Cats Eye

Cats Eye

Ancient comfort kitty rubbed her jaw

on my pale elbow at the window sill

while I watched robins walking circles

in the grass below

“one, two, three–"

A silver tabby paw batted the glass;

and they scattered like--

“You win” I laughed,

elbow hand rubbing

her neck and jaw,

eyes readjusting

until I saw

house flies coming in for a landing

on the screen outside.

I closed then opened my eyes

tears came quickly

and extra loving

for seeing-eye kitty

Posted for "Personal Challenge: Visual Pathways with Mary Ann Potter" at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads (6/27/12).   Did you know that California's Mott's Dots are also known as catseyes?  Neither did I!  but Wikipedia told me all about it.  So glow like a gem, see like a cat, be precious in my eyes.

RePosted for Poets United "Poetry Pantry #126" (12/2/12).

 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

Flagship

"Details"  © Margaret Bednar ~  i & I ~  2012

My first one was turquoise 
jeweled with pink scrolling 
swirled all 'round, even
dull green hood and black bonnet

She matched my jeans' inserts 

belled lovingly by hand
and her Vintage?  born 60s
Mine in the psychedelic 70s.

Eager to go on a running pop-start, 

easy slide into worn cloth seat, 

held together by unchanged oil, 
heated by engine air in motion

She preferred not to stop--
Broken master cylinders--

quick right-foot pedal lifts
on long slow-down upgrades

My flag of freedom, she took me 
from divorce to MFA, and when 

she could no longer move forward, 
her reverse gear kept her alive

Running groceries up and garbage down 
a steep communal driveway, where

I last saw her at the bottom, hood less

and home to yellow and orange flowers. 

Written in response to "The Sunday Challenge, Take # 2 with Margaret Bednar" 
at Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads. 

Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

La Mama Ellen

I wrote a reflection on this poem and revised it slightly on Summer Solstice, June 20, 2014.  Find it HERE!

International innovator Ellen Stewart died at the age of 91 in 2011.

"Ellen Stewart was a global citizen before anybody invented that identity as a way of being in the world. She staked a powerful claim on multiculturalism, intercultural thinking and multi-ethnic casting before any of these postures had acquired the patina of a fashionable movement dynamic.  Stewart herself credited Joseph Cino for starting the Off-Off-Broadway movement—but if Cino was the father of Off-Off-Broadway, Stewart was the mother. In building her Greenwich Village coffeehouse, Café LaMaMa—which morphed to become the world-famous La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club—our Mama welcomed huddled masses of artists yearning to breathe theatre. . . . "     

—Randy Gener from "Viva La Mama." TCG.

La Mama Ellen

           

                    by Susan L. Chast, 22 June 2012

They say that she cannot be summed up,

this high Catholic Sagittarius of legend

who thrived on drama and controversy.

That no matter where she cooked the brew

she served in the east ventricle of New York City,

she pumped its blood through the veins of ancient

civilizations and innovative fashion.

That she was a diplomat of the United Nations

who used theatre, music, and dance to prove

that borders can be crossed and that making

art together can change the world.

That she was beautiful, challenging, helpful,

difficult, stubborn, impossible, a genius,

an innovator, an imitator, an opportunist,

an opportunity, a seer.

And to her student-scholar, her shadow for a brief 20 months 

out of her life of nineteen hundred and ninety four:

She was a Mentor of quantum possibility 

She was a Mama who just knew

that I had energy to collaborate toward

common goals as well as to interpret

that I had time to watch and learn

as well as to record and analyze

that rehearsal breaks were for tasks

and not for naps.

She was Producer, Director,  Designer

and a cleaning woman who taught that we make the room

by cleaning walls and bathrooms and floor boards

because we respect the space and those who walk in it.

This was her secret and her bottom line: Occupation 

and Sharing of Space--Say what you must, but keep the space; 

Defend who you must but do not give up the space; 

Occupy the ground first and then play with definitions 

and remember that if peepee and poopoo is all 

that they can hear, then it is all that they deserve. 

Place was her gift.  We will not be dis-placed.

Ellen Stewart surrounded by her "babies" at a production meeting in her apartment in 1970.  Photo Credit: from Theatre Communications Group for LaMaMa 50th Anniversary in 2011 who have it courtesy of La MaMa Archive.  

This was the original last verse, cut by the poet: 

I have never forgotten to own and occupy the space, to empower myself and others through this oh-so-natural and necessary first step:  First comes Eden and only after, if you invite in the snake, can you call it Hell, and better yet--engage that snake in the work and in the play, open the snake eyes,  let it join in and cross the border. 

 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

Thank you Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads! 

This is a real toad--a poem that has been in my mind since my dissertation research in 1989-90--pulled out of my history by yesterday's challenge "Fireblossom Friday ~ Get Famous."   Thank you Ellen Stewart and thank you Fireblossom, for helping me to celebrate her life, 

Susan
23 June 2012

Arcadia in the Catskills

Neither sheep nor shepherds populate the canvasses

of the Hudson River School of painters and Mom

concurs in her renderings of river banks where spring-

flowering apple and cherry orchards turn to small fruit

by the 4^th of July when the corn is knee high and heat

tricks maple leaves into early oranges among pine-needled

forests where grew The Climbing Tree.   

Mom drew the long-limbed pine while I watched 

chipmunks and fairies run and hide from me 

in reindeer-mossed hobbit homes under the brown-skinned 

roots of the ancient tree surrounded with rattlesnake-filled

stone walls where cows once grazed in the old days. 

