ccdarling's Open Salon Blog

Fear Bubbles Up

Fri, 25 May 2012 22:05:40 -0400

Scathed, touchable,
Daunted, flinching

Random remark
Punctures tender core

Fear bubbles up
Oily iridescent glamour

Spreading, coating,
Spoiling, choking

Vainly seeking
Solace, harmony

Pleading tranquilo,
Tranquilo, tranquilo!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdRNTXaweoo

The Witch Is Dead

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:05:25 -0400

Once again she felt that familiar tug just under her heart and between her shoulder blades. Only this time it was firmer. It lasted longer too. Not precisely a pain, more than a pull, that left her gasping and her heart skipping.

“Yes, yes, mother, I know,” she whispered. “It is time.”

Merite rested for a bit on the stool by her stoop, watching brown leaves dance with the breeze. Autumn, and the sky was light blue with a few clouds wandering around like wooly sheep. The sun was on her shoulders, shining across the meadow, warming the chilly air. Wherever her soul wandered, she would remember this place.

She had chosen this unplowed clearing many years ago, paying three village men to set the corner posts, truing door and windows with the sun’s rising and setting so she would have light for as long as the day lasted. They thatched the roof, set stones for fireplace and hearth, and extended branches for a porch from which she could hang bundles of healing herbs to dry.

The men ostentatiously scraped the dirt off their boots before they left, believing her witching ways couldn’t follow them. They counted her coins though and pocketed them quickly enough. She was amused, knowing they and their neighbors would return, singly and silently winding through the woods, scratching on her door, rattling the latch, seeking healing for their ills, birthing for their babes, and solace for their fears.

For many, many years Merite examined their palms, lighted a candle and filled her scrying bowl with water, waited for words the goddess whispered. So she made a living, tending to their needs, but never was she welcomed into their homes. Shunned when she came into the village to purchase the few things she could not make for herself, but how different were they sitting across from her at her table! Their yearning eyes supplicated for certainty, capricious promises from a jealous fortune, wanting what their dreams could imagine but their minds never fulfill.

Many of the comeliest she took in her arms, enjoying their embraces, sometimes even their spotty-faced young men looking for their first experience, for the dance of life was sacred to her. But never did she receive the gift of a growing belly, the sweet blessing of baby’s mouth upon her breast. There was only the rush of scarlet from her legs at the waxing of the moon and as the years passed, so too those visits waned like the moon. Her hair of flame grayed, her face reflected in the scrying bowl collapsed in on itself, wrinkled with time and brown from the sun. Her spine bent and bowed, so no longer could she walk swinging her green linsey-woolsey skirt and cape, drawing furtive admiring glances from the men, condemning scowls from the women.

“Ah well, ‘tis time,” she muttered, and rose from her stool. She slipped her talisman in her apron pocket, taking a lighted taper from the hearth. She touched it to a few places on the dried thatch and left the door open. The breeze should bring the blaze to life quickly. Having no daughter to leave her knowledge to, and determined to leave nothing behind for the unworthy, she crossed the clearing and walked into the woods toward the setting sun.

The girl was gathering mushrooms in the woods when she saw smoke rise over by where the old witch lived. Her parents had forbidden her to ever go near the crone, but she had overheard tales from the elders in the village. If she just looked for mushrooms over there by the clearing but no further, there could be no harm, surely? She edged behind one old oak, its branches so warped by decades of living that some of them rested on the ground. Cilla watched the witch hobble across the clearing into the woods. But what could the old one be doing? She had left her house on fire!

The witch’s green cloak disappeared from view, and Cilla made up her mind to follow. She could not possibly get into trouble if she brought the village news about the witch burning down her house. They might even reward her!

Merite followed the path, overgrown with thistles as high as her knees, into the woods toward the sacred grove. The tug in her chest was growing painful, and she had to pause often to catch her breath. Leaning against the rough bark of an ash tree, she wanted to lie down for a bit of rest, but the call was imperious and unrelenting.

“I come, lady, I come!” she gasped, and stumbled forward, grasping the trees for support. She had left her walking staff in the hut, to twist and blacken and crack with her scrying bowl.

Staying behind the trees, but not so far she couldn’t glimpse the crone’s green cloak, Cilla stepped carefully, silently, alert for dry branches and leaves that could betray her presence.

At last the path widened into a small clearing, and in the center a spiral of small white stones circled a stump of what must have once been an enormous tree. The atmosphere was heavy here, thick with humidity. The sky above darkened with clouds, while the breeze strengthened into powerful gusts, blowing leaves and small twigs in corresponding spirals.

Merite slipped off her shoes and cast off her cloak. She began walking the sacred maze, discarding skirt and apron and shift as she turned, until at last she stood naked before the tree stump altar. Into its center she placed her last possession, the talisman, a red stone formed in the shape of a candle.

“Mother, I have come,” she murmured, kneeling. “I return all to you who once entrusted it to me.”

