Thursday, April 11, 2013


THE LAND OF THE HEART
For Isabel Nuñez
In that Land of our Hearts, always

No one dies
in the Land of the Heart
suns never set
no one stands guard
night has no purpose
no curtain is drawn
voices reach out
in lightness of song
no one dies
in this land without borders
all are welcome
the wastrel the hoarder
the writer the reader
the follower the leader
the rich the poor
the less the more
days are endless
reminders of joy
rain comes only
when magic deploys
to freshen and nourish
our flowering souls
we keep the map
of this land
within reach
and know you are there
forever at peace
for now the sadness
we’ll gently discard
no one dies
in the Land of the Heart




Sunday, April 7, 2013

“I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, 
emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.” — Isabel Allende


MY MAGIC RING
I have a Magic Ring.
It was given to me when I was a very lonely teenager, thrust against my will to a strange city. My father had lost his business in Manhattan. It came at the crossroads of a slow, torturous path along which we never knew what it was like not to worry. There were many reasons for the loss. Some were not his fault. Others came from a deeply disappointed life. He looked for salvation in bars where there was none and he drank deeply of what was offered.
We were moved to Hartford, Connecticut in the summer before my senior year of high school. I went from a vibrant, artistic, racially mixed community of school friends at the High School Of Art & Design in Manhattan to become the stranger in a senior class where black kids were bussed into the school’s white population.
I met a man, a Native American—Zuni—who was a stock boy where I had an after school job in a department store in downtown Hartford. I had a habit of attaching myself to older people who took to me kindly. Lost children tend to do that. We became friends. He knew a lot about art and we passed many hours wandering through the Wadsworth Atheneum. We were the odd couple. He was forty something, dark skinned and quiet. I was an excitable blonde teenager. Our love of art and our sense of being strangers on the planet was our commonality.
He never chastised me for gloomy self-indulgence and always championed the laughter out of me. He told me he suspected I had some spiritual powers that would awaken in me. He was never anything but kind, considerate, and a little bit mysterious. He thought reading to his mother, who was blind, would be a good thing to take my mind off my own problems. I did that.
He gave me the ring—a silver band set with eight turquoise tiles. It had belonged to his great grandfather and passed down to the eldest son until it came to a halt with Ralph. He had no son for whom to pass it along. He thought it best to ask permission of my parents before offering to me. He did. My father was suspicious. My mother suggested it might better suit her. “No,” he told them, “Your daughter should have it.” And then he revealed I had been spending my Saturdays reading to his mother. He did not tell them it was a Magic Ring.
And so he gave it to me. He told me it was a Magic Ring and that it would keep me safe as long as I continued on a giving path. And then, he said, “It doesn’t really matter. The ring has chosen you.”
I had never taken it off my ring finger until I had shoulder surgery some years back. It had to be cut off but I put it on another finger as soon as I could. It was a little too loose and one birthday, just into my 60s, we celebrated in Montauk and it disappeared. We searched everywhere. We combed through the motel room, retraced our steps, even, ridiculously, looked for it in the ever-shifting sand dunes. I had hoped, by some miracle, that I had left it at home. But, there it was, in all it’s turquoise magic, in a photograph of me in the diner on the way to Land’s End. I knew then it was forever lost in Montauk, possibly in the Atlantic Ocean. I said a quiet good-bye and hoped it would find its way to the hand of another who would embrace its magic.
Nine months later, in Leicester for The Mister’s birthday, I was digging around for the lost bus tickets we’d need on our way home from the airport and found it in a deep pocket. It went right back on my little finger, where it remains. My Magic Ring.
I’ve told this story before, but now, in a certain time, that could possibly become uncertain, I give a little nod of gratitude to the ring because I know where the magic comes from. It comes from a man who showed a young, maybe selfish, girl how to be kind. 


Saturday, April 6, 2013


day poem

for Mary Neal Linker

this hardly ever happens
anymore
not since I completed a morph
not since the wild and wooly
days of pandemonium
not since I pranced about
in turpentine perfume
not since unfazed
in fashionable rags
I charged through life
after cleaning the trap
and wielded those brushes
on unsuspecting canvas
drawing my sins in a damp
basement room
not since I gave in to
nighttime
as lifeline
not since I recognized
daylight’s state of mind
not since I adhered to
real love and sober writing
not since I’d abandoned
skywriting


Wednesday, April 3, 2013


there once was a hardened New Yorker
who’d found in a certain French quarter
a man of her liking
who struck her like lightning
and softened her heart in short order

Happy Birthday Mister