A brief catalogue of lines

Lines connect us – I can strike up the most surprising conversation with my neighbor in the check-out line. And lines divide us: I’m drawing this one in the sand and dare you to step over it.

In conga lines we share rhythmic moments. In lines of poetry we break open stories and make room to put things together that are clearly out of place in prose.


A brief catalogue of lines

by Sara Eisenberg

I was gloriously out of _______.

He wanted to mark his words:
the shortest distance was a _______
between 
the ● he was making and the ●
of his knife,
(with which he wanted to pin me
before giving his blessing)
a  _______
that ran clear through me
as if I wasn’t even there.


The teachers went on strike in 1974,
my 2nd grader and I took sandwiches down to the picket _______
and we laughed because the 2nd graders, they knew
how to stand and walk in a _______.
The teachers meandered, had no discipline,
modeled being 
gloriously
out of line,
signs tilted this
way and that.


Stolid grey Soviet citizens, 1977: 
they stood in _______s  ringing the block for
fatty meat, for
bread, for
soap.


Cheerful Londoners, 1966 and even now,
they queue up 
at the bus
stop.


1966 there was no _______:
no more right way
to queue up
to get in to the US of A


There is still no _______,

no shortest distance

between two sufferings.

______________________________________________________________________________

Inspired by immigration attorney Matt Cameron

A covenant of birth as we enter 2019

Dear Readers,

I have failed utterly in my attempt to shape some cohesive, meaningful narrative out of the alchemical heat of 2018. A wild mix of chaos, deaths small and large; courageous and inspiring traveling companions; insights, fulfillments, shatterings into greater wholeness, lingering terrors, and refurbishing of the heart.

So all I can do, as the year 2019 is birthed,  is to share with you words I need both to voice and to hear, the contract I am ready to make with Reality, not hide-bound but heart-bound, not only in weeping but also in joy.

May we ask and live into good questions, cheer one another on, and help one another materially as we can in 2019 and beyond.

With love,

Sara

 

A covenant of birth

by Sara Eisenberg

 

Unwinding, 

living threads

lengthen,

straighten, 

send 

life-preserving 

taproots deep into 

disturbed soil,

draw buried 

nutrients to me,

redeem 

an arid moonscape

that 

 

glows now 

with 

succulent

night-bloomers

whose eloquent fragrance 

 

frees bound 

soil, mind, heart,

 

refashions

built worlds, 

 

refreshes

imagination.

 

No choice but to know, intimately,

my yearnings, aversions, despairs:

instructive, dignifying, and precious,

a true north stretched out over empty space,

an earth suspended over Nothing,

 

the very features of

God’s world

and my way home.

Des frissons: shivering with stray worries, pleasure

Just now a few stray worries set me shivering like these black cohosh in a light breeze. Tingling micro-movements also mixed with anticipation, fear, pleasure. Perhaps you too can feel that quiver in the French “des frissons.” 

photo

Black Cohosh, meanwhile, is safely rooted

in the soil by such roots as these,

so beautifully drawn by herbalist Doug Elliott

(Wild Roots, A Forager’s Guide,

from Healing Arts Press.)

Frissons

by Sara Eisenberg

ceaseless, the inner move-

ments, mo-ments,

i am leaf stalks in a strong spring

breeze, shivering in spite

of warm air,

long blown 

away

but

for

my

gnarly roots,

scarred and sprouting pinkish

buds from which emerges new growth.

On North Avenue, A Chance Encounter with Dignity

A chance encounter with dignity: we were headed in different directions, our destinations – and everything else – unknown to one another.

A portion of North Avenue, formerly a city limit, is home to a jumble of long-time African-American neighbors, creatives, young entrepreneurs, and people passing through. Rich with their assorted cultural resources. 

It’s one place in Baltimore where racial and class silos are just a bit permeable. People mix it up on the street. At the corner of North Avenue and North Charles Street. At Red Emma’s, where you can pay it forward for a cuppa joe and browse radical lit. At the Y-Not Lot, home to community gatherings like the mourning after the Pulse shootings. At Impact Hub, a co-working and civic forum space. I was headed there yesterday to learn about the work of B-CIITY: Baltimore City Intergenerational Initiatives for Trauma and Youth. 

More about them another time: that event was cancelled at the last minute, making room for a different encounter.

 

North Avenue, Tuesday morning

by Sara Eisenberg

 

how ‘bout we exchange a little love?

you said,

throwing your left arm wide 

open for a hug.

 

awlriiiight, I said,

turning back to you

with a natural affection.

 

you’d spent four bucks

on a bus pass and had not

eaten, i had

a couple of bucks

to spare.

 

we turned away, headed in different

directions,

I had a clear destination, 

arrived to find 

B-CIITY’s event cancelled, so

 

(ten minutes) 

 

there you were, reached out

again, 

standing at the bus stop, half

a hot sandwich wrapped

in paper

 

made my day,

you said

turns out I came down here just to meet you,

I said

 

you looked emaciated, even a lightweight

jacket sat heavy on your

shoulders but

you had a destination too

 

and dignity

to spare.

