nedful things

It was a day that might have been run out
Under one of those seamless summer skies,
Or in trees whose low branches invited
A good climb and a comfortable seat.
From there she viewed the world as only she could;
Child monarch, with the reign of a season.

With a choice of memories to be made,
She abdicated this throne of childhood

To journey with the man in overalls,
Whose scent was always that of dust and wood,
Whose view was always to a creation,
Whose half-creation followed him that day.,
To a house; solid, but aged and creaking
In spots where it had collected the steps

Of all that walked their history through it;
And told their tales in its groans and echoed
Empty for the day. Yet to her, whispered
Of lives that filled it in other hours
In a boy's unmade bed and the coffee
Still warm in the cup, near by the paper.

The carpenter starts his work, fashioning
New constructions to store the stuff of lives,
Frameworks for the memories they will make.
The child's hand proud when occasionally
Called in to hold a level, or steady
A two-by-four cut to exact measure.               

The carpenter lives for accuracy;
His joy, the beauty found in a plumb line.

His child's hand ready to assist the work
But when unbeckoned, bangs at the upright
In the parlor. That which might properly
Be called a Living room, when in it is
Clementine played so haphazardly and
Joyfully on a day that could be spent

Breathlessly run out along stream and field,
Chasing clouds under a wedgewood sky.

Days will come when memory starts to fade.
When the carpenter forgets a kettle
He has set to boil. He remembers not
The gathering where final goodbyes said
And the flowering of a limousine
Mean his wife will not be returning home.

The names and the times of his past return;
Melding in a hazy place, where he
Keeps these lives, and tells his stories; where he
Plays a fiddle on a Saturday night,
The horse that bit his shoulder, and the field
Needs plowing and the potatoes brought in.

This treasured memory of the man, who
Taught her the lessons of pride and work and
The true application of a hammer -
The child now grown, holds up like a mirror;
Measures her life against the memory
Of a man whose measures were always true.

And now grown old, knows that she too, will pass
Into the years and fade from memory;
And the day that she held so lovingly
Will be gone with the last one who knew it.
But the sturdy construction of his hands
Will outlast the years that overcome flesh,

Beyond her time will continue to stand
Silently holding that day forever.

                       
                 (My Father's passport photo)

Something that Liz (ME Strauss) over at Letting me be posted got me commenting.  Then it got me thinking.  Worst of all it got me writing.

Now I know that genetics, like all other scientific and mathematical type equations, has set perameters and rules within rules and all gene combinations are going to fit within these perameters.  And one would suppose that by combining the genes of two completely different people, you would arrive at five offspring whose characteristics would have wide variations within those perameters.  But, it doesn't always work that way.

Let me post for you the comment so you have a little understanding of the situation:

"All those theories work fine until you get to my mother. My mother refused to have any children who didn't look just like her. My mother had genes that were predatory and they seek out and destroy all other genes even to the second generation.

I look in the mirror now, and each day I see her more than I see what I used to think was me. I look at my children and see her mother and "mini-me" and I realize, that science held no sway over this woman. I suppose if I have to look like someone, I should be happy to look like the woman who conquered genetics."

And over time, my mother seems to be proving right as I notice all my siblings turning into versions of her.  In any case, by the time I was an adult, I was sure we only had her genes too.  My father seemed to provide only a means of support as my mother sought to spread her genes to future generations.

Which led me once to ask her a strange question.

 I must preface this by saying that my mother, though compassionate and fond of animals, often grew tired of pets that refused to follow her rules or whose presence was becoming annoying. I remember being about 8 or 9, standing outside on a porch every night for weeks and calling a cat who never came home only to discover that he had been taken to the ASPCA.  A dog disappeared while I was at school, he had just had his third flea infestation and I guess the third time is the charm.  Pets  disappeared without warning. It gave my childhood that element of surprise and mystery.

But all my life, I had believed that Benny the dog had run away. He was just the kind of dog you would expect to run away, frenzied and impulsive.  I believed this, that is, until a few years ago. One evening as my brother and I sat in my mother's kitchen we discussed a dog who had run into the yard a few years after Benny had disappeared.  This dog taunted the owners who chased him, turning himself inside out with the joy of his apparent escape.  This dog looked and acted so much like Benny that we wondered if he had wandered home to say "hello".

