Tag Archives: by Catherine Keefe

I waited all winter to tell you

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under the ancient oak
an empty picnic table

I wrote those lines late last December after a walk with Chester, the big white dog. I remember well the afternoon we wandered in the gloaming, he with all the bounce and romp of a puppy and I with some elegiac tang induced by another year’s looming end.

fog swirling mist
descends upon the night
chill

the stars are crying.

Why so sad? I wonder now in summer’s glare.

summer afternoon shade
untied my shoes

I wanted to tell you how the table surprised me that afternoon when I turned left on the path instead of right. There were no tables anywhere else in sight, just this one simple wooden stopping place.  I waited through January, February, the bluster of March to give it to you, not from the vantage point of the path which ran past it, but with the solidity of its worn wooden bench beneath me, with the joy of describing the summer solstice meal I ate from atop its uneven surface, with the fervent vow to eat al fresco more this summer than last.

So much depends upon a wooden picnic table in a winter afternoon.  I felt a new comprehension of William Carlos William’s 1923 poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

I wanted to tell you how my table seemed embedded in the grass, as if it had roots like the oak above it, how it was the soft brown of shadow on bark with bright orange streaks where a kind of moss grew upon it as if it were a living thing.

By April I vowed to eat at a different picnic table each week this entire summer. I would dine under the sky! Describe parks and beaches and campgrounds! Find new vantage points!

Then I wondered; would that plan celebrate the novel and restless over the warm familiar? Maybe instead, I should resolve to meet this table and this table alone with my basket all summer.

so much depends
upon

I think of Monet’s Haystacks, the artist’s study of light upon a common object.

I think of Antonio Porchia‘s slim volume, Voices, the writer’s light fixed on common man.

I have scarcely touched the clay and I am made of it.

I think of something as solid as wood in a world which feels more like a river than stone.  Anticipation is delicious.

under the ancient oak
an empty picnic table
summer afternoon shade

Summer begins yesterday.  I wait as long as I can.  Noon turns to afternoon turns to almost twilight. I’m ready with camera and Chester and a brown paper bag full of first peaches because it’s the kind of day where I don’t have time to cook.

We go the long way, take the path which curves first left, then right, then around the bend of the seasonal creek, the path which places the setting sun behind my shoulders which casts my shadow long and makes me look as if I’m always arriving.

Chester pulls on the leash.
And there under the ancient oak.

It’s demolished. The table top now lies at the bottom of the creek bed.

“Certainties are arrived at only on foot,” Antonio Porchia writes in Voices.

Past tense and future crumble the present I was given and never received. As I walk home, I know. I waited too long to whisper my secret wish to picnic with you, but I will tell you now.

~ With high hopes for surprises along your own path, C

Give the people a love story

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What are you writing?
Everyone wants to know.
Wretchedly miserable love poems, I say.
The poems or the love?
You, of all people, must know.
(from beach bag journal, 2005)

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Kauai is a study in couples.

Yesterday’s bride perches poolside, feet dangling in the water.  A fraternity-size of group of men surrounds her, holding out icy cups of beer.

“Drink!”
“Drink!”
“Drink!”

“No more!” she insists and jumps to her feet.

Newlywed

As she sashays away the rhinestone word scripted across her bikini bottom sparkles in the afternoon sun. The man wearing the white Groom hat downs his beer and doesn’t follow.

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Fewer people will look you in the eye and say, I could be your lover than the number who will say they’re thinking about becoming a writer too.

Which one of these is the harder thing to do?
(from beach bag journal 2006)

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The friends who join us on this trip point out The Feral Pig, a restaurant that used to be a breakfast place.  “We ate there on our honeymoon. ”

These are the kind of friends we’ve had since before we both married that hot summer of 1980, D and I trading bridesmaid duties.

Today they giggle, then tell us a honeymoon story.

One morning, we saw a couple eating breakfast there.

They just sat at a table, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper.  They never even talked to each other.

We think of that couple all the time.  We don’t to be like them.

