Oh, look!

Another poetry site - One Single Impression - I followed Poetikat there. This week's prompt is denouement. What follows is my One Single Impression.

Denouement

by Sandra Leigh

One question haunts me.
Had I known that we had
left the preface long before,
that all the days behind us,
while we tried to learn the shapes,
the hollows of each other,
the sounds and smells
and bitter tears and
sudden, melting smiles,

were the whole
of our life together,
and all that followed
only epilogue,

would I
have raised my hand,

could I
have spoken one word - Wait -

and changed the world?

The Beginning of the Beginning (TMI)


Benign Neglect

by Sandra Leigh

My sister who quips
she could kill
a plastic plant
has nothing on me.

Mozart and tea,
violins and steam
whistles the kettle I
really must attend to.

Loyal Rooibos,
of all the gentle teas
my favourite, is the
perfect tea for me.

Ignore it if I please,
all day if it suits me
and it may turn cold but
It never grows bitter.

I just found this fragment in my Documents file, and I'm trying to remember exactly what prompted it (particularly that strange second stanza). Though the specific incident escapes me, I certainly remember how I felt when I wrote it. I'm afraid that that is my relationship to poetry, in a nutshell. I write poems to work through what I'm feeling. That feeling may not be a lasting one - or, as in the case of this fragment, it may point to some trait I see in myself, something I may not be proud of, but that needs to be acknowledged. It's all terribly self-indulgent.

************************************

This has been a stressful week. After a few days of feeling as if I'd been caught in a whirlpool,
I happened upon René Wing's Yes is Red entry for June 1, "Poetry is for Everyone". My first reaction was something like embarrassment - René was asking me (no, not just me, but isn't it all about me?) to talk about the beginning of my (poetic) beginnings, as if that weren't last Tuesday, or maybe a few years ago when I wrote some trite/maudlin/bitter/... attempts that I've long since thrown away or buried in a drawer.

But when I thought it through, I realized that my relationship to poetry really does go back a lot farther than that.

If I may digress for a moment, I'll try afterward to make my way back to the subject at hand.

Also in my Documents file is a (working) biography of my mother, who died when I was seventeen. When it's finished, I intend to make copies for my children, and also for my sisters - who have been helping to fill the gaps in my memory. René's question inspired me to have a look in that biography for a memory that I had set aside. I found a couple of them. First of all, there's this:

She had very strong likes and dislikes in that area. She said Dick Haymes had a voice like chocolate ice cream – and she loved chocolate ice cream. Her judgment of Paul Anka’s songs was severe – “Moon, spoon, croon, June”, she would snarl. And G. reminds me that when Anka sang “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” in "Diana", Mom would say “Sounds like somebody goosing him all the way up the stairs!” Sammy Davis Jr. suffered similar criticisms. About Marilyn Monroe’s kisses, she asked “Does she serve towels with her bath?” But she swooned over Orson Welles’s hands, and could listen all night to Edith Piaf singing.

Then:

Another time, our entire Thanksgiving dinner ended up dribbling down the wallpaper when Mom threw one dish after another at the wall. That was the time that my father had made a recording of himself reciting “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” (from Sonnets from the Portuguese) and played it in front of everybody, including Aunt R’s family. He was apparently the only one in the room that didn’t know Mom was about to leave him, or maybe he was trying to change her mind. If so, it didn’t work. By that time, Grandma had died and there was nothing to keep Mom there.

How about that? The first passage tells me that I came by my discomfort with rhyme in the most natural way. It was my mother's fault! It also shows that I apparently inherited my tendency to cross senses (not synesthesia as such) from her. I remember the first time I heard a counter-tenor sing. I said he sounded like dry sherry. And yes, Dick Haymes did sound like chocolate ice cream.

The second passage is probably more telling, in that it reminds me that my difficulty in expressing strong emotions comes from seeing far too much acting out when I was a child (I was under eight when the Thanksgiving dinner incident happened, and it was just the climax of a very long melodrama.)

Many years later, a friend of mine brought home a Bette Midler video. I don't remember what number Miss M was doing, but she ended up writhing on the floor, wailing, seemingly in tears. I remember commenting that people paid good money to get psychiatrists to listen to that stuff, and here this woman had got us to pay her for the privilege. "Nice work", I said. I have since become a Bette Midler fan, though I still get uncomfortable when she goes over the top - and going over the top is, of course, her forte. Maybe what I like about her is that she makes me uncomfortable.