 

Banner photo: Common Threads, by Linda Carmel, Hillsborough Gallery, Hillsborough, North Carolina

Freddie Gray: three years gone

I am an older white woman. My presence does not provoke a call to 911.

If I get pulled over for a broken tail-light, the most I have to worry about is a pricey ticket.

If I get followed by a salesperson, the most I have to worry about is her zealous devotion to making a sale.

If I am locked out of my house, the most I have to worry about is getting back in and maybe replacing the window I had to break to do it.

I am an older white woman. If I see a cop on the street, I am not likely to flee on foot, as Freddie Gray did on the day of his arrest. According to charging documents, ”unprovoked upon noticing police presence.”

 

Dear Freddie Gray

by Sara Eisenberg

 

Freddie Gray,

there’s a lot of people you never met

whose lives you changed.

 

You should have your own flag, rising

above your own Memorial

Stadium,

while we take the knee,

especially we

white people, 

it was our city that

would not hear your

story in your own words,

who you were, 

what you wanted,

what you wanted to give, 

what you wanted to leave behind,

 

and then leaving long before your time,

 

leaving a lot of people you never met,

whose lives you changed

these three years ago,

people you never met,

whose lives you changed:

in your name,

we’re not leaving

without changing

black men’s lives.

Designed to go on being, even when I forget to trust

I know I am designed “to go on being.” And to “go on being” not just anybody. Not an idealized, cleaned up version of myself. Nor an aspirational version. But a plain and quirky, occasionally brilliant, more often ordinary and flawed Sara: one-of-a-kind.

Yet I forget. I forget to trust my design. 

Life itself provides the reminders, as well as the support and pleasures of “going on being” in the company of other one-of-a-kinders.

 

recommissioned in perpetuity

by Sara Eisenberg

 

a wisdom-mechanism within

moves inexorably towards wholeness,

around, over, through the

barriers I have erected

(put in place for the Highest Good at the time: survival.) I

 

study myself to know I 

am alive, have a place. I 

push myself. I 

push against myself

(prevent  annihilation) 

unforgiving towards my

self as a flaw in creation. I

 

move out of the center of my attention,

move towards you: I 

push against you or disappear

(Reb Nachman said, ‘All the world is just a narrow bridge.” 

Just so my bandwidth for connection.)

 

in my 02 Honda the check engine light comes on.

Gary the technician reminds me it could be nothing, again, or one 

of ninety-two possible malfunctions.

Brenda the healer reminds me I can bear the incompleteness I

am.

 

the battery of the loaner car, parked

in front of my house 

dies.

 

by evening,

Daniel and Leah bear witness to the day’s

recommissions: I trust

my existence, relax

in my skin, dance

as I wash dishes,

self-forgiven,

soft, tender,

a woman

of rank.

Aloneness and connection: the theme of our universe

From the viewpoint of Kabbalah, relationship is the entire theme of creation. 

The One has become Two and then Many, yet each and every part remains connected to every other and to the whole. The transcendent and the immanent, the personal and the impersonal, the material and the highest realms of spirit are present everywhere.

Our essential dilemma as humans likewise is rooted in the underlying conditions of separation and connection.

We feel both our essential aloneness, and the vast possibilities of what it can mean to give and to receive in relationship. 

This is true whether we consider the nature of our relationship with a friend, a significant other, or The Significant Other who devotional poets have long called The Beloved.

The single word “cleave” carries the essential paradoxical dynamic of relationship. This Janus word looks in opposite directions at the same time, signifying both to separate or hew apart, as well as to adhere closely, with strength of attachment. Without the hewing, there is only enmeshment: no real connection, no space into which giving and receiving can be offered.

 

Cleaving

by Sara Eisenberg

 

I have long forgotten what I was made for:

to cleave, to cling and to hew all

at once.

 

With two fingers I tap

on the clear frigid air

of this first morning of the new year,

it shatters but holds together.

 

That same air must pass through

warming shades of blue

wool across nose and mouth to deliver

its essential lode to lungs that

have a new freedom I cannot account for.

 

I cross the room, walk smack into swags of

unseasonable gossamer, that sticky stuff

that has ambushed me in the late-summer garden,

and now presses itself into my crevices as if sealing a vow between

two solids.

 

No longer am I spread out over vast distances, destined

to spin, order and turn worlds,

harbor and protect legions, heedless of sleep: labors suitable to

whole colonies of social insects.

 

To be in my very own skin

where there is space between us

where breath may pass, and words, and love,

that cleaving we were made for.

Banner photo: Duke Gardens by Pat Merriman, Hillsborough Art Gallery, Hillsborough, North Carolina

 

Morning has broken, I swim up to waking

Morning. Light hits my eyelids. As I swim up to waking, I mistakenly believe I am alone in the Universe.

