Saturday, January 30, 2016
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence;
as it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity"
George Eliot
Each of us is born into a hard, unaccommodating actual
Χαμαιλεων
I bought a ruby red candle holder today named Joy,
the same hue as a stiff Negroni, luscious in August's heat
Neither color nor languor to be had though in this winter's sallow light
The bitter grapefruit rind swings pink in its bath, the yellow skin mellows the bite
of the liquor, a lizard, trans-morphed as the lion's mane is yanked off
Hope's verdant coat is stripped, and missing target once more, the
blue cold blood flows in my heart - oh the grace of saving face and lot
Survival is a triumph after all
I bought a ruby red candle holder today named Joy,
the same hue as a stiff Negroni, luscious in August's heat
Neither color nor languor to be had though in this winter's sallow light
The bitter grapefruit rind swings pink in its bath, the yellow skin mellows the bite
of the liquor, a lizard, trans-morphed as the lion's mane is yanked off
Hope's verdant coat is stripped, and missing target once more, the
blue cold blood flows in my heart - oh the grace of saving face and lot
Survival is a triumph after all
Friday, January 29, 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
The Lonely Coast
When I finally washed ashore, broken masts and all
sweeter wish could not be had
but find a cove to lay my head
and clear water my thirst to quench
Yet seven-fold the want frenzied bawls
for love was always in Aeolus's hand,
and fire has turned to brittle glass
the light of promised Eden's land
When I finally washed ashore, broken masts and all
sweeter wish could not be had
but find a cove to lay my head
and clear water my thirst to quench
Yet seven-fold the want frenzied bawls
for love was always in Aeolus's hand,
and fire has turned to brittle glass
the light of promised Eden's land
Sunday, January 24, 2016
January 24 2016
There it was, a stark image of the urn, a clay container of ashes, "τεφροδοχος", you confidently declared it to be as you casually offered it to me, three decades and some ago. A jackpot of your pillaging a burial hill, somewhere in Chalkidiki, two, three millennia old, arrived in today's birdsong of FB posts.
Memories flooded in, of feeling out the calcified bottom, touching the carbonized dust, the negligible remains of a person, perhaps a hundred-fold removed relative of ours. The thumbprints of the clay thrower's, were forever preserved on its twin handles, yet the identity of that person unknown..
Before I could revisit the picture, giving in to sentimental forensics, it had been withdrawn.The image of the plain-earth beige color of the slip, the crude triangle shape of the vessel's finishing form, insufficient in honoring a being as he/she should ever deserve, flashed once more before my eyes. Dust to dust and all that of death, it was as plain an urn as it could be: unpretentious and amazing in having survived intact yet far from importance and grandness.
I remember I wanted to assign unworthiness to its owner. The indelicate form of the vessel was explained in my young mind that it must have been for some crusty, heavy-limbed peasant, puny in thought and accomplishments, deserving of oblivion, if not for that urn having survived..Yet, all I wanted in my life then was grandness, affirmation, entitlement and Z was affording me that mirage, as much as he was allowing it for himself. My early trauma was enough punishment, even at a cost of self-deceit and cowering to lesser virtue, I deserved no simple mortal, only the heights of intellect and refinement, which I was convinced he solely possessed.
But that gift also filled me with a painful foreboding of disaster, that I remember now I had wished to exorcise immediately, as if trying to suspend a final act before the curtain drops. The awkward "present", ever so short-lived as it turned out to be, signaled the betrayal and curse to come.
Hubris, is an exacting, leveling prize for unmerited heights, and it is coming on full-frontal today.
The father's tender love, softly sharing the pain, the pride, the ameliorating resilience: he is relating the aftermath of a gene deficit lot, Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome. The luminosity of J, the boy who claimed my daughter's heart and I am forced to reckon, once again, with the loss of my own boy.
This is the velvet rope, corralling the memory of the urn and today's appraisal.
I did bury the "Υιος απολλυμενος", thirty eight years ago, under layers of ash, to preserve myself. I killed my son, to give birth to this parenthood, in a way.
It was the forfeiture of my motherhood to a cuckoo's nest claim, with the adoption of N. And in the end, the debit of my entitlement, was this unexpected gift, an alloy of kindness and love and shambles, the legacy of kintsukuroi.
May the love long live.
There it was, a stark image of the urn, a clay container of ashes, "τεφροδοχος", you confidently declared it to be as you casually offered it to me, three decades and some ago. A jackpot of your pillaging a burial hill, somewhere in Chalkidiki, two, three millennia old, arrived in today's birdsong of FB posts.
Memories flooded in, of feeling out the calcified bottom, touching the carbonized dust, the negligible remains of a person, perhaps a hundred-fold removed relative of ours. The thumbprints of the clay thrower's, were forever preserved on its twin handles, yet the identity of that person unknown..
Before I could revisit the picture, giving in to sentimental forensics, it had been withdrawn.The image of the plain-earth beige color of the slip, the crude triangle shape of the vessel's finishing form, insufficient in honoring a being as he/she should ever deserve, flashed once more before my eyes. Dust to dust and all that of death, it was as plain an urn as it could be: unpretentious and amazing in having survived intact yet far from importance and grandness.
I remember I wanted to assign unworthiness to its owner. The indelicate form of the vessel was explained in my young mind that it must have been for some crusty, heavy-limbed peasant, puny in thought and accomplishments, deserving of oblivion, if not for that urn having survived..Yet, all I wanted in my life then was grandness, affirmation, entitlement and Z was affording me that mirage, as much as he was allowing it for himself. My early trauma was enough punishment, even at a cost of self-deceit and cowering to lesser virtue, I deserved no simple mortal, only the heights of intellect and refinement, which I was convinced he solely possessed.
But that gift also filled me with a painful foreboding of disaster, that I remember now I had wished to exorcise immediately, as if trying to suspend a final act before the curtain drops. The awkward "present", ever so short-lived as it turned out to be, signaled the betrayal and curse to come.
Hubris, is an exacting, leveling prize for unmerited heights, and it is coming on full-frontal today.
The father's tender love, softly sharing the pain, the pride, the ameliorating resilience: he is relating the aftermath of a gene deficit lot, Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome. The luminosity of J, the boy who claimed my daughter's heart and I am forced to reckon, once again, with the loss of my own boy.
This is the velvet rope, corralling the memory of the urn and today's appraisal.
I did bury the "Υιος απολλυμενος", thirty eight years ago, under layers of ash, to preserve myself. I killed my son, to give birth to this parenthood, in a way.
It was the forfeiture of my motherhood to a cuckoo's nest claim, with the adoption of N. And in the end, the debit of my entitlement, was this unexpected gift, an alloy of kindness and love and shambles, the legacy of kintsukuroi.
May the love long live.
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