Nebunele.com

Communication

It struck me driving over the bridge toward home—
the lights of the city! The dark water!
Oh, how the clouds reflected all the hazy light pollution,
made me feel small and adventurous
and alone, and like if I spoke
to the city itself, it might reply.
I turned to my new love in the passenger’s seat
and tried: “I just got this feeling of…
of yearning.”
“Of what?”
“Yearning. Like a…like a longing for something. For a life
I don’t have. Or something.” I felt foolish.
“I know a cure for that!” he proclaimed.
“But I don’t want to be cured. I like this, this
lonely melancholy. Do you see?”
He didn’t. I tried again.
“You know when you’re hiking somewhere beautiful, alone?
That pretty loneliness you get?”
“I think I know what you mean. Being alone in nature.”
“Yes, but it’s a feeling of being just outside of a magic life.”
He looked at me blankly.
“I guess I’m not explaining it very well. I was just wondering if you ever feel that way.”
“Maybe you should write a poem,” he said.

It’s like that time when you were nine and you spoke to trees, thinking they were wiser than you, and patient. It’s like the first understanding that your parents’ wooden chessboard, that inert object, is older than you. It’s like that time you cried outside at night and the wind answered, tickling the back of your neck and the new hairs prickling out of your armpits. It’s like the first boy/girl party in seventh grade that went late into the night, and the music was loud and some people were holding each other for the first time, and it was dark and you didn’t belong. It’s being very human which means wanting something so badly it feels good just to want it, that satisfying hole, that nerve-wracking hunger. I am, therefore I need. Something. It’s just like being alive. Like that time you were alive.

-Alissa

So much energy into gaining speed down the runway, engines grinding and swearing and panting and hollering, heavy effortful pushing that focuses so much on that drive forward, this heavy bird trying to run fast. And then—a flap drops, light—and we are airborne. Inside, people yawn and do crossword puzzles and meanwhile we are FLYING. Flying. Those Wright brothers and whoever else—I mean, holy cow, here’s something we can’t do and they freaking DID it! Left the ground. Not coming back. Freedom. Like fantasy. Man’s wanted to fly since he saw a bird. Hard to think that at that moment Evolution didn’t look up and go, with a satisfied nod, “My work here is done.” And what I think in the upward-rush-downward-press of that moment of liftoff is “I love, I love, I love. I love, and I am leaving the earth.” I want sex then, something naked and free and thrilling and hard. Flight! Think of it! We are all so jaded, we passengers. But the pilots know. Oh, they know the miracle and they hold it quiet in themselves while everything else goes on, the world, people running about. The pilots take people and put them in the sky. They know what it is they do. And then they bring us gently down again. And we, we put our magazines away and jumble inefficiently out the tiny exit, nodding at them as we fish out our cell phones. I will never get over this modern world. When I die and meet all those people in the afterlife who must be in such high demand I will hunt down Da Vinci and pull him aside and confide in him in a voice husky with emotion, a hoarse whisper because I won’t be able to manage a full voice, and I will say to him, “Leonardo,” I’ll say, “when I was in life, I FLEW.” And he will meet my eyes gravely, and the awe in mine will make his twinkle, and he will understand and be glad.

November

A call to prayer, a mantra,
like an old, familiar song.
When I’m tied up
in the world and how it’s wrong;
when I’m afraid to leave my bed
because of knots
inside my head,
the rain dissolves the rope. Says
“listen.” Says “listen.” Says
“ssshhh…listen to me
tapping on the window.”
And I hope.

Well, it’s 8am, and no sleep for me all night. I’ve been trying since two. I blame the cold medicine I took two–no, three days ago for throwing my schedule all out of whack. Hence the 5am poetry yesterday and here, now, the 8am poetry today. I gotta start sleeping at night or I’ll inundate my so-far-faithful audience.

A poem for Erin

She knew the dress would be too tight.