It was then the truth was finally brought out into the open; a confession finally forthcoming from my mother and my eldest sister. All those years before, Benny and another neighborhood dog had  been involved in some incident with a neighbor's cat; an incident that ended badly for the cat. My mother had taken the dog and had him put down, never letting on to us children that he had not, in fact, just run away.  

It was then, at the scene of this startling revelation that a terrible thought occurred to me. The full impact of the ease with which my mother dispensed with unwanted pets combined with her insistence that all her offspring resemble her, compelled me to turn to her and ask:

"How many children did you really have?"

Amidst the cacophonous clatter
of keyboards being struck
with weighty matters and a
monotonous fervor of discipline

a symphony of voices greet
jangling cries for attention
meet laughter, anger, frustration
(each has paid for an ear)

"impatient people
needing immediate assistance
with inconsequential questions
may press zero for transfer
to a higher authority"

coffee consumed like elixer
is the facsimile of life
for dark-circled eyes that
that mirror coffee ringed desks

and watch the clock
that balks and stops
refusing to advance and
relinquish its eight hour reign

conveniently divided into
how long?  until break
how long?  until lunch
and
how long?  

until reluctantly, Time
ticks over the minutes
it held suspended and
calls it a day

If...
You say "Good Morning"
only to be told you're half right
(and the clock tells you which half)

and you say "oh, I wish the rain
would stop" and in reply you hear
"I am going for a walk,
 I want to soak myself
in the cool spray of the day"

If you throw out verbal trinkets:
"I like that color on you" or
"what a lovely dress" and you
are told it was $2.00 on final
clearance and
"I didn't feel like
ironing so the wrinkles are my
statement of general apathy towards
making a favourable impression";

If you cannot even get away with
the simple "How are you?" and
avoid the puzzled stare as the answer
seems to totally escape the one asked,
the answer decided upon finally being
"I don't know, I am not ready to commit
to a status"

then I can probably guarantee
you are talking to me.

Something in my eye
bends the light and
blurs the lines until
It's all the same
it's the pain that seems so wry
I can't tell the difference sometimes
between the knife and the feather
they come from the same place
grew up together,  
play in the same heart

sometimes my jokes are so funny
they hurt

Now the tale of Rapunzel has been told on this wise: that a wicked enchantress kept her hidden and locked in a tower and so she awaited rescue by a handsome prince.  But this is, as most fairy tales turn out to be, not entirely true.

 There was no enchantress, this was an invention of the myth that followed the discovery of Rapunzel.  For people will embellish and romanticize and as the story was told over and over, imaginations added to the truth until the life of Rapunzel became a story told to young girls who dreamed of princes, when the time came for them to lay their heads upon their pillows and dream the dreams of young girls.

 Rapunzel did not always live in a tower of stone.  She lived in a village, a quite ordinary village of quite ordinary people.  Had she been ordinary, she would have been quite ordinarily happy there.   As Rapunzel grew, she realized that the thoughts of these people were not her thoughts, their concerns did not hold her interest and she spent her days alone and pondering the empty spaces inside her that she could not fill with stories of whose cow had the hoof and mouth or whose farm had produced the most corn or even which proud wife of which proud husband had produced the prize winning jam at the village fair.

Rapunzel went far into the woods on those days when the voices grew too loud and pounded in her head.  The crowded, noisy village made her lonely; and she went to a secret spot near a small pond, where she read and wrote in her journal.  

There was a peaceful busy-ness to this place. The birds carried on their coded conversations and their songs held more meaning for her than all the words that she had ever heard.

One day, as she wrote in her journal of the visions she saw drawn in the sky, the wispy dreams that floated past the sun, a voice behind her startled her out of her reverie. That was the day she first met him.

 He stood there, with the day's dying sun settling on him like burnished gold.  His eyes  had the color of the mist that rose from the water in the early morning.  His voice sounded like the music from a distant land, and called her away into him.

She met him there, day after day, travelling by his words into worlds she had not known, and her discontent with her village life increased tenfold.  Each day she awoke, full of anticipation of him, and travelled to meet him until that one day when he did not arrive.

 The next day felt his absence too, and the day that followed that, and the day that followed that.

