So now it’s about new reverberations, repercussions. Ripples. Banjo shy. A new round of imperfection. Play it slow enough to get all the notes right. Steady. He says it’s nerve wracking having the coaches after his ass. He has to play for them now. Ramification. Do the words fit between a capital letter and a period. Are they better served, is it better served with all this formality. Attraction. No. Yes. The issue is falling in love. I fall in love with men. And women just the same. It’s so fundamental the words sound silly. But apparently it is not.

So I snaked right back to formal music lessons. Imagine that. Talking about a new round of imperfection. There are differences. Choice. Mine. Standard bearer, me. Pleasure mine. Meanwhile my mother, OurMother has turned another corner. And like with our father everyone is finding that safe place. Where they won’t get struck down when she falls. Out of arm’s way, or in deep. I’m going in. It’s the inside passage I find the safest. The most familiar. I hear the music at night. Or walking down the street. I will work and play with heart toward courageous excellence. Not perfection.

The problem is the shorthand, it begs the question. It construes rather than describes or informs. Bisexual multisexual ambisexual ambivalent bivalent multivalent. It’s all in the story. The whole story. Nothing but. Anything else is too silly or apologetic for words. Or rhetorical, tautological. Yet, no words, is as big a problem. Misconstrues. It’s been a process. I fall in love with men. Yeah so I fall in love with women. Yeah so I fall in love with qualities not born of not determined by not limited to particularity of gender or equipment.

I am illuminated by men. And women.

So here we go again. Circles open and close. He’s gotten a divorce. No surprise there. I don’t know why. Don’t know how I knew. That’s not true. You could see it in their faces. But then he was always a tight ass. Liked me cause I didn’t pay that any nevermind. But now I see, that we’ve come back face to face to balance the books. He mentored me through mine. Made sure I was on the straight and narrow. Was the polestar.
Now it’s my turn.
Time is short. No one up to the task of the mirror.

She’d been dreading her music lesson. Lived in dread of her music lesson all week in fact. The worst was playing from memory. As if it were simply a matter of mind. But for her it was. Losing her way she had no recourse but to start over, it never until just now dawning on her to recreate the melody. To recall the whole. To reintegrate it conceptually. But she had never listened. Or heard. Never had been inside the music she was playing. Never intimate with her instrument. Mindless and heartless. And living in dread of her music lesson.

Her gait gave you the sense she had the room of the world to make good use of her godgiven hips. I watched the weight of her frame shift from one leg to the other in magnificent concert. Her insouciant stride entrained my heart. She had long and fleshy legs. Almost tight jeans. Layered lime green, red, and black sweaters in keeping with her lackadaisical stride. Topped her abundant and exuberant close on red hair with a black and white striped cap. Pearly green eyes. Ruddy cheeks Glossy lips. Long reaching smile.
Wasted it all talking into her cell phone.

I come, go with a sense of leaving home this time, not going home. With a sense of leaving my home. Being absent from my home. As a visitor. With a visitor’s eye. I will make the leap, cross the threshold. Enter the community for the while I’m there. Bridge the distance that I’ve purposefully recreated.

He said something about not feeling a need to go because he felt no blood love. Casts an odd disilluminating light. The blood connection never lured him either. It has nothing I would venture to say do with blood. But agreements.

It’s all self-serving.

It was good. A finishing of that thing we started. And I said I would. Go when she was moved again. David asked if she knew where she was. Home she said. Composing the cadenza now for the final movement of her symphony. And I am comforted. There is nothing that needs doing, no need of hers that will be or is left wanting.
She is not lost to herself. Only to us. The mother is gone. Proving there was a mother. Had been mothering. A mother’s caring. She knows my name. Remembers the face. But not what it means.

She has made that final turn. Severed her ties. Her view diminishing. As it should be her world, like a babe’s is increasingly taken up not only with her needs but with herself. I had a moment touched by her smallness. I was heart full of her simple sweetness, an immense innocence. She is left now with no agenda, no sense of self that wills or intends or effects has only needs that start and end with the body and so the heart. And she is well loved where she is now and I am at peace and without regrets.

