Ha -

I was talking to someone today about my blog, how it's been my intention to post my poetry regularly, but the process of weeding and culling and sorting just gets to be too much. Yah. Way too much.

Anyway, the year is drawing to an end, and here I am again, looking at the resolutions I came up with last year (or over the course of this year), and I'm thinking about how I can make good on them, still.

One of my big promises to myself was that I was going to post my poetry online. I've got these books of poems, all nicely formatted and looking ever so tidy in printed form.

I should promote them, you say? Honestly, who has the time for marketing it all? I just haven't got the urge. I'd much rather be writing, than promoting, anyway (and I know, Virginia, that today's writer must be their own promoter, too, but dangit, I jest don' feel like it!)

What ever happened to the honor in just being a writer...? What ever happened to the accomplishment of actually putting words together in a cogent form that folks can actually access? I mourn the days when it was enough to have a thorough grasp of the deep-and-wide-and-highly-textured English language, in order to write and read poetry. What's happened to us all, that we have to go through all those aesthetic contortions to be taken "seriously"? I just don't get it...

And I think back to one of my college buddies who was adopted as a literary protege by one of the English dept. profs. He was cultivated and sponsored and encouraged, and I seem to remember he was pretty good at the verse work. It looked like he was all set in his literary life... getting noticed by magazines... connecting with the right editors... Then my life took a sharp turn to the left-right-left, and off I went into the wild blue yonder.

I always assumed this guy had done well for himself, and I would occasionally check literary mags to see if he'd made it. No sign of him. And then while I was watching MTV, back in the summer of 1993, lo and behold, there he was on the roof of the MTV beach house, cigarette and beer bottle (still) in hand, looking way ragged, way dissipated, and eminently un-literary. Funny, how those things go. It was sad. But also wickedly sweet. More sad, though.

But wait, I think I've digressed... Back to the poetry...

I think it's time for a new strategy that lets me just get the work up there, without having to do all the editorial labor. I've got way too much material, to spend time figuring out what to post when. I'll just start at the beginning and work my way through. Or, even better, I'll just post the friggin' pdfs of the books I produced, and be done with it.

That's better. I hate getting bogged down in old stuff. I do want to honor the past, and give it its due after all it's done to make me the person I am. But it is old, and it is past, and I need to make room for What's Next.

Now... Back to the blogging business. I must more of it. Because my life has gotten a lot more interesting, all of a sudden, and I find that (as I clean out my study at home), I'm ditching a bunch of old crapola and finding areas in my life magically opened up for closer scrutiny.

It's wild, how life twists and turns the way it does. How tossing out three long filing cabinet drawers full of old papers (that used to mean something to me, but are no longer of use to me at all) can prompt me to think about one of the streets I grew up on, and the elementary schools I attended...

Anyway, I'm rambling. It's almost 8 p.m., and I've had a long day. My clothes dryer is broken and awaiting repairs (so sparks stop flying out the back -- how's that for excitement?), my laptop hard drive is making weird grinding noises that remind me to backup anything I care about, and this morning we had a gorgeous layer of frosty whiteness all over things that were very much alive during the summer.

There is much to celebrate. So I shall.

A new poem, as Fort Hood mourns its dead

I did not follow much of the coverage of the Fort Hood tragedy. Too much misinformation, too much speculation, too many conclusions jumped to, and too little insight into the full spectrum of very human conditions which contributed to it.

As Thanksgiving approaches, my thoughts turn to the survivors and loved-ones of those involved… and to everyone who was affected by it. Thanksgiving for me is as much about loss as it is about gratitude. It is a season when I am keenly reminded of those who are no longer around, those who have passed out of my life… places and things and aspects of my life which are now beyond my reach.

Perhaps it’s the proximity of Halloween and All Souls. Or perhaps it’s just the normal course of life. Who can say? But summer is over, autumn is giving way to winter, and the days grow shorter with each passing week. The loss of light, in itself, is a significant loss — even if there is promise of its return.

I have had my share of losses in this life, and there will always be empty seats at the tables where I sit during the holidays. We cannot love without losing, I believe. And we cannot gain without sacrificing first. Of course, some sacrifices are a hell of a lot more painful than others…

But enough of my prattle. For all those who have lost, and (like me) are reminded of it this time of year, this is for you.


Requiem for Healed Griefs

A week later, it is still HERE. No relief in sight.

