Broom Zen
This morning I’m spending time with my sheltie, Echo, who is departing this world today. Here is another poem of saying goodbye, inspired by a dear friend at Heathcote:
Charles’ mother is dying.
He has planed
800 miles.
Now he sweeps
Her kitchen.
Back home this is his
After-dinner chore.
He sweeps the hall,
2 seconds per stroke
By the mantle clock.
“Get the stairs while
You’re at it,”
His father says.
He sweeps the living room
And the porch.
He sweeps the lawn.
His mother is awake.
She asks of his plans.
He talks of job changes.
She takes out 3 papers
And crunches numbers
On the first.
Charles makes
Clarifying calculations
On the second.
She rests.
And Charles waltzes the broom.
He spreads out the pages–
Her handwriting, his;
The choreography of cursive.
And one more…
He takes the unused page,
With a pause for
All symphonies in the ether,
Unwritten,
And drags his dustpile
Onto the page
With his mother’s broom.
–Wren Tuatha
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For Saniya
You are the moment
I reached the gape of the
Grand Canyon. A pile of my
friends tickling and chasing on
summer break, 1975. You’re
the sound of the waterfall in
that state park where even
the birds stop to listen to the
frozen, flowing moment.
When you tell me about
your day and your eyes
gape and grin and I realize I’m
doing that mirror
game from acting class,
I serve our stirfry and I picture that
10 years forward I’ll smell this
steam and flash of you. Will I turn
and tell you about it?
—-Wren Tuatha
Lessons from the Beer, Bourbon & BBQ Festival
So our third year at Baltimore’s Beer Bourbon & BBQ Festival is history. So is our participation, I think. It seems the festival has grown larger and more corporate and louder. It was so loud I couldn’t hear myself leave my body. But when someone on one end of the hall would drop the glass they’d been issued with admission, meaning, I assume, that their drinking was done, festival goers from one end to the other would shout a wave of mourning and sympathy through the hall. This happened a lot.
As people became tipsy, their explorations of our fair trade wares were at least amusing. One young man, regarding our onyx carvings, mused, “It’s like, turtles…only made outta ROCK!!!”
So as I look ahead to our schedule for 2009, I hope you find helpful these lessons I take with me in case we do similar shows:
- When selling to drunk people, wear washable shoes. Sorry to start with this. I know you’re thinking vomit. In fact, the reason is that when they go to dig change out of their wallets, they don’t realize they’re pouring their drink onto their salesperson’s feet.
- Drunk people say, “Keep the change,” with strange frequency, sometimes to statements like, “May I help you?”
- Don’t cry over spilled crystals. Don’t cry over things spilled into your crystals. Cry over things spilled into purses.
- Beverage-themed festivals should provide extra restroom facilities or locate my booth near tall shrubry.
- Pretzel necklaces go with everything.
- Five-gallon buckets of water aren’t good enough sandbags for an EZUp canopy in thirty mile-per-hour wind. If you see a row of canopies so anchored, don’t park downwind of them.
- Drunk people sometimes want to hug their festival vendors as if we were hosting The Price Is Right and they’ve just won something. Yes. Show them what they’re won, Wren! “You’ve won a shopping spree at Heathcote Earthings! This includes a menora made from a recycled bicycle chain, all the treetop angels left over from last year, and five pounds of fancy jasper, which I think is cool but no one seems to want! Will that be cash or check?”
Not my crowd.
I’m on the road to Arkansas, to visit my partner Iuval as he searches for land to form an Intentional Community. Watch for posts on my adventures!
Not a Promise
This is not a promise,
just a flaky muse:
What if I gave you peaches, cut to the pit just
at the moment of sugaring? What if
you shivered when the juice tracked your chin,
amused to be sticky again?
What if a moment were enough?
I can’t say, but what if I showed up with
wildflowers and you’d just been pondering that
empty corner in your kitchen? Would they be
just perfect or are you allergic
to wildflowers
or gifts that show up, riding a beaming smile as if
you’d asked the universe a question? Be careful of
requests; Choose your words like a lawyer.
The universe might just make you divorce that
habit you wear…out.
Funny how the badminton shuttle rights itself with
each hit. Funny, the sight of you, chattering and
restringing my racket…again, endless patience and
contentment at twenty paces. My limitless listening.
My serve…
What if the night sounds of my house became
familiar and you slept eight hours, your hand, food on
the plate of mine, feeding us rest?
You could plant tomatoes and I could weed when
I remember. Wineberries, catnip, tearthumb. Just
a notion. Could be shiny.
I have to laugh that we can’t seem to get more than
five volies of that shuttle off before I miss. I’m willing
to practice but the weight of your gaze on my hair
is distracting. What if I got the rhythm?
Your serve…
—-Wren Tuatha
Maybe a Metronome
The work is done, anyway.
You dragged me out of my cave, just by your scent,
and the you I attached to it.
And so I lost weight,
remembered I had hair and styled it.
I bought clothes in case you might
notice. You might have.
I studied your movements, as if you were a
constellation I would join in the velvet blanket, as if
you were a timepiece, maybe a metronome,
and you would hear me sing and chord.
You might have, but you couldn’t admit it.
You had momentum, you had flow.
You had a passport and I had a cave.
So I am alone still but the work is done.
Some other lonely hunter will swirl around
the kill you missed in your momentum,
the corazon you crushed in your flow.
—-Wren Tuatha
The Thud of Escapement
The Thud of Escapement
It came to me in the watch museum.
It’s weights, hammers and gears.
Action, reaction. Action, reaction.
The thud of escapement.
The dominoes of a story.
I want to stand inside a pocketwatch
and lose myself to inevitable design.
I want a plan well engineered,
that leaves nothing to emotion but the
joy of cog after cog, falling in track,
ticking toward the unalarmed achievement of
another hour struck. Zen empty time.
And thus our story could be like a watch,
Action, reaction. Weights, hammers, gears.
Little gears for instant gratification,
Huge gears that circle in years with minute changes.
And I could know that your actions are reactions,
along a path which matters like another hour struck.
Nothing personal.
—-Wren Tuatha
Let me explain…I went through a watch phase in my writing a couple of years back. A acquaintance is a writer who covers high-end watches for watch collector magazines. I get curious. I needed to understand how people could fill up one magazine with fancy watches, much less several, and how people could willingly spend more than twenty bucks on a timepiece, when cellphones tell time, much less spending twenty thousand, one-hundred thousand or more for a watch when there are people, causes and projects who could use that money to meaningfully help so many.
I learned a lot. Although I’m still triggered by their price tags, I gained awe and respect for the artistry that goes into these watches. They are tiny, well engineered worlds unto themselves. I still don’t want to buy one. I’d be afraid to wear it!
But I began wanting to crawl inside one.
After a couple of visits to the National Watch and Clock Museum (yes, they get their own museum) I was satisfied that I had crawled inside. And what I realized from the inside is how watches, with their gears milling and harnessing time, doling it out to us, had become a symbol of my midlife crisis of that time, facing my mother’s and my own mortality, taking inventory of how far I was from my life goals.
There’s a mechanism inside a windup watch called the escapement. It regulates the speed of the gears. I became captivated by watch terminology, and this word is especially delicious to me. And so came this poem.