Dish. She wants more on the dish. I suppose how and why she caught my eye, and at least the same amount of detail over time as we know about him. After all if he’s only the foil why is he served up on a silver platter. And she relegated as if left-over.--Why did she capture me?--I told. Discussed the quandary. And have evoked nothing.

Not good.

It’s a vibration. A sound. A smell. A woman’s welcome. A way she holds herself. Says hello. Shares, emanates a warmth. Ssignals come on. It’s that thing that women do. Amplify.

Why are he and she in the same story? I suppose why not doesn’t count. Because. Because he is the backdrop against which I notice everything. Against which I notice my inherent flaws. Notice the nuances and the hypocrisies. Notice that the kindness of strangers is something I count on. Assume. Take for granted. And all of a sudden it’s time for a contribution to the fund. Time to notice my own bullshit. Or worse chickenshit. Because we were thrown together as life would have it. To make choices. About actions. To stand on the line. Act on our truths.

Told him he needed to speak to me. As if I had truth to tell him. Or something that belongs to him. More like a truth of his. A knowing somehow he’s not yet learned the lesson. Not yet come clean. I wonder if I will dare to ask him.
Meanwhile the cat plays with her toy. Knocking it off the counter only to catch it before it falls. And she does. Outsmarts herself.
He’s still a pretender. Mirror mirror on the wall. Talks the talk. Doesn’t take
the risk.
She’s brought me the rubber band. Fights me for it.

so I said stretch it out to that next place where it's not so, um contained... where the risk is, for you, and he said I'm honestly not sure what risk means for me though... what those concrete steps are...

to paraphrase sol stein:
think of something excruciatingly private, embarrassing, revelatory that you would never tell
risk is the courage it takes to tell those secrets good and memorable writing is saying what others may sometimes think but would not say
probing (our) secrets is the key to finding an emotional root, getting past so what to giving a damn

It’s not that she was someone I would notice. It was more the flush of prayer. Of music speaking for god. No warning. No bells. No stardust, I was entrained. No preliminaries. No dance. The joy of spotting fireflies. It was a heady perfume. Innocent as my aging mother. And unfettered. Even with all the encumbrances. It was not a question of making sense. It was impossible. But even if nothing more were done it was already on the books.

It was the way she brushed past me and answered without having been asked a question foremost on my mind.

her aged innocence and passivity bypass prudent discretion and you are plunged into the moat just as you enter heart, so beware the tenderness allows you no free will distance, it is instantaneous and the tears are not sadness but the wash of ones soul the primordial purification before baptism I am put in mind of the fullness of minor keys pouty lips not silky hair and meat cooking on the spit wind on the steppes, wolves circling the camp a babe wrapped in fur listening to the sounds of its parents couple
I will be born in the morning

Fair, it’s not fair, accepting work after the deadline...at face value that is a correct statement and there was a time I understood it...a young and righteous nursing instructor, passing was 76 let’s say and she the student had 75 and they passed her, I was flabbergasted. I was outraged. As what’s his name said, there are rules and how are we going to know what to do if we don’t follow the rules?*!*? Who knows what to do once we’ve breached the contract?
But the deadline was not a contract. It was a convenience. And ours at that.

I know lots and nothing about it. An intermediate beginner is what I am. Lots of familiarity. Lots of vicarious expertise. But little experience of my own in spite of having played the violin for at least as long as I was married the first time. He gets frustrated with me. That I can’t make immediate sense of “3rd finger 5th fret 2nd string”or when I cannot repeat the rolls he shows me just listening to them. Me too. But that’s where the beginner comes in.
And the for having listened all my life not really ever having heard.

