Love conquers

6/21/11

My prayers are scooped up and gently sealed with you.
A year underground and not a whisper from my heart
Not a murmur from the part of me
That left with you.

My memories have been laid bare with the stars.
Dead heroes, ancient scars, the laughter of kings
We warred the same things
Together.

Silent, fallen, tears, ash.
Is this how it will go down?
What you were
Was not mine.
The order of succession was confused
And you have received no crown.

I have knelt in the night before lions that speak your name.
Taunting and furious to unbury the lies in their throats,
They circle. They come and go.
I sleep in peace.

Our battle was not new.
Our lessons have been learned.

Of death, in life.
Of life, in death.

O soul unsaved.
O one not won.
O lost.

Love conquers us, or we are conquered.

Standing before a blank sea, face toward a brightening sail.
It is too much to fight and I drop my weapons in the sand.  

Awake

I am watching rain drift down in the dark, and tonight here is no one here but me. At first the alone-ness was flashing like lightning on the walls of this heart; frightened and pale and thunderless, like a baby giant's tantrum. But now the night has fallen calm and I wish I was not stolen in all directions, or so aware of my feet; feet that were left standing on nothing but the road when all the newness fell through. And this is all to say I'm coming up empty, Lord. Maybe I should have listened.

The only good thing about broken hearts is the mending, and the hands that set and seal and sew; with kind fingers against our rough hearts, polishing away the blisters and with time healing the scar. And then we are not raggedy, or broken, or lost. We are just His. Sometimes I can remember the silhouette of my daddy's face against the headlights reflected in my seven year old sleepy brown eyes. More often than I deserve I can see Your face against these flashes of loneliness in a night where I thought there was no but me.

There is something else I meant to say. I love You. With all the love in my senseless heart which is a love that is so small and little and not enough. But even though it is not enough and it's small and it's little, it fills me up until I can't breathe through my tears sometimes. And I don't know why I kept falling in love with being in love with anything but You. And I don't know why I ran away, when I had no place else to go.

Tell me to go and I will go. Tell me to stay, I will stay. Tell me to live or die, to be whole or be broken. I don't care about anything but to say I'm listening, now. And I will wait until I hear; and I will wait until everyone else has left; and if it means I'm waiting forever, then I will stand waiting forever. And maybe sometime in that forever the little piece of love in my heart will have grown up, and maybe I will be so spellbound by it that I will barely notice it when You take back my hand and lead me to where I need to be. And even though now I feel nothing, I know You can hear me. I will always know that.


Because I believe in the sun even when it's not shining;

I believe in love even when I am alone;

And I believe in God, even when He is silent.


I am watching the rain, drifting down in the dark, and tonight there is no one but You.

Love comes through our wounds

In the summer that year I had a whole field of daisies. Daisies were always my favorite. They reminded me of innocence. My head would be clear and empty there and I could walk and let go of most of the memories, and fill my hands up with precious white flowers and hope instead. Yet those last words I remember you saying still echoed in my vacant heart.

"Love comes through our wounds."

*

You were my Preceptor then, and gave me Dylan, Yeats, and the oldest stories,
the poetry, the paintings, the prince of tides.
You taught me to love words, because words were all we had to give. So you gave me yours, and the new possibilities of language rang in my mind, in the voice of your poems
of harlequins, and maidens
and leather-clad heroes
riding the slipstream of the night.

I guess I learned even this from you... to bear things until I could write them, and write things until I could bear them. It makes sense that so much I write is about you. I could write a thousand pages from the days we had. About how in the beginning I corrected your southern mouth. You said I had a lot of pluck. I told you that you drank too much. You told me that you loved me.

And here we were like children, playing out our story through the characters we knew:
A star-crossed little girl, and a boy who wouldn't grow up;
stolen from our prams and bereft of a home, all for the silly sake of learning how to fly.

Whatever we were.... we were we.

In a world so precarious, that was all we knew.


*


“Love comes through our wounds.”

You said I might not understand what it meant yet. But I was up and smart and sensitive. You believed one day I would know.


