Natterings

Mindless Wanderings & Mindful Wonderings by Laura Mauney

FOG

Fog stills the water like ice stills the water, but beware of taking a step, unless you are prepared to swim the treacherous deep on a cold day.

D’amour près de la mer paisible un été (message en bouteille)

Just the other morning I was dreaming of you when I saw a flower gleaming in the sun and wondered if I would ever see you again.

The cold times have come, so here’s a blossom in blue for you, to remember the summer times and tangled-up vines from so long ago.

You sang me the song of the Golden Mean, the dazzling arrays of the stars, the back of the Turtle, and the cool jazz scene.

When I asked you “why?” you smiled, “what else is there to think about?”

Merci d’être né.

REMNANTS

Blackberry blooms peak through winter’s detritus, mimicking snow flakes, perhaps, vast nets of prickly vines wherever wild places persist, vines tangled up in the muscadines, tiny fanned leaves leafing out to restart summer’s great canopy. Berries and grapes will feed the wild things well this year, and perhaps a few of us not so wild anymore.

Great-Grandmother said once, take the baskets and bring back the blackberries so I can make you a pie.  And so we did, clambering among the granite outcrops, jumping the rusty, decaying barbed-wire, dashing into the woods, picking (and eating) all the way. She knew how to keep us fed, and out from under foot. The muscadines, she said, are for making jelly to last through next year’s winter.

COLORS

Red Father Bird rests among the wild, yellow flower vines grown up into the high branches of the gray, barren oak, moss draped, more gray,  just budding with the faintest of greens against the morning sky, blue white as the yellow flowers portend.

GLIMMERS

Magnolia and holly, evergreen, sparkle as the full moonshine drifts down, iridescent like bioluminescent phytoplankton, except there is no salty water nor waves up here; just simple rain to bring hope to the deciduous, the hickory and oak letting all that moonshine through to the forest floor.

WIND IN THE PINES

Hawks circle and call, catching our glimpse.
Distant Labrador calls, catching our scent.
Owl calls, joining the fray.
Mockingbird warns,
The hawks are too close.
Nests sit stark, overexposed in the barren hickories and sweetgums, 
But trillium, violet and clover peak up
Through the dried, fallen leaves.
Sunlight springs, like a beacon, beyond the thinned woods,
Where pines lie snapped at the mid drift,
One upon the other, 
Ripped at the roots,
Toppled by Earth’s raging storms.

AROUND THE BLOCK

North 2nd Street is a place of magical places and mystical creatures; like many places, I expect.

At dawn, as a storm blows in from the Pacific, the calico cat, a feral, glares from the trash bin enclosure as we exit the courtyard.

Poppies reach out over the walkway to wish us well along our way.

Father Raven, who adopted us at first sight, and belongs to a vast clan of hundreds, hops away from the sprinkler runoff in the street gutter, then follows as we wend around the corner. He suddenly sweeps above us with a squawk, perched on the high wire, warning us of something that matters especially to ravens maybe a coyote is nearby!).

On the windward side, wind chimes in the California cedar at a curve in the road ring boisterously.

The four hearted wild flower flutters, embracing the approaching storm.

Juncos chitter and feed from the feeder hung with the chimes.

The neighbor man who lives behind us,  in his robe, waters his eroding lawn. I nod hello.

His long haired cat, a domestic, watches the dog from a secret place of prey atop a painted, very old, and neatly laid brick wall.

On the leeward side, we pass the Little Free Library. A civic minded couple set it up in the ivy garden in front of their home, nestled near a Mardi Gras beaded Buddha. Books are stacked in the box. The deal is: you take a book and leave a book.

Old Abuelo, who lives with his daughter, spends hours each day sweeping the sidewalk and street around his place, or tending his flower garden: chrysanthemum and poppies. He flirts when I pass, thanking me for brightening his day. Very “his” generation is old Abuelo.

The family who built a rabbit hutch right at the edge of their yard lost a white bunny a few months back, then replaced it with a black and white. Now the gray has a new companion. Everyone who passes must have stopped at least once, perhaps with dogs or children or both, to admire the rabbits. All the rabbit babies live in tunnels behind the brick (don’t tell the coyotes, please).

A family of at least three dozen parrots swoops and soars and settles repeatedly, calling out.

I spot the loner hawk, and won’t speculate much about what he does except to say that on one particular day a pigeon was involved (it just dropped out of the sky, right at my feet), and the ravens got so mad they dove and snipped at the hawk mercilessly until it flew away.

In all the many, roses, hollyhocks, and daisies lean out or reach high. In the winter, amaryllis bloom brilliantly. Roses float through an iron fence laced with monofilament to keep in an extremely tiny dog, so tiny he could be a mouse.

Flowers grow wild year round in the verges and through the earthquake cracks of sidewalks and walls, wherever rooting is possible, even in the driest of times: dandelions, morning glory, lantana, bougainvillea, jasmine, wild poppies, the ever deadly oleander.

In the spring, clouds of jacaranda flowers canopy the sky, then fall, carpeting the sidewalks, cars, and streets until everything is covered in jacaranda blooms, like purple flower snow.

