Writin with Jesse

Vast and particular

Fascination and anger

Clown

In this vast pandemic the world seems united, smaller than usual, though we still have the haves and the have nots. I just heard from my Bengali friend, the Indian poet who was my partner at Poets United for three years. There the poor have been laid off work and are struggling to get back to their families, struggling to stay alive. In comes the winds and floods—cyclone runs, and she is grateful for her strong roof. I am grateful for mine. It is a white box I sit in, with a grey top. The winds take down the deadwood but the house withstands the battering of the dead and the dying. All that dark red is outside, swirling like a scream, and in here I have a calm, a golden flame that is amazingly steady despite the wind. How odd that it persists whether I feel fear, anger, despair or giddiness. I pray that everyone has it, this little house of heart that shelters their flame whether walking the road, drenched and hungry or sitting ensconced in front of media, full with enough or hoarding against fear. Sumana is in almost constant prayer with a mantra that takes the edges and escapes off her absorption into the universe. She cannot write, barely eats, though, oddly, she sometimes watches the NY Governor talk and hopes he becomes president. She cannot write, and neither can I. She has had to let her servantrs go, as they wanted to join the mecca back to their family homes. She loaded them with money and gifts and gratitude. I who have never had servants struggle to understand her NORMAL. It is not the same as serfdom or English manors where nobility are responsible for towns. It is more intimate, like sharing the home with another family. I gave up sharing a home when I became a professor. Cats and books and paper and media became my only companions, and they are still. I have given nothing up, but I've grown smaller anyway. No more public performance. No more attempts to publish. No more excursions to rallies and large gatherings. 

I have become my grandmother, sitting surrounded by art and my own work, but looking with longing out the windows to the world. In here it is modified paisley and subdued greens, soft like feather blankets, each seat a pleasure. Outside the universe and viruses are dancing, wild and free, as if humans had never constrained or tamed them and turned them to their own use. They are recalling their ancestors, hoping to resurrect them.  Oh, yes, I am reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind a tome by Yuval Noah Harari.  He puts words and philosophy to particulars I've long suspected.  I know what we have done.

Blue succumbs to red

The sky a mirror of blood

we shed, pretending.

I hide in pine tree

havens where soft browns and greens

soften existence.

Can I live here forever?

I ask white pine. Only if 

you entwine roots with everyone.

Jesse says that I Seek Justice for a larger world even when writing personally. 

 She noticed when I noticed color.