A month later… WTF?! Three letters are about all one can muster.

A year later, one would imagine
it will all disperse like so many fall leaves after
several rainfalls
and a handful of hard frosts.
The shock, the guilt, the accusations un-
spoken, yet deeply felt, the fault, the fault… and more
faulty wires crossed between family members far-
flung to disparate lives, sparking
in the dessicated tinder of old hurts
unhealed, bursting
minor incidents into major-
league blow-outs… like a bobbled infield hit can so quickly
turn into a triple…

A year later — yes, all twelve months’ worth — one would
think, the hurt could lessen, the anguish
could fade, the jagged edges
of loss-loss-loss would soften. But

no


Two years after The Loss
That Dares Not Speak Its Name, one would think
it would be just a little bit easier to sit
in the same room as others
grieving. Some are still taking it harder
than others. But

no

it is not enough time. Two years is twenty-four months, is
730 days (or 731 if a leap year happens), and that adds
up to over a million individual minutes of individual
pain.
That’s way
too many minutes to think about grieving.
Too much time to spend being it, as well.
We know that. We know — we think — better
than to let it get us down.
But loss is loss.
And I don’t care what folks say — time does not
heal all wounds.
Two years is not nearly enough time to make
sense of much of anything.


Three years later, aren’t we all
feeling foolish and a little self-indulgent, still
smarting from time’s lash…
Those who grieve hard — still — cannot help but
wish their pain will last
as long as they breathe, the measure
of their anguish
being the measure of their devotion
to their long-lost loved one’s memory. To pry
their grieving grasp from around their treasured memories, to try
to talk them into trading tear-soaked-soggy sack-
cloth and ashes for a comfortable house dress… Well,
that would be
just plain cruel.


Four years after that terrible, terrible
weekend/week/evening/event, some
still ache as though it happened yesterday, and they
cannot help but
suspect
those who claim to have moved
on…

and in the middle
stand
the ones who can see
both sides…

they’re the ones who hurt either half
or twice
as much, depending
on the movements of the moon
and the configuration of the seasonal sunlight
on scenes once shared with the one
who’s passed.

Grief is not like an autumn leaf suc-
cumbing to persistent elements.
It is a season, in itself.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Kay Stoner, All Rights Reserved

Refund

The road has returned
my missing scarf -- almost
before I knew it was missing. I found it
lying almost undisturbed on the snowbank where
I must have dropped it
yesterday, whilst rooting through my pockets for some-
such I've since forgotten.
A little wet
in spots, but mostly dry, yes --
that would be the scarf I was looking
for this morning before
I set out.
Thanks be to country roads
where precious few walk on foot
and a dropped item can be
reclaimed
with as little fanfare as kicking a pebble.

Waltz Whitman

You propel me out onto the roads today,
brother. Striding
down the long hill away from my house, all
I want of the day
and the woods around me, is
to see.
Like you, I am queer
as the day is long, and I know better than to suspect
the cozy coddled world of established ways
will have me as I am -- without alteration -- or reward'
me for my defiant differences.

The sight of a well-train'd runner got your juices
flowing in 1867. I, myself, grapple with whether or not to dote on my work. I think, not. My work
shall arrive a paper out of time.
Should ti prove durable enough to pique curiosity, lo
those many years down the line, I"ll leave it
to the academians to determine the precise year of my poems'
inception.
I have the dates marked down
somewhere.
let them dig for them. It will give them something
academic to do...

But back to "The Runner" -- such a small
poem, that. Almost
haiku.
And I embarrass myself with all this verbosity over
four simple lines.
Like a Chinese fan, you snapped that moment closed on paper.
I am pulling it open again, perhaps finding more
within, than originally existed.
From your grave
I hear you chuckling -- what a complicated mess
we butterflies pinned tot he board of the 21st Century
have made of simple things.
A runner.
A moment.
An impulse.
We are starving to understand mechanics, we moderns -- hungering to detect
THE mechanics
of Life, all secrets
we suppose
laid bare under the glass of adequate scrutiny.
But the microscope lowered too far
cracks the plate, and the specimen is lost
to intellectual greed.
Best
to wonder from a distance.