It was a knitted dress, homemade lining sewn in,
and spying it in her grandmother’s cedar chest
she knew also that it would look well on her.
That too-hot day,
the too-thick garment—
alone in her grandmother’s house,
she laid out the dress on the bed
and abandoned her shorts in a crumpled pile
on the bedroom floor.
the dress inched over her shoulders—oh, tight, but smooth,
a tug or two wedging it in place.
Her breasts squashed in it, her arms
restricted to 45 degrees,
she regarded herself in the mirror,
a funny old-fashioned girl,
comely, in an old knit dress. A fly
buzzed at the closed half of the half-open window.
No breeze stirred the gauze curtains.

When her grandmother returned,
the girl, in shorts again, shamefaced, explained.
The dress, too hot, too close, would not yield.
Difficulty breathing, half an hour’s stifling lonely struggle,
half-clothed and her sweat soaking into the old dress,
the delicate heirloom, the old treasure.
The clinging of the lining.
Trapped. She could not move her arms.
Discomfort, dehydration, panic. Scissors.
Her grandmother’s astonishment.
“but I made that dress in 1950…”
“I know, Grandma. I’m sorry.”

-Alissa

I started to go in to bed with everyone else, but
as I turned to close the sliding
glass door, I caught sight
of the light.
Those hard cut-out shadows cast
by the patio furniture
were not from any streetlight,
but the nearly-bursting moon,
fervently beaming all over the valley,
crackling through hushed desert air,
slamming light off the concrete.

My grandparents’ mansion reclines on a hill
looking out across Dove Hollow in ranch-land, southern California,
into the holdings of other palatial residences
one hillside over.
They face each other in uncomfortable
camaraderie—it feels safe, cozy, this night-time curl
of inward-facing millionaires, but a little
too easy to look through each others’
illuminated picture windows.

Swimming in the infinity pool
with my mom this afternoon
were a dozen stupid and angry
bees, who must have thought a dip looked
inviting. We scooped them out
with the same long-handled pool net that,
later,
my dad used to capture the baby
black widow
we found under the lip of the Jacuzzi.
As I sit here on the patio,
I’m in the middle of one of the light-colored squares
of concrete ringing the pool.
I was going to sit on the edge
of the planter, but today Joan warned me
that’s where the black widows were most infested.
Here on the light concrete, I reason,
I’ll see a little dark shadow coming towards me
before it’s too late.
Joan also told me about
the scorpion she found in the front doorway,
and how before they had the exterminator come
they would go to the bathroom at night
with their feet hoisted in the air,
out of the invisible scuttling insects’ way.

The people here have orchards
for tax reasons.
They keep a whole room off the kitchen
to store the booze.
You can look across the way and see fences
rolling beautifully across acres
of empty, arid land.

A neighbor’s Chihuahua’s throat
was slit ear to ear by coyotes,
a few months back. They say
the coyotes call to the dogs, invite them into the pack,
then turn on them and attack them.
Well, when the neighbors found their Chihuahua,
they took him to the emergency vet straightaway
and saved his life.
But the very next time that dumb dog heard the coyotes calling—
“Here, we’re here, your wild desert freedom is here—
Your rough & tumble gang
from the wrong side of the tracks—
Your brethren cauterized by hard life,
your tough brotherhood, your tarnished paladins—
We’ll take you in
if you can take the heat—“
That crazy dog ran away to join them
a second time.

Ladies & gents, some technical difficulties with the flash player. Sparky, heeeeelp! Everyone else: music coming soon…I hope…

Played a bit in me dad’s studio with him and made a song out of the kite poem a few entries ago! Lyrics & vocals me; instrumentation, composition and mixing Doug; melody both of us; supporting vocals at the very end me & Claytie.

Whee!

Update (by Sparky): All better now. Everyone: enjoy Alissa’s rocking singing!

I just read the latest entries in all my various friends’ blogs and it gave me blogging envy. So here I am. I don’t have all that much to say. Hang on, let me see if I’ve written a poem lately…Here’s one…(thanks Claytie for the title)

I Never Took My Shoes Off At the Beach but My Toes Are Full of Sand

little miracles
cat I thought was a boy getting pregnant
five-dollar bill in my pocket out of the wash
Sam calling me right when I thought of him
The music I love playing on the stereo at the thrift store
Enough peanut butter for a sandwich
if you scrape the bottom of the jar

When I was ten years old
my aunt gave me a big white shell.
She told me to hold it up to my ear
so I could hear the ocean in it.