*

You had lived your whole life with Carolina in your mind, unafraid of the sun in your marsh lands, by your islands on the coast. They say when most of us die our bodies will turn back into earth, but I always knew you would melt into water. Your eyes were a piece of the sea. But together at the end we were autumn trees, displaying our death in flagrant colors; hiding the truth we knew all along, that no part of us would last.

When the days became too much, and I would hold you while you cried because it hurt that everyone who loved you once had left. I always came to you, even when your hurt started to hurt me. You shook when you sobbed and I held you by my heart like a child. I cried too. Your hair had turned silver when you were a boy.

By then you were not the mentor, or the author, or the man. Life had caught you, with its rising and falling tide of memory. You grieved the loss of your father's love, and of your little brother who had died leaving you to never know why. You remembered that you died too in the kind of accidents little boys have with guns; but somehow, in a blur of morphine, hospitals, and healing you came back. Everyone had said that was because you were meant for some special purpose. You told me you had never figured out what it was. I said one day you would find it, because I didn't know what else to say. You smiled. And then you were gone.

I just wanted to say I know now.

Even though I can't find you to tell you, I see what I should have seen long ago. That all the while you must have known you were slipping away, and yet you let me fight. Even though we lost every battle, you told me there was hope so I would not forget there were things worth fighting for. Every time I cried for you made sure I would never forget how to feel love. And until now I have hated you for letting go, when that is the only thing that has caused me to know how precious it is to hold on.

I know now what you knew then, when you spoke those last words to me.

“Love comes through our wounds. “

It was the fighting to save you, that was saving me.

June 21

and should some why completely weep 
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry 
for he could feel the mountains grow

- e.e. cummings

If you haven't heard this at least once in your life already.... You're welcome.

practicing this today

Pianist: Israela Margalit

May 10

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one.  It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

            (suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)



- e.e. cummings

Tomorrow is for mommas. Today I was thinking how my mother reminds me of Jesus, because she loves me more than I give in return, she helps when I think I don't need help, she makes me do stuff that is good for me like drink organic things and plant tomatoes, and she's beautiful. She's just beautiful.

one sweet day

today i made two kinds of cookies.
i danced around and Frank Sinatra sang Summer Wind.
creatures of all kinds watched through the windows.

waking up at 9:30am, i am prompted to share my thoughts on sleep after a year in college:

my thoughts on sleep after a year in college are that sleep is good.

so it's harder than it looks

coming back to anywhere, when you've been away for a while.

but, just in case it's worth anything:

i'm here. . .

~c

A new favorite poem for K

I had a little nut tree
And nothing would it bear
But I'm nuts enough for both of us
So I don't really care

= Best day ever

I. am. WHOA! so caffeinated.

To catch up: a passim

At the house where I live there is a Momma and a Poppafamilias, a white dog, a Spinet, bare feet and gardens, and six other variations of me.

At the house where I stay there lives a good Doctor, his wife and his pipe, two princess puppies, one of the prettiest pianos in the world, and a quiet blue pool outside.

I don't get to be where I live very much. The house where I stay is not home. And I am getting used to this, which is one of the six or seven feelings one year ago I never thought I would feel.

*

Last night we went to the St. Louis Symphony, some of us because it counted as credit and some because we hadn't been since we were very little which was when we were allowed to be very little and to care more than the music, that we got to sit next to a lady we loved. Last night I heard Yefim Bronfman play the Rachmaninoff 3rd piano concerto and it was more beautiful than anything in the world and by now I know better than to think it was silly of me but I sat there in the dimness of the hall with my face bathed in tears because it was everything I wanted. It was everything I wanted.
When it was very late and I got back to the house where I stay, I was filled up with music and I couldn't fall asleep for hours because the soul of that night had made mine so gentle and awake, like candles.

-
In other news:
Fall left for a while and is coming back next week. 60s. I love my scarves.

-

I haven't written because so many things are coming up on me. October is going to be half gone before I see it. Recital this, concert that, Competition. I have a teacher now. I have practiced so much my hands ache to practice some more. I've been discouraged and afraid and hopeful and the closest to confident yet, in that order. I have a teacher now. I felt very stupid at first and quiet and then very small and trusting at the piano next to hers, all of which I need to feel to grow.

