The Things We Save, Part Two

 

 

As I attempt to give away items

I own that spark memories, some items

won’t let me go. “You’ll need me once again,”

they say, taking command, “How else to draw

this specific memory out of

the clutter of your mind?”* What surprises

me is that those objecting are not

only gifts. Most are my own purchases

of fabric, books, antique tapes and CDs,

knickknacks, magazines, papers and snapshots.

Already—or still—boxed, these anchors sleep

in closets, waking only at the threat

of annihilation. “You won’t always

have the internet,” they insist. “You are

sorry you haven’t scanned all your snapshots,”

they grumble. “But someday you’ll regret

trusting the digital world.” I relent

for the moment, but I think how easy

erasing would be. Now I shred papers,

hold yard sales, and take heavy boxes to

thrift stores. Someday I’ll explain libraries

and museums to them. Someday I won’t see

nor hear them. Someday a larger life force 

will conquer.  But now, like my cats, they reign.

*Quoting my brother Peter’s response to The Things We Saved.

My blog poems are rough drafts.

   Please respect my copyright. 

 If you quote, credit this page.

     © 2021 Susan L. Chast

The Things We Save

Things accumulated over years

concern us when we slow down enough

to see how they've anchored us.

We've lived under the illusion that

they love us as much as we love them—

these gifts from friends and lovers:

horse-covered pillows, tree paintings and

prints, a fuzzy green shawl, the angel-

winged begonia, carved maple bowls and

pine boxes, scented candles, ceramic

birds and glass cats, brightly feathered

butterflies—more and more everywhere.

 

But that’s a trick of a mind that thinks

memories flow from those things and not

our own bodies. So now we touch things

and let them go in twos and threes.

We find we didn’t need anchors.

We’re ships nurtured by memories we

co-create, but we root like flowers

to earth, her weather, life and gravity. We

matured and aged in the spirit that

conspires with earth to create and to die.

And after all, is this a mystery that

we need years and decades to discern?

My blog poems are rough drafts.

   Please respect my copyright. 

 If you quote, credit this page.

     © 2021 Susan L. Chast

Dear God and Earth who share and show us creation

Do you see your creation in me?  

Do I show you physically, mentally, and other ways?

I look at you when I look up and down and within, even when I don’t remember you are here.

I remind myself multiple times a day to tune in to your reality in the day, the night and the ocean. So many colors and tones surround me!

And if I am not aware that I experience you, let me recognize you later, reflecting on my experience—a moment recalled in tranquility like a poem.

I am no longer trying to be too much or bigger or any other way than a learner in your light.  Let me see you in all life.  Let the joy I feel in writing this praise turn into hope.  Let my hope be full of courage. Let it be shared.

(Part of the larger writing Here.)

My blog poems are rough drafts.

   Please respect my copyright. 

 If you quote, credit this page.

     © 2021 Susan L. Chast

An Over- Sized Sketchbook

I asked for an 8.5 x 11 one but that size was gone, so I have a 12 x 18 one.  It’s too heavy to carry, too vast to write a line on or a broken line on—unless I also draw in it.  Is that God’s plan?  Its way of leading me?  My mother said "Make it bigger. You could be an artist."  Do I want to be an artist?  Did I want her to confirm that thought in me?  The over-sized sketchbook matches my grandmother’s.  Hers lives unopened on the bottom shelf.  

Grandmother’s sketchbooks.  I deliberately don’t open them.  The sketches and watercolors would be gorgeous, and take me from vase-filled still lives to rocky shores with pine trees.  She couldn’t draw people. Or didn’t.  How do I know that?  I must have peaked once.  I imagine blunt irises in her sketch books—mistakes—not the perfection and rules of an art teacher.  I imagine people with scribbled faces, circles overlapping with fuzzy edges.   

Reflections from the cave, capital I-iris, capital G-grandmother with sounds and smells of brownies and homemade raisin bread.  Where is this perfection?  Instruction: Hems undone to redo with a measured stitch, not strained.  Embroidery undone to hide the do nots and thread knots.  Don’t touch the ceramic tiles.  Take up the spade instead.  Pile the rocks for a fence that doesn’t need mortar.  How is it done?  Must each canvass, each drama on stage be reinvented?  

Invention sparks as the over-sized notebook opens next to colored pencils, water colors, and chalks.  I find I like beginning tabula raza, looking out or in, capturing an image-thought my eyes pick up outside anyone else's lines.  I wasted paper in smaller scales, but this vision won’t be denied. Gosh it’s creamy, it’s inviting.  Here is room for whole new worlds, the only constraint common decency.  Wild decency, wild open spaces.  Worthy of its own weightiness.  I carry the possibility. 

#

Is An Over- Sized Sketchbook a poem? 

Written in RAJIV MOHABIR'S WRITING WORKSHOP "At Home in the Moving Body,"

zoomed 6/5/2021 from the Roxbury Poetry Festival Revised 1x.

The directions remind me of my work in Performance art, moving from object to object, association to association. 

1.      Breathe:  Start with everyday image specific to my experiences.  (4 min) 

2.      Breathe.  Deeper emotion that expands the original image or deviates from it some self truth (4 min) 

3.      Breathe.  Expand the myth of #2  let mind take me into my experience  (4 min) 

4.      Breathe—return to the original image which is somehow changed  4 min) 

My blog poems are rough drafts.

   Please respect my copyright. 

 If you quote, credit this page.

     © 2021 Susan L. Chast

I'm Waiting for You

 

O my dear creator help me to channel you!
Months have passed since I made anything. Speechlessness
is bad for both writer and teacher—and what else
can I be? On this wee patch of earth, I’m waiting.

Typing here, I’m waiting for guidance. Cleaning up trash

from passing cars, I wait. Cultivating pine trees

and bushes of red and yellow roses, I wait.

Counting three parts per foot, I am waiting for you.

Counting four feet per line, I am waiting for you.

I’m occupying this corner as a free zone

while I wait, although I haven’t told this story.

Has waiting become its own prayer, creator?

Is this where you want me? Can I serve standing here?

Amen then. I’ll pray and wait for you without fear.

My blog poems are rough drafts.

   Please respect my copyright. 

 If you quote, credit this page.

     © 2021 Susan L. Chast

 

A Wonderful Phone Call

For Sheila         

Here again is the cramp in the arm

I won’t complain about—the one from

an hours-long deepened talk with a friend

while holding the phone to my ear. Why

not turn on the speaker?  Stretch slowly,

then hang up, we who see digital

culture through relics of older days.

Do we still “hang up” the telephone? 

And talking, are we still distant and

invisible to the families we left, or

to those who left us along the way?

When it is more and more possible

to predict the future, will I want

to know?  When I am dead, will I watch

life as if it were a long movie?

My blog poems are rough drafts.

   Please respect my copyright. 

 If you quote, credit this page.

     © 2021 Susan L. Chast