Sleep, Sleep

Sleep, sleep
Slip past the speckled sidewalk, the curb
the sunlight sprinkled over
trees and into shadows
Come into shadows, gray
and black and blue, come
into shadowed seas whipped
white whipped into froth
Where you and I are not
so different, you and I
are frothed obsidian, not
so different floating in the
fade. Sleep, sleep
and cover your face,
smooth your face, wrap
ourselves in seaweed to
cover our face, you and I
are not so different in
the seaweed sleep.

Untitled

I grow tired of Summer's
advances: heat and color,
flexing muscles
and thrusting hips. Give me
Autumn-- the musky sex
of season change,
wood-smoke and leaves just
starting to rot, bitter apple
bark in your hair, a lover
that slides a slick pumpkin
tongue between your teeth
and folds a sweater around
your shoulders. Give me
brisk dusk walks in
the near-chill, the damp
sponge of the earth,
absurdly blue sky.
Fields of leggy thin women
with hair like silk, all
bending together at a
turn in the breeze.

A Dream of Owls

It’s got cheap steak, so we steer
The ancient smelly Ford
Six and a quarter miles East
Through pea-sized hail
And slow when we spot it
Not hard to find, GIRLS
GIRLS GIRLS
In flickering orange neon.

Center-stage, spot-lit, writhing,
Sinuous as a cat with faint
C-section scarring, glimpse
Of a miniscule flag tattoo,
Left inner wrist—Polish. Czech?

I can’t look her in the eye. I am red,
Flustered, digesting rubbery meat;
Embarrassed to be transfixed, (though
I’d like to be, she moves like night)
And you lean over and spill hot wet
Reassurance in my ear: “You can watch.
That’s why she’s up there.”

Her breasts lift up and out, point
Like owl eyes when she raises her arms.
She aims a pout at us, winks
Upside-down clacks slick heels together--
Long brown thighs, too tan for Spring
Wrapped like ribbons round a may-pole.

A sudden swish, hands-free
Look-at-me-Ma
And she swoops floor-ward, spinning.
Bottle-blonde curls caress
The grimy pole-base. Her shoes glitter.
The crowd whoops
Sipping tepid beer.

Late in bed I breathe your sleep
Smell, flannel-gray and quiet
And dream of owls
Staring, spreading deep wings
Golden in the half-light
To spiral down on unsuspecting mice.

Bean

In time-lapse,
our flowering bean pokes
narrow helicopter blades
through the earth
and looms suddenly
lush and curling overhead.

We watch her
budding love affair
with the sun, sped up, trembling.
She opens
like a smile when he
touches her, unfurls her fruit,

and shrivels
when he pulls away.
Days rotate in seconds. We
are amazed
that such a simple
dance could keep the world turning.

Crook of the Arm

To ache is to remember our old home,
how ocean air would fleck the cliffs with foam
and whip the cove into a frenzied fit.
This town, of all the places to forget
forever haunts. I brush my teeth with sand.
I comb the seaweed through my hair and find
the carcasses of horseshoe crabs in my bed.
The shallow pools of sucking mud turned red
from years of rusted fishing hooks. The din
of gulls that swoop to grab your hot dog bun.
Cicadas keep the dogs awake at night.
Raccoons tip over garbage cans and fight
for scraps. The house next door holds someone new
each summer. Vines climb over the canoe
that we used only when the moon was full.
(My mother used to joke that she could pull
that pearl from Heaven with our tiny boat
by navigating her own secret route:
the bridge of light that stretched from shore to sea.
It would be hers if only she could reach.)
To feel is to remember how the grass
would squeak a dying note when firmly grasped.
It's mine, this town of green-head flies and bikes--
how could I possibly forget when nights
in dreaming I return to touch our porch?
Caress the graying shingles and the door
that's always open, weathered, letting through
the low-tide stench? The scent of evening dew?
Beneath our roof I move, nostalgic lust,
to climb stairs aging, warped with feathered dust
and from the salt-swelled window of her room,
I watch my mother wade out to the moon.

Your Absence

It's a quiet
that squeezes into cracks
and holes in our conversation,
gooey, smothering. We nod
when your name comes up, explain
to others, shrug, smile a little. The gap
that follows eats us whole.

