"There is no one between you and me." Czeslaw Milosz

"There is no one between you and me” Czeslaw Milosz

When I started this blog in 2006, I instinctively titled it Augustine’s Confessions—no other name for this even brushed by. So, I’ll confess. I turned 65 today. Who woulda thunk? I’m proud and grateful. I had one open-heart surgery at 51, and another one eight years later, and the year after that a surgeon put a VERY IMPORTANT stent in my left main artery. For a couple of years my cardiologist checked to see if it was still open, via heart catheterization every six months and it was always fine, so we decided not to go through that for awhile. Oh, and I have a messy neurological disease called Myasthenia gravis (it’s always done that way, with a capital M and a small g ) Six and a half decades! I’ll tell you about them:

1-10: small New Jersey town, neighborhood full of kids, St. Paul’s Elementary, learned to read (!!!) ballet classes & Miss Lynn, 3 remarkable, funny, handsome, teasing, brothers, Mommy and Daddy, Ditty and Bob.

10-20: All of the above and first kiss (Dickie Young in the back of a bus) many more ballet classes, NYC and Juilliard, Antony Tudor, hard, hard, hard work, fell in love 2x, (one painter, one actor) sex, learned about theater, museums, drugs, music, living poor, marched against the war, Bob Dylan, dance, dance, dance, dance.

20-30: Went to Italy for a summer to perform at Spoleto, graduated from said Juilliard, fell in love with a piano player, moved to Albuquerque, taught at the University of New Mexico, started a modern dance company with the piano player and another Juilliard student, lost the guy, choreographed, performed on tour, did costumes, became a drinker, moved back to NYC.

30-40: Tore my Achilles tendon in performance, stopped dancing, kept drinking, sobered up, (32 years, now) went back to school, became a teacher in Florida (emotionally disturbed Kindergartners), almost got married twice, wanted a baby.

40-50: Got pregnant, got married, lost my baby, (the worst thing) spent a year living in England, (maybe the best year) moved to Maryland, dogs, cats, and gardens, taught older special needs kids, felt pretty damn middle class, went to a lot of doctors because I had weird things going on like double vision all the time and it felt like I was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro when I went up a slope, (a slope!) went back to Europe a couple of times, started to look a lot more like Mom.

50-60: Divorce, moved back to Florida to take care of Mom, then Dad, Mom died, my youngest brother, Ric, died, Dad died, (I know) got answers to my health mysteries, began writing poems and a bad novel.

60-65: Peaceful. One of my brothers, (Drago’s his blog name) and I live in a comfortable house with a dog and 3 cats. There are also outside cats who were born in our back garden and who have stayed around. Two of them beg to get their bellies rubbed whenever I go out to see them. My book of poems, “One Day Tells its Tale to Another” got published by The Linnet’s Wings, and I go off on road trips at least once a year to a poetry festival. My brother/housemate and I get along ridiculously well and so do the cats and our dog…and the other cats. My other brother lives in Philadelphia, but maybe he'll join us one day.   

Some time ago I developed the habit of posting something on my Facebook page about a writer (usually) whose birthday was on that day. I wake up, feed the outside cats (and the inside animals if I’m up first) and start reading biographies. I’ve become pleasurably compulsive about this and today I had SO MANY birthday greetings from people who know me through FB.   

I haven’t been writing this summer, but I’m going to. I’m going to write a book of poems about the ancestry research I went from dabbling in to doing intensively. It turns out my family comes from the first kings and queens of Scotland, conquistadors, Alsatian farmers, French pioneers, factory girls, and Irish refugees from the potato famine. During the 19th century my great-grandparents made it to Staten Island, New York and hooked up. And here I am. 65. I still dance, alone in the Florida room when Drago’s out teaching yoga, I still listen to Bob Dylan, (I’m more a Leftie than ever) and I still,  as ever, love to read a good book.