 Soon, she stopped returning to the village even at night. She built a shelter, a make-shift thing at first but as days went on and became weeks, she built in earnest, gathering stones and constructing walls.

 In time she had built a strong tower with but one window that overlooked her beloved place.  She watched the mist rise from the water in the morning and knew his eyes, she saw the sun go red and gold in the late afternoon and knew his face and she listened to the song the birds sang to their mates, her heart struggling to sing with them.

Now, in this time, Rapunzel's hair grew long and thick and she braided it into a strong plait of gold (yes, you see, this part is true). It happened one day that a passing traveller on horseback came by her pond, and seeing the tower called out for any sign of a resident.

Rapunzel leaning out of her window, so enchanted the fellow that he begged her to allow him entrance.  Amused but slightly irritated at his insistence, she acquiesced but playfully lied and told him the only way to gain access was to climb up her braid, which she let fall down out of the window.  It was long enough now that it reached to the top of his horse's head (which stood 15 hands). The fellow was game and did indeed climb her golden staircase of hair.  

 His company wore thin after just a short time.  Her words fell on closed ears, he heard nothing of her and knew her not, he saw her visage only and insisted that she be as he imagined her to be from what only his eyes could perceive.  He was no more than those she knew in the village, and she sent him away.  

 Her heart knew only one, and he did not return.

 But word spread now, throughout the countryside, of the beautiful girl who lived in the tower and more came to find her.

 They came and stood under her window, begging for the golden staircase to be let down to them. Each proved more unworthy than the last, although occasionally one would tempt her heart, she would always find he was not true and could not see her as she truly was.

 The constant invasion of her chosen seclusion became so onerous that one night, in a moment of utter despair and heartbreak, she took scissors and cut off the means of connection to the world below.  Rapunzel took the braid and wrapped it carefully, for if he ever came, she would have it ready for him.  But when others appeared at her window now, she would show herself, shorn and with her face contorted.  She would cry out as one mad and frightened them all so that eventually, only the bravest of the village children on a dare came to see her.  Word of the mad Rapunzel in the tower spread like a fairy tale through the land.

And so it was, that is how they found her many years later. Sitting by her window, where she had watched the mist come up in the morning, and had watched the sunset in the evening, waiting for the one who owned her soul.  The unused ladder lay beside her. Stacks of journals she had written, of the one whose love she longed for, told her story.  But those who found her were not able to read and understand, and the stories of Rapunzel sprang up as different and plentiful as there were voices to tell them.  The one that lasted the longest is the one you hear even today.

Yet her journals still exist, they wait to be read and understood.  And here and there, now and again, one who has loved will read them and understand.

The temperature charges
a slap of air insults my face
stiff and unyielding
Like a smothering blanket
The day swaddles me, breathless

The road attracts, it
pulls me over hills and curves
the climbs are tortuous
strong as urges
Of a sultry summer

A sudden sky bursts
plasters fire to the asphalt
of slick and sweet decay
pulled from tree limbs
The wind won't wait for October

The car is airborne
does not tread asphalt
the brakes may not apply
suspended above the hotplate
In this fiery September

A bullet spray
purges the scorched road
oily steam rises thick in my nostrils
smells like the heat
Of lovers in collision

The fastidious gardener hates a bloom,
That breaks forth like a rash of yellow suns.
He hatches schemes 'gainst every sturdy stem,
His garden, well-trimmed, does not wildly run.
But the weed again, overcomes his plan.
From roots, deep and solid, again it springs,
And stands forth yet until it finds a hand,
To set loose on the wind, its progeny.
The fastidious gardener hates that bloom,
That turns its face in time from sun to snow,
With one breeze it fires generations,
Shooting a cluster of feathered arrows.
The gardener sets to his war again
Prepares his weapons, a battle to wage,
Against the onslaught of order's enemy,
His strategy ready with sharpened blade.
But another there is, who loves a bloom.
Amidst nature's golden triumph she stands,
With eyes the color of a liquid sky.
A treasure she clutches in tiny hands,
Bouquets of this inconvenient glory.
Now the blade, its usefulness set aside,
Undesired and unemployed, stands still.
The gardener's love is not for order as
Nature unfettered, plays upon the hill.
His love set now, not in the garden's groom
But settled all on one who loves the bloom.