Julia Park Tracey

The curious at Red Hills Review are asking for examples of poetry so I’m posting a few of my own here. Indulge me, please.

Science

All the time I sat and listened while you
chalked the board and marked the tests,
paced beneath deer heads and the bobcat skeleton,
diagrams of creatures with six legs,
thorax, abdomen, thighs
glistening wet with the rainbow
of sweat, saliva, tasting,
kneeling, mounting, rearing,
backing into you, animal, planted
firmly inside me, memory, desire, learning.

Train to Bath

I dozed against the hard pane.
The Welsh man and his wife talked low:
rumble, murmur,
words indistinct in their marriage cant.
Elves, he said, I thought I heard,
or was it Elvis?
Elves in Maidenhead, Twyford, Reading.
Elvis in Didcot, Swindon, Chippenham.
I dreamed an elvish poem and
like Coleridge, lost it when I
opened my eyes to green fields
patched with the yellow flowers of rape,
and stepped out at Bath, on time.

Wednesdays

I stand at the sink, cleaning what’s caught in the trap:
the refuse of breakfast, congealing grease,
coffee grounds, crusty remains
of morning.

Out the window, maple leaves unfurl
new as a dress with the tags still on.
The bird feeder sways —
a sudden flash of color,
and they’re gone.
Doorbell rings. Mail drops in.
The trash collectors come on Wednesdays.

The wings I never had now itch me
like an amputated finger,
each dish I wash as shiny as a just-waxed floor;
stacked in racks, one against the other
a gleaming, fragile row.

Amaryllis

Pressed into earth, the shoot appears like a finger,
testing the air for spring;
it grows,
oh, how it telescopes its length into the room –
an arm; at its end, a fist,
clenched, unclenching
with fingers, buds, palest green,
stripping back the calyx,
and there, in the space of an hour,
what was a fingerling of green unwhorls,
now trumpets in coral-pink,
and by the end of day it’s a cornucopia,
its stamen gold-dusted,
its white pistil curving like a tongue to catch snowflakes,
raindrops,
the yellow flecks of its own semen.

Amaryllis,
I whisper your name like a lover.

Amaryllis is the title poem of a collection to be published by Scarlet Letter Press later this spring. All poems mine. Thanks for reading.

…is what they call it.

I used to read Adair Lara in the San Francisco Chronicle every day, and I particularly loved the images she created of her mother, pinning out the wet clothes to dry and thinking of each child as she hung their shirts and jeans. I loved the images of her mother’s orangey-pink lipstick pressed onto Kleenex, a hundred kisses littering the tabletop.

I wonder what images my children will have of me. We were laughing and laughing on the Fourth of July — my three daughters, one of their friends, and my beau, who had volunteered to barbeque for us. My eldest, the beautiful Miss M, told stories about her sisters — the youngest one screaming and arching her back as a toddler when she didn’t get her way, the middle one timid and crouching behind furniture when she was small. All were delivered in such a comic voice, with such a madcap stance and delivery that you knew they were spot-on.

Scary, as well as howlingly funny, were her imitations of me. She’d imitate the things I say – you know, those amazing lines we repeat to our children. My father’s favorite was, “Do I have to draw you a picture?” and he never finished a lecture. You’d start to relax, then he’d walk back into the room and say, “And another thing…”

Miss M’s imitation of me was the famous, “Do I have to send you an invitation?” This line — yes, it’s beautiful, choice, inspiring! This is delivered when the child doesn’t attend or perform the first (second, third…) time asked.

And her favorite is me, in complete exhausted exasperation (me with three kids, two in diapers at once, and an alcoholic/workaholic husband, alas, at the end of her rope): “God damn it!”

I guess you had to be there to appreciate it.

I can take it, though it hits a little close to the bone. I know I should have been more patient when the kids were younger. Heck, I should be more patient now. It’s a definite failing, and it’s not one you can pray about — God (if there is one) laughs at the plea for patience, sending instead long lines, loud noises, stupid clerks, fractious children, missed buses, empty gas tanks, plagues of locusts and more.

It’s a beautiful thing when your kids catch you in your shit. They are the ones who will carry forth your image, your reputation, your stories (your DNA). When they peg you, really nail you in your weakness, your inconsistency, your failings, well, there’s no way around it. You’ve gotta just step up and face it, laugh with them, and try a little harder not to be such a kvetch, nag, crank, whiner, control freak, what-have-you.

Kids see it all. And they have memories. And just when you least expect it (like when you’re impressing your beau with your children and they haul out their impressions of you behaving badly), well, it’s a beautiful thing.

Something to think about on a fogged-in Thursday.

…and I really mean it!

The last few months have been an unbelievably hectic time, as the newspaper ramped up and took off, leaving my option of work-from-home virtually impossible. Instead of commuting the 100-mile roundtrip three times a week, I was driving it five days for work, plus most weekends as well. My only escape was when I could crash on an Alameda couch and save myself the late night/early morning turnaround.

The point of moving my kids to Sonoma County in October was for a better standard of living — good schools, country living, safe streets, more time with grandparents and cousins. Unfortunately, the result was I was on the road so much that I barely got to see my kids. Instead of improving my time with my kids, I seemed to abdicate the raising of them to my extended family, and that just wasn’t OK with me. I missed my girls. I was rarely home to spend time with them, in our sweet little house in the woods, and on weekends, though there were hundreds of fun outdoor things we could have done (Bodega Bay, Spring Lake, horseback riding, biking, hiking in the Sonoma hills, etc.), I was too exhausted to make the drive anywhere. I think in those seven months the extent of our exploration included two or three trips to the mall in Santa Rosa, and that was it.