My distaste with analysis sends me out
onto the roads today -- no pack on my back, no staff
in my hand, only paper and pen in my pocket
and a charged cell phone -- just in case. The road
eases by underfoot, the lives of all Sunday homebound citizens
who line this track out on display
for passers-by like me, to note well and bless with our attention. The woods sweep by
on either side -- oak and beech
and pine and hickory and maple and redbud
and more, most alive, some dying, many dead -- centering the road
with their sentry density.
You, brother, took alternately to city and country, much
as I have,
now and then traveling some distance to find some trace
of What Must Be Worshiped
or simply Must Be.
There was too much love in you
to be held to just one way or place,,e and my own
promiscuous muse is restless, now, too, aching
and whining
to be fed some new sweetmeat of experience.
But I am no single man, free to ramble
about my nation's back roads, criss-
crossing at will whatever country calls me. No,
I am a married woman, wedded to the kind
of life I suspect you disdained, and I have much
I must accomplish today.
The road leading away from my house
down
the
hill
beckons. I take with me
the sense of you,
my pockets full of Now.

Reading Elizabeth Bishop and Wondering...

Had I been born in, oh, say ‘07, and had I
known then what I know now,
would we have called each other up to travel,
or summoned one another with telegrams --
“Pack those bags, girl -- we’re going away
again!” attaches of papers and works
in progress
tucked under our arms, the streetnumbers of fay friends
settled down towards Cuba neatly
penned into our address book.
Would we have known each other
at all?
Could we have not?

Reminiscence

Dreams of Hemingway once
sufficed -- my battered old copy of Islands
In the Stream still travels everywhere
with me, and I promise myself
frequently, I’ll read it again
soon.

Halcyon days they were, when visions of expatriates sipping
anise on the Left Bank and signing on
with ambulance crews to prove
their devotion to a cause could extend past
paint or canvas
moved me as much as the words they called their own.

At 18, I dreamed
it was enough to flee one’s homeland
and cluster abroad in pockets of conscience
to retrieve one’s life
from a predicted, prescribed fate.
At 18, I planned to travel
widely and leave
all calculation behind.

And at 20, I did.

Commute

The world goes silent
as the train rolls in -- traffic stopped
at the crossing, cars idling in patient
resignation till the bells sound again,
the crossbars raise,
and their trips work-ward can resume.

Along the platform, we
wait, heads turned away
from dust blown up by the wheels and wind,
steeling ourselves against one more day,
as resigned (but not quite so patient)
as the sedans and SUVs lined up
on either side of the tracks.

Where will this day take us?

The train eases to a stop -- the open doors
at the next platform down from where
all of us have gathered.
Silently, we file down, climb aboard past
the conductor, our thoughts already well into the day
that takes us far from this silent place.

Loss – No. 1

It’s 6:00.
Where are you?

It wasn’t every
day our paths
crossed, but it was often
enough
to turn seeing you into a habit.
A comfortable, comforting rite of my pass-
ing day, a marker
that told me how well my week
was going
and made many things right
just by right
of your being
there.

What is this odd-strange world that makes friends
of virtual strangers, simply
by rights of habitual proximity?

What is that weird pen-
chant I/we/some people have to turn
acquaintances
into fixtures that fix
our wandering gazes just long
enough to hold us
close — all eyes and ears — close
enough to make us
feel
this must be something more
than accident… and no,
this was not some trick of chance log-
istics — it was
…
more.

Surely, we must be
connected… Or is it little more than
chemistry, instinctive cerebroglandular en-
thusiasm pumping us full
of what passes for contentment
impelled by nothing
more than
familiarity? “Nothing more than…” I say?
I don’t mean it, of course. I know better. I know…
at the very heartroot of familiarity is
“family”.

Routine relates us.

But now that is broken.
And so am I.
That little part of me that hates to admit to limit-
ation, to begin
with, is abashed
at how little it takes to throw
me off
…
way off.

Have I told you lately how much I
hate
this?
Of course not, you are nowhere
to be found, and I am dis-
traught over —
what?
A fracture in my routine
that my heart takes personally?
What?!

It is 6:20.
And it’s been weeks since I last caught
sight
of you.

I am a fool.

And would have it
no other way.

