I had written a poem. It took a long time. And it never took form, never got real. Just a word or two of truth and then some junk. I asked him once. I said, how do you know when to write a poem. He said when you don’t want to use any commas.
January 1, 2024 Soon there will be no one left to forgive me Your voice tumbling out violets grown wild in streams where fish jumped You were never tomorrow The moon glinted moving the peace so I wouldn’t stumble
The rounds made your laughter mean Sunlight kill ing behind the trees when I couldn’t see you move the branches back Too loud too late…limb and leaf blinded by boots slick from remembering one last line missing
Where your smile was as bright as the sun light where the fish jumped.
Eventually it comes to this. Someone dies and you must go through their items. Otherwise known as going through their junk. Then later, much later you’ll need to go through the leftovers and sort again, the things you kept and never used. You still can’t bear to do away with the treasures that are nothing but things.
Her plates. The ones she had to have to go with the fancy silverware. The silverware itself. Never used, never polished. Your own unused too. “No one entertains like that today.” That’s what we say, we hippies returned to hippy life.
Today we share gummies and play games or talk of Ethics or Morals or The Reality of God. Better yet, Who is God? Certainly no longer the “Father in Heaven” of our youth. What an answer to tide us over. An answer that doesn’t help with the sorting.
The holding onto is clearly an attempt to hold onto our youth. The memories of certain dinners. The memories of Safety that can no longer be replicated. Just as my son’s blanket won’t make me safe. My daughter once said, “Mom, Joel is not in that blanket.” And yet sometimes I found him there, sometimes as I cried and hung onto it, I saw him as a child, I heard his voice.
So now I wonder what I should do with those plates I’ve never used in all the time since she has been gone. Now here it is. The move to end all moves. The final move, out of the country yet. The move where only essentials are taken. Preparing for that is going to take a while. It’s a good thing I won’t be embarking until next year. But the plates are going to be long gone before then.
Joe Bentley Wisconsin post and photo. From the memory palace, if I were taking the back roads.
These are actually thoughts I’m having on the date of her birthday, not thoughts about her birthday. Sometimes too many words are involved in order to make something clear. Especially in a header. And more than once I have thought that the preposition carries a boat load on its little shoulders.
• The daughter was sitting on the floor in front of the TV, eating a toasted-cheese sandwich. This means that it is a Friday and the rules are set aside for “Wild Wild West.” Her hair is shimmering and shining its thousand shades of brown in the sunlight that streams though the window. The boy is sent to his room for some childhood offense and loses out on the broken rules and favored TV show. Just as he walks by, without turning around or looking,
This from the girl: “He’ll never learn.”
• Another TV night, this time on the front porch. The girl is sitting in a chair, not eating, and watching a show. It’s another shoot-em-up but not a western. At some point a man rushes into his bedroom and lands on his bed. As he does so, the bed explodes.
This from the girl: “Oh boy! Is he ever in trouble!”
• The girl and boy are sitting on the sofa. They are watching a TV show. I walk into the room and ask them what they are watching.
The girl answers: “I don’t know but it must be ‘Mission Impossible’ because I don’t know what’s going on.
• Baby Z and I just got our noses slammed by a door. It was the cat’s fault. Her last words were “CAT! NO! No cat.” Followed by a slam. I was stunned. So was baby Z. We just looked at each other.
• The point of it is that a true novel would never end. We are living it after all.
• What is the need to be doing two things at once? Or is it something else making a distraction or a comfort in the background? Nope. It’s about having something to distract the part of the person who becomes aware.
• When the boy was very young he came into the bedroom to tell me that he had a stomach ache in his head. And he came laughing into the kitchen the first time he got the hiccups. He’d hiccup and giggle, hiccup and giggle. Big brown eyes wide and grin the whole of his face.
• Religion and Sex are the same things…sooner or later someone is going to end up on their knees.
• Hey, if we start every new sentence or break with a capital letter why do we need periods at all? Aren’t they redundant?
• Slowly you fall back in love with the things that mattered to you.
• “Permission to leave the battle, sir? God? God, sir? Permission to leave sir?”
• Household rooms need to be renamed: living = group therapy; kitchen=anorexia /bulimia /gluttony, talk therapy; and so on.
• Fear is the dog that’s lapping at the heels same as the voice that calls you back to awareness…
This is a photo from the candlelight chamber-music concert that we went to when we celebrated my birthday here in Cleveland. It was so beautiful. Then the daughter went to Portugal to lease an apartment and celebrate her birthday which is on the 28th.
From a sampling of cat logic. Feel free to answer True or False.
Boston ferns are brought indoors. Boston ferns shed a great deal. Humans sweep up Boston-fern sheds. Humans sweep Boston-fern sheds into neat little piles. Cats jump into once neat little Boston-fern shed piles. Therefore Cats spread Boston-fern sheds more than Boston ferns shed.
And here is the author himself, quite noble and pleased with his abilities, Baby Z, aka Zooie Cat, or Zeus.
As Lois Smith and Julie Harris have said, James Dean was a sweet and sensitive actor, beautifully handled by Elia Kazan and his friends. It was all happening far too quickly.
USA. New York City. 1955. Jimmy DEAN with a withdrawn timid look, “East of Eden” had just opened in New York at the Astor Theater after a celebrity studded preview. Jimmy neither attended the previews or the opening, “I can’t handle that scene” so he boarded a plane to Los Angeles.USA. Fairmount, Indiana. 1955. In 1955 James DEAN visited the town where he had spent his youth, it was just after he had made “East of Eden” but the film was not yet released. He stayed on the farm of his uncle Marcus Winslow with his relatives.USA. New York City. 1955. James DEAN.
And he was my first love, my first crush. A symbol of what was to come in a love for bad boys: the unavailable, those meant to die young in a flurry of dreams and fast cars. You know, the kind you play the sad songs for. The ones who break your heart.
Writers Ink—Writing and Stuff 