Fade to Quiet

photo: Derekolsonphotography.com Whereas, the City of Asheville situates itself in one of the most beautiful locations in the world, and Whereas, the City of Asheville’s founding visionaries E.W. Grove, Fred Seely, George Vanderbilt, Thomas Wadley Raoul were all devotees to the Aesthetic Age which embraced a certain wildness of spirit and allowance for Beauty, and Whereas, the City of Asheville’s preserved architecture was designed by the masters of the Aesthetic Age finding in Asheville an open space in which to practice the new “Fine Art” that elevated people's character through proportionate balance of order and the unforeseen, and Whereas, City of Asheville’s favorite son Thomas Wolfe bore witness to the passion and Beauty of the city in words so powerful William Faulkner named him the greatest writer of their generation, and the City did not listen, and  Whereas, the City of Asheville’s brickwork of former slaves and their sons create visual music of j...

Dear NC House, I am certain it is my fault, this recent flurry of women's-reproductive-rights-deflating activity. Because I am a woman, and, as you well know, since the Fall of Man, pretty much everything has been my fault. The lack of jobs? My fault. Had I only had the sense to hand in my riveter and overalls after the boys came home from the war, and returned to vacuuming, which once had given me so much joy, we would not have the job crisis we have today. The S & L crisis (not SNL, as a friend had to point out to me last week)? I'm sure it's my fault, too, since it seems only women such as Martha Stewart seem to do any time for any questionable Wall Street activity, just as racism is probably my fault, too, since it seems only women such as Paula Deen (not that I defend her but I've seen worse from Donald Trump) seem to suffer any consequences for their ideas while of course men are forgiven because they are, after all, only men. So, it must be my faul...

Ode to Joy O God! – you have no threefold being and are independent of everything, you are the true, eternal, blessed, unchangeable light of all time and space. . . You are present throughout the whole world and sustain all things.                                                                                                         A translation by Beethoven of Hindu text* The moon begins below the water, always. In all things, it begins this way, the left hand the rhythm in an enduring lunar pulse that pulls and draws, attracts and yields, however far the right hand ventures closer to the sun then to return, then to succumb and venture deeper. At the wall of the dining room in Lawrence Par...

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...