Going East to Look West

I see it all more clearly from a great, wide distance --
the speed, the urgency, the mad dash to whatever
grabs our attention
and holds it tight - tighter- tighter, till the sheer force
of centrifugal speed breaks the grip of compulsion.
From a great, wide distance across the sea,
the Way Things Are
becomes almost comical, when stripped of daily context
and the collective, assuming mind
that conditioning lulls.
GET AWAY! cries the voice I usually drown
with coffee and the flow of a carefully packed schedule. GET
AWAY
to where they can't' see you to assign one more task, to where
you can't see that side of you
any longer
that's arranged by the clutter of expedience. Get Away
to where you recognize, there is more to life
than billable hours, allocated resources, status checks. Get Out
to where milestones still are lumps of granite
nestled in a wild tuft of grass by the side of a well-worn path.
And there
in that place, look back over your shoulder, catch
a glimpses of the old heads-down world
you put behind, for however long you can afford to, and know
in your bones
all that which a 6x6 foot cubicle
cannot encompass.
Know the feel of the grasses crushed underfoot, the cool
packed earth of that old path, the coarse
solidity of this honest-to-God milestone marker.
Breathe
deep.
But do more -- live
more deeply.
And believe.

Poems for those who pass through

I have had a lot of people passing through my life, of late. People I haven't seen in years who suddenly show up... people who I've known for years who are moving on. It seems to be going around... I've been hearing a lot of stories about people losing friends to suicide or retirement or relocation or career changes or starting a new family. Either way, change is change, and it puts us through our paces.

People come, people go, and as the world is in such flux, these days, it seems only right to, well, write about it.

Verse is really the only thing that's making much sense to me, these days. Prose just ends up glomming up the pipes. So, I write poetry. And it helps.

New poem - Alarm Clocked

Alarm Clocked

I.

That marauding black cat from across the street must be
gone. The chip-
munks and jays are
quiet
again -- tho’ it’s too late now
for me to get back to sleep.

Saturday morning before eight, one prefers not
to be woken by the manic-frantic OhMyGodInHeavenOhMyGodInHeaven
shrieking of bird and miniature rodent parents
telling all the world the neighbor’s beautiful
killing machine is near-
by... on the prowl,
hunkered down
beneath a fallen log, too close!
to all the nests full of freshly birthed hungry striving life, while
bluejays shrilly dive-bomb with unreserved aggression and chippies squeak
at
ambulance decibel levels. Their nails-
on-the-blackboard calls
drove the predator away -- and with her, my Saturday morning lie-in.
Death is afoot! Death is afoot! Guard your babies!
The alarm is for all
the world to hear, including once-sleeping me, oh deafening
entitlement of survival.

That cat must be gone. All is quiet. But all
is not well.
I am awake
when I shouldn’t be. I did not get
to bed at the pre-arranged hour, the night
before. The movie and the prospect of a long week-
end were too enticingly rebellious -- and so liberating. I could not
take myself to bed
at ten.
I simply couldn’t. And life has refused
to humor my defiance, waking
me early, re-
fusing to fill in the neglectful gaps
I’ve created in my own needful routine.

I have none but myself to blame for being bo-
thered by being woken early.
There ‘tis.
What is
simply is. And today I won’t sleep in.
Life
goes on -- but not by default. Some things,
like keeping chicks and pups safe from feline claws and teeth,
must be
earned.
What must be done, must
be done.

II.

Now all is quiet.
I have made peace with being woken by nature’s
eternal dance of life and death.
I have brushed my teeth and put on
my grubbies for the morning, and resigned my-
self to having a sick headache from too
little sleep (staying up
too late last night is the cul-
pable culprit, not the chippies and jays, not
even the neighbor’s cat). I have taken what
responsibility I can for my situation and re-
solved to redeem myself with verse -- and nap
in the early afternoon.

Today, I shall write. And perhaps mow the wild-growing yards
around our house. At
least, walk the lawn to see
how the seed I spread a week ago is
taking, in the bare-ish patches that come
back in the same spots
each year.

But wait -
it looks like rain.
Perhaps I shall not
go out today -- live instead
like a modified Emily Dickinson, roaming my
house, rather
than my attic, but avoiding outside act-
ivities all the same.
There are ticks out there, after all.

III.

Five or six days ago, I was
asked -- “Have you written any poetry recently?”

And, thinking myself honest
and sincere
and 100% correct, I replied, “No,
I haven’t had the time or the inclination.
Not lately.”
I was convinced of it, too.
Utterly,
totally convinced. Utterly,
totally
wrong.

On a hunch, I thought I should double-check my certainty, and
the following day, upon rifling the top drawer in the filing
cabinet that holds up the left side
of my makeshift desk, I found
tens -- maybe more
than a hundred -- pages of verse penned
in the past three years.

