Fade to Quiet

THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC A POEM WITH 90 TITLES OF ABBA SONGS It's because now my life's as good as an ABBA song. --Muriel’s Wedding Because Love is all there is in this SUMMER NIGHT CITY , Because no one is CASSANDRA on THE DAY BEFORE YOU CAME , Because If it wasn't for the nights, we think that we could take it, Because we expect HAPPY HAWAII and get a MUSICIAN with FUNKY FEET ,  Because THAT’S ME , in the car where the ABBA CD blares strobe light satisfaction, rearview mirror turns mirror ball.  Because I enter a WINNER-TAKES-IT-ALL as the low bass line of ABBA subverts my bottom line, Because  my history falls from the shelf because it's WATERLOO , I couldn't escape if I wanted to, Because we DANCE WHILE THE MUSIC GOES ON in the heart's dopamine disco, Because CHIQUITITA , I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Because I turn that music on and I forget  everything. Because I am 8 again, arms out spinning Disco innocence in ...

Three Poems: December 15, 2012   The Swan On the first night my baby was not in my body she lay in a plastic basinet next to me in my room. Bundled, she looked like a sweet date. I lay in the pale lit room and I traced her features with my eyes, sketching her in my memory, recognizing that this is what it means to make a person; it will be someone you’ve never seen before and would change into anything to protect. I reached my hand to the plastic’s rim and lay it gently on her chest, through the blanket, through the hours that would complete her first rotation of the sun. I understood from now on I would be in direct competition with every harm that lives in the world. I would grow great wings invisible to any but her and me, and I would cover her when something terrible neared and I would hiss. The clock on the wall also became something more real to me. Until then, I had been waiting for her to come. Now every second was another of her movements away fr...

(photos by Michael Oppenheim) Some history of the Basilica: Paul Roebling Jr,  grandson of the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, (Yes!)  first started development of Haywood Street exactly one century ago with The Haywood Building. At that time, Haywood Street was little more than a ravine running along the base of the resplendent Battery Park Hotel property. This is not the same Battery Park Hotel as the one standing at the north end of the city today. It was a Queen Anne-style green-painted wood and was owned by the Coxe family. Thomas Wolfe spent hours in the lobby watching the guests as they arrived, and he lamented its loss heavily when E.W. Grove purchased the land, razed the hotel and destroyed the mountain it stood on. Both Vanderbilt and Grove first espied their respective mountain real estate legacies from windows of that original hotel. Guastavino came to Asheville on a commission from Richard Morris Hunt, the first Fine Art architect in the U.S. and de...

I sent my first email in 1996. My boyfriend at the time had a computer, and the computer had internet. He sent emails all the time. When I was working on a project with PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) to develop a salivary ferning microscope that was cost-efficient enough to be distributed to impoverished women in India and Africa, I was asked for my email address. My boyfriend said I could use his.  One afternoon, my colleague at PATH forwarded an email from Mother Theresa. She was giving PATH her approval of the device. Once you get an email from Mother Theresa, there isn't much else to anticipate (Note to the 20000 senders of emails I've received since: you understand). The project got tanked along the way, despite my patchwork re-design that involved a cardboard kaleidescope from a child's birthday party and a 50x magnifying glass. I waited another two years to get my own email address, and another two passed before I started to actually ...

Well, the new fear today is getting your face eaten. Yesterday, the fear was having your rights of partnership dissolved, your gas price gone over the 4 or $5.00 mark. And before that it was getting bombed by your neighbor in the hijab, your other neighbor being shot in a hoodie. Before this, there was the fear of the hijacker, of the office building exploding, and before that there was the fear of the things that happen in farther away places than the mailbox that may or may not contain the letter laced with anthrax. Remember when the Tylenol first was “tampered with?” Remember the way we checked for razors in the Halloween apples and the candy spilled out from the pillow cases (because I grew up in a neighborhood where you could acquire a pillowcase of candy in a night) and a worried parent held each piece up to the desk lamp, searching for the  torn wrapper, the steel eyes of death tucked inside the taffy, and before this there was the terror of the too quiet room, the blan...