I climbed quietly to a still low limb to scout until pine  

tickled my nose into A Sneeze.

Later I dreamed untamed forests full of elves, lost

ghosts knocking on our walls and windows, and magic

so loud I couldn’t sleep--indeed the morning footprints

dotted across the driveway could have been ghost horses

not the deer trespassing to chew lettuce

with the rabbits, little Peter Cotton tail in the lead

as they ran before The Morning Sun

I leaned my rake against the fence, clothes pinned

the towels on the line until they swept the ground,

and scolded the crows and red-winged blackbirds,

robins, starlings and swifts not to eat

the mulberries over the fresh wash and to leave

some on the tree for me to have with milk before

I visited the climbing tree.

Was it gone?  Did it Brigadoon away when the night  

moon played tricks on pathways and tree limbs?

One more rise to climb and then another—

I knew it was closer yesterday but not as close as when

my older brother or mom came along to play or when

the faeries slipped a dime under my pillow

in exchange for a tooth.

Where did the faeries put the teeth?  I scuffed

the thick mat of rusty needles to find them,

reached into nooks and climbed higher to see

if they used my teeth up in the tree –and I knew

mom laughed at me, but she also told me stories

of when my grandfather’s geese chased her,  bit her

heels and she ran home

Then  Rip Van Winkle started bowling and skies
turned angry with fat cheeks blowing hard to shake us
from the limbs--and this time everyone ran: elves
and faeries, mom and brother and me, deer, rabbit,
horses, ghosts, leaves and rattlesnakes just like
the cards in Alice’s trial leaping and falling for shelter,
towels, naps and dreams.

Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast
Chosen for book 11/2013

Heart in hand, I just posted this to dVerse's "Where in the World AM I?-Meeting the Bar."  
In the picture I am the Scout-look-alike on the right.

School is never out

For Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads "Open-Link Monday, "  I have dredged up a poem written on the back of a flyer for a 1985 support vigil.  I got the flyer at a Witness for Peace meeting I attended before the vigil to support volunteers who had been arrested for protesting US aid to the Contras who were trying to overthrow their Nicaraguan government and killing many civilians in the process.  Whew.  I am sure I learned more about Witness for Peace since.  And I am not sure any of that background is important to this poem.

Witness. 

Just watch.  

Do not interfere and do not protest.

Stay with your partner.

Do not miss a thing on any side of the conflict.

Will this be boring?  I wonder as if a 

child in school one week before summer.

I know that witness makes learning crisper 

and clearer and more effective 

like a meditation that lifts my center to float

all seeing and then emitting quadraphonic sound 

from all edges of the room until it is as if 

I am no longer speaking, but Truth itself is 

pouring through the transparent ceiling. Ha!

Careful, stop.  Witness only.  Do not speak.  

Be on the earth and not in the air.  

But I fear I am a chronological liar who embroiders 
the facts with the romance of forgetfulness 
and obscure associations across many planes of time. 
I should write fiction. I panic.

Witness. Watch. Remember. Do not interfere.  

Born a teacher, I frown censor-like and within these restraints 
groan and grow committed, deeply rooted and accurate,
surefooted and owl-eyed with a twinkle--
the twinkle of one who, sure of her topic, watches resolve 
ripple on the changing faces of the knowledge seekers, 
the rainbow catchers, the flyer filers, and others like me.  

This is our real school: listeners and watchers, 
marchers and speakers.  This is the school 
of waiting for an opening or creating it, the school 
of coaxing or demanding.  It is the school of stand up 

and act and be sure we have witnesses.

And school is never out. 

In the Tunnel of Love

Published on You Tube on Jun 16, 2012 by  Poemsapennyeach

June 16th 2012 Bloomsday : the last lines of Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy 

to the backdrop of a Tribute Painting by the Video Artist 

 Bloomsday dawned clear and untroubled on the Sea of Indifference and the Isle of Right.  A few of us celebrated in the Tunnel of Love, reading aloud, letting Molly Bloom stand in for Penelope so someday a woman or a man could say "vagina" in Michigan.

We had watched the censors’ ships come into harbor again.  They are here for 50 Shades of Grey now that they have finished with the siren red of Molly’s dress, the deep blue Well of Loneliness , and the dark Howl  in our Brave New World where on the table of  The Naked Lunch lies the fiery Sex of Madonna.

   

The sleek ship is heavy with grime slung in judgment as we honor Molly once again, hearing her say: “I near lost my breath yes  . . . yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life . . ." 

And the flower of the mountain goes on to say what she did to pleasure him and her lover and she compares body parts and ends with:  “I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

We finished the reading with a sigh, closed the book, and joked about the ships now at sea.  What do Madonna and Molly have in common, we joked.  And the answer was “What they cannot say in Michigan.”  

And then, unnoticed by the youth among us, we retired women and men touched hands.  Yes, we thought we had finished fighting for women’s control over yes their own bodies and yes the words they utter and yes we will fight again yes.

Written to the marvelous "Re-Joycing in “Poetics” (and Exile)" challenge at dVerse Poet's Pub.  Visit there for the full challenge.  All of the titles in this poem are books censored at one time or another within the USA.  The landmark book-censorship case was about James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922.

Re-posted at D'verse for Victoria's  "Meeting the Bar: Literary Allusion."

 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast
Submitted to Rattle 8/29/2013