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.

My students wrote stories of unicorns today. forty five minutes of silence as they flew in their minds in their enchanted forests.  We shared our first sentences, standing up tall. No girliness and mumbling allowed. Cute isn’t squirming or being shy I told them. Be proud.  Wonderful listening. Magical worlds. Once upon a times. We left the classroom on our magical steeds and felt our horns begin to grow out of our heads.  The magic of writing was real. All are authors. All are creative . All are artist. Seven and eight and nine years old. Summer is galloping within our grasp and our pens create new worlds where unicorns are our friends.

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?  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.

I have had too many students put into prison.  I just saw a headline yesterday. Another troubled child, now grown, sent to prison for shooting someone.  As a teacher you see how disturbed they are, how much in pain, how horrific their lives are, how dysfunctional their families, how abused they come, how broken they were as small children.  I write of Eddie and his brother Richard, both who murdered other young men, who came to school beaten and wild and in pain.  Eddie was always in trouble from the day he walked in as a kindergarten. Richard was quiet. We thought he’d “make it.”  I didn’t teach Eddie to read.  Richard could have been a scholar.  I think of driving along a winding road outside Willits and hearing the news that Alberto had shot his brother Rafael and how I stopped in the middle of the road taking in the news.  Now Sonny.  Red-headed and angry, so angry as a child.  How helpless we feel with these children as teachers.  There is nowhere to send them for the help they need.  They’re fighting generational abuse.  No stories we read to them can heal their spirits.  Poor children, all of them, illiterate parents.  And our prisons are full of men who were once boys who created chaos because their tears were ripped from t hem and their fists and guns and  hatred that has grown like a poisoned weed has filled their souls in their place.

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.

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.

The Scent of Violets

My palms form a tent

over distant cities as I pray

and I want violets to rain down,

and to smell healing oils

instead of sulfur,

and see angels pour the waters of peace

from their place of mythic origin,

no angels on backs of apocalyptic horses,

no plagues, nor rumors of war,

no masquerades of death,

and to hear that myths of sacrifice

are no longer allowed by the laws of Heaven,

the testing of Abraham eased from human memory,

of Isaac in peaceful slumber, no vengeful Lord

waiting to see how far a father will go,

no knife raised above any altar.

no offering of children to slaughter,

no cruel jokes of a jealous god,

not even a scapegoat desired,

and for prayers to rise to Heaven

on the scent of violets and answers given

as rain falls silently to a quiet Earth.

From my chapbook Threshold, Meeting of the Minds Publications