Gin Bottles
We know this secluded warm pool
and every time my plane lands in your town
we agree by looks to dip a little deeper.
I’ve been marking my mother’s gin bottles,
afraid to see the levels go down…and marking
my skin as the water of us climbs me…and you
and there is the breath-held thrill that fear might
come as a cold current. But not so far, and last
time you dipped me in the words I love you.
It wasn’t a splash, just some interplay of water
waves and sound waves and time spiraling
imperceptibly as we gave space and touch.
How do I mark this?
Fear asks the question. I know you meant it
as another holon holding me against my own
demon towel. How do I let you know that,
even so, I’ll take it?
Gin bottles. I drink too much fear. In a growing
moment, I believe I can breathe underwater.
And our warm pool is space, silently expanding
after the big bang that didn’t hurt a bit.
–Wren Tuatha
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Plankton
Look at me wintering, wise little raccoon,
cold, anxious fingers licking tea and dreadlocks,
sorting yellow seeds from poppy seeds,
poppy seeds from dirt, dirt from food.
Washing and typing, busy hands to
keep up with this head, ahead of this
pining for summer and shiny sweat.
Light will rise soon, bringing haiku and
didgeridoos.
Shiny things. Knobs to turn and regret.
Spilling and more things to sort.
Shiny things, the glint in his eye in a
photograph. The prism in his eye so
close that his open mouth is sifting me
in like plankton. Hazel. His eyes are
shiny. I surrender my skin to his
nutrition.
Light kisses his calendar and we are
markers and pix and a plate of
pearly mung beans. Yellow seeds left,
poppy right, and parsley, deep green
from between the bricks. A shiny eye
and I loose my language.
—WT
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Folding Chair
I told you then I would take it out back and
kill it with a knife but I couldn’t do it.
You stumbled upon my love today as then.
It’s a folding chair, forgotten in the woods,
rusting beside living oaks and rotting, jutting stumps, unsuitable seats.
Your mind tries to pick up its stories from the air around,
a picnicker, a hunter, absent minded yogi.
but stories are noise, excuses. Mute air transmits this year’s bird noise,
same as the moment before and the moment after this chair was left here.
You realize the years–Four legs grounded through
snow mounding and hurricanes,
the inflating and shriveling of mushrooms.
Fox and mouse, mouse and beetle, squirrel and squirrel.
Food and urges and panic. I remember loving you. There was noise.
Mute, awake air, used to being taken in and released,
doesn’t suffer seasons or fools,
doesn’t root for predator or prey, doesn’t pray that you find
your own heart among curly, restless ferns.
I still do.
–Wren Tuatha
Repost: Your Violin
When you look at me your ancestors fall out your eyes–
Romania, the Camps, Zion and Lady Liberty.
You are traveling still, I may not be home.
You look at me when you’ve found a crack in
your grandmother’s violin. Your swaying and fingering
stops in the stream as your son bows still.
Your china shop bull is prancing in my living room,
and my grandmother’s candy dish clanks claps in time
or on the edge of it. You would build a village with
words or playing cards or particles, electrons, if you
could just learn the trick of pulling them through
the veil. The veil to that dimension, the veil between
the world of the living and the world of the dead.
The ancestors, reduced to Platonic forms in your head,
to the thoughts of a violin bow as she sings old notes,
and remembers leaving home.
When you pull at me your ancestors fall out your eyes
and you become all ages of a human man, out of order as
your face squints affection and worry. “Impish,” that’s the
word you prefer for the boy who makes you say the
wrong thing. And a moment later you’re a lover at my
neck or the traveler at mid-life, the highway a neck of a
violin. Thoughts veil your face and your fingers twist your
beard. I expect a Torah lesson but then you return to me
and the boy grins, hands full of liberty and my locks.
You hide in science as if God has hidden your homeland in
space time and we are to live in the house that experimentation
built. I just want to collect your DNA. For further study.
I’m a witch. I know the power of words better than a physicist.
But I’m a poet. I know words are sirens and a ship on the rocks
is no homeland. But our eyes locked, telling ages and the
myths we make to hold hurts, our eyes locked, our bellies
locked, dimensions, homelands, make me your violin.
–Wren Tuatha
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
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
Sketches of the Falling Away…
Words are thin.
Don’t paper me at midnight when the
truth is you’re leaving.
Don’t start a fight to make the leaving
right.
Keep me in your eyes instead, cunning,
murky, devoted. Everywhere your eyes land
I will be the hue of desire, the fabric in your
grasping hand. You wear me and no change of
season will have you putting me down. Even as you leave, to travel,
to find what I was not,
you take me with you.
