Who Knows What Will Happen Next

I came home to Canby this weekend.
In what might be termed an overdue visit.
I've been crying over phones in the seats of my car
and neglecting the folding of clothes on my floor
my iambic pentameter is poor, no doubt.
but unintentional, so don't fuss or shout.
Most importantly
I can't seem to see
any flashing car lights
or noises from planes;
a simple silence of crickets pervades
I am at peace, I claim it for me -
a small step for mankind, one big step for Lyndsay.

Timshel

My mouth opened with the flare of my nose

My nose closed with the fall of my chest

My chest rose in time with my knee

My knee left a rose on my thigh

Movements may never lie.


My eyes would not believe my bones

My bones disagreed with my skin

My skin fell in love with my hair

But my hair was cut and left in the sink

Whilst I remained on the brink.

A Phone Call After Dinner

I am trying to substitute your face with this phone.
But let us be honest --
No Nokia, no Verizon 3G smart-berry has the capacity to replicate your contours.
Not even the Iphone, with its HD image capture and its smooth and silky touch screen, makes an even veritable trade.
You know, all these letters piled together can be simplified. 3GHDR2D2.... though the acronyms have taken on new meaning through repetitive cultural use, they can still be simplified into single, fully-telling words.

Accompanying your face is a name, but your name will never be able to fully tell the story of your face.
To know this story you must experience it - like one of the Spanish words for knowing. They say conocer. To know. To experience. The Spanish always understood the multiplicities of knowing far better than we.
So in the spirit of the conquistador I have held the smooth ridge of your cheek to my palm, I have wiped away tears from your eyes. As the eldest, I admit I am protective. There are pores in your cheek that I can see when I have sat across from you in the past- it reminds me that you are human and open to the world. (Though your 15 years of life would like to close itself off from everything, at times.)
I miss you, more than midnight poetry can suppose.

And for those that insist that cell phone vocabulary will never pass as poetry, my only reply is: The things you spend the most time with become part of your heart. And our heart, friends, is the only example of living poetry that we have.

Tonight my heart reflects only the screen of an Iphone, as your voice travels one hundred and ninety eight miles to fade quickly in my ear. I can't grasp it; sound has no pores. Tonight my heart reflects only a screen; smooth and without any opening to the world. It does not open to me.

There is a word in this post that isn't real

Oh girl imbued with a volatile nature!
Why do you neglect your little blog?

Some questions, dear friends, can not (or refuse to) be answered here on this 2 x 4 of internet space.
My little stake of cyber space, etched out here. 23 followers. 23 followers who subscribe to the jibbering foggy notions of a 3 am brain. March came and went, I thought it would make more of an impact this year. But I thought wrong; March is always surprisingly quick. What irony, when March finds its namesake in Mars, the god of War. Wars always take a long time. (You can argue that sentiment if you want. I admit there are loop holes. Loop holes everywhere, and I am overwhelmed with them!)

The twin's recently married friend is here, sitting on our living room couch. He is finishing out his bachelors at some  university here in Seattle, I forget which. He is a nice guy, I saw him drum in a band once in Canby before I knew him. That's when I first met the twins as well, though we would forget about that meeting (embarrassing for me) until three years later during a conversation in their house in Seattle.

I bring the married friend, Tommy, into this post because his conversation has inspired me into a bit of transparency. But, being a girl of volatile nature, that moment of inspiration is already passing. Basically I will summarize: He mentioned his new wife with such sweetness, respect, and consideration that it jolted me, for a moment, out of my stolid insistence on independence.

I would like to be considered deeply. Does that make sense? I would like some one to ask me questions and actually want an answer. So many people, and I am guilty of this too, flush out so much information via the web and life in general. Tumblr, Tweets, whatever. It's the mating call of the 21st century. Look at this video, look at this picture, look at this thought I'm thinking. Cute, right? Date me.

Goodness I have been going over this thought a lot lately. I want to keep going, but I'm going to let it alone for now because I have an 8:00 tomorrow. It is possible that I have been conceptualizing a lot lately, and am just realizing it. Maybe thats why I haven't been posting. Too much time has been going into generating thoughts, very little into writing them down.

But who cares about this, right? Whenever I tell people that I blog, (There I go, flushing out information again.) the response is always, "Oh I could never blog - no one would want to read what I'm thinking or doing - how boring for them!" Then we chuckle and I insist it isn't true and life goes on. But really those instances are always downers. What did I say in this post? What have you gained from this? 23 readers, forced to tag their names onto a mass of ever-evolving, well-intentioned bullshit.

But I love it. I won't stop. This is for me, not you. Get over it.

Oh lonely girl in your Seattle apartment,
Your getting lazy and translucent in your blog writing.

Dance 4 Lyfe

I always miss the exit to Interstate 205 when I'm driving home from Seattle alone. I delve into my own private world and once there it's hard to recall me from it. It's especially hard when your a voiceless sign alongside the highway. I wonder if road signs ever get lonely.

Which reminds me of an idea I had once. Dancing is a powerful medium of expression, yes? Only robots don't like dancing. Regardless, it would be wonderful set up people at a sequence of light posts down a main interstate. You know, those giant light posts that jut out besides the big roads of america like nerve endings from a spinal cord. They turn black night to orange puff. Magic.

