The Sun is Not There: A Sound Experiment

I ask this of you right now

Maybe the sun is not there for the peddlers

The jacks of tirades

The artisans of peppers

The conveyors of words?

 

Hope breached by the almighty nothing

The stupendous lie

He who is bidden could be mistaken

By his biding for time

In fact he is bitten by the firm jab of fear’s metal blade

 

The bite of rust nicks supple flesh

Fast he is wrested away by the nape

Only to be jarred into coherence by the nigh   

All wrong is everything

And everything is awry.

 

The sullenness of sighs

The rhetorical Why

This mere dust among loneliness

The rafters and riddles of cries of surprise.

 

I Dream of Houses

I dream of houses.  Whenever I remember a dream, it is almost always about a house, or sometimes snakes or rats, but that is a different story altogether.  A recent dream of mine including a house, but this one was filled with all sorts of people milling around.  This house served as a container of many things: life, love, memories, change, nostalgia, hospitality, the old guard and tradition, as well as the new and the progressive.  This particular archetypal house stirred me to understand the meaning of the house, not only as structure, but as an archetype of the mind and of humanity.

          I will describe this dream.  Most of the time, when I dream of a house, there will always be some sort of haunted room that I am both avoiding, but, at the same time, drawn to and fascinated by.  This house was different.  There was no haunted room.  I searched and searched, but could not find that thickness in the air, the feeling of a presence or a pull or heavy gesture all around.  The house was completely empty of prior deathly existence.  There was a different figure to replace the inevitable ghost. Instead of an apparition, there was the physical reality of the previous owner.  She, a woman of about 80 years of age wearing an old house dress and slippers, was still wandering the house like a ghost, where it was clear that my husband and I had just taken ownership of it.  While I was struggling to discard all of the trash and old catalogs littering the house, she was frantically trying to prevent this by collecting what she saw as sentimental tokens of her life and love that this house was imbued with into discrete piles, neatly separated from the real trash (well, `real` trash to her).  I was meanwhile collecting in a dark trash bag old home design catalogs from the late sixties that were mirroring the design of the renovated kitchen, circa 1969.  The pictures were the same as what I was seeing all around me (I was organizing a baker`s rack filled with papers in the kitchen), but the wear and tear of time was evident to me, and I could almost feel the age of the surfaces and masses around me.  To the lady, the objects represented her lived life and her loved ones, her kitchen, her care and concern for those who crossed her threshold, the food she cooked, fuel for the other lives she had touched through the years, while to me, they represented the past that must be discarded and replaced in order to make way for a new life, a new way of living, a better world, the beginning of the future of my family and our own ancestral line. 

It was not only the objects I was discarding, however.  With chisel in hand, I began to literally destroy and discard the kitchen itself.  With every blow of the hammer, the walls and tiles of the kitchen crumbled.  I remember feeling empowered, my strength increasing with each strike at the mortar.  As I continued, something emerged beneath the dust of my destruction:  it was the old original kitchen made new again.  The white subway tiles gleamed in the light, even the room began to get brighter as I worked.  There was no sign of wear and tear in this new kitchen.  It was the essence of the house finally revealed after years of being pulled into the house`s subconscious.  The woman who had been pacing behind me, back and forth, disappeared as the dust settled.  Without a trace of her physicality or essence, the room was made new again.  The old kitchen was completely gone (no dumpster needed), and the sun`s rays were streaming into the room through the line of windows along the driveway side of the house.  My husband, my mom, my son (my own ancestral line), and many others were there as this transformation occurred.  I had been brewing some coffee for everyone: the first creation to be made within the new walls of this house.  The coffee was too weak though, even too weak for my mom`s mild taste buds. 

I somehow knew that it would take time before I was able to replace the life that had been there before.  The coffee would get stronger, my own magazines will start to fill the shelves with the year 2013 printed upon them, I would fill those cupboards with my own china, the refrigerator with my own culinary creations. I believe that the lady had left because she understood that life renews and moves on.  We are all part of life in our own time, we each take a piece of the timeline to do what we will, and the house will be our vessel, our time machine that will enable us to hold onto those very artifacts that make our lives sacred.  Houses, therefore, have become our sacred vessels.  And truly, houses are one of my own truly sacred objects. This is the reason why I feel it my duty to honor the essence of houses, to reveal their inner honest beauty instead of the falseness of pretense. I see houses as mirrors of our bodies.  As our bodies serve as vessel through our journey through our lives, so houses are the vessels that contain the body and all of what is truly sacred in the lives that we choose to lead.