__________
These are the things that are falling away.
The quickness in our pulses, the sympathy of our
eyes for each other, dances without obvious music.
This is my skin, continuous with only itself.
In my room, a box of stillness and furniture
that knew you.
And a breath comes like the turning
of a motor with the oil all burned off.
There’s no way the next one could be better.
–Wren Tuatha
Your Violin
When you look at me your ancestors fall out your eyes–
Romania, the Camps, Zion and Lady Liberty.
You are traveling still, I may not be home.
You look at me when you’ve found a crack in
your grandmother’s violin. Your swaying and fingering
stops in the stream as your son bows still.
Your china shop bull is prancing in my living room,
and my grandmother’s candy dish clanks claps in time
or on the edge of it. You would build a village with
words or playing cards or particles, electrons, if you
could just learn the trick of pulling them through
the veil. The veil to that dimension, the veil between
the world of the living and the world of the dead.
The ancestors, reduced to Platonic forms in your head,
to the thoughts of a violin bow as she sings old notes,
and remembers leaving home.
When you pull at me your ancestors fall out your eyes
and you become all ages of a human man, out of order as
your face squints affection and worry. “Impish,” that’s the
word you prefer for the boy who makes you say the
wrong thing. And a moment later you’re a lover at my
neck or the traveler at mid-life, the highway a neck of a
violin. Thoughts veil your face and your fingers twist your
beard. I expect a Torah lesson but then you return to me
and the boy grins, hands full of liberty and my locks.
You hide in science as if God has hidden your homeland in
space time and we are to live in the house that experimentation
built. I just want to collect your DNA. For further study.
I’m a witch. I know the power of words better than a physicist.
But I’m a poet. I know words are sirens and a ship on the rocks
is no homeland. But our eyes locked, telling ages and the
myths we make to hold hurts, our eyes locked, our bellies
locked, dimensions, homelands, make me your violin.
–Wren Tuatha
Jas’ Sustainable Life List
James Handley, Jas to us friends, emailed me his list of changes or practices for minimizing one’s impact. This is his response to Iuval’s practices on his biodiesel bus in Arkansas. Jas is a lawyer for the Price Carbon Campaign, promoting a carbon tax. Thanks for your hilarious and wise list!!!
Hi Wren,
That was a funny blog. Here’s my sustainable living list, in rough order:
1) Family planning: We need to (and will, one way or another) reduce world population by ~ 2/3 within a century. Preferably zero, but maximum one child per couple. Each additional person multiplies your impact. This is, by far, number one. If you have zero kids, the rest of this list is essentially, optional. You’ve done more than everything else on this list will.
2) Eschew debt so you can work at something socially useful instead of becoming a debt slave to an exploiter. Keep overhead low. Don’t buy anything new. Even if you have to live like a grad student, keep half a year’s expenses in the bank so you can quit any job that isn’t satisfying.
3) Minimize or eliminate air travel. (Each passenger in a full jetliner has about the same impact as driving the same distance in an SUV, alone. Flying burns gobs of dirty fuel.) No legal activity that I can think of does more damage per minute to the planet than flying. See George Monbiot’s book, Heat for a full explanation. Discharging CO2 into the stratosphere is a huge cause of global climate chaos.
4) Drive only when absolutely necessary, avoid rapid acceleration and braking and strictly obey speed limits. Live where you work, play and recreate– close to loved ones. Bike, use public transit, carpool instead of driving alone. (Biodiesel and hybrids are mostly feel-good BS, especially if you end up buying a new vehicle or driving more. Bikes are righteous.)
5) Lower the thermostat as far as you can and then keep going. Adapt to seasons. Wear seasonally-appropriate clothing, especially thermal underwear. Take infrequent short, tepid showers, turn water off when soaping. Don’t run water continually to wash dishes. Take cool showers in summer instead of air conditioning.
6) Plant shade and fruit trees.
7) Insulate and seal your house, especially the attic.
Use a clothes line instead of a dryer and yes, wash only clothes that are really dirty.
9) Grow as much food as you can without blowing any of the other guidelines to do it. Eat low on the foodchain, not meat-centered. Compost. Don’t drink bottled water or any beverage or food in one-serving containers.
10) Don’t nag or harass other Earthlings who don’t practice the above, but don’t mingle body fluids or finances with anyone who doesn’t at least get most of them and steer clear of anyone addicted to money, drugs or power. – jh