*

Well, I have written actually. Stuff. Like PAPERS. I hate papers. I'm supposed to be writing a paper right now. I'm not good at writing papers. I can't write papers on a schedule because I get hung up. I get hung up on one word, every time, because usually it seems to me that the choice between that word and another word make all the difference.

Besides, I always think of things I'm supposed to say here in the morning when I'm looking at my face in the mirror. By the time I get to school and I do have something to write, I have to do it in the library and I try to avoid actually having do something serious in the library because I can never concentrate properly between all The Jamaicans that think the library is an appropriate place to ask me out. The Jamaicans are long story, one of the ones that it would take longer than a while to actually catch up on. What's happening? 500 things, I feel the same and way, way different. Presently I am needing to find a balance to my schedule. Let me illustrate

:

College.

1) Good grades
2) Social life
3) Sleep

Someone very wise told me I have to pick two.

But, lest we forget, coffee.

TBC

Hello

Right now I am sitting barefoot on a tall chair in the school library. Before I was here I was sitting barefoot on the school swing under the school trees and before that I was walking barefoot on a few crunchy school leaves along a row of school trees and for the first time was feeling like I do at home. Because this is my homeweather* (see Important Neologistical Footnote). Almost always when September comes I like to land and breathe, and almost always also observe curiously a poignant gentle sadness and joy/longing that seems to be reserved in my head for this period of time between today and the cold. It's fall, now. The whole meaning of the air is autumn. You have to have felt what I feel to know what I mean, but it is the first day when you can look out a window and tell it's here. Something in the light; brighter, crisper? You have to have seen what I see to know what I'm saying, that the light of a season is distinct to itself, its very own colour and idea. Autumn light is clear, and thin and sharp like the first bite of an apple.

I thought I should also say that maybe sometime soon I'll write things. A million shapes have changed, inside and around me but a million more haven't. The weather still starts turning after summer and I still go all crazy happy and want to tell someone about it. People ask me what I want to do and I still say music, because I still think that explains everything.


-

* Important Neologistical Footnote:

Homeweather is kind of like homeboy/girl/fry/slice, only slightly more atmospherical

christina

_
Chain Stir
An Itch, Sir
Sat Rich In
His Tin Car
I Hint Scar
Char in Its
Inch Star, I
Can Hit, Sir
Rich Saint
Is Arc Thin


_


well
what's in your name?

how the air must feel in the space between words

Today is one week before my first classes. I don't know what to do with it yet. I've been scared then excited then jittery then smart then doubtful then flighty then shy then everything then nothing and at this point time better just go by quick because I'm starting around the circle all over again. Today is only three days before I go and stay away from my family for the first time for the first time for the first time in a long time or ever. Now that you feel sorry for me it's just for one night. Small steps. I think I should stop writing so much about myself. It must be bad for the environment. Unfortunately it's pretty much all I do here. That's why I like this place. It's got a lot of me and somehow I still like it. And now that I have to get all bizzy bizzy, I don't know what will happen to it. Will someone take over for me? All you have to do is say I a lot and put some verbs nouns and lots of lovely adjectives in front of it and throw in a few pictures of a white dog and bam you're a SUB BLOGGER, poorly paid but strangely pleased. Anybody? You probably know more about it than I do. Which is hard to believe, I know.

Naptime

*

To each their own.

Ever since the slumber party 3 year olds spent the morning pounding their sticky fists on it, my Spinet sounds lightheaded and on the verge of falling out of tune again. The fifth octave especially is beginning to sound super jangly. These are the moments I think I will only have 12 kids instead of thirteen and absolutely none of them will ever be three years old, because that is the age when you don't even think about stopping them when they're ruining your beautiful instrument because they're cute, just so evil and cute. I have been practicing Debussy on it anyway, for a long time, la fille aux cheveaux de lin - The Girl with the Flaxen hair, which has always been my favorite that I forget about, until I play it and hear it and it reminds me once again of someone that I can never quite put my finger on and I'm not sure but I think it's the someone I want to be.

When something is wrong with my baby, oh
something is wrong with me

Isaac Hayes