Oh, and apparently I was exposed to the Brownings at a tender age. ;>)

Now. I did say I would get back to the point, didn't I? I have established that I learned early that the safest course was to keep those pesky emotions under control, and that any necessary emoting had best be, if possible, in disguise. Maybe that's why I have always loved music, why I have always sung. That's a safe sort of emoting, especially if your favourite kind of singing is Tudor-era Anglican chant (and madrigals, which, as Anna Russell said, are very square indeed).

Poetry, then, is my attempt to find my way out of that box I constructed for myself a long time ago. It is my way of stepping out of the safe zone. I have always written poems, but I have seldom shown them to anyone else. Posting poems on the internet is a Giant Step out of that safe zone, because once they're out in cyberspace, I can't change my mind. The same applies, of course, to this story.

Thank you, René, for your thought-provoking post. I'll stop talking now, before I end up writhing on the floor. I'll leave you with a bit of the Divine Miss M's work (no writhing):

BetterU Tuesday: The Beginning

For some reason, I am unable to keep up with the world this week - I mean, I'm less able than usual to do that. Even at the best of times, I seem to be running full tilt to keep up. This week, it's a hopeless task.

However, I have not forgotten The Turtle. Indeed, it is much on my mind. Fortunately, I can come here in between all the distractions and report on what's happening. Maybe the writing of it will help get it under some degree of control.

Yesterday was Day 1 of the American Red Cross's Go Red for Women BetterU program. I signed up and joined Joshilyn Jackson's posse, to make myself accountable to her and the others, because if I'm accountable only to myself, I'm likely to fall off the Heart Health wagon before very long.

I will be blogging about the twelve-week program on Tuesdays, reporting my progress, complaining about my aching knees, and all that. So. To begin.

When Joshilyn first started talking about BetterU, I jumped right in and started watching what I ate, trying to be more active. Hence, by yesterday, when the program started in earnest, I had already lost six pounds.

Hooray for Sandra!

My stats on Day 1 are:

Weight = X (which is really X-6, but I'll make it X for all future calculations)
Waist measurement = W, which stands for W-a-a-a-a-a-y too big.
Blood Pressure (BP) = 115/69, which is an improvement over a few weeks ago, but I didn't think to write the figure down, back then. In any event, it's not a big concern for me.

My cholesterol is high. I am taking Crestor to control it. I don't want to strain the health care system by getting tested unnecessarily. I was tested just a couple of months ago. I'll have to see if my doctor's office can give me a printout without my having an appointment. Otherwise, I'll just wait for my next scheduled test and see how it compares to the last one.

My goal is to lose 15 pounds on the program. Towards that goal, I am eating a lot less - and a lot better - than I was a few weeks ago. I'm following the Weight Watchers guidelines, aiming for 20 points a day, allowing myself 2 points for half an hour of walking or at the gym. That 2 points represents about a 100-calorie Breyer's ice cream sundae (or a Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich, which I think is 130 calories.)

Today I walked 4 kilometres (2.5 miles) with my Nordic walking poles. My doctor recommended them, and I'm really enjoying them. I think that besides burning extra calories, they are working my pecs, biceps, and triceps. They make me walk faster than usual, so I presume I'm getting my heart rate up. Win-win. I'm planning to take a forty-minute walk, four times a week.

Twice a week, I will go to the gym, where I will walk half an hour on the treadmill, then use the vertical leg press, pec deck, thighworkerthingy, vertical row, lat pulldown, and the dreaded Roman Chair. I've been to the gym four times so far, I think. My main reason for going (because the walking is really good, so I probably don't really need the gym) is that they have a great scale there. I believe it is actually accurate. The one I have at home is amusing, but not very useful. In general, I think it weighs about ten pounds low, but it's hard to tell, because if I get on and off it a few times in succession, it will give me results that vary by six pounds - eight, on a bad day. So it's hard to trust the thing, and I'm going to do my official weighing in at the gym.

I sort of planned on doing two gym workouts and five walks each week, but it has since occurred to me that a day of doing absolutely nothing, once a week, might be great for morale, and it would give my muscles a few hours to repair themselves.

Wish me luck, folks.