Runaway hedges woven through with morning glory fling berries and leaves all over us whenever the wind blows hard.

Cedars intermingle with magnolias, Japanese and American, palms, plumeria, and hibiscus. We have a ficus tree with a street-wide canopy right next door. It is as famous as a movie star. Some say you can see it from Space.

As we arrive home, raven flies over us and squawks his welcome. Mockingbird, who wakes me at sunrise each and every day, delivers her latest symphony from the top of the palm behind the patio.

The storm took all day and into the night to finally drop the rain we needed.

THE LUPINE TIME

Winter is over.
The lupine time has come again.
The ground is heating up.
I lift my wings to embrace the light.
Even when the air is chill, I am warm.
And so I glow as spring meanders to summer;
I sing my colors and dance with the breezes.

RUST

Iron fist slammed into the
Lily pond;
Clear water scattered in a
Fist formed ring, its
Unity dissolved into
Leaves and soil;
Lily pads severed from stems;
Lotus petals bent and flattened,
Like mashed bows in the late delivered
Christmas package;
Guppies, tadpoles, skitterbugs, flung to rot.

The repair was hurried and patchy:
No replication or imitation and certainly
No restoration;
Simply a cover to mask the ruins.

Neither birds,
Nor snakes,
Nor any furred land creature can
Sip through the hard, deceptive fake;
Turtles are long gone.

So, after all, rust was the iron fist’s fate.

We knew this already. Incongruity is the message.

ALL THINGS ARE THE SAME THING, CONFIGURED DIFFERENTLY

Our active senses,
Seeing,
Hearing,
Smelling,
Tasting,
Touching,
And somehow just plain knowing,

Are the tools we use to perceive the patterns particles form
As they move and reform and connect, particles
Dancing,
Singing,
Scenting,
Flavoring,
Brushing by, or…….

Moving aside on the surface of a soft summer sweetgum leaf
to make room for the tips of our fingers.

Time empowers us to interpret the meaning of the patterns

Danger,
Passion,
Hostility,
Friendship,
Beauty,
Love,
The subtle approach of something new,

The understanding that everything new is also old, that all things are just the same thing, configured differently.

(The first draft of this poem was published by Laura M Mauney in 1999 on the late Rodney L’Ongnion’s Wonderverse website.)

TRIO

The river rocks holding the sheet music in place seemed normal.

A butterfly fluttered across the stage. I wondered if it knew those vibrations were music.
After a while, the bird time came, and the birds tried to sing in time.

The wind kicked up and the oak leaves danced in the setting light.

EULOGY

The Moth who slept on my porch yesterday flew off in the night, so I decided to clear the deadwood of the Passion Fruit vine, to make room for new growth. New Passion flowers are scheduled to bloom anytime now, and the Wisteria needs a chance to breathe if she’s ever going to survive.

As dust and smog-smut and flakes of leaves showered over me, I rambled randomly (in my mind, of course); delicately stitched together that first fresh move, first blush, first crush crushed, first dance danced, first kiss, first heartbreak, first time promise was fulfilled, first child born, second child born…

(Do the men even comprehend the effect they have on us?)

Rejected that thought. How could a woman ever know?

(Generalities are offensive, anyway, and never suffice.)

(Stick to the narrow sliver of truth that you know to be dead.)

(I will never forgive him and him alone for leaving us in danger.)

For fear of mites, I massaged tea tree oil through my hair, cleaned my face with lavender water and rubbed the lotion that smells like roses (that my children gave to me) into my skin.

Such a combination of scents; They’ll linger with me for the rest of the day as I admire the improvement in the quality of light as it filters through the Passion Fruit leaves, into my house.

ODE TO THE NIMRUD

How amazing is it that a simple lens can warp the vast magnitude of the universe, bazillions of light years long and wide and deep, stealing its light, like a black hole steals energy and mass, spitting it out on the flip side in a whirlwind of reconstructed particles, delivering it to us in a size that is smaller than ourselves, the plain and accessible size of a monitor or photographic print or telescope eyepiece, and thereby bring it all down to an eye-catching user-friendly scale that we, grounded here on earth, can actually comprehend?

THE IRONY OF ROVING ON MARS

Who knows? Perhaps the striations of water crystals and CO2 photographed by Rover on Mars are really the havens of teeny-tiny, microscopic or even quanta-sized Martian civilizations?

Oh sure, some scientist would tell me no, not so… that planet’s dead, been dead for a long time… but how would he, or she know?

Was HG Wells’ vision of a Mars invasion prophetic, in a reverse Roverian sense, or perhaps a case of “careful what you wish for” or clever idea-planting?

Imagine, if there is a quanta sized civilization on Mars, what that Rover must look like to them… eeeeek!!! Shock and Awe!

(and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, read Wells’ book – it’s called War of the Worlds, and it’s great).

JAZZ-IZ

If love, complete and culminated, was sound instead of touch,
Love would be jazz.

