The New Normal 2.3 (Jitterbug, and Father's Day)

 My father, David Greenbaum, probably 8 or so, already deaf. (1927-1979)

Jitterbug

 

You have to understand:

at six months he should have died

when fever torched his otic nerve,

scalded his inner ear.

Grandma bargained, connived, even

changed his name to change God’s mind:

David, always outmatched,

yet understanding the swing of sling.

The odds shorted him, every time.

 

Somehow he knew music,

sold vinyl in Hollywood after school.

His heart beat 4/4 like the blues,

just right for a jitterbug slow enough for flair,

to place, to plant the back foot

so the wave snaps right up your spine

to your thrown-back head.

Loved the cool grunt of the bass

sounding diminished thirds,

augmented sevenths. Vibes poured

through the pencil

he held like a straw between his teeth,

eraser braced on the turntable base.

 

The man could dance.

Taught me the off-kilter tilt of hips

kept balanced by the partner’s hand,

shoulders spiraled around the core,

each of us styling, saved from falling

by the back-beat back-step.

 

He’d raise his arm and I’d strut under,

turning as natural as walking.

We’d move into the snazzy draw,

hands sliding along the other’s arms,

no words needed for the trick

of snagging fingertips,

catching and pulling back to the center,

leaning and returning,

solid on the beat he could not hear.

:::

The New Normal 2.2 (featuring The Clairvoyant Widow)

 

Karen Greenbaum-Maya Archives | U n l o s t (unlostjournal.com)

The cento is a fun form and something of a Rorschach test for the poet. You pull out some other writers' work and take lines that strike you, in no particular way. Then you arrange them so that the order makes sense to you. I love found objects and found poems anyhow, and when I saw that line of Roethke, I knew what to do. I have included this one in my tribute to my husband, The Beautiful Leaves, which Bamboo Dart Press will publish in August 2023.

The Ballad of the Clairvoyant Widow

--a cento of lines of Christine Gosnay, Michelle Brittan Rosado, Russell Salomon, and Theodore Roethke

   Slow, slow as a fish she came,

A green angel swaying branches.

The wide streams go their way.

She went in slowly, and found him.

She watched the river wind itself away.

 

   Everything undoes itself.

He woke with mountains in his knees.

She saw her father shrinking in his skin.

She thought a bird and it began to fly.

The light cried out, and she was there to hear.

 

   The wings have fallen off. The arms too.

It was as if she tried to walk in hay.

Once she knew how to run.

She came to the western river,

breathed as if moving a hand toward a candle.

 

   The sleep was not deep but waking was slow.

The outline of one is inseparable.

The New Normal 2.1 (featuring Busy)

 

https://bodyliterature.com/2020/01/27/karen-greenbaum-maya-5/

B O D Y  is an estimable journal published out of Prague. Yes, that Prague. I am honored to have placed several pieces there over the years.

Busy

French bees are dying, she tells me. Not because of big Agro pushing its products, threatening finance interruptus, the short-term win killing the long-term love. The bees are dying because the Chinese have planted killer bees that lay their eggs in the French bees. Like mantises they behead, like termites they eat wood, like wasps they colonize from within the good-hearted worker bee herself.   

Oh, these Chinese bees. They’re aggressive as South American bees and twice times the size. Easily they kill the French bees. A single smear of their honey leaves you braindead but unable to stop consuming Chinese imports. There you go, buying twice what you need. There are bees flying all over the blossoming trees, cherry and quince, even willows and camellias, but she knows the bees are dying, just going through the motions.

 She can tell the Chinese ladybugs from the French. The vulgar Chinese are gaudy with too many dots. The French ladybugs are subtly accented with two, at most four, asymmetrical for interest. Chinese ladybugs adapt quickly. They do not care about tradition. They undersell the French ladybugs and take over their turf. You’d think there would be enough for all, aphids being what they are, but no. Oh no.

The New Normal 2.0 (featuring To Die in Cochabamba)

You realize, of course, that I'd rather be able to go back to the way I was managing this blog before, namely, putting forth my comments and observations and posting links to any on-line publication. But Google improved the format over a year ago, and as a result I can't figure out how to set up the links. So, I'm going to make it possible for me, and I hope simple for you, Gentle Reader. When I get something published, and when it achieves publication, I will post the link and the text of the poem right here, in the post. Where you are reading this. If I actually achieve a thought worth sharing, I'll put that up here too.

Today's post, not a new one, but from an expired link to The Centrifugal Eye, a project of Eve Hanninen, who set it down so she could spend some time with her own work. What an excellent editor she is, reading closely and considering what might improve the poem.

To Die in Cochabamba (I Will Not Die in Paris) 

Cochabamba, green valley at the mountaintop,

umbilical scar high on the equator.

