GRAMPUS
what waits off shore?
Oh, yeah. I have a blog.
I have a cat story.
When I was five years old, a little girl in love with kitties, and Little Joe’s horse from Bonanza, our neighbor’s cat had kittens. They were old enough to play with and be away from their mom so my best friend and I would dress them up, stuff them in our pockets and parade around the neighborhood lording our kitten largesse over the other plebeian kittenless kids.
Our neighborhood was really cool back then because crews were building new houses everywhere and we could run in and out between the 2×4 walls at will, playing house all day. That’s pretty much what we were doing one day when we got tired of packing the kittens around so we put our “baby” kitties down for their naps in a window well of one of the new basements. They would be safe there while we played.
And we played and we played and we played til the light started to fade.
At dinner time I drug myself into the house, dusty and tired and my mom asked me, “Where are the kittens?”
Wha?
OK, let’s pause right here to say THE KITTENS ARE OK. NO KITTENS WERE HURT. It ends well for them. Ok, on with the story.
Those kittens were the most precious things I had in my young life and I had left them in a window well. In that moment my mom asked me where they were I realized I had completely forgotten the kittens even existed on the planet. I have never gotten over the guilt and shame of that moment. How could I have done that? Sure, I was only 5 and exhausted after “keeping house” all day and my attention span was that of gnat. Still, I lived for kittens.
In a panic, I tore out of our backdoor. The kittens were fine, meowing to get out, when I got to them. I cried and told them how sorry I was. They were kittens, I don’t think they told me they forgave me.
That brings me to this blog, and what I’ve left behind here in the deep window well of WordPress. I’m feeling guilty. Writing is everything to me. How could I abandon what I’ve started here? There are a lot of excuses, boring and predictable. Blah blah Pandemic blah blah cortisol raging through my nervous system blah blah new episode of The Mandalorian just dropped blah blah blah.
Look, it’s not like I’m waking up in the middle of the night, suddenly struck with a panic that I haven’t written a blog post in years…. YEARS…. but why am I here now? Not for forgiveness, that’s for kitties. I’m not completely sure, but I feel there is more here to be explored: a reclamation of who I used to be and maybe a public inquiry into what is possible. I doubt I’ll have anything important or even interesting to say. After all, how many rip-roaring cat stories have a I got in me?, never mind I’m a dog person now.
Something is compelling me to write across this white screen, off the edge and beyond.
Because I Love Birch Trees
On A Day In February
A new knock knock knock against the wall
(he wind is blowing,
I should mention that)
for two decades the birch tree
in the backyard has leafed and thickened
stretched to reach the house
now unbeautiful, weather-broken with winter,
all scrawny-limbed and sharp-knuckled hands
the tree sways with single intent
to knock and see who answers.
–Arlitia Jones
Polymaths, Dabblers and Moonsails
Happy New Year, friends.
Are you ready to take it slow?
“…a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even her moonsails…”
We had a blizzard last night and this morning I’m looking out on a bright, mounded, blank world and I don’t have the least intention of getting out there and making something of it. I tried that last year and it almost broke me.
Let the beautiful world be the beautiful world in its own form, in its own right. Let the snow have this day untracked. Let the oyster keep its pearl.
Over the past year, I have been learning to paint and draw. Rather, I should say relearning to paint and draw because I did these things all the time when I was a child. They were second nature. I’m not sure at what point they became third nature behind the writing, and then 10th nature, and 34th nature, and finally falling off the scale entirely until I had to rediscover as an adult how much I have missed and love creating visually.
I am not a polymath. But maybe I am the thing that comes before the polymath. The poly-curious. The Dabbler in all things.
It’s so scary to put this work out there, but one of my goals this year is to share more of what I can create with the world. Friends, I’m hoping this is one of your goals, too. I love seeing what you do.
It’s also one of my goals to reacquaint myself with this blog which, I admit, I forgot I started. I’ll spare you the emoji face with the big eyes, but that’s the face I’m making right now.
Last year, somebody called me a polymath… oh, if only!
It is a great compliment, and it is not true. I do not have great learning in numerous varied subjects. I can’t read music. I don’t know the names of Jupiter’s moons. I can’t point to Kuala Lumpur on a map. For the love of all that is holy, don’t ask me to multiply and divide fractions. If you can do this, the throne is truly your inheritance.