Idiot.
I can be such an idiot at times.
Saying stupid shit like “Oh, no, I haven’t written very much at all
in three years!” makes me
look like a pathological liar. I didn’t mean
to deceive, but
I did a damned good job of it -- myself, not least of all. And
once again, I find evidence
that I am without a doubt truly
stupid.
Utterly.
Totally.

IV.

But
wait.
Self-flagellation doesn’t become me.
Where mortification runs thin, my pride wins out.
And I turn my mind to more productive,
attractive
activities.
.... now that I’ve found
these words
I penned in a flurry and tucked away
tidily in a steel-cased desk
drawer...
now what?

First,
I shall try like hell to figure out why
in heaven’s name I would forget a thing like
having written hundreds
upon hundreds
upon hundreds
of lines
and placed them neatly in labeled manila folios,
suspended in tabbed hanging folders,
tucked in tightly like sleepy children
all organized
in my left
desk drawer,
out
of sight
out
of mind...

Why?
That question must be answered first.

And next,
I shall work like hell to redeem myself from my in-
explicable neglect, walking deliberately
across the territory I dashed
wildly through
in recent years past,
salvaging
what’s worth saving (in my estimation), ditching
or pitching
what didn’t work then and won’t work
now ... all along paying mind
to the promising skeletons that may still support
fleshy addition -- making like Dr. Frankenstein
picking choicest pieces
of anatomical additions for his prized
creation, I myself
being cognizant (more than the fic-
tional Swiss doctor was, perhaps)
that I may not end up
creating what I sought to seize
in words and sound and breath -- but yet de-
termined to love
what comes of it
all the same, un-
like the fictional doctor who fled
the crass evidence
of his most human failings.

Then what?
Then what shall I do?

V.

Like Proust biting into that madeleine,
this gradually dawning shock of mine -- that I
have done much much more
than I recorded in my sometimes dim im-
agination -- has unleashed
some sort of torrent.

Panic, perhaps, that I lost sight
of something so vital, so precious, so
core.
And was so quick to dismiss it,
as though I could dis-
pense with breath
or light
or the sea.

My voice -- where is my voice? What is my Voice? Has
it changed on my journey through the long
dark gauntlet tunnel
of shifting jobs, medical emergencies, reversals of fortune, and the too-soon
passing of my next-younger sister?
I am com-
pelled to look backwards-forwards-backwards again,
to compare my before-and-after styles,
my pacing and diction and choices
of sounds -- my “maturity”, if any is to be dis-
cerned by my own self, unschooled as I am
in the popular vernacular of poetic/artistic
acceptability. I took enough anthro-
pology to know analysis is not often best done
from the inside. Criticism is an out-
side job.
I think...

But what would I know of these things?
I have not taken the designated coursework and satisfied
sufficient requirements to call myself publicly “a poet.”
I make a shitty student -- and I make no apologies for it -- teachers
of the intentional, professional, certified human sort irri-
tate the shit out of me.
I can never figure out what they want me to say... tho’ I’m pretty
damned sure they don’t mean it
when they say,
“What do you think?” I don’t know their world well enough to tell
when I’m being tricked.
In classrooms I usually feel like
I’m about to be tricked.
Trapped.
Taken for a ride.
For the amusement of the neurotypical.
Or the predatiously dense who hang
on my words long enough to lift them from my distracted possession
and sell them to someone else.

No, I am no use to anyone in a cubical classroom of cinderblock walls.
I am too wary of my fellow students.
Too clueless to give my teachers what they seek.

Too itchy for actual life.
To guru life, in contrast, I am a doting,
rapt
devotee.

The passing years must be
my classroom.

So it has always been.
And I’ve not suffered
for it.

So mote it be.

VI.

.... But where was I?
Ah, yes.
Proust.

I am awake now, even
as his petite madeleine broke him out
of the everyday present and unleashed a sensory avalanche
of What Once Was.
Volume
upon volume
of words-words-more-words. All written
by hand...
I sit here at my desk overlooking a back clearing
alive with chipping rodents and pipping birds, sensory cacophony
of life as it is, was, shall always be (provided we don’t wreck
it all with our lust for wasteful conveniences)... also writing
in longhand -- though surely
with less artsy grace than Marcel. The computer I usually
use is not yet turned on,
oh blessed relief.
And in the punctuated silence,
words come.
Even
before coffee.