June 29, 2014

Morning Sun, Edward Hopper 1952

If I were still a child I could light a candle for the young immigrants from Central America and believe the flame I’d lit would do them some good. Tonight I’d include in my list of blessing requests the new father who was killed a few miles away by a drunk’s stray bullet. I’d say Hail Marys for the sad Arabs who are murdered every day and then I’d light more candles for slaves all over the globe. When I was a child I believed things would come out all right in the world if I prayed enough and if you joined in. I was taught to light candles and to pray, as were my schoolmates, of course, but I took to it mightily. I remember feeling like God would listen, and it was only a matter of time before people would become kind to each other and peaceful. But I’m an adult, and I’m at a loss. I don’t know what to do for this barbaric race of ours.

The Oxford Dictionary defines “barbaric” as 1) savagely cruel 2)primitive; unsophisticated 3) uncivilized and uncultured. Here’s a splendid list of synonyms: brutal, barbarous, brutish, bestial, savage, vicious, fierce, ferocious, wicked, cruel, nasty, ruthless, remorseless, merciless, villainous, murderous, heinous, nefarious, monstrous, base, low, low-down, vile, inhuman, infernal, dark, black, black-hearted, fiendish, hellish, diabolical, ghastly, horrible, barbarian, primitive, heathen, wild, Neanderthal; thuggish, loutish; uncouth, coarse, rough, boorish, oafish, vulgar, archaic, rude. (When I read this list I wondered if possibly the lexicographer was being sarcastic by ending with “rude,” but I don’t suppose sarcasm seeps into dictionaries as a rule. ) This is the etymology: Origin: late Middle English (as a noun in the sense 'a barbarian'): from Old French barbarique, or via Latin from Greek barbarikos, from barbaros 'foreign' (especially with reference to speech). So, “other,” then. Not us.

Certainly not me. I’m not a murderer. I don’t keep slaves. I don’t get drunk and shoot a bullet that travels through the woods to stop in the body of a proud father celebrating the birth of his first child with his wife and a few friends. I’m not a barbarian. I wasn’t when I was young enough to believe in those burning candles sending my messages to God, either. But back then cruelty hurt me somehow. When I heard about the starving children in China from the nuns or, as you might have, too, from my mother when she was trying to make me eat something revolting like squash, I felt a pain somewhere within. This aching still goes on in me, and in you, (if you’ve read this plaint so far then I can say that confidently) when six year olds die from gunshots, when boys and girls are sold to sex traffickers, when chemical weapons are deployed. I sometimes yearn for the belief I held fast in my heart as a child: if I prayed and you prayed, brutal, barbarous, brutish, bestial, savage, vicious, fierce, ferocious, wicked, cruel, all those kinds of things would stop. God would fix things for us. Well. I’ve turned out to be someone who doesn’t light candles or get on my knees and fold my hands together in nightly prayer anymore, but I find I still hurt. And I’m at a loss.

Sin

My brother braces the worn cardboard box against the bed lest the photographs spill from its bowed, damp sides. We didn’t know my mother stored hundreds of photos up there in the dark awkward attic. Setting about my task of sorting treasuring saving all these people and places I am stopped by Aunt Shirley.

My Aunt Shirley, who had moved off Staten Island,

who had a good job, worked in a Manhattan bank,

 who had her own apartment off Washington Square,

who was the most devout Catholic of the bunch of them,

who was in love with her best friend's fiancé,

slept with him, became pregnant and in June of 1952

slit her throat with Grandpop's razor in the white tile bathroom 

of my grandparents' big house on Castleton Avenue.

A man, a neighbor, broke open the door, and so Nana found her. 

Blood, screams and whispers, then a priest who refused 

to say Mass at her funeral or bury her in a consecrated grave. 

Maybe my mother wanted to die too, but she was a wife 

who had children to raise, and a house in New Jersey to keep.

My mother never talked about her sister, but Dad told us. 

I have the photos, can see how close, how alike they'd been back then—

small girls, school girls, teenage brunettes with trim figures, unguarded eyes.

Now that Mom has died, I meet Aunt Shirley. 


a version of this poem was first published at Sheldon Lee Compton's Revolution John magazine

On the Irish side...

These poems were previously published by Sheldon Lee Compton in Revolution John magazine. Someday they will be in a new book of poems about people and places I've discovered while researching my family's ancestors. I do believe we are all cousins and that we might as well get along, eh?

