What are the consolations within his blessed mercies?

Strike the empty resonance
with all the pairing opposites--
so much like all the others.

Really it would have been something
if an occasional affirmation had
loosed from any of your lips,
could have made the difference.
A burning forward at my chest
no more now than a rumor
no senses from suffering
and elemental consequences.
Heart unbroken, unresonant
like a collection of all the others.

All of them,
all these nothing, the same
as bright clean prayers
folded on paper, together
left hanging on stripped branches,
piled upon by subsequent requests
abandoned to the air.

And still, the lightness
all the space, to bear
fully the sighs in freedom

the dual chained links ever unset on my hand

Family?

So I recently read this book, title appears below the quote, and this passage below really struck me. Actually, many things in the book were particularly noteworthy. This one, I think, requires us to recast our understanding of what the term "traditional family" may actually be pointing towards.

“Although chattel slavery was under attack at the end of the eighteenth century, it belonged to a long and some thought honorable tradition. Slaves were among a crowd of dependents subject to household authority. When people today talk about assaults on the “traditional family,” they demonstrate the limits of historical memory. The medieval historian David Herlihy has explained that the English word family comes from the Latin familia, which in its earliest uses connoted “a band of slaves.” The Latin word for father, pater, has an equally complex derivation. It originally meant someone in authority, not a biological parent.
The concept of the family as an authoritarian conglomerate of unrelated persons persisted in early modern Europe. A fascinating passage in the work of the sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bpdin begins with a question: How many persons does it take to make a family? Bodin answers that it takes a master and at least three other persons, whether they be his children, slaves servants, or free dependents who have voluntarily submitted to his authority. Then, almost as an afterthought, he acknowledges that a family must also include a wife:

But for as much as Families, Colleges, Companies, Cities, and Commonweals, yea, and mankind it selfe would perish and come to an end were it not by marriages... Preserved and continued, it followeth well that a family cannot be in all points perfect and accomplished without a wife. So that by this account it cometh to passe, there must be five persons at least to make up an whole and entire family.”

P 124-5
Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History
By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich


This website entry cites some other, relevant information about the topic:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=familia&searchmode=none

Spring Thoughts (perhaps characteristically inappropriate)

So today, regardless of what the calendar says, I consider the official confirmation of Spring. First I was on a busy street in Salem and I had to stop in a long line of cars because of the great number of Canadian Geese crossing the four lane road with their babies, all of them together in a line. Usually I would be rather irritated because the geese have to stop and honk at a particular car that they are offended by, and stand and flap their wings while my timeframe for an appointment I’d like to keep is steadily expiring. But this time I took great joy in observing the fluffy, grey, and adorable babies follow their parents all bunched together with their funny backwards-oriented knees bouncing them around, able by the sheer force of their cuteness and their will to cross the street to bring a great number of adults in large, heavy cars to a standstill at the geese’s own pleasure. So I didn’t mind watching these wonderful birds bounce their way across the street. And I should add that they were crossing from the little bird park where people drive in and pull over to feed a large number of the Greater Fowl in the Mid-Willamette Valley bread crumbs and sometimes (maybe) their children. The park is just next to the busy street, and a little stream or creek runs right next to it. And on the other side of that creek, the chain link fencing and razor wire of the State Prison. On State Street and not far from our own golden-topped Capital building. On the other side of the street, the Geese’s destination, was a grassy knoll in front of the State Parks Administration or State Forestry building, you know, some government conservancy type thing or whatever. Lots of grass and nature and water running around in front of it.