I know next to nothing
about Proust, aside from
his petite madeleine and that it fired his mind. Or per-
haps that is just hearsay, and it wasn’t
like that at all. I may be taking
liberties again with my memory -- poetic
license I can apply in the privacy of my own
simple study/studio, to fill in
the gaps of what I think I know
but truly do not.

VII.

I am awake now
and very much in need
of coffee. Let me take
this notepad and pencil and pencil sharpener down-
stairs with me and keep it handy while I boil
water and watch
for what words come next.

Downstairs is cool, now. Yesterday
was hot. Almost too hot -- making everyone
I encountered nervous, antsy, prone to move
and drive and react
too quickly.
Yesterday was hot. But today -- this
morning, anyway -- it’s cool.

The cat slumbers, paws tucked under chest, atop
the scratching post perch. She loves the heat, lan-
guishes in it each afternoon, but she rests better when
it’s cool.
The kitchen is quiet, dimly lit
by a cloud-covered noncommittal sky.
Even the refrigerator’s mute.

A rush of water from spigot into kettle.
The click of the knob that turns on
the back right burner. The clack of kettle bottom
onto tempered glass cooktop. And the stove starts to hum lowly
with electronic heating work.

Peace.

VIII.

And yet
I am still troubled by -- no, perhaps “intrigued” is a
better choice of words -- no, troubled fits --
this lapse of mine, this lost
memory of deeply productive activity.
What the hell?!
Am I losing my mind?
Is my memory going, as my older friends. all
assure/threaten me that it will?
Did I think so little
of my work that I just dis-
missed it, banished it, sent it
packing
without so much as
a good-bye?
Do I value my words so scantily? Imagine
I had better things to do, than
redeem my various, varied experiences
with lilting, healing sound?

What was I thinking, when I told that active listener
I had written nothing of consequence
for years? What
was I thinking?
No --
wait --
“thinking”is not the right word.
“Feeling” fits better. In my case,
at least.
What Was
and Is
and Will Be, I do not retain
in my brain alone.
My body holds it for my brain to ac-
cess later.

IX.
Let me
explain...

The Sense of
Things -- Events -- Moments in Time
is what I retain. The intellectual details
perhaps
not so much. At least
not in the way others do.

It is the Sense of the Thing, the
Feel of the Moment, the physical impression
that makes it mark and
stays with me long
after the particulars are past.

An energetic Signature -- sense-able signpost
along the path of my life that marks
where/how/when I have passed my time.
My memory works best when my brain is not
on its own -- at least
the brain in my skull. the brain in my belly
must be engaged, as well.
Or else.
I forget.

In truth, I recall
being very much up in my head
the morning I forgot the last three years of poetic excess.
And when I was asked, “Have you written any-
thing recently?” I did not feel
as though I had. I sought out
a specific type of sense memory -- re-collection of
laboring long and hard over pages, editing, editing, editing--
which of course I hadn’t done. I haven’t done it in years.

Small wonder, I had no memory
of writing. I did not do it that way.
Not at all.
I was looking for the wrong kind of memory.

So, you see
I actually told a specific truth about that vague por-
tion of my experience. And my in-
accuracy was less related to de-
ception than thoroughgoing single-
mindedness... an out-
of-sight-out-of-mind focus I de-
pend upon to do well in the world... to do
anything at all, really -- well
or not. My rapt devotion to specific,
pragmatic priorities
betrayed my memory again, blotted my poetry’s presence
from my fickle recollection.

It wasn’t an intent to deceive that drove my tongue, just
some acquired fragmentation of the vessel
that contains
what came before
which I carry with me into
my present
in hopes of making future.

The vessel cracked, pieces
of what makes me
dropped through without my notice.

How cracked am I, anyway?

X.

It’s terrifying, isn’t it -- the prospect
of losing one’s mind to in-
herited dementia, Alzheimer’s, head trauma,
brain virus, stroke, miscellaneous unpronounceable degenerative conditions, un-
treated mental illness, neurological insult of various kinds, or the un-
avoidable march of time.
Blood-chilling.
And in many minds, un-
avoidable.
On my more darkly resolute days, the prospect of progressing madness
impels me to plan
a later life of extreme sports -- parachuting, base jumping, rock climbing without
ropes, leading police on the cross-country high-speed chase
I’ve always craved, or plain
and simple
telling the truth to cranky people in power
out loud and
for all the world to hear.