"On a Lee Shore"  Winslow Homer 1900

Ancestry.com

The Liverpool census in 1851 lists him:

“Thirteen years old, Irish. Occupation: beggar.”

Only that. I will do more for him.

I will see him in torn jacket and too-short pants

singing all day of the sea, the cliffs, the rivers

Shannon and Liffey, the lass who died too soon.

I will give him a pure tenor and a brother clicking bones,

keeping time while he’s tuned to the doings in the street,

his freezing feet, his big brother’s sweet, hungry voice.

Two stevedore’s march past, heading for work on the docks.

Their clothes gray and their caps grimy, they’re tired, silent

men who have no time, money, or even a listen to give them.

Here is a man coming through in a well-cut coat,

and his hat is a gentleman’s hat. The boys eye him

slow down and stop. Sure, but he’s English

thinks the singer and the rhythm of the bones

never falter though the player is thinking of boots.

They finish their tune, stand, stare, and wait.

“I’m a music teacher and I thank you for your music.”

He smiles, opens his purse, and hands them coins.

“Get some food, go home, rest your fingers, rest your voice.”

The Englishman walks on and the beggars are done for the day.

The census taker’s fine script hurled itself at me; his facts smashed something too soft in me, but I’ve caught these boys,

given them music and food. Tomorrow I’ll give them warmth.

Strength & Luck

There was no food in Ireland for young Patrick Kennedy who'd known nothing of blooming. So he crossed the wintry sea in a bucking, groaning boat to Liverpool. Once the damn ship docked in sloppy, exhausted triumph, Patrick was shoved and hurried to join the mass of his countryman lost in the dirty alleys snaking from the docks. English churchwomen met them with bread and jugs of weak ale. There was more food if he worked and he would not go without food again so Patrick, who'd been a farmer, became a stevedore, all the while hating coal-smothered Liverpool, and hated by the English working alongside him. When he'd had enough of the place and the place had had enough of him he boarded The City of Manchester, a ship bound to New York, or so he'd heard. The voyage was 49 days of hell, the only good being the end of it. Patrick's skinny self stayed free of the typhus that forced quarantine on those it didn't kill. When he stumbled down the gangplank the recruiting man grabbed him by the shirt and pushed him onto a cart belonging to the Union Army and he survived the Civil War, too.  Because Patrick Kennedy went through all that and lived to have a family with Catherine McCarthy I am here to write these things down about my great-great grandfather, born in Cork, Ireland in 1836, dead in New York in 1877.

Transcription of Audio: Miss Jewel Eppinette

No one has touched me for a long, long time and I believe that is why I am dying. This is a notion that is new to me but it has persisted over the last few weeks and I believe I finally have apprehended the truth. There was a time, I remember all too well, when I might indeed have died from being touched too often, too deeply, and too profoundly but the dangers present at that time in my life have certainly been gone for some time. My insides down there and my outsides all over my body are becoming numb and will, I feel sure, soon cease to carry on with their intended purposes. The skin on my arms and shoulders has not been kissed or caressed and my navel has continued without attention or admiration for a fair number of years. I do touch myself and of course my dear cat will sit on my lap but I do not see that these touches are adequate. Neither am I speaking of the tactile attentions of doctors, servants and so forth. They are in my pay. No, I am dying because there is no longer anyone who desires, with passion or even warm affection, to touch me. I have lost this pleasurable experience, and, yes, I believe its loss is what is killing me. Maybe I should consider an encounter with one of those Burmese pythons that are overwhelming our Everglades and let his intense squeezing kill me quickly. I wonder how I might obtain one? 

Dr. Lyle has determined that heart failure is in progress within me and I agree with him.  My heart is failing, but as I’ve explained to him as emphatically as I could during our brief consultations I do not believe he perceives the true nature of this unfortunate circumstance. Hearts wither when we require nothing from them other than the maintenance chores they perform for us as a matter of course.  For a heart to remain in good health it needs to be exercised, challenged, torn, pulled this way and that and above all enlivened by engagement with robust humanity. I follow my doctor’s instruction in every possible way but I continue to weaken and have come to rely on my own assessment of my dilemma. Although I am often alone, when I am in the company of others they are invariably unwilling or unable to penetrate this sphere that surrounds me. There is a barrier that neither they nor I can see but I feel it and I believe they do, too. 