Later on, I am in my Aunt’s back yard checking in on a dog and I pause to look up at a songbird. He’s got a red-flecked head and he’s quite small but making quite a mellifluous racket and at the same time exerting himself, hopping and flapping all up and down a power line. Then I noticed that he’s surrounded by a veritable harem of “chicks” spending a great amount of effort to appear as if they are completely disinterested in this vulgar display of machismo. Yet these ladies, less flagrantly colored to say the least, dowdy to say even more, were doing nothing but listen and quite brazenly judging him. It turns out that all of his activity was focused on one particular bird at the center of his hopping and flapping. How did I pinpoint the lass? Well, at a certain point he stopped flapping and flopping and alighted quite deliberately on her back, straining his wings quite rapidly and ...bouncing right on her. Which she responded with a casual shrug, causing him to reposition himself next to her. My inner Voyeur being piqued, I continued to watch them. The male bird tried again. This second time, I observed quite scientifically, the female seemed to try and steady him, as if they were acrobatic birds at the Cirque du Soleil in the center ring. (Do they have the three rings at Cirque? I’ve never been.) So then this attempt, seemingly more successful than the first, ended rather quickly and I thought, “Is that normal for birds to be so fast? ...I mean, they do have short lifespans but damn....” Then they both turned around and looked at me alternating eyes at me, first the left and then the right. Actually, I think each bird looked with a different eye, one with the left and the other with a right and then they traded, never moving except for their heads. I felt like they were saying, “WhaaaaAAAAaaaat, it’s love.” They were kind of treating me like I was their kid and I had caught them. I got the feeling that nothing was going to proceed and I could personally hold myself responsible for interrupting the continuation of the Finches if I remained. So I walked back inside, determined to write it up.

Can we deny our basic natures?

I know that they say
animals,
raging
frothing
slicing beasts
pacing over each other
in our cars
roaring down the speeding
circuits of our anger and acquisitions

I see it too,
salivating mouths, glazed-over eyes
though accidents and crises in the
television
blood and violence medicating
our empty spaces, rapacious desecrations
churning beneath our smiles,
parking spots are war zones
text and cyber messages our bullets

So have I given feed to the ferocious
withering beast
inside,
And I see they do contain their own
destructive instincts,
though dogs content themselves on dirt
and rotting things.

I know about potential

How many lives pass within my imagination?
I do not cease my fantasies--
more like me not to breathe than stop supposing
worthy empty things like
relationships and experiences.

I am the fool, the one who makes loud declarations
to empty rooms,
rather than speak to what I know.

Each morning the sun reaches
across the blue white morning,
reddening he crests the buildings beyond
my window, and drags fingers across me
starting at my feet, going--until he
offers a tiny blessing at my forehead.
He knows how to hold a person’s splendor
without burning.

Best if I go there alone

You must do what is
your wont,
but I
would not ask you
ever to go back to
that place where you
thought to
uncouple from this world--

Better not to recall
how close it felt
that I’d wake up
to find you extricated from
my life,
and pausing with the detail’s permeation
to observe the precipitant opportunities
(my head becoming a supersaturated solution
cooling to room temperature, casting down
granules of relevant insights)
of stopping your fantasies for an hour,
a duration of a cup of coffee
or a slightly shorter night's sleep.

I cannot turn from tragedy

There is a part of me in suffering
so far removed from my
everydays, almost mistaken
for a separate state entirely.

Does a day descend without your
presence--
When again the concrete integrations
of my together expectations
again particulates into windstreams,
swept along the dust-clogged avenues
of our designs?

I must bear these atrocities I
ask to turn away from;
I must watch longer the television
screen and try to participate in tragedy
not my own.

We are breathing together

Some queer thirst for your
name inspires your initials on a passing car;
your impression in place maps
and miscellaneous unintended elements
through town;
I tried to extricate every bit of you
but the very word itself,
a careless incantation and then a sharp
breath,
always in a car,
alone, driving
and your name calls me.

I am faced with an internal and also
transpersonal journey, wandering between a
wish to banish my foolishness from my waking
wanderings and never to have any more
from you,
and “I have,” I say,
though a third element in our conspirations
directs a walking tour of my museum-heart's
permanent collections

unwelcome, unbidden, and
ordained.

Disgorging the poem I owe

Warm and quick it jumped from
my open mouth displaying itself
across my sweater and guzzled down into
my fuzzy pajama bottoms.
I was left with a surprise at my
loss of bodily control, so unlike the
commands I normally issue.
Was I too young still to know when I'd
had too much
to eat?

The last time I had submitted to extreme
gastric exodus I was a skinnier 14, no longer
subject to the monthly migraines; coming home
from school pale and bleary eyed, stumbling to my
bed in the afternoon and waking up 12 hours later,
bringing up every drop of liquid in my stomach
on a seemingly 5 minute rotation. But 14, my first
week of high school in a new place,
muscle spasms in my neck, quick-sharp gasps of pain
and one ear always resting on my shoulder.
No answers from physicians, just spinal taps
and heating pads. I only learned to live with it,
but not heal it. And one night I fell asleep
with the heating pad on maximum and woke up
hours later in the early minutes of the morning,
stumbled to the carpet in my bathroom and stripped
down to nothing, delirious and in-not-pain; partially
beyond my body then.
I passed out naked on the bathroom floor,
thinking that they will find me this way in a few hours,
mom and dad and a naked dead child on the floor.
I woke up though after a few minutes, and
blew bits of carrot out my nose and my mouth,
then went to bed.
Found my carrot in a tissue the next day.

