Sun-bleached bougainvillea petals
pile up along the fenceline
like obsolete coins or the scales
of some iridescent fish. In a dream
an enormous carp leaped out of
a clear lake and into my arms,
wriggled its mighty muscles and
dove back into the water. What
was it for? Luck? Long life?
I may find out, if I reach the top
of this ridge lined with dried
eucalyptus leaves, tan and tough
and scattered like feathers
on the angelback of the mountain.
Poem A Week: The Farewell To Music /
Listen to the song that inspired this poem.
How comes an ancient bard by firelight,
How comes the ringing that rushes the ears,
How tired these fingers, how frosty this heart
As the harp nestles into the shoulder's cradle,
And the music bleeds to life
Bells and dusk, the honey wine and cheers
No longer turn the years away
The blaze in your blood
Fades to a shudder, fades still
But they are rapt and counting
On you their attention lingers.
As your hands go to threads of brass
And pull them tightly into songs,
They wonder how a blind man finds a voice
That could burn cold castles to the ground.
Between the notes you gasp
And strain to hear.
Is anyone there,
Do they silence their breath?
Or is your audience this night composed
Of the hosts of fay, await with chariots of light?
From blind forests cries your closing tune,
A thing of pure ecstasy, knowing
That as its last refrains ring free from the cairns
You will be dancing with the sidhe,
Free of this terrible harp's pox.
And so your fingers lift once more,
Raging like Uaithne's sonic spellcraft
Which this time poisons your own mind.
Note after devastating note you finger your fate,
Each triplet imploring the Morrigan to dance.
For a moment longer you are entangled
In the filigreed edges of Ireland's last cry.
And then the strings melt beneath your touch,
Flooding golden into your veins, pumping your heart,
Becoming you as you become the melody.
Your body, shining white as the moon's burn,
Fades to the fire, leaving only crescent shadows.
The stairs, ascended by halves, carry you to the sky
Where your bones are scorched clean by gleaming ravens
And your eyes, for the first time since childhood, find the light.
(For Turlough O’Carolan)
Poem A Week: Inanna Thinks /
Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal depicting Inanna resting her foot on the back of a lion while Ninshubur stands in front of her paying obeisance, c. 2334 – c. 2154 BC.
It's not so much that I descended
into the earth as that
I became the earth.
In that time Heaven exhaled its breath
into the lungs of the land
and you could not separate the two.
Back then I walked among crops
fed by two fertile rivers
whose names are now the mantras of history books
but otherwise unmentioned.
Now the ground is as dry as the dust
one of their gods — I forget his name —
said the people would return to.
They deny their own end,
every day shouting and firing their guns
as though their vacant blood
will nourish the land,
as though it matters whose footsteps
running through the streets
of Baghdad, of Babylon, of Sumer
will awaken me.
Poem A Week: Bodega Head /
Photo by Flickr user J. Curley. Creative Commons.
Here, in this cradle of earth, surrounded by low boulders,
was our wedding bed.
I think this is where I married you.
I do not think it can be undone.
Instead the land wove deep threads through us on needles
so tiny we thought the pricking was pleasure.
It was in this place that I loved your warmth,
sheltering me from the winds' knives,
and you loved the flavor of my mouth,
which reminded you of riding the ocean.
You wanted to be drunk on me and I let you be,
never understanding that the words of a drunkard
do not truck in the unintoxicated world.
I would have let you take me then,
there in the sunshine and soil,
or that night in your cold bed.
As much as I wanted it I am lucky you didn't take me.
I am even luckier that you left me.
Your absence, and this thin, ridiculous longing,
are far better companions than you could have ever been.
Poem A Week: You Do Not Complete Me /
Photo by Filip Mishevski on Unsplash
You do not complete me
any more than the tree completes the soil,
each slowly devouring the other;
any more than the sun completes the moon,
which is still the moon whether or not it is lit;
any more than the spoon completes the bowl,
filling and emptying it again;
any more than the traveler completes the road,
which goes onward, explored or unexplored, to its end.
Poem A Week: Ashore /
Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash
Each morning I haul myself
out from the depths of sleep,
pillow a life raft, blankets a tangle
of fisherman's net trapping my legs.
Voices on the radio tow me in,
sometimes so sharply I don't remember going under,
other times so weakly I gasp and cough chestfuls
of dreams from my leaden lungs.
Dreams stream from my hair,
catch between fingers and toes,
weigh me with fragmented memory.
The taste of ash in my mouth,
limbs bruised where you grasped them too hard,
fresh ache of a loved one dead, alive, dead again.
Some dreamers skiff across the night sea's surface
in fast-moving vessels, wake easily each day.
Me, it's a wonder I don't drown.
Poem A Week: Petaluma, 2009 /
"Hunt & Behrens, Petaluma" by Fred Davis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Birds boomerang above the tin spires
of the empty granary.
Its stacks are ringed with rust.
Its threadbare sheds stand hollow, doors open,
framing the weedy lot beyond.
No one has hauled grain from here in decades.
Ruined barns shy from the roadside,
split sides knitted together with spiderwebs,
spines broken and piled with mouldering straw and leaves.
Livestock would turn from them for fear of collapse.
Freight trucks gather in the darkness just off 101,
wheels nestling into gravel,
headlights winking out two by two.
Sleep, coffee, Grand Slam breakfast and harder things:
all these stave off white-line fever.