For some time now all I’ve encountered in my life is respectful or indifferent behavior. I am thankful that I at least have memories of lusty men who used me as thoroughly as I did them and who felt free to express themselves with uncensored speech. I also cherish those women who laughed and cried with me and who revealed themselves in conversations on thousands of occasions. I remember people who sought to know me and that is a fine thing indeed and one which I failed to appreciate until fairly recently. I can’t name anyone now who I think of as more than a polite acquaintance. No one has raised their voice to me or employed rude language in years! It is no wonder that I am becoming deaf. Hearing is a sense that needs to be stimulated by vigorous conversation between people who want to damn well be heard. I have given up alcohol, but I might consider going to a tavern in order to hear the boisterous, belligerent and morose or the gleeful, silly, and inane talk from people who have lost their inhibitions and damaged their judgement through over-indulgence in consumption of their preferred drink.

My vision at least continues to serve me well, I feel sure, because of my collection. As you assuredly already know, my parents were friends of Georgette and René Magritte and were excited about the artistic direction he was pursuing during the time they were all together in France. Monsieur René painted me dozens of times and my parents then bought the paintings which of course was of great benefit to both my family, as it later developed, and to the Magritte household at the time. I continue to spend some part of every day with these images and this study has kept my vision and ,I believe my mind, sharp. 

Here, in this painting, as you can see with your no doubt excellent young eyes, I am depicted as a pretty seven year old girl, dressed typically for a well-off child in 1927, but I ride my hobby horse on bare floorboards. The room, with its large windows, was unlike any room I had ever been in whether in Paris or anywhere else I traveled with my parents. The views were so strange to me-- stormy seas, dark streets lit by street lamps that have eyes peering from them, rolling hills and meadows seen from a very high perspective as if my room were in a tower. Or are all those scenes paintings within the painting, I wondered. (I was a precocious child.) And who are those formally dressed men who stand around me but steadfastly ignore me and my wooden pony? This was the first painting with my image in it that I beheld of Monsieur René’s and it frightened me. Madame Georgette smiled and told me that her husband (who was in Germany for an exhibition at the time) was a man who adored mystery and that he also adored me and would not want to make me cry.  She said she would ask him to talk to me about the painting to me when he returned, but we never did have that talk. 

However the suited gentlemen in the painting did talk to me and they explained to me how I could climb out of the window onto the street scene. I did this four times, and although the sidewalk was always empty of people, I did hear voices from inside the various buildings, dogs barking, and cats yowling. My walks in the painting were always at night, of course, so I never did hear any birds. Even though I was very young, I intuited that this was something I had better not share with my parents. Then, after my last exploration of this kind, my father happened to walk into the library, where the painting hung on the north wall, and saw me climbing down the library stepladder. Daddy was upset because he found me out of bed late at night, my skin felt icy to his touch, and there was dirt on my slippers.  My father didn’t often get angry with me and every time he did I would cry, which is how I responded to his anger that night, but unfortunately I pointed to the painting and said it was not my fault, it was the fault of the gentlemen in the painting. My parents removed the oil and kept me from seeing the other paintings in which I appeared until I was in my teens. When they hung the Magrittes in this house, which they built in 1934, I discovered I had lost the ability to visit “my” street or converse with those mysterious men. I believe that loss was due to my having gone through puberty.  Even when I could only enjoy the paintings in an ordinary way, they have been a wonder to me and, as I may have said, I’ve continued to ponder

each of these canvasses every day even now, well into my 94^th year. I have set myself the task of finding a good home for them and you will have to persuade me that you will take care of them, ensure that they will never leave the South, and make them freely available to others, especially children under the age of fourteen. 

