I was never one to yearn for spring —
the air too full of eager wings,
the breeze a burden of song.
Even the ground swells,
straining under a yoke of seeds.
Leave me in spring
to wait for the season’s passing,
and look for me then when
my face is pressed
to a sepia sky.
© Elaine Frankonis
Thinking about it. Annoyed by it. Just not yet destroyed by it.
There were times during that icy week without heat that I could imagine just slipping into a frozen sleep and not waking up.
There were times during the week or so after, floundering in a mix of aches and fever and stuffed sinuses and peppery throat, unable to rest or eat or think, that I could imagine dosing myself into a cloudy sleep and not waking up.
Discomforts for the young can become depressing struggles for elders.
And, if it’s more than just discomfort, if it is, indeed, mortality beleaguering your cells — as it is for my first hospice patient with whom I sat for several hours today — how do you wrap your mind around that?
When I got home from that visit, I found an email letting me know that I have three poems accepted for an online poetry site, the new version of which will be up sometime over the winter. Two of the poems I submitted were based on my experiences with my mother during the last stages of her dementia.
Mortality. It’s just the way it is. We are all terminal.
In the meanwhile, I have to come up with a recent photo to go along with my bio that will go along with my poems on Cyclamens and Swords. The photo that they have — and the one that was on this blog for a while — is almost a couple of years old.
So I take a new photo.
Yeah. More reminders of mortality.
But I do my best to look my best — a little blush, a little hair teasing. Only there’s no denying the passage of time, fine-lining it toward the final loosing of that mortal coil.
Like Mehitabel, I used to brag that “there’s a dance in the ol’ dame yet!”
Well, today, I’m not so sure about a dance. But a song, for sure.
….my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai
the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai.
Wotthehell.
Those really were my golden years — those four college years between 1957 and 1961. And so I was willing to help plan our 50th class reunion. I even sewed a big 50th reunion banner and put up a class reunion blog. That was the fun part.
But it turned out that my closest “girl” friends couldn’t be there for the part that was supposed to be the most fun. When I checked in with one of them a month before the event, I found out that she had moved into an “assisted living” facility (in the same nursing home building where her husband, also a good friend of mine, was confined to a wheel chair with a deadly combination of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases). She told me that her daughter had taken away her car and license, and so there was no way she could attend the reunion.
(If she is there, will I not be far behind, I wonder. We are the same age, same height, same coloring; we shared wardrobes for four years and together descended on Fort Lauderdale, Florida for one glorious Spring Break. Life is not fair.)
A week before the event, my other close friend called to tell me that she had just had a mammogram and was told to go in for a biopsy. The biopsy turned out to be early Stage 1 breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy yesterday and will proceed with the recommended treatment. Life is not fair.
So, did I have fun at my 50th college reunion?
Well, I have to admit that there was a certain amount of pleasant nostalgia that propelled me through my planning committee tasks. Some things went right. Some things went wrong. What went wrong had to do with logistics; what went right had to do with having a chance to connect with some of the 50-years-older people whom I knew and liked back in those golden years.
As a female college freshman back in 1957, sharing a room in a small “group house,” I lived under rules that today’s female college freshmen would never tolerate: we had curfew hours, dress codes, no males allowed beyond the front room and not even there after 10 pm. Two of the girls who shared that group house with me came to the reunion. Seeing them again was part of the fun.
At the reunion dinner, a table covered with memorabilia from those golden years included a copy of the annual literary magazine from 1959. No, it didn’t include any writing by me. In 1959 I was too busy dancing in college musicals and writing a gossipy column for the college newspaper. And drinking beer. And dating. And joining a sorority. And cutting classes to TGIF. Many of my reunited classmates tell me that they remember me as always smiling and happy. Heh. Why not. Daddy was paying the bills and I was off absorbing the joys of life, the universe, and everything.
That’s right. I was no scholar. I managed to balance out my Cs and Ds with a greater number of As and somehow graduated as the B+ person I continue to be. But I digress.
From your absinthe tinted green dreams and
soulless wanderings across deserts of the mind, came truth–
ice-essence truth……
On page 32 of the literary magazine, I find a poem that begins with the above lines — lines inscribed on the flyleaf of a paperback book of Rimbaud’s poems by the talented young man who wrote the poem and gave me the book. I learned that he passed away a year and a half ago. I wonder if he had still had that tousled red hair, that red beard, that passionate, dark, beat-poet intensity. He almost seduced me. But I wasn’t ready yet, back in 1959.
The literary journal also had some pieces by his best friend, who also was my friend, and whose family became friends with my family after we both married and had kids. He is still writing. We lost touch more than a decade ago, although I had learned about his wife’s tragic illness and death sometime along the way.
Bob decided to come to the reunion at the last minute, and we sat together at dinner, recalling those mellow days and nights when we hung out together in front of his future wife’s sorority house — he and his dark-haired Irish lovely, and me with my brooding red-headed boy. And he asks me if I am happy. And what I can answer is that “I am not unhappy.” We plan to keep in touch. I went and ordered his recent book of short stories.