If I must exit this delicious world, let it be decisively,
with a sugar shot of adrenaline-glucose-endorphin-laced
biochemistry cascading through my pumping veins.
Let the end be worth it.
Let it taste good.
Let it be by choice, rather than by accidental, irreversibly progressive tragedy.

But I am getting ahead of myself. All I’ve done
is forgotten writing poetry -- but one aspect
of countless occasions over three
Very Busy Years.
The fact that I’m still standing tells me
I don’t need to learn to skydive anytime soon.

So there.

XI.

~ Sigh ~
I must learn
to let myself be.
Learn to see myself -- again -- for what
I truly am, and do more
than organize swiftly penned verses in proper-
ly labeled manila folders in the left-
hand side of my desk drawers. Learn
to do more than react to what
descends upon me, and Answer
with my gut
as well as my head, when asked some-
thing as significant as
“Have you written any poetry recently?”

I must also learn to slow myself down. I fear
too keenly
I haven’t got all year to sort this shit out.
I’m accustomed to being swept along by artificial time’s hurried pace,
adept at grabbing its coat-
tails and swinging myself up
behind it, like a bandit fleeing the scene
with a mounted compatriot, well-practiced at hauling
myself onto the back of a galloping steed, like some
circus performer who does it every night
and day for paying, cheering crowds.
I AM
a bandit. And a thief. And a practiced
performer. All the best-
living artists are. And the world never misses what we
steal, repackage, and sell back to it, pro-
mising enhanced powers
from its ingestion.

All the world, it seems, longs to be tricked.
Our species is like a flock of magpies who crave and collect
magick sparkles and bold promises of the most
unlikely miracles.
We as a species are addicted
to faith.
Heaven help us.

XII.

So, where is mine? My
faith, I mean. Me-
thinks I buckled too quickly when I found those files
of captured words, gave in
to the idea that my mind was going, diving memory-
first into the suspending brine of prospective dementia.
Started
planning my own funeral, just
in case.
Foolish. I can be all too capricious and cut
myself too few breaks. And for
what? To feel I’m on top of things
again?
That I have a plan?

What things should I be on top of?
What plan should -- can -- I have?

My point...
where
is my point?
I’ve lost it while roaming the room
around my being. Come
back.
Why am I here in the first
place?

Because I forgot? No -- I just
didn’t remember properly.
Memory was not lost to me completely. Only
mis
placed.

XIII.

Track it back.
Cut
to the chase.
Get on with the day. The cat is calling
from downstairs for another course
of wet food before noon
arrives.

Recap:

1.
I woke up too early... No, I was woken earlier
than I wanted to be
by the protective natures of threatened creatures
who wanted nothing more than
to live to see another day and to see their babies
do the same.

2.
Their shrieking,
screaming, piping, chipping at the tops
of their tiny lungs kindled
a kindred impulse in me -- to throw reserved propriety
to the wind and make loud loud
sounds of cacophonic cadence
to claim my place on this spinning orb,
no matter what dark
shadowy beast(s)
may stalk me.

3.
My memory may have its own mind
at times, but that is of no great con-
sequence
if I can just remember what I am really trying
to access.
Sure as
bluejays dive-bombed the neighbor’s cat
at the crack of my dawning day,
I too shall fly
at what threatens to pounce...
and then trounce me -- those inner-
most misgivings that must flee -- like black kitty --
when exposed, full-throated,
by the unabashed drive to do more than
survive.

But live.

And write.

And be what
I simply am
as best
I simply can.



Copyright (c) 2009 by Kay Stoner

All Rights Reserved

Reading Elizabeth Bishop and Wondering…

Had I been born in, oh, say 1907, and had I
known then what I know now,
would we have called each other up to travel,
or summoned one another with telegrams --
“Pack those bags, girl -- we’re going away
again!” attaches of papers and works
in progress
tucked under our arms, the street numbers of fay friends
settled down towards Cuba neatly
penned into our address book.
Would we have known each other
at all?
Could we have not?


Copyright (c) 2009 by Kay Stoner
All Rights Reserved

Winged Destiny

Spun of magic
and of grace, this moment
crackles with its newness,
like fresh crepe paper from the wrapper
embraced by eager palm.

The emerging monarch climbs free of its cocoon, spreads
its damp-heavy
wings to the shifting breeze and lifts
from from my finger.

Milkweed feasts come first, while
South America awaits.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Kay Stoner
All Rights Reserved