I had the Swine Flu for a week or so,
and not even with the intermittent fever dreams
of falling asleep in a convention hall with people
peering over me and talking about me in my bed,
interrupted by the brief naps with my head over the toilet,
not even then did I throw up. I said to my bubbling stomach,
"Either do it now or let me go back to sweating in my bed."

Illness does not do it anymore,
but evidently too much Miso Soup can pop my gasket.

We just change the subject

We in our conversation
try to get our points across
with the only thing reaching
between us
our disagreement;
while underneath our feet
we stand on tiny
islands.

Or is gender-blender better?

I glared slightly at the pants-less Dancer,
offering no words but a quick change in my
facial posture, a quiet "no" in the twist of my head,
a back-off when he shimmied up to
me in the dark. Content to stand with
arms down at my side, occasional
conversations with other dark forms,
declining to gain much attention.

I think he dances for me all the time
but I turn toward other things;
my virtuosic motions confined
to fountain strokes on leather-trimmed
pages with elastic bindings.

There is only the one Gender-Bender
inside us and all supra-gendered beings invoke
our originator's continual recreations;
the One who shifts best,
and he happily dons the masks we
offer to giggle and delight at our blind wanderings.
We are roving madmen arguing over texts
while she moves inside us
waiting for the music to begin.

We share the wall between us

Though that is nothing strange for us,
your domestic indiscretions
disturbed my day of rest
and altogether
inserted me in your unquiet
exchange.

I never thought to
see you in a state of rage
but more like it was your way
to be acknowledged-
it sounded like a language
you were apt to use fluently,
over coffee I heard frequently,
"Shut the F(lahdeedah) up!"

I thought while I adjusted to
the clean and silent sunlight displayed
across my sheets
that the two of you were outside
and from across the way,
like when she,
the manic banshee lady,
would shriek and tear her hair at
her husband and children around the
breakfast table
expletives and accusations
containing the entire thrust
of her assertions--

But no, I found out it was you
beneath me, and I heard
in your words the same
song and continued refrain that
had disturbed me for many
months of Sundays.

I stepped lightly through the door
into my kitchen
and engaged the coffee grinder,
then the stereo on a Sunday morning.
The sensations of slamming doors
and thrown objects into walls ran across
your ceiling and to my toes. And then
through tears and animal noises
I heard a man laughing,
encouraging you to rage;
pulling your warm frustrations between you
as an endless taffy distorts and sticks together,
both your altered voices from our
brief accustomed courtesies
feeding each other
to violence and the word, "Always."

Other things drift upwards and between apartments
smells and extra-curricular activities
slithering through wall spaces and pipelines,
but you made me stand witness in the very room
of your frustrations.

Not the same sounds that used
to wake me on Sundays,
moans and sighs loud enough
to invade my habitual earplugs,
still irreparably awake.
Giggling to myself in bed not quite alone,
I found I was in unrequested territory,
and then, too, I would stride through my house
engaging televisions and other noise-makers
until it was proper again for me to return,
giggling and shaking my head.

Not like now, though, no.

Love waits for us to find

I stepped in a bit of love
this morning
on my way home when
I wasn't in my normal stride.
Funny it seemed
to be waiting there for me
as I stepped off of the sidewalk
and into the gutter.
A mounded reconstitution of rain
like a dog pile ready to fill my world
with a squishy pungent odor.

Now that I have the stain
on my sole
I cannot gain its absence.
Love and my existence has not
been lately discovered but with me
all the while.

Thoughts with vacuuming

I cannot make you see what
isn't really there--

Making a spectacle of myself
in front of the wilting lettuce,
the red-felt bowl of shriveled ginger and
decimated garlic,
I collect myself in the untraveled
spaces behind opened doors,
along the distance of the floor,
beneath the walls and
joined with the quietly breathing dust
mites and wispy balls of hair set
into the corners of our conversations
by the daily unsung motions
of living things-
the blood clot lints spun from small
cotton rugs,
the dropped stains of coffee
rings and dried consumed concoctions,
scurfs of habitual living
and the dross marked paths between them,
pushed by brooms and
people that move them.