 

 

Season`s Greetings: a poem for the winter season.

Season`s Greetings by Susan E. Harris-Gamard

As the earthy night stretches deep and black

And the clangy sound of engines and brakes

Is silenced under the frozen muffle

Of crystalline randomness,

Billions of lost souls are deposited onto a wasteland,

Without warning

Or imprint.

They just fall.

Huddled together like angels evicted from paradise.

As I rise, my own body anew

In the diurnal sunrise.

I am mirrored on the outside

By presences

Themselves asleep

As I had been.

The prodigal winter raged and gained strength

Regardless

Of who was watching.

I walk out the door to find that the ground

That I knew yesterday

Was made anew, covered with tiny virgins

Purified and caressed by the night and moon`s full light.

A sole set of tracks has vanquished the smooth landscape

Intruder, caught by its own traces.

Like a detective I search for intent

Caution Do Not Cross

The Boundary for fear

Of contaminating the scene

That remains.

I walk forward to mindlessly tread
Onto the horizontal plane of the perfect glittering surface

With my own boot prints

(Held within a database somewhere

Black Sorels Size 8)

Charged with only negligence

And so I deposit my own little angel

Onto the large yellow vehicle

Directed towards his own enlightenment

At the small school

Nestled within the hill.

Hands of Clay

Hands of Clay

Labyrinthine hollows swirling freely through unformed clay

Slithering, slipping , moving down

And tossed away.

Tunneling blindly through the darkness

Searching for that perfect state

Hands against the warm fluid

Disappearing, releasing fate.

Water, an intermediary between this organic bond

This terra incognita slowly folding into a tight mound

I am the alchemist of my own single vision of today

Like an injured pigeon, hands cup clay.

Night comes, the wheel is placed away

Covered neatly to sleep

As your own body`s quiet firmness

Moves against my own vulnerable, moldable form

The complex folds of your languid eyelids relax and drift down

Tears overthrown, shaken away by loving breath, 

blowing warm.

I am quickly reminded that we are but two wholes becoming one

Not like the clay nestled in a potter`s hands

But like the ocean, two rivers 

flowing away from the land.

And I Hear: my latest poem.

And I Hear

A swaying above.

The dank black form of the musty chandelier

Gives off its empty, flickering brilliance.

A blue ghost sweeps into my periphery

Discarding its turbulent vacuum through the din gloom.

I seem to catch it. My mind says yes

As time swallows me whole.

It moves with my heart, and like it, my heart

Carries on without you.

The shadow of your own lengthy form sways against me

As it and time passes.

Your skin burned into my neuronic template

Locked away. Precious.

Lost love plated, inscripted.

Savor your essence on my rough tongue,

Lingering sweetness seeps into me

Like some still remains to be dug up and lifted from the earth

Semi-intact, waiting to be revived.

Through the particles of dust and dirt,

Forgotten pages, and gifts, and glass,

Sounds stolen, possessed, passed.

And I, a grave robber,

Thief of the heart`s lost but hollow beauty

I possess a memory of hair as if washed by strawberry rain

It softly rests upon my shoulder as I observe

Watch it. Embrace it.

But still press through greedily to another moment pillaged.

And move away to crave only the ugliness

Found in a twisted, uncharted future.

Time is

A bleak, faded non-presence

Slipping through gnarled hands

The sweeping of their curling nails

Against the battered old wooden board of time`s fortress

Moving relentlessly, moving away

From moments so frantically captured

Swallowed inside my craving wanton self.

Your and my own verses jut out

Just out of reach but still

There as its own heavy presence between us.

Your verses in timed rhythm with my restless limbs

Longing to push forward

Moving ahead into this gloom

Running from time and its nightmares and desolate visions

Of the fallacy it is.

Vast legs so warm compared to this cold marble

That I caress now.

Like the carvings of the ancients:

Cold, lifeless, dead to all.

Like you:  a vision long lost.

My blue lips nipping the tips of your slender fingers

My teeth ripping your fingerprints away from you

Kept close and safe: your essence.

It is mine for a while.

