Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd. (Rumi)
I love to see a field of thistle
from a distance. Get too close
and you will bleed. But someone
has to chop it down before it
goes to seed and spreads its drifting,
downy, dangerous self into a
field of corn or beans or maybe
where the cattle feed. It has not
many friends except the butterfies and
bees. And I am not one either except
I love to see it purple in a field, far
away, where it cannot make me bleed.
Sunday morning sipping tea.
Different from past Sundays.
No newspaper. No black and white movie on t.v.
No coffee (too acidic, causes arthritis, gums up your joints).
Now I sit at the kitchen table
still in my robe at noon
laptop computer wirelessly surfing the net
from one website to the oddly connected next
like a cyber version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
From the blood type diet to the blood type of Jesus
to a blog about Ernest Angley to a Wiccan site (for balance)
to a chakra site to Shirley MacLaine’s site
which talked about her new book
and had the first chapter online
which mentioned the connection of musical tones to colors
and how that is evidenced in the chakra system
which made me think . . .
Connection. Colors. Tones. Energy centers. Emotion.
So I wrote a poem about the color of anger.
Can’t you see I’m working?
The Internet test said “write down the name of someone you associate with the color red.”
I put my father, of course, because everyone knows that red is angry.
Poor red. So maligned.
Some anger is brown.
Deeply rooted, earthy, quiet,
smoldering like the bubbling brew under the Hawaiian Islands.
Some is green.
Nurtured at the hands of others, growing, jealous, victim-anger.
Some is frightened, paranoid, unworthy.
Yellow.
Whatever color anger – and I’ve had a rainbow – it’s definitely not all red.
But that’s still the color of my father.
His anger is of the fire-engine variety.
Hot, spreading, fueled by anything in its path, inflicting damage.
I click to the next screen of the Internet test.
It says, “The person you associate with red is the person you love the most.”
I feel deep, midnight, black-like blue spill down over my head like a cracked egg
and turn navy, then cobalt, then azure, then cornflower, then baby.
I don’t think any anger is blue.
This morning, just after I woke up and just before I admitted that fact to the world, I daydream fantasized a poem. I was in an old house, but it was light and airy. Big wooden windows opened by breaking a paint seal. Dust motes swimming, diving and rising as the calico’s tail creates a stir from the sill. Hardwood floors. High ceilings. Mismatched furniture. Desk from a yard sale. Couch handed down from somebody I don’t remember. Plastic crates stolen from Purity Dairy holding books, tapes, . . . actual albums.
I see it, hear it, taste it. I remember it so well, and yet it is no specific place I have ever been. Rather, this is the vision that remains from long ago feelings.
It’s a rental. Upstairs a struggling musician lives with his girlfriend. He’s a bass player, thank god, not a drummer. The back screen door has a wire coil pulling it shut. Back porch a slab of concrete with four steps down to the yard, a patchwork quilt of grass, weeds, and bare earth. Grass has a hard time growing under the constant shade of such big old trees.
I feel it. It is a house of youthful hope and ancient desire. It holds a memory of simplicity unappreciated in its time. It was a place I think I might have been once in the 80s.
When the feeling has been explored, my poet’s mind begins to consider structure and rhythm. I anticipate the writing by combining words and rolling them around in my mouth awhile like analyzing a vintage Cabernet.
The last line might be, “How could I ever want more?”
Then, finally, I rise from my bed, abandon my theta state wet dream, and turn once again to the world of work and worry.
Deb Moore 