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Repeat after me: Give the people a love story.

Los viejitos sólo deben salir para ser amables.  Old people should only go out in public to be sweet.

This quote is attributed to Leopoldo, the uncle of Aura Estrada, Aura, the muse and amor of author Franciso Goldman, Aura, the woman who died in a freak body surfing accident and then Francisco wrote about her in the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.  In Say Her Name, Francisco says,

“Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breather her in deeply. Say her name…”

He can write about love like that because he doesn’t have it anymore and no one can accuse him of being sentimental.

I read Say Her Name on the beach and remember a question I once asked an entire class at the end of a semester when I was a literature grad student.

“Where, where is the happy love story, the great literature happy love story?”

Titles peppered me like small darts. Love in the Time of Cholera.  Anna Karenina. Lolita.

So I start with Lolita. I find love in a million masks: obsessiveness, possessiveness, irrationality, kindness, tenderness, anger, illness, forgiveness, relief and release, madness. Is this the only kind of love that makes great books? I really need to know the answer to this. I really need to find a happy love literary feat.

My friend who’s never been to grad school but loves to read suggests Rebecca.   I look it up, it’s a romance novel. I don’t read it.

Maybe love and literature are like the raindrops in a storm.  Who can write well about one small droplet of water without evoking thunder and floods and the loss of sun behind clouds?  One small drop of fresh water. Where’s the miracle in that?

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“We’re on our honeymoon.”

I tell this to my husband, (isn’t that a glorious word?), I tell my husband this as we stand at Gate 45 in LAX preparing to board our flight to Kauai.

“Our honeymoon. Yes. I like the sound of that.”

In truth, we’ve been married almost 32 years.

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Writers block only happens when you stop telling the truth.
(Scribbled in my Theory of Fiction Class Notes)

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The Gray Divorcés

The divorce rate for people 50 and over has doubled in the past two decades. Why baby boomers are breaking up late in life like no generation before.
Wall Street Journal headline, March 2012.

One small drop of fresh water. Where’s the miracle in that?
Repeat after me:
Give the people a love story.

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You don’t brick over the hearth if the fire burns out.  You gather kindling and tinder. You haul in logs from the woods.  Hell, you cut down the whole damn forest  if you must.

You hold a long-stemmed match to crumpled paper of your past and breathe and blow to fan the flame. You swear to tend this fire as if your life depends upon it.

You don’t want to be that couple that doesn’t hold hands on the beach, nor the one who doesn’t talk at dinner.  You want to be that one over there, the one laughing in the surf, holding hands.  I wonder if they’re on their honeymoon?

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“Write love stories. I benefit when you write love stories. I’ll be your research.”
J says this to me one day when I say I’m only writing sad stories.
(From my journal, March, 2007)

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Just don’t lie to me says the writer to the heart. It makes the work turn out badly.

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I tell J I’m sorry. I can’t write a happy love story. I wonder though: can I write you a life instead?

~With love, C

“Stop this day and night with me…”

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This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

Angel’s Apple Blossom

I saw Angel today.

He sat slumped in the driver’s seat of his sagging brown truck in the General Store parking lot at ten in the morning guzzling beer from a 24 oz. can.  His head waggled and seemed disjointed from his neck. His red eyes blazed. When I jumped out of my car and tried, after all these years, to finally thank him he waved me away with a wobbly hand.

“No, no, no.”

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?

I had hired Angel one winter to mow my grass and pull weeds, to prune my roses and feed the orange trees. He did those things sporadically and not very well.  His strength was drinking beer and surprising me with gifts.  His specialty was to plant what appeared to be utterly dead fruit trees in my yard.

“The other house, no want,” he told me the first day I came home to find a bony trunk with naked branches staked on the fringe of my grass.

“What is it?” I asked.

Angel spread his muddy palms to the sky and shrugged.

“Fruit.”

“What kind of fruit?”

He spread his muddy palms to the sky and shrugged.