The camelias are blooming a nice refrain after having plucked and tossed the many once frozen now rotten lemons. The days are spring like and the urge to make haste into the garden is terrific, but we resist. It may yet freeze or flood again. Instead we brave the plants laid waste. Meanwhile I’m getting it, perhaps I did after all learn some things: the inevitability of scales and other exercises; learning new and refreshing old repertoire; sight reading and looking ahead; becoming more familiar and–llike any good love affair–after the first blush, the ups and downs of making way.

sliced any which way poetry including its music is entrained by and responsible to feelings less than ideas, in this chicken and egg debate the feelings come first hands down whereas in prose--no matter how poetic--it can still be argued either way, though good writing no matter its genre including nonfiction will elicit and evoke--the more the better--which is not to say there should be no constraint

and like the many her acclaimed work does not get bogged down in intent and message, which is not to say it carries none, but that it’s subservient to

Interesting what I’m learning about music somehow that translates to writing poetry. I was looking at the sweet phrases in my newest poem and the cadence and the density of some of the specific words–indemnity for instance and asking myself what I mean by this or that and I was pleased to have seen for each question I had answers and peacefulness. And I was opened by the re-creation. It is good. And it is different, as is my story, from what came before.

It comes from some beginning, some aboriginal wisdom that is connected to the music. Oh shit!

It’s no use. There’s nothing to be done. The irony–which the godfearing in you will think of as a miracle, is that’s the perfect solution. So I’ll take the remains of my righteousness and sit it on the deck–what you folks who see yourselves as genteel call a veranda. By the sounds of it there’s a new batch of crickets which you uppity highfalooters wouldbe calling cicadas. At this point I’m for the bullfrogs. For the way of things, and not interfering.

“Henry!”

Then again, that wife of mine, with her bony fingers, likely has something else altogether in mind.

I’m struck literally by how her nature poetry is suffused with unaccounted for judgement construed as metaphor leaving me nothing to identify with except how stupid I am and how enlightened she is and the odd mistrust she has of the trees she loves so much to endure–there it is–the recapitulation of abandonment

I see this working through my own heavy handed metaphors that–just the other day I felt so smart about–but were soundless or worse discordant

true poetry evokes and leaves room to drift and imagine and so once gain music reaches around and bites me in the ass

pleased as punch lines as we call them in a manner of speaking are about lack of trust, it has been a different or more conscious process this time spending deliberate time with each of the images or rather each of the feelings and the images used in response to them and then the visa verse coming back to see if the words elicited from scratch as it were those feelings and of course not surprisingly the last pleased as punch line did nothing but obstruct, it wasn’t even a good syncopation
but I did move it to the title~

I did move it to the title and got busted just the same, a phrase meaningful to me but otherwise a throwaway, imparting nothing to an innocent reader, to the naive (a wide spectrum word this) reader so I am forced to account for why it is so important, what it was is intended to convey not already said

and so the last bivouac, the last hold fell and I was left standing as I was left standing which started the whole damn thing in the first place

uncovered unfettered or fettered depending on which way you look at it

again it’s a question of geography, more than meteorology–and not a question of surprise though I say I was surprised, by what she asked and then I had to say of course I was not surprised–it was through the looking glass or wormhole if you’d rather of purity to that place uncluttered (ha by feeling, yes exactly) that place that is tears and white in the presence of all colors sense and in connection to in the not separate from the perfect stillness, windlessness at the center (of I) , the wellspring of sensation but not emotion or feelings–a different compilation

for better or worse right or wrong he’s basically an all or nothing kind of a guy and does bear the weight of a grudge and otherwise, well he’s really not--men do that better than women, that not looking back thing that line thing being stationary which is not about compromise or flexibility--it’s about knowing where the line is, then again maybe it’s not a man thing at all but a line thing
ah yes the line thing, too late to blame my mother speaking of which wow on how now that she’s not I am making music

So talking of snaking back around...I remembered or noticed more like it that I’d forgotten my resolve to do it differently this time. Yeah, so here I am back to the p’s and q’s of it...all these periods and capital letters and clues about where I might be taking a breath. I’ve noticed that when my banjo loses its sonorous quality it’s my instrument that’s amiss, not it. It is me that is clutching. Amazing how lessons learned surfing inform my banjo playing informs my poetry.
And so I remember the tao. And the heart of the matter. Joyousness--