So I drift

Away

Time cannot consume what I have gained

It utters your name as it passes

And I hear.

I Am Back

photo credit: billphelps.com

I am back.  What else does one write after being away from their poor, neglected  blog for almost 6 months?  It seems that I come back here during times of turbulent emotions: those times when I do not feel as if I am floating on tranquil waters.  When the waves start to crash on my shores, and I struggle to find footing again, but realize that I should just let go, let the waves take me away somewhere new and uncharted.  A place to call my own, gained through both struggle and self-defeat, from being faced with feelings of sadness and the kind reactions of reassurance of so many beautiful others in my life. I have quite a few poems written now and am thinking about publishing them.  I will write maybe two more and will then be ready. I believe that this is where these waves are taking me. A fresh start is in the distance.  A new sort of me. Six months of self-assessment and self discovery have brought me back to myself, if that is possible.  My ever-changing, evolving self anyway.  From my sensing of a misplaced fear of solitude to the realization that I have not been allowing myself to find true solace from within, I have escaped from life`s grasp and have returned. A bit bruised, but never shaken, and never beaten.

There is no need to adjust my sails any more.  I have come home.  I am free to release and just let go. 

Clarissa and Rino--the story continues

The party pad is holding things together well. Richard sees me and screams, “The sculptor is here! Woot woot!”  He calls me “the sculptor” even though he knows full well that I am just a mason.  Richard refuses to accept that people can be so mundane and ordinary. The way I see it, I put the pieces together, instead of taking them apart.  Unlike Richard, who insists on rummaging through one’s life like a child looking for his lost stuffed dog.  His own life has been coming apart at the seams for years.  He remains on the fence of alcoholism, tempting fate, while all the while Clarissa spends her life trying to fix what he has dismantled.  I fear that he has started to unhinge her to the point where she is losing herself, but I will make my best attempt at talking to her further in order to foresee the truth.  I am glad that they never married, but, on the other hand, at least she would then be heir to his “kingdom” when he inevitably fades away.  Clarissa is in the kitchen, so I pass through the crowd politely, accepting the requisite introductions, and head there to help out if I can.

“May I help you at all, Clarissa?”  She is frantically trying to put together a plate of olives, when I come upon her from behind.  She is evidently nervous about something.  Her shoulders seem tense, and her hands are just not steady.  “Oh Rino, thank you. I can always count on you.  But, if I have to explain to you what I need to do, it could already be done.  You can keep me company though. And give me something to look at.”  She giggles that adorable little laugh that I clearly remember. I notice the bouquet I had given her has already been arranged caringly in a porcelain vase.  It does not surprise me.  Clarissa always had a way with sentiment. “Clarissa, you said you wanted to ask me something.  What was it?  Or did you decide against it.”  She stops momentarily, and a frown dims her face. "I spoke hastily." She carries the tray to the living room and returns.  She looks exhausted already.  "How about we share a nice glass of wine.  You look like you could use one."  I find an impressive bottle on the counter and proceed to open it.
"Clarissa, you should know that you could never speak hastily to me.  If you are feeling something, anything, you know you can confide in me.  Truth is never spoken in haste, don't you agree?"  She starts to say something, but it comes out in a jumble of words. Even with my strong accent, I feel easier to understand at this point. She composes herself, "I'm sorry.  I just miss you.  How long has it been? Three years?  No, I think it has been four. I've had so much to tell you for so long, the words are not even recognizable any more.   I feel them , but cannot express them.  I am so sorry for everything.  Things became so confused.  I needed to separate myself.  When I first saw you coming up the steps outside, it all came back.  The times we had, the talks, the intense, yet comfortable connection.  It was simply you.  No masks.  I felt happy again, free .  Now, I realize it was just a mirage." I hand her a glass of wine, and we toast lightly, reluctantly.  Is it the best time to toast?  I am intent to make it a perfect time.  At the very least, I will try.
"I can stay, you know. For good. I shouldn't have let you be by yourself.  I see now I should have been stronger. For you. Someone should."  As I speak, Richard is heard guffawing and jumping around.  Soon, there is a loud crash and a rush of people. Our stolen moment has now passed into Richard's solipsistic oblivion. And Clarissa and I look at each other with the longing and sadness that two people are only capable of feeling when held prisoner by fate for much too long.