Slowly a patchwork orchard emerged in my backyard. Angel murmured to the branches as he hand watered the circles of dirt around each tree.  When he caught me watching him, he smiled broadly.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

“Is it alive?”

Angel nodded, always yes.

“What kind of tree?” He spread his muddy palms to the sky and shrugged.

Each tree ignored my need for it to prove its place by greening, then blooming on any proper schedule.  I researched the rhythm of bare root fruit, but spring didn’t bring an end to the mystery.  The trees remained unfazed as earth turned toward blooming season.  I stopped inspecting the branches after a while and began instead to consider how hard it might be to pull up dead trees.

Then one damp night I was restless and wandering, wanting stars.

Solitary at midnight in my backyard…

Angel’s first tree shimmered in the moonlight.  I walked up to it and swear I heard trumpets. What I had missed all those days, looking from afar at the branches barren of leaves was the riot of ruffled pink popcorn pearls pinned on slick branches. Tight blossoms were poised this night to begin a wild unfurling.

Peaches?
Apricots?
Nectarines?

What could I imagine eating sun-warm some months from now?  What might I capture in jam jars to tie with red gingham?

Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands,
Say, old top-knot, what do you want?

The next time I saw Angel and showed off our blossoms he smiled, more bemused at my excitement than joyful for the harvest. He never doubted fruit would come.
A peach tree.
An apple.
An orange.
Another apple.
A plum.
An apricot.

For seven years Angel tended our slowly growing orchard.  His faith in the indiscernible life hiding within brown leafless branches scavenged from other yards was impeccable.  Then one day Angel stopped coming. Yet every now and then a new barren tree would appear in my backyard and I would look over my shoulder, half expecting him to be squatting at the base of the apple tree, his favorite spot, humming absently.

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

I began to wonder if I’d imagined the man.  When he called himself Angel was that a name or his being?  I took over the care and feeding of the trees and silently thanked him with each basket of ripe fruit I brought into my kitchen. I shared the bounty with neighbors and told them about how Angel showed me that you could save a thing by moving it to the right home and tending it with water and words.  Was I creating a myth?

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean…

Today as I walk back to my car, rebuffed, I turn my palms to the sky and shrug.  Driving away, I wonder: If I could plant Angel in my backyard would he bloom again?

Angel’s Apple Tree

I exist as I am, that is enough…
Imagining you in health and sun,
~C

Note:  The words in italics come from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself (1881).  Today would be Whitman’s 193rd birthday.  If you’re lucky enough to live in or be visiting New York this Sunday, June 3, you can participate in the Ninth Annual Walt Whitman Marathon Reading of “Song of Myself.”  For more information about the man, the poet, or events at Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center in West Hills, NY, visit http://www.waltwhitman.org/ 

Excuse me

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Dearest,
I tried to write today.  I was on my way into the house.  I was going straight upstairs to my office to begin composing.  But then I noticed something in the front yard between the tree roses still wild in their red ruffled first bloom. There! A tender cotyledon of some sort pushing up through the mulch.

You know how I often yank out weeds sometimes when I return from my morning walk. Can you see the bend of my back as I stoop down to inspect this new growth?

But there was something so non-weedy about this growing thing. Perhaps it was the unusual turn of its green, a domesticity blaring in the gentle roundness of her leaves. I left her there, leaves turned toward the early morning sun, germinating.  But by then, filled with the curiosity of what she might become, I forgot entirely what else I had to say.  Oh, wonder. All day, all I could do was fill up on wonder.

I promise to do better tomorrow.
-C

Things I will miss someday

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You, of course, Dear One,

And books made of paper.

I know this for certain as I pack my bookcases, preparing to move.  When I open my dog-eared copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I discover a pencil-scrawled note in my own hand.

…overheard in Target at the checkout line by a little girl wearing a bee yellow soccer t-shirt.

“Can I start reading my new book in the car, Mom?”
“
No, Chelsea. No. Don’t ask me again.”