Please, have another piece of my cook’s lemon cake. I envy your apparent enjoyment of it. I have lost my sense of taste and my sense of smell--losses which are abominable to me and I am glad I didn’t know these senses would disappear with prolonged survival or I might have surrendered to death a few years back. I do not wish to linger on in life much longer, however. I have several more curators to interview and once I have made a decision and seen that my collection has found its proper home I will depart this diminished life of mine in a fashion of my own choosing. I do miss being touched and the feeling of another’s warm flesh under my fingertips, perhaps more than I regret any other loss that has come with advanced age, but I suppose finding someone to furnish me with a Burmese python is rather eccentric, even for me.  Once the python squeezed me to death with his nasty, forceful pressure I would be gone and unable to protect my cat, or much less cherished neighbors, as I’m sure a python could slither over my walls, from his or her--the females are larger I’ve read--aggression. I will abandon that line of thinking altogether.

First published in the "Dead Mule School of Southern Literature", Fall 2013

Photo: Chris Gillette

Push, Soar, Thud, Rescue

Edgar Degas, Three Ballet Dancers, One with Dark Crimson Waist 
1899 (170 Kb); Pastel on paper, 23 1/4 x 19 1/4 in; Barnes Foundation; Photograph by Charalambos Amvrosiou 

Push, Soar, Thud, and Rescue

I pushed myself.  I wanted the chance, you see.  Without the afternoons, Saturdays, hours alone, there’d be no Firebird, no Swan Queen. I was greedy-not for name fame, never that. What pulled me was having the stage, the music, the risk, the irretrievable moments-all to myself. You, in the audience, all to myself. And if you’d be there, rapt, I would give you everything, all that I had. And I knew our spirits would dance together.

By the time I was ten, play was all but over. I had too much work to do. My legs didn’t lift as high as they needed to and clumsiness interfered with fast, intricate footwork. I took more classes; got on the train after school so that I could take class in a studio in another town from a different teacher, one who didn’t care deeply for me, as my first teacher did. I practiced in the basement at the barre my father installed. Down there on the cement floor, somehow missing the poles that supported our suburban house, I flew to the allegros in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, suffered with strange longings when the slow themes took over my child’s body. There are children who dance, play piano, write poems, sing, long before experience informs them, and yet they get it right. I don’t understand this now, and I certainly didn’t understand it then, but I danced to Chopin with emotions I had no names for, would have no names for until adulthood when I christened them.

As a teenager I wore tiaras and was partnered by princes. Finally I could take some pride in my “line,” my extensions, my pirouettes. For a brief, innocent time, dancing was joy. But I moved to New York and more accomplished dancers were everywhere. Passion and “musicality” were not enough; I needed strength, technique.  I studied under teachers who were gifted, cruel, inspiring, relentless, and impossibly sophisticated. The worst they could do to me was ignore me in class.  Indifference was devastating. Of course I cried, but I-never considered quitting. I was aware of a larger world, cared about it too, but dance was where I lived, had lived, continued to live, even successfully, even with some fame, until I turned thirty and tore my Achilles heel; the ironic injury. A month went by without daily class, then two, then the doctors advised limits. Two hours a day, then two hours of rest. No jumping at all. Idiots! They understood nothing.  I stopped dancing and landed with a thump in a flat world, old at thirty. I deconstructed and became a sodden heap, without motive while dance slowly, painfully drained out of me. After living through two stark years of empty spirit, humble wishes (hardly ambitions) rescued me: I wanted only to walk, head erect, feet on the ground, simply and, possibly, with grace; I wanted to regain dignity, but only my rightful share. I learned, slowly, to extend, to stretch, to share in an off-stage world, without the practice, without techniques. I am still learning.

Sleeping with Lowell Nesbitt

I’ve just returned from my January poetry road trip. I grew up in a family with a penchant for traditions. It seemed if we did anything two years running, on, say, Christmas Eve, it became an annual practice for us and I’ve continued to roll the same way as an adult. So, even though there are excellent festivals and conferences for writers during the other eleven months, trips in January to study with poets has been my tradition for four years now. This year my imperturbable 2005 Buick LeSabre and I drove to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, for the Blue Flower Arts Winter Writers Conference at The Atlantic Center for the Arts. (Lots of capital letters needed for that sentence, eh?)