Energy powers motion. We keep busy
and talk often, press ourselves together
at night, forget.
They call it a defense mechanism
but we like to think of it as
staying sane.
You swim behind every man we encounter,
pieces of you lodged in their faces
like bits of light. We fight the urge to
shake them
touch their shoulders
and remind ourselves.

Found some old poetry...

Don't you love going through old papers? I recently found a series of my poems from two or three years ago that I thought I might share here.

Next few following posts are of that old stock.

Return of the Sparky II: Electric Boogaloo

It seems this is my first entry since the new year began.

This is an old pattern of mine; were I to go through my bookshelves I'd probably find dozens of journals with feverish beginnings, dating back to third grade. I write frantically, in spurts, and then grow distracted with everything else in my life and forget. It's a shame, really, for I dearly love jotting my thoughts down.

I'm not even sure where to begin the update. I've finally opened up LuLu Massage Therapies in the trendy part of town and now have a small --but respectable-- handful of regular clients. I've been seeing a naturopath who has done wonders for my problems with nausea. I'm in love with a man who, despite all of our old demons, respects me like no other.

That's sort of it for the big stuff. The rest involves things like, "I bought a new shirt the other day," and "we really need to go grocery shopping."

...I promise to write more. I'm back at a point where I need an outlet, and poetry will always be there to swallow me up.

Stay tuned. I've missed you.

I heard she got eaten by a giant turtle!

A friend of mine saw the perpetually "busy" signal on my chat program just now and sent me this delicious run-on sentence (which either amuses me greatly or mildly alarms me. Possibly both):

Always red! So stand-offish, putting up this wall that urges me to peek over just for a glimpse of a friend that is so elusive she might as well start to have folklore spread about her at local podunk gas stations over checkerboards by old bearded men.

I Strive to be Gigantic:

It takes a BIG person, Sarah, to accept full responsibility for their own happiness.

It takes an even BIGGER person to accept full responsibility for their own unhappiness.

But, Sarah, it takes a spiritual GIANT, who upon realizing any degree of unhappiness, decides to be the change they seek - in spite of having to endure the "same old, same old" that may still linger on for awhile.

Yeah.

Fee-Fi-Foe-Fum,
The Universe

On the Upcoming All Hallows Eve

Sean and I carved pumpkins earlier today. They're sitting on the table, one wearing a Mr. Yuk face and the other looking a bit like it just experienced a very enjoyable stroke.

The house has a nice sharp brown smell to it, like the seeds that I toasted. Outside the colorful trees are lit from behind and beneath by the street lamps, and people are still out walking hand-in-hand. It's a beautiful picture.

I got to thinking, however, with my hands deep in stringy pumpkin squish: Halloween is a totally bizarre holiday. We dress our kids up like dead things and make an honest attempt to scare them stupid. We send them out on the street to beg for handouts door-to-door, and we sit back and watch as they slip into sugar-induced comas as a result.

And here I am, pulling the guts out of a beautiful fruit with my bare hands, salting and roasting its unborn children, then carving out its flesh and lighting up its mutilated body for the whole neighborhood to see.

I mean... seriously. What the hell.

I have to admit I love it, though. Favorite time of year.

Atonement, continued.

A couple comments on my last post made me feel the need to clarify a couple things. Moreover, it helps me to write everything down. Gets it out of my head so I don't make myself sick over it.

Please do not think I'm convinced that I'm all better now and everything's peachy. I'm happier in myself, sure, but I am nowhere NEAR rehabilitated. I have a lot of things wrong with me-- old, old things that go way back that I've never really allowed myself to come face-to-face with until very, very recently. The atonement of which I speak is not something that I feel I am experiencing right this minute, nor am I absolutely sure I shall ever find it. I just feel the need to stop and reevaluate my life, my actions, and myself, and put myself on a new path to healing. I need to find peace with myself. Start building a foundation to keep myself from making the same mistakes I've made in the past all over again.

I have never done this before. I've never even really asked for help before. It's a learning process. Sarah "on the mend" is going to take a long time, and I'm well aware of it.

Much thanks to those of you who have been supportive, and patient.