The air above me is so vast.
The ground I lie on is so vast.
I am the seam where they meet—

the whole globe pushing
sand into my back,
the whole atmosphere pushing
air into my lungs.

I went to the beach today.
The air was velvet on my skin.
Damp sand broke apart in my fingers.
I could hear the ocean in it.

-Alissa

This is exciting! So a new friend of mine, Michael Welch, is a prolific and knowledgeable haiku poet. I asked him if he had read that Beth Lapides book that I was so happy about finding a few months ago. He’d heard of it (not read it), but has a different notion of what haiku actually consists of than most of us Americans who learned from our fourth-grade teachers that it’s a poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third, and little else.

So here’s the additional information I had already gathered through being a poetry fan: that 5-7-5 is sort of a bad translation from the original Japanese form (hence there are plenty of lovely haiku that don’t stick to that formality). That haiku are more about concrete imagery than emotional description. That what really defines a haiku is that little “aha” moment that fits compactly into the three lines–a little mental jump that the poem helps you make.

But! My understanding was still far short of what a haiku really is! Michael’s essay in haikuworld has shown me different. Key bit of understanding that has changed the way I read haiku, and I had to read the essay twice before it sunk in: a haiku depends upon a comparison between two distinct things (usually with a pause or caesura between them), and the “aha” in a good haiku should come from lingering on the two disparate images until the link between them becomes apparent.

Wow! Just looking back at the haiku examples in the essay that way, my perception of them shifts, and they become hundreds of times more awesome. How did I not get this before? This is a whole poetic form that I had mostly dismissed as boring–I sigh to think how many brilliant little insights I have totally overlooked in my life by simply not knowing what to look for in the haiku I encountered.

Hurrah for a new analytical toy!
Alissa

Just going through some of the poems I’ve written in the past six months or so. These ones are all works in progress. Edited 7-29-07 in response to feedback–keep it comin’.

12-16-06

All right, start now please.
…I
It’s a little difficult, could you try again?
I…
That’s it…
I think sometimes I get overwhelmed with all there is to think about I don’t think it’s very useful to think about a hundred things at once or even a dozen at once it’s a little surprise when there’s just
one
thought and it’s a nice surprise like opening the mailbox when it’s not your birthday and there’s a hand-addressed envelope in there though usually lately that’s a ploy from a credit card company or a big charity that wants a donation everybody wants your attention but for a moment it’s like, hey, somebody wrote me a letter.

Nobody does that any more.

12-14-06
(winds up to 70mph it’s a real storm a real crazy storm)

I wish I had a giant kite
I’d take it outside let it loose and hold on tight
and I’d ride it through the lightening
and I’d ride it through the rain
and I’d dance it to the thunder
and I’d be myself again

I wish I had a rocket ship
I’d get aboard count to ten and let ‘er rip
and I’d ride it through the atmosphere
and I’d ride it to the sun
and I’d race it out the universe
and I’d come back all alone

I wish I had a pair of wings
I’d spread ‘em out flap ‘em and see what it brings
and I’d fly right up to heaven
and I’d fly right up to God
and I’d pirouette to Holy Writ
and I’d know what Man forgot

12-12-06
For Sleeping

My heart beats too fast
sometimes
like when the wind
(loud & wild)
makes neighbors holler outside
or when a truck
(fast & heavy)
makes me jump back onto the curb
or when

(a boy)

7/17/07
Vindication

I’m a slow eater.
I’m a veteran of the impatient
sighs of my polite
tablemates.
Sometimes
I apologize
duck my head
and shovel it in,
or let the waiter
swipe my plate early.
Sometimes, though,
I like
making

them

wait

12-15-06
You know you

Buzzing a little on wine
and hanging around with your ex-boyfriend
is a little like

like buzzing a little on wine
and driving around when you know you

you shouldn’t