At each light post a person would be dancing. Really getting into their jam. Smooth moves galore. Then maybe at the front of the sequence a sign would be placed, saying something along the lines of "tune your radio to 98.6, por favor!" And then the nice compliant driver would comply, and something along the lines of Green Onions by Booker T and the MG's would drift out of their car speakers, and the people standing by the roadside and the light poles would be dancing to the same song, and everything would feel really nice.

Yeah, I would really like that.

To tell you the truth, there are a lot of thingsss I am feeling right now. Or avoiding feeling. Among them, my Grandpa is here and tomorrow him and I drive down to Medford to meet my family there. But that means it is just him and I in the big Lone Elder house. And who isn't nervous staying by themselves in their parents house?

I am.

I anticipate a lot of good writing material in the wake of all this driving and relational time with relatives. Activities as liturgical as driving awake my brain. Or at least, I wake up enough to miss the exit signs for subsequent interstates.
Hopefully I will scope out a few new spots to implement my dancing plans. I love public space, and I love seeing it filled by the public. Next time your driving and Green Onions blares over the car radio, watch out. A revolution might be taking place outside your car window.

The Thinnest Gold (a revised story)

There is a memory I am told often. I was too fresh in the world then to remember it now, so my mothers voice fills the colors in for me instead. She sits in one of our old kitchen chairs and begins with Grandma and Grampa, with their driving hats and wide smiles. Almost every year, when my sisters and I were young, they would drive their old Buick across the country to our home in Oregon. We loved it when they came to visit. My sisters and I would wait patiently on the porch in the spring, or behind our big living room window in the winter. The gravel of our driveway would crunch and suddenly all the waiting was over: They were here. Then my father would open the door and his three girls would flood out; surrounding the weary travelers, taking them by the hand, hugging their knees.

My mother listens even when she speaks, and her smell is clean and lipstick.

She tells me my grandparents would take me on long walks when they came to visit. She would stand behind the living room window and watch me toddling between the both of them. I would stop soon after we passed the mailbox. There was a grassy ditch there, paralleling the road that lead to my house. I would stop there and squat down, with feet firmly planted and bottom brushing the ground, in that child’s pose that comes so easily to kids. Examining the ground, I would tenderly sort the grass and pick out a dandelion, a rock, the dying stalk of Queen Anne’s Lace. I wanted my grandparents to see, and I was fascinated with the tiny organisms.

My mom usually ends here, but then my dad picks up the story. He holds his hands up with the tips of all his fingers touching. He moves them softly, rubbing them over each other like a jewelry man sorting the thinnest gold – memorizing its veins and malleability.

“This is what you would do,” He says, “I saw you do that a hundred times.”

        

My dad is the subtle thespian of the family.

It feels nice to hold a collected memory like that, all curled up and tucked inside of you. It’s nice to hold a moment like that with my grandparents, who lived far away then and are separated now by opaque time and the curtain of life. But what tethers me to that memory is the moment I lean down to study the small weed. I am trying to understand my steady fascination with the dandelion things, small worlds that we barely even see.

         Eventually I started coloring in my own memories. I remember sitting in the old kitchen chairs at that house on Black Bear Drive. They where a scratchy 70's beige: if I had known other kitchen chairs during that time I probably would have been more skeptical of their dated yellow texture. But these were our chairs, they belonged to my world. Ten years later the padding sewn inside would start to creep out the stitches after ten thousand games of pretend. My dad would plead and cajole us to fix them up with sewing needle and thread. But my sisters and I had been to other kitchens by that point. Staunch in our consumer training we smugly thought: just buy new ones.

My dad is the subtly sentimental one of the family.

When we were young, though, these chairs where the objects of our affections, the foundation of our games of pretend. The rules to these games were adjustable and were most often adjusted by me, the eldest. The plot of these games, however original or inspired they began, always turned out to be some sort of escape. Escape from The Sea Monster, from The Abominable Snow Man, from Mom With the Vacuum.

We always made it. (Though there were times that the latter prevailed and we were banned to the out of doors to make way for the cleaning rumble of vacuuming monsters.) Still- my sister Bailey and I were quite the heroines. We would dangle on the precipice of make-believe danger until our littlest sibling, Maddie, would be close to tears in fear and angst over our make-believe safety.

But I made it through, all pretend appendages still intact....

The question that haunts me still, however, is what if Maddie was right? At that age she was still examining her own dandelion worlds. She was privy to sensitive information that Bailey and I must have exchanged for faster reflexes and video game systems long ago. I find myself wondering sometimes if I were ever truly at risk, of losing something. She was always so scared for us during the cliff-hanging climax of our adventures; so breathless and teary-eyed.

There are those nervous dreams where you try with all your might to get a message across, your mouths opening and closing like unsatisfied goldfish. No sound escapes.

Our old chairs now sit in the kitchen of our new house, faithful runes remaining from the earliest years of the family. Our own little Easter Island. The rules of the games they played their parts in are long since mist among the runes - fuzzy memories we bring out and polish with talk until a film covers the clearest parts. We laugh at ourselves. We have lost nothing, we think.

But maybe we are wrong.

         These two memories fit snug in the cavity near my heart. They have been there so long they are a part of it now. I would feel their absence if I granted them worlds of their own. But if you were to tease them out of me, I think they would open up like a set of Matryoshka dolls, like the painted collection my aunt brought us back from Russia. Opening to reveal until all you have is a last true remaining essence. And when that world within worlds is held in your palm, I hope you would hold it like the thinnest of gold.

Lately...

...I'm spending my time thinking about the weight of life and the change of light.