I write all kinds of things in books. Notes to myself. Things to track down.  Finding this jot immediately takes me back to that night in Target and how I almost touched Chelsea’s shoulder and told her she could drive home with me.  Realizing that would be an infintely eerie and highly misunderstood act, I inscribed her name instead and recorded these words in a book I hadn’t even paid for yet to remind me to speak wisely to my own daughter.

I wonder someday, when all the books are digital, where I’ll keep these memorandums.

It’s frontismatter – will that word become extinct? – and marginalia words recorded in another’s hand that I’ll miss even more when paper books have dwindled to near extinction.

As I pack another shelf, I discover my mother’s signature, swirled in black fountain pen, on the browned and brittle first page of a 1965 Vintage edition of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea. So many years after the lend I feel guilty that I’ve not returned it, but in exact opposition to the slow way I lost track of having her book, I immediately remember her words the day she pressed it into my hands.

“This is a lovely book for a woman in the middle of family life. I think you might enjoy it. I know I did.”

I read the book as grown-up daughter, not the seven-year-old I was when my mother read it first, and I wonder if this passage also began a slow shift in the river of her life the way it opened in me the possibility of finding rhythm, peace, and solitude in nature.

“…Woman’s life today is tending more and more toward the state of William James describes so well in the German word, “‘Zerrissenheit—torn-to-pieces-hood.’ She cannot live perpetually in ‘Zerrissenheit. She will be shattered into a thousand pieces.”

The wonderful thing about my mother is the graceful way she can guide without seeming to do so. So subtle was her influence that even though I own several editions of Gift From the Sea, and I’ve given it frequently as a present, it wasn’t until I found my mother’s copy, with her tidy penmanship on the blank first page, that I remembered who first introduced me to its beauty and its wisdom.  I also realize if I alone have kept it all these years, my sisters haven’t had a chance to read their mother’s treasure. Mea culpa, mea culpa.

Packing and moving can make a person feel nostalgic, but this longing for the permanence of pen and ink goes deeper than my desire to touch the same page as one I love.

Where will I find the croissant crumbs from that little boulangerie in Paris when I reread Baudelaire?

Where will I tuck the card or letter from my book’s giver and how will he inscribe upon the front, “Love, Dad.”

When I really really miss you, where will I find your chocolate fingerprints, or the sand leftover from your own sojourn one summer by the sea?

I suppose these things will remain alone in my memory’s cache or I’ll forget and never miss what I don’t recall.

Oh I suppose I could always write about them, but how would I find the time and words?

Imagine this in pen and ink,
C.


For every perigee, an equal and predictable apogee

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One night in Venice

Dear One,
Am I the moon and you the earth? If so, what then is the sun?

The moon recedes, will reach its furthest point from earth this year on May 19 as it slowly starts to spin away.  Away. What brilliance shone on May 5 must be remembered. Will you walk into the dim lit dark, look up into the sky and wait?

dateline: PORT TOWNSEND, Washington, one May evening

Upon finding myself walking behind a grey-haired man and a white-haired woman not holding hands on a Friday night and following them into Sweet Laurette Cafe.

His right hand is in his right pocket instead of holding hers. The tilt of his shoulders in stride veers just that much toward the sidewalk. Away from her.

There’s enough space to fit another adult between them.

She bounds, feet wildly meeting the pavement as if an afterthought of movement, a requirement, this tethering to the earth. Her legs flail. Is it possible that one wants to head right and the other left?  She glances furtively at him, catches the side of his cheek, not his eyes.  She swivels her gaze wide in the opposite direction.

They lack the lean, the comfort of aging into each other, the ah yes, it’s you and I’m so glad.

Not that there’s tension. No sparks fly. None of either kind.

She will let him dawdle over the menu. He will wait while she spoons great gobs of loganberry pie à la mode into her mouth long after his hunger has been sated.

She will snort when she laughs and his silence will halt her mirth.

He will pick the chicken from the spot where his gums recede with the sharpened fingernail of his left pinky.  They will walk back up the hill, no closer than when they descended.