I grew up believing that if there was something I wanted to see happen in the world, it was on me to bring it about: me alone. Years of adulthood roll on by before I even grok that this is a burden and a messianic imagining.  More years before I understand this to be an actual impossibility. Going it alone is just not possible.

We are irrevocably linked to one another and held together in God or Reality. Nor can God go it alone. She needs our arms and legs, our hands and voices.

 

Morning has broken

by Sara Eisenberg

 

I wake to find myself

wearing a tattered garment.

During sleep it has become

my skin, no seams,

the barest of hemmed edges

 

gilded with holes,

some gaping

where the garment hangs

on me,

by turns sad, reluctant, fearful as

light strikes

the fabric.

 

Such is the effort of waking as

if burdened by breath and pulse.

 

Once showered, properly

dressed for weather and agenda,

no one but You knows the undergarment.

Even I forget as the day goes on.

It doesn’t exactly chafe like a hair-shirt

but hums low, occasionally growls

and gives off a whiff of – Bear,

 

persists because You are in the holes and tatters

and persists because it makes a difference that I breathe and pulse

and slog and soar and walk tenderly and blindly

in this reluctant body,

and because it makes a difference that I know You are in the tatters and holes.

 

Still, I long to

lie still,

because there is One who longs

to wake into a world frayed yet made

whole.

 

Banner photo: Crooked Sky, Cold wax and oil, by Jude Lobe. Hillsborough Gallery of Art, Hillsborough, North Carolina

I welcome the lengthening dark

This season I find myself welcoming, even craving, the blue hour deepening to black. My moods shift frequently and want more space, and quiet, than daylight and activity allow. It’s a bit odd, since I almost entirely missed the summer sun and garden, pre-occupied with endless sorting and winnowing and boxing and giving-away and shredding and discarding STUFF. That is done. So is the painting and the refinishing of floors.

Only in the past few days have I been able to get outside for a few hours to cut down the dead blackberry canes, the brown, dried stalks of Joe Pye, echinacea, and mullein. According to my garden log, in other years I have finished shutting down the garden as late as December 27.  Still, that work seems unseasonal this week.

The lengthening dark somehow offers a balm to my disrupted seasonal rhythms that involves curviness and word-play, a different flavor of sitting in the dark.

 

this lengthening dark

by Sara Eisenberg

 

this lengthening dark

this early dark

draws

me

in

 

twenty-one more nights

geminated

resolve

me

on-

 

ward

mood-

blue slopes

clarify space

 

trewe as any bonde

true as innocence

true as magnet

to iron true

and

pauseless

as the pulses

as true as Tristram

and Isolde were true

as stars true as I live

 

wildly irreverent

 

 

For my poet-loving readers: can you match the “true-ism” to the author?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning                       “true as magnet to iron”

Geoffrey Chaucer                                          “true as innocence”

John Dryden                                                  “true as stars”

John Keats                                                     “true as I live”

Walter Savage Landor                                 “trewe as any bonde”

Thomas Moore                                              “true and pauseless as the pulses”

William Shakespeare                                    “as true as Tristram and Isolde were”

 

 

 

 

Changes of season, changes of state: they matter

We humans, as all life on our planet, are made to shift with the seasons,  change our state,  our activities, our being.

Changes of state fascinate me.   The roles of temperature, pressure, motion, scale. Vapor to water to ice.  Relaxation to anxiety.  Mystery to revelation. A sudden change of mood, perception, mind, heart. Uncountable changes of all these types fly past us unnoticed every day.  These moments matter, and so do the properties they exhibit.

Venetian Glass i was inspired by the following curated description:

Although glass … acts like a solid, it is actually most like a super-cooled liquid. When glass is cooled, it cools too fast for the atoms to form a crystalline structure. This means the atoms are still able to vibrate slightly but not rotate or translate the way they are able to do in a liquid or gas phase.
Quote and banner photo above: Dale Chihuly Venetian Glass exhibit
Alamance Arts, Graham, North Carolina
August, 2016

 

Venetian Glass i

by Sara Eisenberg

gone, the season of

august heat,

air heavy with with-

held rains,

sun-loving plants thrusting straight,

straight up into the open furnace-door of sky,

shade plants and me

on our knees,

hugging the ground then

 

cooled down,

I’ve been cooled down,

swung, sassed miles riding on

blue notes wailed by some

saxophonic wind-force

 

vacillating still between

demon and angel.

 

You can still trace my shape with your fingers,

follow the gold strands embellishing my surface,

feel how I vibrate slightly.

 

I occupy the same space,

act like a solid, yet

I can no longer

pour myself into the shape of my life

nor diffuse through it.

For more poetry:

A post-card from Eden: on retreat, dancing with a pen

Being special is different from what I was taught