Marjorie's writing table

On the way, (sort of) I stayed at a B&B in Micanopy for two nights. I’d been off B&B’s for awhile. I suppose I became weary of gimcracks. This one, Herlong Mansion, is on the National Registry of Historic Places and is, more importantly, only a few minutes away from Cross Creek State Park, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ farm. (I’m not going to be bothered by capital letters from here on. They can appear, or not, as they will.) I had a chilly morning at the farm, saw the small table on which the author wrote The Yearling, her nonfiction books, and her astounding short stories, (try “Jacob’s Ladder”) saw the tiny guest room and the single bed that Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, Robert Frost, Gregory Peck and lord knows who else slept on, picked tangerines, with the park ranger’s permission, (frost was on its way) soaked up as much of Marjorie’s aura as I could, and in the afternoon meandered through a few antique shops in the tiny, no stoplight town of Micanopy, the oldest inland town in Florida. At the Mansion I had the Carriage House and there was a huge jacuzzi tub smack dab in the same room as the bed! There was a separate bathroom, too, but man, I got a charge out of taking my bath “out in the open” like that. I forgave the B&B its furbelows because Caroline West, the owner, was so delightful. And she liked my poetry.

Cross Creek: Camillias and kitchen garden

The Atlantic Center for the Arts is stunning. The exteriors of the buildings are rustic and smooth themselves into the setting of palmetto, pine, and exquisite quiet without a single jarring note, but within them are state of the art facilities for musicians, visual artists, dancers, writers, and artists-who-work-with-electronics (how does one say that more efficiently, one wonders?) Each participant has a room of her/his own, with a bath, lots of places to put things away, a long desk, enough plugs, good WiFi, and big windows that open and that look onto the green, green, green expanse of the Center’s park. Nice. I was in the Lowell Nesbitt (he was an early Artist-in-Residence) room all week. His photograph hung opposite my bed and he watched me, with approval I thought, as I wrote, drank tea, and slept.

Everyone eats together. Everyone. I was shy on the first night and then I forgot about it. Richard Blanco, my workshop leader, and I had most of our meals together. There were always others at our table, of course, but we shared his attention amiably. The poets met in the library every morning for five days and we worked hard and we laughed a lot, too. I can see myself becoming a Richard Blanco groupie. You know, following him around from reading to reading, conference to conference. Maybe he would take me on as a Tia Nonnie, and I could learn to cook him arroz con pollo ( or something) at a moment’s notice or staple his teacher’s packets together for him. I could become a whiz with printers, even irritating, impossible to get along with, slow as mud printers. I’d do those things for him, because he was so generous to me and to the other fine, funny, interesting poets in my workshop.

Talking while eating

Working in the Library

Me and Richard Blanco!

In the intelligently designed, intimate,“black box” theater, Mark Doty, (Memoir workshop) Pam Houston, (Fiction) and Richard (I can call him Richard, now) gave readings in the evening. Jeffrey Shotts, the edtior from Greywolf Press gave a talk here called “The Art of Rejection,” and despite the title of his talk he was engaging and supportive both in the theater and later when he and I had a private consultation.The audience for these readings and Jeffrey’s talk was small each night, mostly the thirty or so participants, but each of them behaved as if they were sharing their writing and thoughts at Lincoln Center. Awesome, giving, devoted professionals gave us their best and I’ll never forget it.

Open Mic Night

So. I had a good time. I even got to spend a couple of evenings with my brother, Robert, who flew down from Philly, and Cormac, a friend I’ve had since I was three and who lives in New Smyrna Beach with his wife, Lovely Nancy. My Buick and I got a bit lost on the way home to Panama City Beach, but we’re used to doing that and were not upset, and when we did get home, three cats and a little dog who live inside the house and the six backyard cats were as happy to see me as I was to see them. My brother/housemate Drago got home from work a couple of hours later bearing Chinese take-out. I enjoy my road trips, but I am so grateful that I also enjoy getting home as much as I do. This has not always been the case with me and it is not the case for too many people. With poetry, pets, a trusty Buick, loving brothers, cousins, and friends, I know I have it good. I’m a lucky duck swimming around on a small pond that suits me and I’m amazed at how well things are working out for me. “Appreciate” has become one of my favorite verbs.

"Big Bend" (near Appalachacola)