I am the grand-daughter of World War II prison camp survivors. My grandfather and grandmother met in Buckingham Palace where my grandmother was presented at Court at one of Princess Elizabeth's garden parties. They met later, again, in Hong Kong where my grandfather held a medical office in Kowloon. The attraction was undeniable. They married and enjoyed parties at Shing Moon, my grandmother wearing black burma silk evening gowns and hobnobbing with the British "dirty little foreigners" who enjoyed the high life of the Empire's global reach. She befriended the niece of Emperor Pu Yi and frequently joined her for tea within the labyrinthian compound of The Forbidden City. Theirs was a life of luxury. After the Japanese seized Nanking, my grandparents ignored the warnings and invitations to evacuate sent from the British Crown and moved north. My uncle was born in Swatow, my father in Tongshan. In Tianjin, miles from the unrest and terror of Nanking and Shanghai, the...

I want a Twilight font that drips blood and snaps in two when deleted. I want a Romantic poetry font that has birds in it and damp chunks of moss. I want an Art Deco font in which I will type in blue terra cotta tile. I want a Lascaux Cave font comprised of berries, blood and the sounds of wild animals outside the cave. I want a Marcel Marceau font that says nothing and still makes the reader weep. I want a Beethoven font that no one can hear and a Chagall font that flies, painted red, above the page. A Sartre font in which when I write I love you it doesn’t mean you are in a cage. I want a zen font that vanishes in the wind. I want a Camus font that carries no meaning. I want a Malthus font with a bug in its mouth. Design for me a Darwinian font. Let the words eat each other. And then eat the page. An Edith Piaf font that sings for the Resistance. A Billie Holiday font that prints only in blue. A Lao Tzu font. It is made of water, fire, some dirt and a soft breeze....

On Finding Out the BeeGees own the Priory where Joan of Arc was Sentenced to Death I Write a Poem using 40 titles of their No. 1 Hits (I'm posting this in honor of Robin Gibb's announcement of his battle with cancer. Thanks, songman for songs that always cheer me up! The BeeGees are the only band to have number ones in five decades.) It was God whom she needed to show how deep was her love, and for one night only, spirits having flown, she was named guilty, doomed to stand, sticks and specks, against the flames' shadow dancing. Did she think, did she hear alone the melody, through the still waters of her timeless, god-connected mind for whom the bell still tolls, knowing a love so right, the words in the night, in the night we love, we know how to do it? Did a horn section blast out the hard beats, shout out as the ropes lashed her wrists, the words nobody gets too much heaven no more? Did she expect to get saved by the greatest bell? I just want to be ...

--for the children murdered by their ill-medicated mother on August 27, 2011 The city will remember your smiles, beloveds, and carry them in its heart. The shapes of your small hands will always be beloved, grasping at the world you were just coming to know by heart. The city will invite you over to play, beloveds, when the mountains are changing as they are always changing our hearts. The city will sit on the edge of your bed, beloveds, read you your favorite story until it knows it by heart. And the city will peek in on you at night, beloved, and watch the rising blankets as you breathe and listen to the beating of your heart. Though we now let you go to be with the spirit, beloveds, we will keep you here in our spirit in our hearts. We will watch you grow, beloveds. We will remember you when our hearts delight in play. Our children will remember the name of your most beloved fruit. They will know how high you could swing on the playground with a racing heart. T...

In 1940s movie consciousness, a honeymoon in Niagara Falls was that iconic holiday. The dream destination for beginning a life together, Niagara is the site of a millenia-old geological event. At the end of the last ice age, the newly formed Great Lakes crashed through the escarpment, forging a path to the Atlantic Ocean. Despite its being one of natural wonders of the world, Niagara Falls was commonplace in my childhood. My grandparents lived fifteen minutes away along the Parkway in a Georgian house on the river. We picnicked just above the Falls where a ruined ship rusts away in the current over the decades. "This is my favorite part of the river," my grandmother would say, "just before the Falls." I grew up with one of the greatest natural phenomena just down the road.      When my daughter was three weeks old, I flew to Canada to introduce her to my 93 year old grandmother. We stayed in a Victorian Bed and Breakfast where my grandmother had played with her fr...