Past these graveyards and pit stops
flows the wide river,
carrying gravel barges, passenger ferries, rumors
of capsized pleasure boats.
The town's dead sit quietly, unburied,
as the earth slowly welcomes them back.
Poem A Week: This Land /
"Redwoods Avenue of Giants" by sobolevnrm is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Read-breasted robins gather on the softball field
in the heavy fog, searching for bugs.
As I approach they take to the sky in one
smooth, silent trajectory. It is clear,
even when humans are not using this land,
these birds think of it as ours.
I do not want it to be mine.
I want the green expanse, a kind of
banquet of insects, to be theirs; I want them
to tell me when I am intruding; I want them
to chase me off for showing up at
family dinner like some traveling salesman
ringing their doorbell. I think of Sonoma, of the
wild green woods, the shrubs and grasses
so massive in the summer, humming with
birds and crawling things. There, nature
is so pervasive and huge that you know,
without doubt, one day it will take over,
swallow everything, and claim its due.
Poem A Week: When I Die /
"Dobro" by Mshai is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
When I die
Bury me in a dobro
Under that pierced steel moon
And its underwater shimmer song
Put my flesh to fire
Bellowed from the heat
Of a 10,000 watt amp
Ringing anywhere everywhere
Lay my bones
In a cello casket
I'll rattle around like dancing
Under the keening of the strings
Press my carbon to diamonds
And put me in a needle
Tuck me into that warm black space
Between the grooves
I could never make music
But when I go
I want you to know
I'm singing
Coming Out: Fibromyalgia /
“When we feel vulnerable sharing something with someone, I think it’s because we are actually judging or shaming ourselves ... And then we’re afraid the other person will as well. We’re afraid they will confirm our worst fears about ourselves. That’s why it’s scary. We fear their rejection because we’re really fearing our own rejection of ourselves.” —Kara Loewenthiel
“The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.” —Rita Mae Brown
I have fibromyalgia.
I was formally diagnosed a couple of years ago, but I’ve been living with it in some form since my early 20s. For years I thought it might be something else: rheumatoid arthritis, maybe, or a connective-tissue disorder. The diagnosis surprised me, but over time it has come to make sense.
The definition of fibromyalgia, as it stands now (the medical world doesn’t really understand it very well yet), is that it’s a neurological condition in which things that shouldn’t hurt do, and things that should only hurt a little hurt a lot. When I injure myself, my body heals but the pain lingers — my nervous system “learns” the pain, then struggles to unlearn it. Fibromyalgia often comes with fatigue, general aches, brain fog, trouble sleeping and other symptoms. For everyone who has it, it’s a bit different.
This is what it’s like for me: I’m in a little bit of pain every day, somewhere in my body. Often, it’s more than a little pain. Today, it’s focused in a spot next to my right shoulder blade. But I’m achy elsewhere, too — in my shoulders, my arms, my legs, my feet. Sometimes, I also feel like I’m coming down with the flu: my throat and eyes are scratchy, everything aches and I feel like I could sleep for days. I have one or two days like that each month. Even on a good day, my body gets stiff quickly, and standing up when I’ve been sitting a while means walking gingerly until my muscles joints loosen again.
Fibromyalgia flares often come on when I overdo it, physically or emotionally. If I spend an hour gardening or take a long walk, or even if just have a night of bad sleep, I’ll have flu-like symptoms the next day. It’s similar if I get really upset or stressed out by something. Sometimes it’s worth it — worth it to be fully alive and active in my body or in my emotions, even though I’ll likely feel lousy the next day. But generally I try to do things in moderation.
To look at me, you wouldn’t guess anything was amiss. This is what it means to be invisibly disabled.
It might sound like I’d be miserable all the time, but I’m not. There are bad days, and there are days when I grieve or feel like I’ll never feel good again, but they are pretty rare. This is my baseline and I’m pretty used to it, just like you’re used to yours.
The most common treatments for fibromyalgia are anticonvulsants like gabapentin and pregabalin, thought to keep the nervous system from overreacting and causing symptoms (they’re also used to prevent epileptic seizures, and to treat shingles pain). I haven’t tried them, largely because I am so sensitive to medications, and these ones are notorious for being difficult to get used to (and more difficult to come off of if they don’t work).
Instead, I take low doses of ibuprofen, which helps keep my baseline pain levels down. On bad days I have a whole menu of things to try: stretching, foam rolling or rolling against a pinky ball, THC or CBD tinctures, cannabis salves, heating pad, a bath with epsom salts, massage, chiropractic care, a nap. I’ve tried plenty of other things that don’t help, and I’m not looking for any advice. The best preventatives are good sleep, lots of hydration, and not too much (or too little) exercise or stress. But there’s only so much control I have — which is to say, not much. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to terms with the idea that some days I’ll feel like crap, but they will pass.
The causes of fibromyalgia are still not well understood, but some research points to chronic stress, especially the kind of stress we may carry if we’ve experienced adversity and trauma before we become adults. It’s nice to see this research making its way into mainstream publications after doctors not taking fibromyalgia seriously for decades.
I’ve kept this to myself for a long time, not wanting to be treated as different or less capable — or conversely as some sort of inspiration, achieving so much in the face of adversity. Ultimately I can’t control what others think, and the older I get, the less energy I have for hiding.