Last Entry Here

I am creating a website and will have a blog there. Thank you so much to all of you who have, over the last three years, read and responded to my "letters to the world" (Emily Dickinson). High Heels in the Rain gave me a room to write in. I'd like to softly close its door with words from an exquisite writer, a new favorite of mine.

I believe in the power of transformation, both literal and symbolic. Before we can change, we must be able to imagine it. And if there is no spirit left inside you to begin this journey of the imagination, turn to the earth. The forest. The stream. Touch the bark of a living tree. See the flit of chickadee. The perfection of a dragonfly’s flight […] Leave the concrete and the walls. Enter the living. Breathe. HIROMI GOTO

Ancestors

In a dream I rode on a bus with aunts,

Aunt Maude, Aunt Belle, Gloria.

They placed their ancient hands on mine,

gentle as moths,

as each of them said my name.

Road Trips for NAMI

Just talked to my friend Gregory. I have now been published by him in his online profile. "My friend says I am Buddha's brother." He is--infinitely kind and gentle. We traveled all over King County a couple years ago giving talks for NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Alliance). He used to complain that I made him miss the exits because I would bring up an interesting topic just before we were supposed to turn. "Did you know that Churchill called his depressions 'the old black dog'?" I'd say. "Really?" Gregory would say and then "Damn, I missed it." At his request, I worked hard to stop distracting his driving. After a year, we knew each other so well, we were like a married couple. We're less like that now except when we are.

Colors Passing Through Us

Today at writing group, we celebrated color with the help of art supplies and Marge Piercy's marvelous poem, Colors Passing Through Us. After creating an explosion of crayon on my paper, I wrote this: "When I see this color, kind of a neon green, I feel happy. I saw it on the collar of a woman's coat yesterday and had to restrain myself from touching her coat. If this color was a room, I'd go missing. If this color was a boat, I'd never come home. It is a singing color, my mother belting out a Christmas carol, my two sisters playing the flute in church, Chopin, a lone whistler on a quiet street. This color says, Marry me, and I say, I do. We go to Vegas. The preacher, of course, looks like Judy Garland and, hat low over one eyes, she winks with the other and is this color. This color is the last Olly Olly In Come Free of summer and I am twelve and say to myself, I will never get tagged out again, and I am right."

The Skype Incident

Today, my friend Bill set me up for skype, however, my computer has audio but no videocam. He tested the system later in the day. I was just out of the shower and sitting on my bed half-naked when I pressed on the receive button. I got confused about what could be visible and yelled, "Did you see me?" He and another friend were watching a football game upstairs and were helpless with laughter. "Yes, we did!" they finally sputtered. Their faces were live and mobile. I was being incinerated by embarrassment before I realized they couldn't have seen a thing. Both of them nailed an impression of my voice to repeat at dinner. Dead-on. I swear I try to live like a dignified lady and I never quite pull it off.

Fly Fishing with Doris

I dreampt that Doris Day in her slightly scruffier later years made me a sandwich. Then she and I and several others went fly fishing off a cliff side. The sun was out, and Doris, who was in fine form, caught a salmon. Although it was sunny and breezy, I and a boy I didn't know, sang Singing in the Rain loudly and off-key.

In My Dreams

Sunday afternoon and we're all home, except Phil. Projects upstairs, down. The dryer clanking. NPR on the kitchen radio. "I'm going to be emotional," a woman said as I listen on my way to the restroom, having no idea of context. Then the woman is emotional and the NPR reporter so graceful about it. Deb is blending apples from the tree. Bill is sawing. I'm cleaning as usual. Light dapples the house. It is fine to be my age. It is fine to have arrived here. In my dreams from childhood, this should have been one.

Early Zines

"Burke's Printing Poetry [was] the essential text for aesthetics, design, and letterpress production of handmade poetry books. Craftmanship is meditative, and it is in a way devotional," he wrote. "We watch our hands leap to the work, well trained and eager.

From Ink under the Fingernails by Bob Rose in the anthology, Fishtown and the Skagit River.

