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I’m going through old poems (& choking on the dust & remembering what it used to be like, in those past days) so I can send a missile of about fifteen of the best to some dear friends who will tell me which ones they think are the strongest. I guess the above parenthetical statement is what I really wanted to say, in this post. There are so many, so many awful ones about Ye Olde Unrequited Love, so many And Here I Quote From Ye Olde Holy Scriptures, and so many that are maturing in the Dominican, in Nashville, in grief, in rebirths of consciousness, in paradigm shifts. Several have made me cry. I’m finding my voice, and finding my way through life.
There’s nothing like looking back and seeing that you’ve come so far. Sometimes it is so clear that living is freighted with eternity.
After having transferred the KUB bill to my name, um, I’m very conscious about phrasing. how distracting. this has nothing to do with KUB bills, though, and everything to do with the fact that I’m at a grant-writing workshop that’s been intense. and incredible. completely intimidating and inspiring. and I can hardly write a sentence without being really aware of how it already needs drastic editing. so, today, after hours and hours of lecture / Q&A on the pre-writing work for grants, the forms for state and federal grants, ways to find relevant & generous foundations (and their 9900 tax forms online, woa), agencies with data and statistics, formats, tips, rubrics, lists, stuff … after all of that we were supposed to go ahead and use the information she (Susan) gave us to construct a grant application / letter of intent / inquiry.
grant-writing? I wouldn’t have thought of that — would YOU? I mean, I’ve had lots of bad thoughts about mammoth corporations and various bad operating procedures of the state and federal governments, but I never really thought about how much money is just given out, these days. comparitively, probably still mortifying; not comparatively, I’m flabbergasted. these corporations get some sort of tax breaks by putting their billions of dollars into foundations instead of the operating account, and hire foundation directors, whose job (partly) it is to give some of that money away. obviously they want to hang onto as much as they can — I think they just give the interest on the principle? never the principal? probably? but it’s still millions — like, who was it? I think Garth Brooks’ foundation has given more than 6.2 million since 1999 to nonprofits who’re focusing on kids and “at-risk” families. Wal-Mart, apparently, has given over 160 million (as of what date I don’t know), although that doesn’t come from them — it comes from their Children’s Miracle Network telethon junk junk. but every movie star has a foundation, everybody on the NFL and NBA? Tiger Woods. Madonna!
but having said all that, I’m still nervous. I wish I knew more about my future. Mary (my boss, Global SEEDS, for which I’m going to be the new grant-writer) bought me some Burt’s Bees last night. pomegranate oil … lovely reddish … and now I have Indian Jasmine perfume … which I’ve been waiting for all my life (though I knew it not). I’m very ok with living in this moment. smelling ravishing is one of the most beautiful things to happen to me. I love.
I am behind these people.
my life divided into seasons, like chapters
in a book, cleaving and separating
its length into pieces
I can stand.
Looking down that stretch
of gray open water to where it dons fogs
is a long continuum as full of grief a hundred feet from now
as now is full, two hundred feet,
two hundred miles.
There aren’t any dams here or anchored
markers so a mention of the natural
sessions of season
stands in and rearranges with movements
as reassuring as sleeping children.
Not interrupting but
accenting, delineating its single rope of dimensions
by a new name, a new season
as inevitable as the continual pushing forward
of story, which is so
inevitably welcome.
I know this time is taking
its ropy stream further down.
You should have been there to see the loveliest skilllet-cornbread rising like a hot air balloon in the oven and fried green tomatoes spitting and sizzling on the stove. I don’t care what people think about that kind of thing; to me, it was really a new day. I can’t think of myself as incompetent in the kitchen, anymore — I now know my stuff. We’re trying bagels, soon, too.
I’m getting ready to leave with Katie Gray and Josh for the West. I’m thinking a large portion of the bagels will come with. When I think about driving all those thousands of miles, I just keep seeing a map, lines drawn to separate state from state and parks from not-parks. Districts, counties, rivers snaking throughout, lakes, all outlined in some inocuous shade of blue or green, sometimes tan. And then from there I think of myself in it all and I fall like a falcon, miles to the surface of things, riding with my face out the window and camera strap around my neck, waiting for something beautiful. And there’ll be so much of that, I can’t think. What sort of break, after all, after everything?
What kind of break or cleft is there between “stages” of living, of a life? Are they breaks, or clefts? Or just lines of separation, dotted, drawn on a map, which is not the thing itself but a way to understand the thing? I want to know that now is a new county, that I’ve crossed perhaps state lines, and am in a new place with a new name. And I have to reconcile that with the desire to understand my living as one long branch of tree or river, bends & elbows & brokennesses but single, going forward only, and passing its source of life & maturity from the beginning all the way to the tender, tenderest, end.
