well, I would have to wait.

Later that day, I was on the phone with my mother, who is also in her 70s.

She recently received a Kindle for her birthday and is enjoying downloading books she likes to read, the genre of contemporary mysteries. Her voice lowered as she shared, “you’ll never believe what I am reading for a book group I joined,” I froze and mentally pleaded, “Oh no, please do not say you are reading Fifty Shades of Grey,” as I turned 50 shades of scarlet.

She whispered, “Madame Bovary. I thought you would be proud of me.”

“Wow,” I responded with a sigh of relief, “that’s great!”

Gustave Flaubert’s tale of a French woman in a less than exciting marriage was scandalous at the occasion of its publication in 1857. While quite graphic for the 19th century, this novel of literary merit pales in comparison to the detailed descriptions one finds in Fifty Shades.

Meanwhile, I had State of Wonder, the highly acclaimed and most recent publication by a favorite author, Ann Patchett, on reserve at the library. I had been anxiously awaiting this read all summer; a novel of literary worth and smart style.

Ironically, when the book finally arrived, it was hastily positioned on my bedroom floor, taking second place to E.L. James’s paperback, which I had grabbed on Wednesday and proceeded to devour in a little more than 24 hours.

Chuckling to myself over this fait accompli’, I thought I would bring some laughs to the spin group by dropping it off at the Friday class, daring to expose my fast paced reading of what we might generally label a trashy book, one that engages very little grey matter of our intellect.

I was looking forward to finally settling in with Patchett’s bestseller and re-establishing my reading priorities.

Now as a literacy advocate, I was glad to see so many people reading and discussing a common book personally, I enjoyed the witty email banter between the two main characters in the first two books.

Oh, did I just say first two books?

Yes, I must confess that as I returned book one, someone in the class yelled out, “book two is here it’s yours if you want it!”

And while I truly thought I was done with Mr. Grey and Ms. Steele, I grabbed Fifty Shades Darker and headed to the nearest reading spot to prolong the saga of this dysfunctional, unbelievable, and yet engaging romance.

State of Wonder is now ready to resume, my grey matter ready to fire up, yet somehow I have a sneaky suspicion that book three of the Fifty Shades series will by some means find its way into my control before the summer ends. After all, it is supposed to be the best book of the trilogy.

Robin Fogel-Shrive is a high school teacher in Lake County. She can be reached at rshrive@yahoo.com.