~

I want to tell her, (but of course I don’t because that might admit too much), nature teaches trust amidst her rhythmic wax and wane.  I want to tell her about the moon. But of course that would be too metaphoric for a stranger I never met.  I might tell you instead.

If you want to chart the progress of the moon, check out this Lunar Perigee and Apogee Calculator.

If you’re more poetically inclined, take exactly one minute, nine seconds to have a listen to Caroline Caddy read her poem, “Editing the Moon.”

Brilliance,
C

What’s the sound of mothers dreaming?

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Nanzenji Temple Trees, Kyoto

The sound of my voice in silence makes only one mistake. So I’ll tell you about a small two-story grey house. Can you see weeds flutter among patches of dry Bermuda grass and a chain link fence encircling the front yard which is protected by a padlocked gate?

Imagine shadows, long and chilly. I’ve been here only at dusk for the hour when I used to teach meditation to young women who live at this safe house. They’ve fled abusive relationships. They’re pregnant, or have recently given birth. I’d like to say I exuded an aura of peace when I arrived, but the truth is my silver meditation chimes clattered against each other as I hurriedly picked my way between strollers, a red plastic tricycle, and the rocking horse that cluttered the front porch.

I was, am still, practicing the art of moving gracefully through the day. This class was my idea. I was new to meditation and felt its effects to be profound.  Like the first time I ate a lychee while traveling in Japan and discovered its seed buried unexpectedly beneath the rough bark peel and slippery ivory flesh, when I began to meditate, I found a deep kernel of peace enfolded in my heart and was surprised it lived there. Also, I discovered that when I was very very quiet I could hear my voice, the one that  sounds like the true me without any doubt or hesitation.

It seemed odd: me teaching women with one, two, or three infants or toddlers who barely have time to use the bathroom alone, never mind the possibility of finding solitude to meditate.  I told them that going deep within, to a quiet and holy place, might ground them and bring them peace. Sometimes I felt like I was offering peanut brittle to the toothless, but it was really all I had. Of course when my two children were babies, I’d found no time to center myself. Yet now, when I need it maybe less than I did then, I begin my day before dawn with an hour of reading, meditation and contemplative prayer. This stillness carries me through the day like a time-release sedative.  I reflect on many things, but my thoughts frequently turn to the concept of voice. Do I use mine enough?

One night, after class, I have this dream:

I doze in the sun on a plastic-strapped lounge chair next to a small apartment building pool with leaves and twigs floating atop the water.

Splash!  I open my eyes to see one boy, young enough to still have his milk teeth, smiling as he dog paddles in the shallow end.   “Dad!”  yells a high-pitched voice.  “Dad!  I’m over here.” A man waves absently at the boy and slowly picks his way around the pool deck littered with old chairs. 

The boy cannonballs off the side of the pool.  The father gazes at me, working a cigarette with his lips. He descends the pool steps and wades into the shallow end. 

I peer over the edge and see a dark shape at the bottom, like a balled-up baby doll of a lump.

I glance at the shallow end where the boy sits astride his father’s shoulders thrusting his fists into the air. But I can’t hear him any more. I look again and that thing on the bottom of the pool is still there. 

It looks like a baby doll. Oh please, let it be a baby doll. Precious oxygen time is wasting and still, I don’t dive in. I don’t want to be involved in death this afternoon, especially not the death of strangers. I will not jump in. Even as I say this in my head, I open my mouth.

“Help!”  I yell. There is no sound I scrunch my face and try again.

“HELP!” The boy jumps off his father’s shoulders and the father ducks below the water.

I look again at the shadow on the bottom of the pool. Deliberately I open my mouth wide. “Help! “There’s a baby on the bottom of the pool!” I’m yelling in silence.

Alone, I plunge into the cold water,  try to retrieve what I can hardly bear to touch. A body, rubbery.  And cold.  So cold.  She is cold.  She’s blue.  Dead. Then I shriek.  The man and the boy rush to my end of the pool.  I huddle over the body, shielding the sight from the young boy. 