I fell through a bridge into a river in Switzerland once. It was a glacial river. It was a very old bridge. I still don't know how I survived. I somehow climbed a brick wall and passed out in a woman's vegetable garden. I did survive, and I got arrested for trespassing. For years following, each time I heard the sound of running water, be it of a river or a faucet in a kitchen, my hands would itch and often swell. When I went with friends to a "swimming hole" on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I experienced a full-blown panic attack which led to my being carried up the mountain by rescue rangers in a white wicker rescue basket then taken by ambulance to the hospital. All of this was unconscious. My task was to consciously draw this fear of water forth by exposing myself to increasingly dramatic forms of this necessary element. I think of this "de-fearing" process when I think of Tweeting and Facebooking (and blogging). Public speaking is the number one fear amon...

In the land of the esoteric, the tarot deck is much more than a box of thick, richly illustrated cards. It is a practicing ground for symbolic literacy wherein a practitioner "learns" how to "read into" things intuitively. This literacy renders the world a magical place, one where, as Paulo Coelho says, we can see into the Soul of the World. For the ancient Greeks, for the ancient anybodies anywhere, the world and all that happens in it is living organism, growing, breathing, changing every second.  As a part of this living world, we also participate in the whole. We are affected. We are transformed by experience. (Passive voice fully intentional there.) That is, when we are open, when we have been broken open just enough to let the world speak with us. From that point, with imagination and intuition, we can "see" the world at work inside the world, reflecting on the surface. So, this photograph. How incredibly well it has captured the very essenc...

                                           The Wild Swans at Coole as Yeats saw them, too. I woke up this morning to a clouded over moon and news of a new war, this after a week of earthquake and following fifty nuclear energy workers as they strive to save the world. The vegetables are already contaminated, and the people will get sick from this, even if Ann Coulter continues to insist that radiation is good for us. It is the first day of Spring, and it is cold and gray out. It's a hard day to wake to. I read that it was mostly children who were harmed by the bombs over Libya, and Ghadafi simply replies, "Prepare for a long war." I slept so heavily last night. Today, I want to sleep some more. I feel the earth is tired, the people of the world are tired. I feel we all need to sleep. But we don't sleep. We will keep acting, keep trying, keep searching for the words that will b...

EPICENTER, for Japan Japanese sailors rescue Hiromitsu Shinkawa Sunday, two days after the 60-year-old was washed to sea on the roof of his Minamisoma home by a tsunami caused by a powerful earthquake. Thousands are feared dead.                                 Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2011 When the home is shaken, then taken by the sea, when all they can compare it to are two atomic bombs, there is no such thing as waiting as when in this: the water wants. There is no such thing as meaning as when in this: the earth does break open. Sometimes it helps to lift one’s head in prayer and look around the world for what is missing, to count the waves and all the waves have taken and see how everything can be taken. The shoulder of the globe is always soft to cry on. The distance love will travel, salt to salt. I look to the man on his ro...

The Full Dreaming of Asheville Wordfest, a press release for a paper that might not exist yet. by Laura Hope-Gill on Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 3:48pm ASHEVILLE WORDFEST 2011 May 2-8, 2011 All poetry events are free. Films $10.00 donation. It’s time for Asheville Wordfest, Asheville’s poetry festival. Between Tuesday May 2 and Sunday May 8, Asheville residences and guests can enjoy poetry events and readings around the city. Asheville Wordfest is the product of a conversation among poets Laura Hope-Gill, Glenis Redmond, Jeff Davis and James Nave in 2007. In 2008, Wordfest launched at UNCA. Director Hope-Gill expected “maybe forty people, but by the end of the weekend, more than ten times that many had come to the events.” Wordfest is a local festival created to bring the Asheville community together while also connecting it with global voices. Each year, Wordfest explores a theme, using poetry as a form of citizen journalism and not just as a Fine Art. This year’s t...