All at once the distant drumming of thunder rushed into the clearing, the clearing darkened, and impossibly, a finger of spinning wind reached down from the sky. Terrified, Cilla threw herself under a dead tree fallen by the path and covered her eyes with her pinafore. She felt sticks and pebbles and vegetation torn from its roots smack her back and tangle her hair, stinging her like furious bees. The roar was so deafening that when it stopped as suddenly as it had started, she swore she could still hear its rushing in her ears over the thumping of her heart.

A while later Cilla’s fear abated and her curiosity rose, and she crawled out from under the fallen tree. The daylight had returned and she could see the clearing was empty. The spiral of white stones, the witch and her clothes, all had disappeared. She stretched to see the slanting sun and calculated her mother would be getting impatient for the mushrooms she was supposed to have gathered for supper.

Brushing off her pinafore and running her fingers through her hair, she turned back to the path. But she stumbled over something sharp that poked her foot through the thin sole of her slipper. Bending down, she felt around in the thicket, and found under leaves of red and gold and brown, a curious shape. Brushing off the dirt on her pinafore, she held it up in the sunlight. A red rock, shaped with a point at one end, it looked almost like a candle. A treasure! She thrust it into her pocket with the mushrooms. She would have to hide this away from her brothers and sisters.

Skipping now, she ran down the path. She was expected home, and she had a story to tell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHJoj9IqeKg

Elegy for a Scent

Tue, 15 May 2012 16:05:58 -0400

Our second Christmas
“I spent a fortune!”
You exclaimed.
You a grad student
I was a secretary.
Fortunes are relative
But this I believe
It was a measure of
Your love for me.

Nearly thirty years
Special occasions only
Until I decided life
Is a special occasion.
Now nearly gone.
Placed among keepsakes,
Open flask and savor
Slightly faded sweetness,

Pure love’s scent.

A Contemplation on “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

Wed, 2 May 2012 15:05:43 -0400

It gets around
Contagion, cackling

Arrows fly true
Targets, acquired

Thought flies faster
Eyes, closed

Secrets moulder
Crumbling, cache

Scarlet blossoms desert
Horrible, horrible, horrible

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WP2exZurfc

cc says “Bleah!”, Part Deux – Got some ‘splainin’ to do

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:04:16 -0400

It was while I attended Jeff Lofton’s performance at UT’s Cactus Café a few weeks ago.

http://www.jefflofton.com/

Sublime traditional jazz, I presented my rapt attentive face - the one I keep in the jar by my door –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaRNrDaoMqw

but skitter, skitter, skitter went my thoughts in my mind.
Picture one of those water spiders skittering aimlessly across the surface of a pond.

I was the captive dweller in the apartment below, futilely banging on the ceiling with my broomstick. “Hey, you up there! Keep the noise down!”

I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

I’ve couldn’t seem to find my “unsinkableness”. I know it was just here a month or so ago. Where is Rose on her raft and her bloody bosun’s whistle when I need her most?

Cue Mary Hopkins, “Those were the days, my friends.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9JOmU2jFUo

Last Friday a guy on a motorcycle gave me (who, ME?!) a second look while I waited in my Honda at the stop light.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UWRypqz5-o

(I was looking rather fetching that day, if I do say so myself. I had on a puffy sleeved coral top, and coordinating lipstick.)

Hear, oh hear, my litany of listlessness, my meanderings of meaninglessness, oh woe! Oh woe is me:

My eyelashes haven’t grown back as long and thick as before. Ooh, too bad, so sad!

(On the other hand, my upper lip and the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin are doing just fine, thank you, thank you very much!)

My hair is growing in very slowly, curly and unmanageable, so I’m still wearing my cancer wig because otherwise I look like that guy from Eraserhead. Ay, pobrecita!

I still have a ghostly bruise on my leg from falling down a year ago in the shower when I was weak from chemo, and a burn mark on my arm from last Christmas’s encounter with my hot oven rack. Quelle tragique!

So WTF?

I was so boosterish about being cured of cancer I could have filled the Republican Convention Center and America’s Chambers of Commerce meetings with my positivity, you betcha, by golly!

I remind myself how incredibly blessed I am. I’m not getting shot in Syria, I’m not starving in Darfur, not getting droned in Afghanistan. I’m vertical and above ground. A few weeks ago I had my second 3-month checkup and all signs indicate I’m still cancer-free.

Cue Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe9kKf7SHco

What the H-E-double-hockeysticks do I do now?

I’ve figured it out, what’s wrong with me is that I’m in mourning. The Claudia Before Cancer, she’s gone, forever and ever, amen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptDBuNlbG0A

That life, that job, that person, gone, all gone. Not coming back, uh-uh, no way, no how.

You know, the five steps of loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Well, guess what? I’ve now realized my relentless positivity was Denial.

Anger and Bargaining? I dunno – maybe I skipped those parts, or maybe they are yet to come. It would be just like me to be a late bloomer in the Kubler-Ross School of Death.

Depression is my long absence from OS. I had approached my blog on OS as a substitute for a meaningful life, but my blog isn’t a life, it’s not purpose, it’s me explaining myself to me.

I know there are Real Writers on OS, people who write because they must.

Me, uh, not so much. Sometimes I play with words. I’m happy if you read me and comment if you feel so moved.

Still searching for Acceptance…