ME WITH MY LITTLE CANDLE

 15 of #100daychallenge

I liberated another box of poetry books today. I really don't have any more room on the shelves here, but there were some choice volumes: The Yale Younger Poets Anthology, The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton,  and An Oregon Message by William Stafford. I found room for most of them in a bookshelf in the garage, which maybe won't get so dirty as Shelly and I are moving our base of sanding and painting operations to the backyard where we can hide in the shade of the bougainvillea and breezeway.

KEEPING A JOURNAL

At night it was easy for me with my little candle

to sit late recording what happened that day. Sometimes

rain breathing in from the dark would begin softly

across the road and then drum wildly for attention.

The candle flame would hunger after each wafting

of air. My pen inscribed thin shadows that leaned

forward and hurried their lines along the wall.

More important than what was recorded, these evenings

deepened my life: they frame every event

or thought and placed it with care by the others.

As time went on, that scribbled wall—even if

it stayed blank—became where everything

recognized itself and passed into meaning.

—William Stafford, An Oregon Message, Harper and Row, New York, 1987

I have discovered so many old personal journals, work notebooks, notebooks of concerts I have seen, lists of books I have read, notebooks of quotes, ideas, first lines of poems. I haven't let myself stray too far into them, but it hardly seems likely the work ones would have much relevance. It is fun to come across the business cards I have taped in and wonder when I met them, why (I am sure it was looking for a gig for me or whatever company I was with), and what happened to all of them. Maybe I will explore that rabbit hole at another time.

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That was Fox sitting on the laptop, considering whether he would like some string cheese.

The cortisone shot to my knee finally gave me some relief today. It still hurts but not as piercingly. Meanwhile, my mom is agony with her arthritic shoulders. Just taking off her sweater can get her close to tears. She wanted to look out in the backyard for some reason, so I walked her around, so so slowly. The cats were delighted to see her outside and followed us, romping dangerously. 

It is so ... confusing to be with someone who is so firmly implanted in your being as their being one way, only to find that you really must change that perspective. She is not my mother in the ways she was, in her personality, in the things I liked about her. Devastatingly, she is an elderly person. She needs maybe more TLC than I have heretofore been capable of. Seeing her wince so deeply in the sweater removal moment was heartbreaking. I thought to get her a microwave neck warmer to put on her shoulders. She said that helped.

Another musing from Lucy B.C.

I think of my niece finding my sister who had had a big stroke, the shock of that transformation. What did she think of that? I mean, she probably wasn't being philosophical, It would even be wrong to step out of that moment to plumb all the meaning when immediate medical care was needed. But there had to be a blow of realization that everything had changed forever. And I know that moment is coming for me.

This poem is not apropos (a word that the aforementioned sister taught me; it was chic boutique in Orange County she took me to in the late 1960s), but I thought it was amusing.

IN COMMUNICATION WITH A UFO

Object clutter the shiny air and flash

through the night sky, parsing its darkness

into the telegraphic grammar of space:

Here! We are here! Believe!

We hover but will not fix, we wheel

in the skeptical atmosphere. Beyond the reach

of your vision we skim curves of the universe

and splash like otters in its large drafts,

uttering shrieks of light, bellywhopping

to where you hang. Each sighting irks you

into a flurry of hope. Blind 

with anticipation, earthlings, you want us

to be serious, bring the good news, disclose

that we are what you want us to be.

—Helen Chasin, Coming Close and Other Poems, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1968