I supposed the ego-stroking highlight of my class reunion (which was part of the university’s Homecoming Weekend) was having a good-looking gray-haired guy (who was a college year behind me) come up to me to tell me that he still remembers the first time he saw me. I was sitting at the long table at the bar we all went to on Friday afternoons. He said that he remembered what I was wearing — a brown skirt and sweater. And I was smiling. And he thought I was gorgeous.
I guess it was a good reunion after all.
A chubby woodchuck
in the middle of an empty parking lot,
stops to watch me walk in circles
around a June afternoon
awash in dandelion seeds
and gently dappled sky.
He twitches his nose,
ambles a few more steps
sits on his haunches,
rests his paws on his full belly –
a curious and patient and satisfied
Buddha.
“The soul needs its burrow,”
the woodchuck says,
“a warren to wend a way
through the solitary earth,
some private ground to hog,
a place safe to spend
that deep season of wonder.”
And, with a fanciful last twitch,
Buddha leaves the spotlight,
his coat a slow and sensuous shimmer
along the grave pavement.
Without looking back,
he disappears into the grasses
between the shadowy sumac,
leaving me to wonder
my own way in.
c elf 2003
Whaling Blues — a found poem
(take one of the blues, the largest…)
Lying at the ocean’s surface,
he is an island in the sea.
He does not fear others.
Others do not fear him.
His only victims
are two-inch crustaceans
(doubtlessly too primitive
for anxiety).
His body is used
for the satisfaction
of skillful motion,
not combat;
he is as harmless as flowers
and, in his silver swimming grace,
as beautiful.
Buoyant with blubber
and virtually weightless
in his glossy yielding element,
he is freer than the birds.
Monogamous —
mating in one year,
raising an infant in the next —
he strokes and glides along
his partner’s body
(although their specific interest in sex
is limited to the spring).
Good will, devotion:
he will stay
with his wounded mate
as long as life lasts,
even while knowing
death is certain.
The best of neighbors,
he will tirelessly
hold up to breathe
an ill or injured friend —
even that pygmie, man,
who hunts with harpoons
and his insatiable hunger
for car wax,
lipstick,
and shoe polish
bled
from the last
of the blues.
c elf 1960s
the earth said beans
instead of grass
to Henry David
Were I to hoe those solemn rows,
I’d till the earth until it sang,
rehearse kohlrabi’s ancient scale
or lead the rutabaga rag; then,
when evening’s blues were done,
invite the weeds’ rich company
to a symphony of salsify.
c elf (1960s)
(for lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day….)
That first winter
(our strange shrimp-shaped child),
locked into the old railroad apartment
(our brassy new marriage keys) —
with the snow seeping through
the chipped bathroom bricks,
I nursed that child
before the open oven,
and we each took showers
with bathroom door hopefully open
to the kitchen’s meager warmth.
Our imaginative landlord
(poet-pretender,
great making of Christmas plum pudding)
attached an infra-red lamp
to the toilet,
mistakenly assuming
that plumbing, like flesh,
would succumb to its magic.
We could afford to laugh,
then, shivering
behind the radiant lie
that lined the loose edges
of the closed bathroom door.
I still feel the cold
of that first winter,
the cold of that closed door.
Cold as hell.
c elf 1960s
(for lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day)
I asked my mother to give me roots.
She smiled and left the cord uncut,
its far end snaking through
a lineage of cords untouched.
I clawed against its tether,
searching desperately for swords.
I asked my father to give me wings.
He stood away,
arms pressed heavy to his sides.
“Fly, fly!” his strained voice cried.
I raised my naked arms
and walked into the wind.
I asked my husband to share
with me the things he knew
of roots and wings.
He showed me scars
where his own still pressed
from deep below old broken skin.
I stumbled away,
a stolen blade tucked in my boot.
I asked my lover to show me
what he thought of roots and wings.
He climbed upon a fence
and sat away the days.
So I called the stones
to coil at my feet,
sharpened my blade to womansword,
and carved a path that spiraled
through a horizontal rain.
And the roots became wings.
And the wings became roots.
And now I flow among the sands,
cold and knowing;
I rise, unbridled,
light among the dust.
c elf 1980s
(for lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day)
I wake
tight
wound in the sheet
–night winding sheet —
wounded
in the tight lined
yellow-sheet logic
of your wound mind
winding
sheet-tight
around my night.
c elf 1970s
(for lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day)
Resting on a quiet ledge
on the beach at Manchester,
the sun warming all of my ends
and endings,
I am drawn to these granite reaches
of the gray North Shore —
the icy sea
an eternal challenge
to the persistent sun
that beats
and strokes
and licks summer heat
into the abiding stones
that wait, still and silent
against the stark abuse
of a relentless surf.
c elf 1980s