Jazz is pure love, organic and
Infinite, revolution, involution, evolution, and cannot be defined
By the strictures of musicology, bars, measures, half-notes, whole-notes,
Nor even marks for syncopation and directions for modulation

And that is why the birth of Jazz mandated the simultaneous and
Spontaneous combustion of the gramophone, because the survival of any species
Requires environmental conditions that enable transition with a capacity for
Transcendence, transmutation, transformation.

But do let it be known that the advent of laser digitization and microcircuited
Quadrophonics cannot completely master the effect of Jazz
Played live. Jazz is all music in the great history of music and all Music
is Jazz, the rhythm of the ancestral and celestial come from the

Rhythm of our heartbeats, of women in childbirth, of child’s first breath and instinctive
Suckling, of acts of love that precede gestation and the everlasting continuation of
Time in the cycle of seasons, and the
Rotation and circulation of Earth as we spiral through the universe.

Jazz is the harmony (dis-melody) of all the sounds of life, internal, external,
Eternal, what we have made in the thrum of our city streets, what we perceive
In the cries of our children, the chatter of birds, the hiss of rain, the rush of wind
In the eucalyptus trees, the silence of the clouds, what we proclaim in ourselves when we choose to listen.

Jazz is Men with sleepy eyes and black ties, white shirts and open coats, slim pants, shining shoes,
Who stand together in acoustic shells and pink light; kiss brass, reeds;
Stroke strings, ivory, ebony, skin in the night to sing to women and make us blush. Jazz is
Women who sing and play with a flushing full, palpitation, oscillation, fibrillation, that is just

Like memories in the dream time,
Sound reconvened as truth.

WE ARE STARDUST

~ * ~Laura~ * ~
~ * ~Veronica~ * ~
~ * ~Sarah~ * ~

A TRUE STORY

Wherein mathematicians quantified
the quality of poetry so that they could write some
of their own and thereby
prove the value of the result.

SKYLINE

Up on the ridge
Above the road
Rabbit ears
Disrupt the interlace
Of seeding grass
And easterly light.

GHOSTING

Esther’s little shepherd yapped,
Snarling, powerless,

Behind her green wooden fence
Down the road,
So I looked and saw
A shadow flitting
Along the moonlit asphalt.

Coyote was invisible;
Mottled fur blending
with the cool full moon;
Silence except for the dog,
And an owl calling from somewhere
Up the hill as coyote
Slipped on by and away.

BIRDCASTING

A day after the bombs were dropped on Baghdad,
(A sight that I by happenstance watched
with absolute horror
live on the TV, the bombs dripping across the city at night,
like the way water drips from wet cloth
when one rushes it from the sink to the clothes rack to dry),
I was sitting out on the porch smoking and fretting about the whys of war.
A bird flew down and lit on the railing, closer than most birds ever get, and chattered,
Chatter, chatter, chatter
As if he, or she, was chattering to me;
As if he, or she, was telling me all
About those bombs.

Sometime later, from the TV again,
I learned that pigeons can hear sounds generated up to 2000 miles away.

So now, I ask, did the birds hear the boom of those bombs,
2000 miles away,
and pass the word, 2000 miles forward, and forward again?

Was the bird who chattered to me passing the word?

Did birds die in Baghdad on that day, too?

Is that what the bird was trying to chatter to me
With such intense anxiety?

boom-chatter-chatter-chatter
boom-chatter-chatter-chatter
boom-chatter-chatter-chatter
boom-chatter-chatter-chatter
boom.

BIRDCASTING REDUX

At the house in Winston-Salem,
where our father’s heart broke,
Tyler at two
heard the birds chattering outside the picture window
and whispered “music!”

BIRDCASTING CAGE FREE

Green parrots on a wire,
(Cage free)
Taking their
(Almost summertime, morning)
Risk, perching
Right next to the little yellow tin sign
With black letters that say “VOLTAGE”
(ALL CAPS),
Squawked and took flight,
(All of a sudden)
And made me remember to write down the time
(Springtime, midnight)
When I decided to
(Head west)
Driving Los Angeles from
Spring Street to 7th Street to Grand Avenue to
Down Wilshire Boulevard
(All the way)
To the Pacific Ocean. After the spot where
Wilshire stops rising, vicinity Lafayette Park,
where the road crests and flattens, going
(Ruler straight),
Every stoplight turned green at once. Greenlights
cascaded gleaming, on wires
Stretched long and far,
For seventy blocks,
Seven miles, or
(10 minutes),
As we say in LA,
Emeralds on a string strung as straight as
Any earthly string can be strung,
Not a single ruby red or golden amber among them.
(Teen drivers)
(I presume)
Taking their
(Springtime, midnight)
Risk, clustered all around me,
(Cruising)
In tandem,
(Big City)
Kids in noisy cars, un-muffled motors, techno thumping,
Blackened windows,
(Going forth)
Beneath the greenlight string, to
(Head west)
(Ruler straight)
(All of a sudden)
(Cage free).
(We made it)
(All the way)
To vicinity La Brea Tar Pits
Without stopping once.