In Which the Writer Expresses Atonement

It is said that the heart is the seat of human emotion. The heart, as is well known, is a rather powerful muscle... and muscles are slowly becoming my specialty. Therefore, I'm finding myself rather often thinking philosophically about the body and how it functions as an appropriate metaphor for various emotional states.

Trigger points are a favorite. A trigger point is a hypersensitive nodule in a muscle that, when compressed to a certain level of discomfort, refers pain, tingling or numbness elsewhere in the body. If held over a period of time at that particular level of discomfort, the nodule is starved of blood. The referred pain diminishes slowly. When released, the point is flooded with new, fresh, oxygenated blood-- the cells are nourished, the muscle relaxes, and the phantom pains disappear completely. Other stuff happens, too, with synapses and filaments and whatnot, but it's the blood that I want to talk about.

I feel like this is a description of my behavior and subsequent healing over the past year or so.

I have been truly awful. I was experiencing so much inner pain and confusion that it spread itself out over my whole little world, referring that discomfort to my friends and family. Although I could definitely see and feel the effect my inner "trigger point" was having on my life and the lives of those around me, I couldn't (wouldn't?) take a good solid look at where that referred pain was coming from.

I hurt people. A lot of people. I hurt people I cared about deeply, people that meant everything to me. I did some terrible things, I told some terrible lies, I covered my face and hated myself thoroughly for a long time. I couldn't even begin to describe what was happening in my heart to the people who loved me and wanted to know, other than to make up lame excuses and shrug it off. Or whine. Or nag. Or distract their questions with something else.

I didn't know where to begin, how to name the bad thing inside me, so I manipulated those around me to hide my shame at being "broken."

I'm so sorry. I was wrong.

I've been taking steps, over the past few months, to find and push on my trigger point. I figure that the more I starve it of the bad blood that's been congealing over the past eight years or so, the more healing will take place when I finally release it. It's been an enlightening process so far. I'm learning how to set boundaries, how to express discomfort or need, how to stand up for myself, how to apologize honestly. It feels good to own up to myself, to confront the things in myself that I've been so afraid of. Therapy's been rewarding on that front, and continues to palpate the tissue of my soul for that point.

You all have a right to be angry. You have a right to express your pain to me, or withhold it, as you see fit. I accept the responsibility of my actions and the subsequent trust I must now re-earn.

I am learning to love myself. No... that isn't quite right; love is not hard to come by for me. I am learning to respect myself, and accept my shortcomings, which for some reason is much more difficult.

But I feel, for the first time ever, as if I'm truly on the mend.

A Lover's Quarrel

There are some to whom a place means nothing,
for whom the lazy zeroes
a goshawk carves across the sky
are nothing,
for whom a home is something one can buy.
I have long wanted to say,
just once before I die,
I am home.

When I remember the sound of my true country,
I hear winds
high up in the evergreens, the soft snore
of surf, far off, on a wintry day,
the half-garbled song of finches
darting off through alder
on a summer day.

Lust does not
fatigue the soul, I say. This wind,
these ever-
green trees, this little bird of the spirit--
this is the shape, the place of my desire. I'm free
as a fish or a stone.

* *

Don't tell me
about the seasons in the East, don't talk to me
about eternal California summer.
It's enough to have
a few days naked
among three hundred kinds of rain.

In its little plastic pot on the high sill,
the African violet
grows away from the place
the sun last was, its fuzzy leaves
leaning out in little curtsies.

It, too, has had enough
of the sun. I love the sound of a storm
without thunder, the way winds
slow, trees darken, heavy clouds
rumbling so softly
you must close you eyes to listen:

then the blotch, blotch
of big drops
plunketing through the leaves.

* *

It is difficult,
this being a stranger on earth.
Why, I've seen pilgrims come
and tear away at blackberry vines
with everything that's in them, I've seen them
heap their anger
up against a tree
and curse these swollen skies.

What's this?--a mountain beaver
no bigger than a newborn mouse
curled in my palm,
an osprey curling over tide pools and lifting
toward the trees, a wind at dusk
hollow in the hollows of the eaves,
a wind over waves
cooling sand crabs washed up along the beach.

Each thing, closely seen,
appears more strange
than before: the shape of my desire
is huge, vague,
full of many things
commingling--

dying bees among the dying flowers;
winter rain and the smoke it brings.

