It’s not a word you hear very often, or did, even back when I was a kid. I must have learned it first from those Archie comic books, to me baffling, unfunny, but riveting as a preview of life down the road in high school.
Well, I was a young fool. High school was nothing like that. No Jughead, hanger-on with his inexplicable serrated hat, or grim Miss Grundy embodying Monday, or sassy and glossy Veronica Lodge with her sleek moneyed sneer. No kind but clueless lovelorn Betty who was perpetually blind to her own beauty.
Especially no irrepressible Archie, all geeked-out freckles and tomato-red hair but with some real spark or flare of talent, like skinny Mick Jagger without the strut or sexual glare. Still, Archie fronted a band, had a car, and that was enough to make him a star. Just a paper construct. Never met one like him.
After college, though, I was briefly married to a red-haired guy, Jeff, who imitated Ry Cooder by playing slide guitar. He had a rusty yellow car that turned over and over but usually died in the driveway. There was too much to fix, I guess. And there I was, inside the house, a lovelorn bride who secretly cried, who tried to be kind, tried to steer toward a happy ending over the bumpy road of his manic ups and downs.
We could never get to a higher gear. I left after he claimed to be addicted to me. He could not metabolize his fear, and later, his father told me, he simply slid off the rails on an excess of something poisonous, just as pernicious as sugar.
All up and down the quiet street, lights wink off and on. Windows open and then close: soft breath of houses. Days flow like ink. Birds are thrilled. Buds form on our glauca rose.
Quiet reigns in the mostly silent streets. I read that seismologists note worldwide how reduced human hum reveals world beats unheard before we chose to move inside,
agreed seclusion was a social gain, could flatten curves of infection and death. At first, we felt relief. Then mounting pain of separation. And now? We find sweet breath
each morning, find peace within our own walls, listen to morning wisdom of bird calls.
Not the wind knocking branches against the eaves, Nor wolves, for they are far, far to the north. Just the small echo chamber of my heart,
Voicing this pain I hear, this pain I see, Twisting shimmers of inherited wroth Polished and shaped for the distance of art.
There is power in voices shaped into song. Our singing breath holds a gathering force. Our sorrows must flow before they are spent,
Acknowledged before any grievous wrong Can be set right. If the river’s course Is dammed, its flow still presses, cannot relent.
Song helps to clear the silt, to sweeten the rue. Our flowing breath can strengthen and renew.
Leslie Schultz
Regular readers of Winona Media might recall some these images. They inspired a NaPoWRiMo poem (April 19, 2017) called “Portrait of a Street Musician” and writing that poem helped me to learn from a reader what the instrument played was so long ago on a grey day in Paris.
This morning, I was thinking about breath and wondering about the tonal and other differences between singing and howling, or indeed whether the difference is only in our naming. Why that today? I don’t really know–gloomy weather, world strife, headache.
What I do know is that it helps me to engage, at least in my own way, to try to make something. To try to make sense.
...all the colours that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable, all the more reason boldly to use them too raw, time will only soften them too much… Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother, Theo)
Who knew that paintings fade like flowers?
Van Gogh foresaw the unstable quality of his pigments,
impressed them vividly onto prepared canvas
as in this picture of a man walking with a woman,
arms entwined, air heavy as blue metal,
trees spaced like columns in a Doric temple, where
undergrowth thick and wavy as seaweed
blooms with color— yellow, orange, white—
but that fugitive one, called spark or geranium lake,
sent from far afield by Theo, used to make
a brief flowering of pink has faded to white;
quite the opposite of the trillium
at the base of my elm which emerges like snow
but then blushes each season into oblivion
shaded by showy day lily, shrouded
afresh in the mystery of understory:
this the story, the way of man,
of woman, of all flesh.
Leslie Schultz
Image: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, b.1853, d.1890); Undergrowth with Two Figures; 1890; oil on canvas; Bequest of Mary E. Johnston; 1967.1430. (Cincinnati Museum of Art)
A child asked me, “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands… (Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 6”)
Fever took me by surprise. I was eight years old. I lay in my room, under a blanket covered with pictures of pink roses, and the room began to whirl. I could not understand it, found it curiouser and curiouser. The ceiling tilted and dropped. The centrifugal force created, somehow, by my own body felt as though it would fling me out of it, as though I had become a spinning galaxy of heat and light and pictures and roses that made a body unneeded. I was puzzled but not alarmed. I was on fire with fire that did not consume.
My mother brought in the glass thermometer, held in under my tongue, kept bringing in trays with ginger ale and aspirin, water, sugary puddings after the sun rose. When the sun fell, my fever broke. I was still here but changed. I could hear the pink Queen Elizabeth roses growing on the other side of the wall, hear the pellucid slugs chewing the light green grass, even the music of starlight streaming through the willow tree I once fell from, when the wind was knocked out of me. Where did it go? I wanted to know. I felt then that whole universe unfurled from my home. Soon after that fever I wrote my first poem.