No one dies in Cochabamba.

I will die in Cochabamba.

Cochabamba of eternal spring,

no longest night, no shortest day.

Streams freeze hard after sundown,

winter comes every night in Cochabamba.

 

Cochabamba of bum leg, the fùtbol ploy.

The center herds the ball around rival feet,

threads it down the field on bamboo legs

while fans shout eternal spring in Cochabamba.

 

Cochabamba, hit samba of Carneval.

Close the window, that cochabamba

is getting on my last nerve, I tell the nurse,

but she is busy slipping morphine under my tongue.

She cups my face in her dry hand,

and my eyes, lips, bum leg relax, Ay, mi cochabamba.

 

It seems in Cochabamba everyone knows,

but I don’t understand, I never have.

I am a plane crash in Cochabamba,

aisle lights down the center in the darkness.

She Discovers that the Changes to Blogpost and Google Prevent Her from Constructing a Handy List of Links to Published Work

Yes, what it says. And since this was the reason I set up a blog int he first place, I'll start making a post for each new work I get published. This will not make finding my pieces easier, but it will do until I set up a proper website. Ah well.

In that spirit, I note that Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com) will take you to She Discovers that Her Republican Grandfather was a Secret Nazi Hunter, of which some was imagined but none was invented.

Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com) March 2021

Long Time Gone, but Well-Remembered

The first photo shows Walter breaking bread for breakfast in the flat we rented in Paris. Breakfast is baguette tradition, some chevre, Normandy butter, and a tangerine. Cafe au lait to come, in the nice little footed bowl. The second photo shows the locks of love mounted on the Pont des Arts, before everyone from all over the world started leaving locks, locks upon locks linked to locks, and the whole thing became too heavy and started peeling away from the bridge itself. Now the bridge is faced with thick pale green glass? or some kind of plastic? not unattractive, but nothing like the panoply of locks. Ours is the tiny black one at the upper left.

I have been working on a collection of my poems about Walter, sending it out to publishers. This week, The Beautiful Leaves was accepted by Bamboo Dart Press. They hope to have it printed by August 2023. The poems encompass Walter's aging and my grief about losing him. The poems themselves date from 2012 to 2022. I know that there is nothing new about loving someone who then dies, but I do believe that I have something unusual to say about that experience, namely, looking at the pain and the beauty directly of losing someone you have loved deeply and who loved you that way as well. I wrote these pieces partly to be honest about the horror and pity, but also to honor him as he deserved.

I had expected that getting the manuscript accepted would leave me joyous. This is not so. I have felt confused and weirdly relieved. I believe that, as glad as I always am when my work is appreciated by someone else, wrapping up this particular project means also wrapping up a chapter in my life. Ready or not, there it goes.

Not to Complain, but Complaining

Behold, an act of God. Last night we had hard winds, gusts up to 80 mph. For comparison, a Category 1 hurricane achieves speeds between 74 and 95 mph. I am not the only one in my community to have trees or parts of trees blowing over. This Italian cypress, unfortunately, came right up out of the ground and landed mostly in my neighbors' yard and on their roof. 

As it happens, these are the neighbors whose Tesla solar roof sends excruciatingly bright glare into my house ten months out of the year, running all along my west-facing wall. I've managed to mitigate said glare by installing ceramic film on all the windows and sliding glass doors. They had seemed amenable to paying some part of it, then apparently decided that I was harassing them and ordered me never to contact them again. Well, goodness. These are the folks whose kids hugged me when they saw me, and to whom I sent fresh-baked goodies. I had hoped we might remain civil but had to give up on that.

Well. Now, the tree lies on their roof, a pine of Rome. I suspect they are not home, as I have heard nothing from them, which suis me fine. Friends and my insurance company tell me that each person is responsible only for their own damage, a relief to me. I will incur $2000 for the deductible, thanks to the pipes that broke two years ago and flooded/destroyed half the house. 

Now I wait to be contacted by my insurance company's designated contractor. Apparently, there are 25 people ahead of me, so far. I had called an arborist I'd used in the past, but 1) he won't be available for two weeks, and 2) his truck now bears the message, "Democrats Are Destroying America." I'd rather not support him anymore.

This debacle follows bills of $2000 to the veterinarian for my cat, who attacked a possum and lost, of $4800 for corroded pipes, which repair included digging up half the front lawn, and, a bill for $8000 for bringing the electrical system up to code (and installing a new main switch, as the old one had frozen). 

I'm feeling beaten up by these acts of God. I had been in the middle of a major re-write qua reorganization of my manuscript of poems about my late husband, and I was making progress, though not without struggle. Looks like time to take a break for something hard in the outer world.