Monday Protection Line

I want my child to be the bravest child.

Not only the one who goes first, for example, but perhaps worse than
Down the darkest scariest path at camp.
Part and pass under the bangs of willows, the shadowy oaks and go
Past the boogeyman,

But be the one who is also kind.
Once you calm your raging heart and enter the unknown 
Be the one who will pivot back towards the next in line
Smile, and tell them,

"You can do it."

What Mama Saw

Flower bud is barely open
Esme smiles at me at the end of her party
But I don't see my Esme smile.
I see a newly minted 6 year old in a backyard in Berkeley
Leave me for Broadway.
She winks at me but I'm not swallowing it.
I am relieved when she winks
I taught her to wink and she's still elegant-clumsy. I hear
the smell of sugary cake on her cheeks.

Three girls earlier, on our basement trapeze
Swung balanced by thin as a pogo stick Chris, who
Stood watching them
a smile on his face feeling
Not left out feeling boy unaware
Yet aware of his boyness among
the leotards pink purple & blue.

"Mama's coming," those two huddled in a corner
suddenly alone.
I touch suspicion, whisper-ask the nearby space station figurines
"What are they doing?"
Suddenly serious they whisper-say,
"They are giggling about underwear."

I will not enjoy this boy's parents as much as the others.
Inshallah she will fall in love with Rashan at 30
her flower tight
but open,
her wink is natural now.

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy, or Why Magical Thinking is Not So Bad

“A pervasive theme in the works of existentialist philosophy, however, is to

persist through encounters with the absurd…”  -Someone on Wikipedia

To someone like me with an overly practical degree but not enough arts and letters, ever, this is all fascinating, new. In the early mornings I let my mind wander, go with the leaps, go with only the resources in front of me at my desk...

“One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy” --Albert Camus, and

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is also deeply on my mind...

One Must Imagine These Circumstances Are Happy

One must pretend...

the grey concrete and steel structure, the new hospital, being erected in front of the window where you sit and get chemo every 2 weeks does not block

the bridge view, the bay view...

One must pretend...

that is has solar panels and a westward facing 7^th story private outdoor/indoor patio only for nurses and the doctors that catch their eye, so that the nurses can invite a higher-paid-better-circumstances-at-birth-man or woman up, for a noon-time or 6am meal (nurses work round the clock so this café never closes—the late nights are staffed by teenagers who think their best at 2am, and the early early mornings by volunteers, very elderly and spry retired senior citizens who need in their souls to have a job to get up for, to comb their wetted silver locks across their crowns for, but to be done with by 10am so they can go home and have lunch at 11, nap, and do what-all they want to in the mid- to late afternoons, as this will always be a luxury for them but they must have a job a function in the early mornings, something from which to rest). 

Yes, the nurses will do the inviting up and the café is powered by pediatric Occupational Therapy clients, the ADD ones whose mothers and fathers unwittingly and quite innocently live in a time with quite an alarming spike in ADD but the children’s fidgeting is not all for naught, for the OTs and three Peruvian electrical engineers have found an intersecting interest and the children’s bouncing balls and trampolines and swings and even stationary bicycles (ridden mostly by large and gentle boys with severe intellectual disabilities and powerful bodies who like and need nothing so much as to spin at high revolutions around and around, going somewhere fast), because you see--yes, why not--these toys are all hooked up through the Peruvians’ genius and the OTs’ practical natures 

to the power grid that serves the café that serves lattes and regular percolator coffee for the throwback nurses, eggs at any time and good, good cheese that feel good to pronounce like Manchego and Ricotta Salata and also spunky salads with whatever they want and also the café has 10, maybe 30 of those open egg shell shaped sleeping pods that were meant for software engineers on the Peninsula but here they are, for nurse naps are encouraged because everyone should know if they don’t already that nurses are really in charge of saving the lives and so it is only fair that the nurses are enjoying a bridge view, a bay view.

For My Goddaughter Sophie on her 11th Birthday

"I am thirsty for odors and laughs,
I am thirsty for new poems,
poems with no lilies or moons,
and no love affairs about to fail."
             -Federico Garcia Lorca

Happy Birthday Sophie
You are a new kind of poem.

August Night

Crept in
their room smells like silence
Fan, humidifier purr out cool moisture

I kissed first
Simon's steady heavy head
Scooped his blonde with my hand

Then climbed on his bed to reach her
loft through the bars I pet her curls
My lion: she is almost six.

August 5

This morning I dreaded a day alone with her
My constant, my girl: But lately Oh!
A six year old gone rogue.  Now it's
Open swim time at the pool
We play she clings to me we play
and suddenly with relief I see

The whole world's gone

Except she

Except me.

Three redwood trees
Lean into each other.
Reminds me of two soldiers we saw in Bali on a motorbike.
The passenger leaned into his buddy's back
Clutched arms around him and napped.

Redwood trees and one mis-managed palm?
What folly.
I raise my arms in a Y, stop mid-sidewalk
At 10 o'clock in sleepy foggy Berkeley who's to stop me?
I allow myself one more question, because again I can't believe my bad luck
and need to yell in my head, astonished all over again

"Why me?"

and walk on.