I’m awake.  Straight up in bed. I’m screaming.  No sound comes out.

For many mornings, I sit in meditation with this dream. Of course I don’t tell the women at the safe house to sit with nightmares looking for answers.  In fact, I really don’t tell them much. I repeat the words of Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.

Breathing in, I calm. Breathing out, I smile. Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment. Breathing out, it is the most wonderful moment. For one simple hour we concentrate on the gentle rhythm of breath. We drink in the blessed silence that happens when babies fall asleep in their mothers’ laps, safe, warm and full, sometimes working their lips as they suck in their dreams. I whisper the thought that this kind of peace can be recalled at other, less tranquil times, as a balm against anger or frustration or fear. Breath is always with us. Sometimes a hardness about the women’s eyes begins to soften. I tiptoe out when my hour is up, not wishing to disturb the mothers who’ve fallen into deep meditation, or sleep, themselves.

Shortly after my dream, meditation classes are cancelled. It has something to do with house counselors wanting more time for job skill training and Bible classes. Yet, I think often about the young women who live in that grey house, wonder if they remember anything at all about what I tried to teach them.  They never considered anything they were doing as remarkable. Not the courage it took to leave their abusive situations. Not the energy they poured into keeping their babies safe and working on a new sort of future.

“We’re just trying to breathe,” they’d say. Then they’d laugh like children.

If you want to begin meditation or deepen your spiritual practice here are some of my favorite book resources: The Energy of Prayer by Thich Nhat Hanh “When love and compassion are present in us, and we send them outward, then that is truly prayer.” Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating “The will is designed for infinite love and the mind for infinite truth, if there is nothing to stop them, they tend to move in that direction.” Or, if you prefer a quick how-to article, you can check out Sam Harris’ “How To Meditate.” Peace, C.

Zen Rock Garden at Nanzenji Temple, Kyoto

Dear one who sent me this note:

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It’s hard to be confident in my writing when I read the works of geniuses like Andreï Makine or Irene Némirovsky. I read and I wonder if anything I write will ever be as good. But I’m trying to not be discouraged and to keep writing. Thank you again for all of your advice…
L.

                  

To this, I reply:
Oh cher étudiant,

Do these words come from the same woman I once described in a recommendation letter as having an “abundance of intellectual curiosity” with “the ability for sound discernment?”  It’s so simple to recognize talent and bursts of greatness in another; nearly impossible to see ourselves reflected with pleasure.

You do know that “I’ll never be as good” is a refrain from your own Songbook of Fear and Despair.

If you write to surpass your literary ancestors you may succeed. Or, you may not.  But you’ll certainly grow a weed of discontentment because, wild word child, how will you measure that kind of benchmark? Will the yardstick be labeled “sales” or “critical acclaim” or “awards won?”

Is this desire coming from the same woman who once argued in a paper, “They Can Save Their Self-Righteousness for a Better Cause,” that critics might censure literature while not realizing it could be their own unfamiliarity with perspectives from societal margins which creates literary discord, rather than some artistic failing by the writer?

You will write from the heart, with developed technique, because you can’t sleep at night until you have your say. You will write and rewrite and rewrite again because you’re building your personal House of Words and “as good as” be damned because your work is yours alone crafted with all the voice and character that sings from your own sacred self-space.

When you feel faulty, write ten pages, twenty pages, and put them away for one month. When you think you’ve got nothing to say, look at what you once wrote and highlight the passages that still make you smile.  When you feel sorry for yourself, remember the great failures of your literary heroes: Némirovsky was accused of anti-Semitism in her work, and Makine “was growing desperate” to be published before his first work was accepted.

We’ll keep this correspondence just between us because someday, when you know in your heart that you are a writer, you’ll be startled by your insecurity.  I look forward to reading more of your work, even that which you can’t quite stand yet.

Speaking of reading, Makine’s new novel, The Life of an Unknown Man arrives in June.  Do you want to read it together?

Kindly,
A Woman of Letters