Weekday Evenings at the Kirkwood Spa

The Jacuzzi is littered
with amorphous female bodies
too old for mating.
Like beached sea lions,
half-submerged and languid,
we rock against each,
gazing through papyrus eyelids
into effervescent water.

Only our diamonds still sparkle
and have kept their shape.

Displaced by bantering bulls
and the liquid iridescence
of adolescent females,
we ancient ones retire,
single file and silent
to the Desert Room
for a touching ritual
where postulants,
terry-turbaned kneel,
offering a cup of spring water
to the rocky gods of gravity and guilt.

Steaming rising, we are anointed
into the Chrism of Oil of Olay
while twenty feet away
in chlorinated deep waters
a rising, diving youth
arches her back
and breaks the surface.

~Pardes 2006 -

I went back to work after a nine day Christmas Holiday vacation and was greeted by multiple expressions of "my my my but you look rested." It was so frequent a phrase that I wondered how bad I must have appeared before I left. I know that I felt exhausted and wore the dilapidated musculature of a 63 year old in the body of an 83 year old.

However, the other actions of touching my shoulders, or gazing at my form with the other multiple comments of "you have to have lost 10 pounds!" intrigued me. Weight is weight and it never concerned me other than as a curious wonderment how gravity and gluttony can ravage a body on the outside while inside you still feel lithe and young. But this statement puzzled me. For the nine days of my vacation I did nothing but sit in a zazen position on my bed and watch movies, write blogs, answer emails from fellow bloggers, or sleep (not in zazen position). How is it possible that I could lose 8 pounds (verified on the morgue scales) in a mere 9 days of physical inactivity.

It's a mystery.

I used to belong to the Kirkwood Spa and would religiously swim every day and walk for miles around the track littered with other male and female bodies exuding a mixture of testosterone, estrogen, and that astringent odor of fresh sweat. All to no avail in terms of losing weight. I would shrug it off since in the old days when I looked like Twiggy, I felt like me and despite my growth sideways, I still feel like me. Feeling like me is a good thing and I wasn't about to make the chlorinated waters murky with the media's version of what "me" should look like.

Life got complicated with an advancement of work that left only complete exhaustion at the end of the day, certainly no time for a two hour trip to swim and surrepitiously observe the drama, not to mention the lovely forms of others. Then I discovered the joy of riding a bicycle which wasn't experienced as "exercise" but as a joy of remembering the wind in your hair innocence of childhood.

I rode for miles and miles and was transported to another realm of the sheer delight of how a body can perform when left alone, when not picked at with circuit repetitions on sweaty stainless steel machines, but just left alone to ride the wind.

I'm still me. I'm still the shape of a fireplug, just a smaller fireplug these days. I don't swim anymore but if you notice an older lady wearing a gold helmet on a silver bicycle adorned with panniers and flashing lights, that will be me. The real me. The one that will always be me. The one that never ages.

The Passion of Trees

What is there to do with a runaway poem that's out of control and refuses to be edited? How do you cover the mistakes in lines that do not scan properly, or how do you define or defend phrases you have no idea as to their meaning?

If chefs can cover their mistakes, their culinary oversights with mayonnaise, then a poet geek can cover her shortcomings with photos and music. It's debatable if I write poetry any better than I cook. (Shrug.) Please allow a bit of time for the video to load .... oh ... and pass the mayonnaise.

text & photos by Pardes

Skirting the Fringes of Copyright

Image via WikipediaI have a bulging folder of my favorite poems written by famous and not so famous poets. I have been wanting to add a periodic blog of these poems but I still haven’t figured out how to handle the copyright issues.

After finding yet another favorite poem today, this time William Meredith’s poem, “A Vision of Good Secrets,” the urge to post it was strong. Why not? After all, the author is dead and besides that I found it on someone else’s blog! Yet it still didn’t seem right.

So I did a little more research on copyright infringement on the internet and added those pages to yet another bulging folder to try and find a definitive answer. The issue to me is wondering how bloggers rationalize posting the creative work of others on their blog. I’m not pointing fingers as much as I’m curious about how blogging has stretched the limits of what used to be taken for granted as an unbreakable rule, an honor code punishable by heaps of shame and shunning if not by judicial process.

Rose DesRochers at “World Outside my Window” offers straightforward wisdom on the topic in her blog, “Copyright Infringement: Request Permission,” while Bobby Revell at “Revellian dot com” takes a more humorous (and completely ethical) approach in his blog, “How to Steal Blog Content: Ethically.”

However, neither of their thoughtful posts were on target with my dilemma: how can I post my favorite poems without spending eons tracking down permission to use them? I’m waiting for a reply from the Special Collections Librarian at Connecticut College where they host a website of William Meredith poetry. Perhaps they have some sage advice since they had to tackle it themselves a few years ago when posting a tribute to William Meredith.

Meanwhile, to pacify myself I’ll post two poems from two of my favorite mystical poets Emily Dickinson and Rainer Maria Rilke where copyright infringement isn’t an issue…at least I don’t think so…..oh great, now I have myself wondering…….

Hopefully I’ll have an answer soon and will be able to share the gems written by William Meredith with you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Nearly every writer has at least heard of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” if not own a copy of it. It’s a gem of a book, thin, yet rich with his love of writing and his compassion for others. However, his mystical poetry shares the searching of his spirit for union with the divine through sublime imagery that is timeless.

Image via Wikipedia

Falling Stars

Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson often gets dismissed as an eccentric agoraphobic poetess until you take a few minutes or hours or days to study the precision with which she articulates her world of ideas. Take a look yourself at her work as an audio or text file at Project Gutenberg.

You’ll know it – as you know ‘tis noon

By intuition, Mighty Things
Assert themselves – and not by terms –
“I”m Midnight” – need the Midnight say –
“I”m Sunrise” – Need the Majesty?
Omnipotence – had not a Tongue –
His lisp – is lightning – and the sun –
His Conversation– with Sea –
“How shall you know”?
Consult your eye!