It is there I fly
down along the disasters
ground of our discourses,
gathered by the wakes from greater things
trapped on the way to the dustbin.

Pale without light

Words
that call with each inhalation
some lacking crisp meaning,
instinctual or flavored with
their appropriate use.
Careless with my definitions
I throw them about me,
laying seeds for a garden.

And when inspiration falls inopportunely
when I cannot reach for a pen
my words sprout messily, and
clump without regard for what's around them.

They start their life still in their packets,
locked away from a light in a drawer--
somehow the steady leaks of
watering emotion
trickle down into the crevices of
my notebooks
to cause these kernels to seek out and
grab onto each other, like slithering
hands in all directions.

Spiral and swerve

Spiral and swerve
It doesn't matter that it happened.
Not that you were ever much good
at fighting it.
No, it slips in with your excuses,
in between your disappointments
and what-might-have-beens
Much like an ant colony discovered
one day under the floor boards,
or the way your neighbors
cheese-and-cauliflower casserole
odors crawl in along the plumbing;

oh how the cold presses close to you,
enough so that it gets inside your toes
to where they feel much like someone else's.
The things that you thought you'd gotten rid of
dumped into the trash bin
along with the ravages of dinner.

It doesn't matter that you're back
same as if you never started--
like reeling in a large fish from the
rolling waves of the oceans;
a few feet in, more out.

Membership quotients

The scores I possess for entry
to Mensa are non-applicable
according to the website's lists.
I pondered submitting the money
for a home test in order to better
understand what the local society's tests
might be like.

The smartest person I know says the
sample questions in the work books she has
entertained herself with are beyond even her.

I think in my whole life the only IQ test I've take
was practice for a neighbor who was studying
to be certified as a TAG instructor.
I was videotaped because her children did not want to be.
And even now I wonder what my non-applicable
test scores (sample) turned out to be.

Now though, I think I would rather spend my time
pursuing other things more practical
rather than sitting in a room with desperate people
for another line on their resume.
I guess that membership in the AARP is more easily attained,
and garners more benefits.

Pied piper sirens

But how can this be?

I turn away from myself when I should spiral down,
following the ambulance scream for my attention,
barreling through the tollways of my mind
like an ice cream truck for the unconscious.
While it twists back itself
I want to skip behind it
back to my childhood memories
scampering along deeper into my unknown,
a subconscious ambulance chaser.

Instead I hear the ambulances and
fire trucks pass by while I consider potentials
over a course of dirty dishes and soap water,
waiting for the coffee to brew and
pondering what I will write today.
Ambulances alert civilians to danger,
racing towards despair and destruction all the while
announcing their presence to the flames.

No more colors until spring

It is in my interest to take note
of the draining colors of the world
and notice the hues that take their leave
as light fades slowly from the skies,
only not so for the trees, the leafy trees.
Their colors warm while everything else cools,
except the autumn vegetables.
The light now less bright
as if the chill in the air somehow
removes the dazzling sharpness from the sun's glare,
like winter has finally caught up with sprinting summer
pulling warmth and effulgent vegetation back behind
the dawn of winter's recalcitrance.
I imagine the oppositions of the year,
and dream sometimes the sun matriculates
like a child with a private education,
flying away south with the squawking geese
while annuals furlough
in the call of the ground swallows.

And then in a few months, when winter, darkness,
and rain have had their way with me,
the grey-dark skies slapping my face with wet fingers
reaching down between my layers,
suddenly the crocus and the blue buds on the trees
will cool as they emerge, when temperatures rise from
beyond the ground, light inflorescent at last.
Just like a stray image from a forgotten dream,
or a stranger that promises to stay for a time then
disappears with hardly a word or a gracious note.

Cosmic parking tickets

She left a ticket underneath my wiper
while I was sitting with coffee
and an open notebook.
She was also writing,
citing the squandering of my gifts
and assigning a fine:
The continued dissatisfaction with my life
and everything in it.

She put a smiley face after her signature.

How was I to know what the meter maid
had secreted inside the searing yellow envelope,
"Violation" displayed boldly across the outside?