In honor of Lithia (although I suspect Litha wasn't all that honored), I treated myself to what we called "poor (wo)man's pasta alla Norma" - mainly because I didn't have the right ricotta or pancetta, and am not all that enamored of tomato sauce. Pasta, fried eggplant and crumbled bacon was pretty much it, give or take an onion instead of garlic, and rosemary instead of basil. Yeah, I know - I have to turn in my "Italian Pride" membership card for that classic re-write that absolutely no one from Italy would recognize. It was good, though. Oh yeah, and in place of the red wine, I mixed my favorite Spanish tempranillo (garnacha de fuego) with zero calorie fruit flavored water (blood orange mango), making it taste something like sangria without the fruit - which I also didn't have.
I had started out a sonnet of celebration for the summer solstice, only to find it turning depressing on me, primarily because everything was turning sour again.
Lithia
Oak cedes to Holly; and now dark is the night moon.
Light fades; this is the time for lessening they say.
Wish for the unwanted to diminish, and pray
sun deities work their magic on the rough-hewn
bone trove they have been handed in the shaded gloom.
I hide from the light; in the cellar of midday;
no one speaks to me, or brushes old things away;
no one comes for me, no one enters the dark room.
I hear my own breathing, labored and hoarse
Scratch my own skin, eyes blazing, claws bared, drawing blood
Sunk in self-loathing at abandonment, deadwood.
Fierce keening I cannot suppress; I need to force
"Mistress of the desert; blazing eye of the sun!"
But she has turned away from my cry too, of course.
21 June 2012
©Snake’s Trail, 2012. All rights reserved
The chair Jim was going to come back and assemble for me right about now – needless to say, I have to do it myself. It’s a very heavy metal and fabric-seated chair which I have managed to drop on every body part I have (fingers, knees, arms, hands, toes, ankles, wrists), because it’s really a two-person assembly, not one. I can’t brace the thing AND screw it together singlehandedly, so have just about disabled myself over a two-day period, and the thing still isn’t assembled. I’m covered head to toe with bruises and gashes. I also need to get up and walk away from it repeatedly before I really lose my temper and start getting violent – both at the chair and at myself.
I can’t seem to even myself out – calm down – emotionally stabilize. I’m flying from mute silence to rage and back again. I’m diving into paranoia and climbing back out again. I’m tired of the fiery wheel sensation of it all.
The Bough
So today you tweeted, tell me something of you.
I thought, in one hundred and forty words? Surely
I can’t so condense the untrammeled depths of me!
Then I read the words of girls whose years were so few
their lives could easily condense into small cubes.
When they delighted you with their simplicity,
with their teenager’s heartbreaks and difficulties,
my screaming resolved into the cry of the loon.
That was the moment, my love, when the bough did break
into millions of toxic splinters in my chest
with an enraged lion’s roar through the doors now burst
a wrathful and raging demon, a soul to take
"Not an angel, not a god, he’s a boy!" The first
rays of an angry sun slid o’er me like a snake.
22 June 2012
©Snake’s Trail, 2012. All rights reserved
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