The Round Sound

Odd thing about circumstance. How you adjust to it. If someone says, "Go be green. Go live in that green cube." If things are strange enough, you become green without questioning. Thirteen years ago, I spent the night at Harborview with my sister and my brother, wrapped in sheets, sitting on the floor of a waiting room, leaning against the wall in silence, being green. A Japanese chaplain came by about 2:00 a.m. and my sibs, both born in Japan, seemed happy to talk to him, to have something familiar handed to them like a gift. I listened, having not been born in Japan, but happy to hear the round sound of voices.

Right Now

Today I got off the bus at Westlake to a jazz band, men in black sunglasses playing trumpet, trombone, tuba and drums. A little girl kept running from her mother's arms to the middle of the square. She would stand two or three feet away from whoever was playing, laughing. I wondered, "Who are you? Who will you be? Are you falling in love with something huge and beautiful right now?"

Word Blossoms

"One never forgets a compliment. 'You looked positively beatific during the exam,' Mrs. Finch, her tenth-grade English told her. 'Staring out the window, a secret little smile on your smile. I was worried, to tell the truth. But then you turned in the best of the bunch.'" Thus, beatific--blissful, saintly, serenely happy--was forever and irrevocably hers" (from Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum).

Up to my Ankles

Read at the Rose on Thursday night. Nervous beforehand. My friend Rachel from work was there and she kept taking my psychic temperature. "Do you want me to hold your hand? Do you want a hug? Another beer?" "It's non-alcoholic," I said. "Oh...well, then beer isn't going to help you." Wouldn't have minded weaving up there and being incomprehensible. Of course, I'd never want to go back. When I told Rachel today I also did Write-O-Rama, an all day writing workshop at Hugo House on Saturday, she said, "Then you're up to your ankles." Don't know exactly what she meant but I like it.

The Best Thing

I go to my gym to greet the dog. Leah is a Sheperd/Golden mix. She sleeps mostly but, when awake, has such quiet eyes. Today, she wasn't in her bed. Jenny, one of the owners, said, "She's in my car. She'd love to say hello to you." The dog had to untangle her ancient limbs and then she immediately pressed her chest into mine, head on my shoulder. It was the best thing. Better than words.

Big Feet

This week, I have misplaced even the smallest of graces. I've lost my angels. Earthen and leaden, I make valleys with my feet.

Meatballs

My reading habit has gotten out of hand. I am eating books. Parts of books even. A binge quality to it. There are things, feelings, I want to avoid. So I serve up a large plate of words, skinny as spaghetti with meatball adjectives.

Richard Pryor

"He was funny but a lot of people are funny. The difference with Pryor was that he was real and vulnerable and raw and accessible." (Susie Essman)

Divine

"We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together, but without tears..." (Robert Lowell borrowed this from his young daughter, Hannah.)

Bus Blues

Worked five hours. Five hours on the bus. At one point on the way home, I found I was leaning back in my seat with my mouth open. I felt like freight. Like a suitcase. I walked in the front door and was offered dinner. I could hardly talk. Doing a suitcase impression is not so great for the personality. Minutes later, really, I found myself laughing about something and then making Bill and Deb laugh. Of course, they had been wonderfully empathetic before that happened.

The Fire

Charles Bukowski once wrote that the gods push him into the fire so he can "yelp a few good lines."

Bach in the DC Subway

"As an experiment, The Washington Post asked a concert violinist--wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a baseball cap--to stand near a trash can at rush hour in the subway and play Bach on a Stradivarius. Partita No. 2 in D Minor called out to commuters like an ocean to waves, sang to the station about why we should bother to live.

A thousand people streamed by. Seven of them paused for a minute or so and thirty-two dollars floated into the open violin case. A cafe' hostess who drifted over to the open door each time she was free said later that Bach gave her peace, and all the children, all of them, waded into the music as if it were water, listening until they had to be rescued by parents who had somewhere else to go."

David Lee Garrison, Sweeping the Cemetery: New and Selected Poems, Browser Books Publishing, 2007.