If it fills me with longing,
it is only because we are wind and smoke,
flower and bee;
it is only because
we are like the rain, falling,
falling through our own most secret being,
through a world of not knowing.

* *

At the end of the day,
I come, finally,
to myself, I return to the strange sounds of a man
who wants to speak
with stones, with the hard crust of earth.
But nothing listens.

When the sea hammers the sea wall,
I'm dumb.
When the nighthawks bleat at dusk, I'm drunk
on the sadness of their songs.
When the moon is so close
you can almost reach it through the trees,
I'm frozen, I'm blind,
or I'm gone.

Fish, bird, stone, there's something
I can't know, but know the same:
I hear the rain inside me
only to look up
into a bitter sun.

What do we listen to, what do we think
we hear? The sound
of sea walls crumbling,
a little bird with hunger in its song:
You should have known! You should have known!

* *

Like any Nootka Rose,
I know there are some
for whom a place is nothing. Like the wild rose,
like the tide and the day,
we come, go, or stay
according to a whim.

It is enough, perhaps,
to say, We live here.
And let it go at that.

This wind lets go
of everything it touches.
I long to hold the wind

I'd kiss a fish
and love a stone
and marry the winter rain

if I could persuade this battered earth
to let me make it home.

Sam Hamill (Port Townsend)

Crap, now I have to take the board exams...

Act the part, Sarah, act the part.

You will become a massage therapist. It's a done deal. Actually, I've already sent out the party invitations.

Act the part,
The Universe

And in the process, Sarah, you'll touch, teach, and heal millions and millions of people... (And not just because I've invited them to the party.)

'Cause If You Want to Disco, Come to San Fransisco!

I just spent the last week in the Bay Area with my best girlfriend, Liza. She's moving a couple hundred miles north of Portland for work tomorrow, so we figured it would be a good idea, while we still had time, to get the heck out of the city and visit a different one.

What a trip-- we hiked all over, saw all the touristy things, stayed in a cool little hostel in North Beach. At the end, I was delighted to find that Liza and I had no issues spending that much time together. We were still just as enthusiastic about being around the other person as we had been at the start of the trip. This is the way we've always interacted, even when we lived together a couple years ago, and I'm still awed by it. Not every day that you find someone you love so thoroughly that you never get sick of their company. True friendship.

I'm going to miss her so much.

No Step #2

When in a hurry, Sarah, step #1 for changing the entire world is falling in love with it as it already is.

Same for changing yourself.

You like?
The Universe

Up From Here

The season is changing. My alarm goes off and I'm waking up in the dark now, always a little bit chilled. Where did summer go?

I feel almost as though I'm suddenly faced with everything I could possibly want at this moment in my life, and it's overwhelming to experience joy, real joy, after so many weeks of emptiness. I'm spluttering a lot trying to find the words: love, a career, my family close by, my friends reaching their goals. Enough to make your head spin!

I can sense my loved ones near me, and love them in return, and let them go. My grieving process isn't even close to over, but it's nice to not feel angry about it anymore. Like their deaths were something done to me.

Good to read back in my posts and find one recently that ended with, "I can only go up from here." It's still true!

No Great Fanfare

There is no great fanfare
when you discover your soul
is caught by another, no
trumpets or overture medley,
no perfectly choreographed
dance scene in the street,
the handsome men in tucked
primary-colored shirts, beardless,
slinging arms round the
impossibly small waists of
their female counterparts, no
swish of pastel skirts or harmonized
whistling, high-kicking
with all their might to celebrate
your admittance to love-- no,
only the soft pit pit perkle
of the one-cup coffee maker,
sugar and mug waiting quietly nearby
and a single trill of birdsong
outside in response to your nearly
imperceptible "oh."

Healing the Two of Us

And what if there were enough
to go around? What it,
slipping my hands into the film
surrounding her, I could somehow
pull myself into being? Cupping
the starry black jelly, invisible,
that coats each golden hair
on her arm? Drinking it into
my listening fingers? What if
my ears were my palms, fleshy,
lined with age, with love and
secrets in the dark; what if
I could heal the two of us
--both of us, each of us, we--
by breathing her breath just once
or twice?