I am not a polymath. But maybe I am the thing that comes before the polymath. The poly-curious. The Dabbler in all things. For no good reason, I read two books last year about dinosaurs. I like saying the names: Amygdalodon! Harpymimus! Muttaburrasaurus!
I researched the benefits of doing headstands and have gotten so-so good at executing them. I’m learning how to pickle Japanese eggs. I have an app on my phone that showed me what the star constellation for Psyche is. I actually watched the World Series this year. But I couldn’t tell you who won.
This morning, I came across moonsails. It’s from Walt Whitman’s “The Ship Starting:”
Lo, the unbounded sea,
On it’s breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even her moonsails,
The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately––below emulous waves press forward,
They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam.
Since I have no idea what a moonsail is, and also since I’m a poly-curious Dabbler, I looked it up.
The moonsail, according to google, is “the moonraker, also known as a moonsail, hope-in-heaven, or hopesail, is a square sail flown immediately above a skysail on the royal masts of a square rigged sailing ship.”
Moonsail. Hope-in-heaven. Hopesail. Oh, yes please! Let us journey forth! Let us raise anything and everything named Hope before the wind this year.
Ok, 2020. Let’s see what you got.
One Poem. One Planet. April 30, 2017
30.
Everything hopeful is happening
right now in the sky above the mountains still merled with snow and rock
the clouds erecting white Potemkin spires into the blue expanse
brief fabulation gone in a moment, blown down by incoming wind
that rides the tide’s gray back,
Such beauty is not meant to last
and yet it has a purpose to make us lift our eyes to the moment
we imagine ourselves
as residents who soar through blue kingdoms at such high altitudes
we are barely seen,
so high, we must throw our voices down to earth so people know we pass.
Let go and fly as the sandhill cranes
for now we are those sandhill cranes (see them?) migrating past
the billowing towers of white
to far away paradise of delta and shore across the wide open blue,
and down below
the fledgling lovers who suddenly hear look up,
again and again, you call my name, I yours
–Arlitia Jones, April 30, 2017
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One Poem. One Planet. April 29, 2017
29.
Nature Poem
Snowshoe Hare who lives
in the tangle of downed trees
next to the culvert where Porcupine
used to hole up in late winter
is gray
Snowshoe Hare who darts
across the mound under white birch bowed
to each other over bare ground where
White Dog sprawled in the dirt
is quiet as a ghost
Snowshoe Hare who streaks
up the driveway toward tall grass
behind the house where Bear
huffed his breath into the spongy ground
is running for her life
–Arlitia Jones, April 29, 2017
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Yesterday’s Poem
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One Poem. One Planet. April 28, 2017
28.
History Sonnet
Perhaps it started when Siegfried killed the lindworm—
the Horrible Serpent dead—so the town of Worms
could cobble to life with congratulatory stone
Cathedrals and Churches and Monasteries, Cloisters
then smithys, jails and burghers’ mansions in view
of high-held domes and steeples—the Pope’s monster-less realm.
The Modern World born of Empire and Martin Luther’s
insurrection—95 Theses nailed to the revered door—
now Lutherans must kill Catholics.
The Serpent claims an eye for Siegfried’s eye
and tooth for tooth for fang—the heretic—
—the hammer—the nail—the new reality
where the worm is now Authority.
–Arlitia Jones, April 28, 2017
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One Poem. One Planet. April 27, 2017
27.
Bald eagles have on average 7000 feathers
compare that to the giant pacific octopus—
with her eight tentacles she wields 2,240 suction cups
We are the counters of everything
we 7.3 billion inhabitants on Earth give or take
a century of democide: mass murder of the people
by their government, that’s 268 million of us in the last 100 years
We quantify to comprehend to find our way
in the forest in our mind, the tangle
of 1 billion times 1 million dendrite branches
where memories flit tree to tree
The bigger the number the better we feel
Inside the red canyons of the human heart 724 trillion blood cells
fly by carrying their bead of oxygen
making our bodies a riot of constant miracles
Compare that to the unexaggerated ratio of
For every 17 children in the world, there is one land mine, or
every 20 minutes someone takes one step and the ground clicks
The problem is we are always talking about numbers.
–Arlitia Jones, April 27, 2017
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GRAMPUS 