I was home for a few days in April, sick as a dog, and while lying there in bed, I realized how great it was not to have to make the drive for a few days. What a blessed relief not to get into the car — ack. It was just too much. What were my options? To leave the Sun and take a job (several of which were available) in Sonoma County, or to return to Alameda and take back the mantle of Island-dweller, although without the family support I had enjoyed in Petaluma. And when faced with that decision, I found I just couldn’t give up on the Sun; it meant too much to let it go. From that point onward, I set my plans into motion to return, found a lovely Victorian cottage in the West End to rent, and moved back in mid-June.

Since then, I’ve been getting organized, unpacking, and having my computer worked on so I can get back online. It seems that viruses ate the brain of my computer, so I had that fixed, and also bought a new computer with some more advanced technology. The whole shebang should be back online any day now.

Is that boring enough for you? Good — my work is through here.

Advice for Aspiring Writers? Not everything you write is gold.

Next time: The days of summer, spots and polka-dots, steps and stairs, and love.

…sorry sorry sorry…

My computer has crashed, I have been unable to access my blog or e-mail from home, or even pay my bills electronically. I apologize and will get back into the swing as soon as possible. Please be patient and check back periodically…I shall return!!!

…I am trying to make head or tail out of single-parenting, and it’s never easy – but always fun, especially if you considered the Spanish Inquisition fun. Ah, religion – what a vast territory that covers, and we, the single parent, are supposed to have all the answers. Some are easy.

My youngest daughter recently asked me where Jesus stood in the line of human evolution – was he before or after Cro-Magnon Man? I begged the question for a moment, tried not to burst out laughing while I pondered the irony – some people, for example, don’t believe that there was a Cro-Magnon Man. Rather than delve into thorny debates such as evolution versus creation, I simply answered, “After. Definitely after.”

Some questions are not so easily answered. I overheard her discussing with her sister the issue of whether Jesus had blonde hair. Again, these questions make me want to laugh out loud, but one cannot take the queries of childhood too lightly, so I politely intervened and began a discussion of how Jesus probably looked – long, dark hair, a beard, probably olive or tan skin. “But no one really knows what Jesus looked like,” I concluded.

“I know what he looked like,” she said. Of course she does – she went through six years of catechism, has holy cards in her dresser drawer, wore the white Communion dress and veil. How could she not know? But the journalist in me perseveres.

“Well, there are really no pictures of Jesus,” I said.

Now, to get her response just right, you have to practice your most withering, scathing tone. Try saying, “Mother!” several times, or “You’re a fricking idiot.” That should get it right. That’s how Ana replied: “There are pictures of Jesus – I’ve seen them.”

I bite my lip and tell her that the camera had yet to be invented for, oh, close to 2,000 years after Jesus departed the planet, and that any pictures she’s seen have been artists’ renderings.

She is not convinced. Her mother is an idiot. She leaves the room in a huff.

Although I have had my moment of levity, the questions she raises are serious. We cannot take lightly the spiritual inquiries of our children. I am grateful that there haven’t been harder questions put to me – like trying to explain the existence of God, or why there is hate and hurt in the world.

Because inevitably such questions would bring up my own issues of faith, my own faltering belief system, and I would have to say, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” How to explain why I still have the rosary beads hanging from my rear view mirror but no longer use them for prayer, or how we used to say grace at meals but now find it difficult to even get to the same table in the same house at the same time? Why we still light the Advent wreath at Christmas, how we bless ourselves when we leave the house or someone dies or we get onto the freeway, but no longer darken the doorways of any house of worship?

How can I explain so many things that I don’t know the answer to? Like how to account for the marriage-shaped hole in my heart that took away the greater portion of my faith when it left? I don’t know.

When my girls were very small, we lived in a house with an orange tree in the backyard. Whenever the weather was nice, we could sit on a blanket in the yard, and my little girls would chase butterflies and pick dandelions while I planted flowers, weeded and hung out clothes to dry. We would play for a while in the sunshine, then pick oranges from the tree and peel and eat them right away. We’d wash away the sticky juice from our fingers with the garden hose.

In those days I was sure of everything – my house, my family, my future, my faith. But how can we be really sure of anything – the things we thought were set in motion have vanished, and we are flung out into the world on our own. It is difficult to tell my daughters that everything will be as they plan, that everything will work out exactly right, when I am no longer convinced. But too much of that kind of pondering makes one rigid with fear.

So I go to my garden, where everything returns again in spring. I planted bulbs like dead lumps in the ground last fall, and they have made an appearance – thin spears of green piercing through the loam, then opening with a bounty of color. Is there anything more perfect than a daffodil in spring? Than a single white iris? The first rosebud to open, or new leaves on a birch tree unfurling like tiny green flags? Is there a lovelier sight than an apricot tree in full bloom, or the first tiny violets making their sweet way through the dead leaves of winter?

When I can’t explain anything to my daughters about the world, the heavens and life now or the one possibly to come, I go to the garden and sink my fingers into the dirt, where everything is simple and real. The dry seeds go into the ground, they come up in the spring, they die and are reborn. It is the simplest resurrection. It is the smallest inkling of faith.

In this Lenten season, it’s nice to know that there’s still hope.