Three summers I spent by the river in the heat of a homeless camp. (Having left my father’s home, which was my home, though I knew it not.)
Three summers of night terrors howling through my tent as the stars threw down their furious spears. (Having left my mother’s home, which was my home, though I knew it not.)
Three summers trolling the streets in blistered feet while eyes turned sideways at my glance. (Having lost all I loved, which loved me still, though I knew it not.)
As I walked the flesh melted from my bones, my teeth melted from my mouth. My thoughts dried up and blew away. Past and present dried up and blew away.
Nothing was left behind to claim a name, to know what I was or wasn’t.
Empty, careless and carefree, I danced along the street like a wind-tossed leaf, like a moon-mad fool, marveling at how all I saw danced with me.
Now my tent is my temple and the river flowing past me washes through me—mother and father and all I love and always was and ever will be.
Now as I walk the streets flowers grow at my feet, and every eye turned toward me is mine.
By Deborah J. Brasket
The story of the Prodigal is a favorite found in almost every faith because it tells deep truths we all recognize. We are all prodigals in some ways, whether living homeless on the streets or in the home of our dreams, if we have not, as this Prodigal has, returned home to our true self. If we have not gone through the weaning process that strips us of all we never were and gives back to us all we are, the magnificence of our oneness with the All-in-all.
This poem, too, is influenced by the tales of the old Zen Masters, relating their journey to enlightenment, a process known as “losing and losing.” Often they began their journey in abject poverty. Chuang Tzu describes how he was able to free himself from the limitations of the finite mind and gain an insight into his innermost being: First freeing himself from the concerns of the world, then from all externalities, from gain and loss, right and wrong, past and present. Finally he was freed from his own existence, from birth and death, I and Other. He sees the One and becomes part of the One. At that point, he was able again to enter again into the world of men, but this time with “bliss-bestowing hands.”
The photo above is one I took at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I wrote a blog post about that visit called “Fascinating Faces, Tao and the Arts.” I wrote: “Some works of art speak to you on a level that is hard to define. You gaze and are drawn inward. Something in you identifies with what you see there. It’s not outside, it’s in here. It was there before you saw it, and the seeing is just a reminder of its presence.” I felt an especial affinity with this face.
I’m working again on that novel I wrote about in The White Hot Flow of Writing some time ago. I feels good to be back in the saddle after that long interval. I’m making good progress so far, putting in 30 hours of writing a week, or more if you count the reading research, of which there is plenty. I enjoy the research almost as much as the writing.
I started in again with the intention to write one full draft and one full revision in one year. It’s more of an experiment, actually. To see if it’s possible, especially with a historical novel set in Central America in the 70’s during all the political unrest and guerrilla warfare going on at that time.
In the White Hot Flow post, I wrote in more detail about the characters and plot, and especially more about my writing process, which I’ve copied in part below. It remains pretty much the same process as now, even after such a long break.
First there’s a germ of an idea, and then the need to anchor it in reality. The need to immerse myself in some aspect of the history, the setting, the geography, the larger ideas that underpin what I’m aiming to write: Research.
( I’m still researching now, and that “germ” keeps growing the more I learn.)
Next in the process comes the need to discover the names and voices of my main characters. I cannot write a word without that. This almost happens simultaneously. The voices must have names to embody them, the names must have voices to bring the alive. The names evoke the voices, the voices evoke the names: Lena and Raoul.
(This remains the same, although the list of names grow as I add characters. within out their name, how can I embody them?)
Once I have these, there’s no stopping them. They take over my life. They start telling me their stories and I run and grab a pen. I keep on writing, pages after pages in my notebook and on my computer. I look up and morning has turned to nightfall. It doesn’t matter. They follow me to bed. I sleep with them. I dream them. I wake up writing love poems in their voices.
(Yes, this is the sweet spot, the white, hot flow of writing, and I still have mornings where I sit in bed till noon with my yellow writing pad and blue pen, taking dictation from my characters.)
Then I need at least a vague sense of how the novel will open, how it will close. It may change along the way, but I need this parenthesis to contain my writing and to show me where it’s moving. They tell me.
When I have the beginning and the ending, keys scenes in between emerge. I write them down quickly before they disappear. They may change over time, but at least I have key points upon which to hang my novel.
By then my characters have become real to me. They have flesh and bone, names, voices, histories. They have deep, deep urges, conflicting desires, inner and outer struggles, a sense of transformation.
It’s like watching a miracle unfold. How they seem to come from nowhere, out of thin air, then suddenly they are breathing bodies, passionate, possessed.
(It still feels that way.)
Eventually I had so many handwritten scenes and research notes and ideas I had to organize them into folders of where they will fall in the novel, which I’ve divided now into 5 parts.
Now I’m in the messy process of inputting the raw material into word documents and shaping them into actual chapters. This is the hard work of writing—not flow, but fits and starts and stops: slowing down when I hit a snag, reversing course as I try out a new plotting strategy, or staring blankly at the screen as I try to reimagine how a scene could unfold. Sometimes I stop to do more research, or put on a load of laundry to give myself a break, or take a walk to clear my head. I take a notebook with me where ever I go in case the dam breaks and the words start flowing again.
But it’s all good, even when the little trolls in my head start complaining: Isn’t this a bit too ambitious? Do you think you might have bitten off more than you can chew? Do you really want to be a slave to this novel for the next year, or two, or whatever it takes? No, no, and yes, I reply.
I chose this. For now. And I’m loving it, even the hard work and crazy-making of the fits and stops and starts of the writing process, as well as the white, hot flow.
Lena and Raoul deserve to have their story told, and who is there to do it but me? I’m writing the kind of novel I would love to read, and even if no one reads it but me, well, that may just be enough.
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar, like what I remember of love when I was young —
love that was so often foolish in its objectives but never in its choices, its intensities Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —
My soul has been so fearful, so violent; forgive its brutality. As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance: it is not the earth I will miss, it is you I will miss.
A New Beginning for Our Ending
I too feel a new tenderness toward this body that holds me so tenderly in return, within its soft, wide confines. That moves me and moves with me wherever I go. That holds within all that I am, memories and emotions that ebb and flow, that mere touch, taste, scent, releases. And even now, after all this time together, when a foot or knee fails, when bones creak and muscles sigh, and the weight of you seems too much to bear, still, still, you gather me in your arms. You hold me near, breathe me in, lift me up, and lay me down. You try so hard to be what I need, to do what needs doing. Too often I have railed against you, dismissed you, disowned you. Let me see you now as friend, as lover, as mother. As dear to me as sky and earth and tree and sea. Let me cherish you as you have cherished me, and when the end comes, let us rest and rise together.
They say opposites attract. That was true when my husband and I first met. I found in him everything I felt missing in myself—he was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident, practical, capable, a man of the world. I was shy, timid, uncertain of myself, a romantic, an idealist, inexperienced. I was a senior in High School. He was a marine returning home from two years in Viet Nam. I thought I had found my soul mate, we seemed to complement each other so well, like two halves of a whole, yin and yang.
The truth is, we were just what we needed at the time. This dark, moody often angry young man who could also be so sweet and loving fulfilled a romantic yearning in me to sooth the savaged soul—Beauty and the Beast, after all, had always been my favorite fairy tale. And he was sorely needing the sweetness and innocence he saw in me, after the things he had witnessed in war. We fit together perfectly in each other’s arms. We still do.
But now I no longer believe in soul mates. I discovered that all the things I was attracted to in him, that seemed to be missing pieces of me, were really undeveloped parts of myself, and a sense of “completion” could not come from outside me but from within. Once I realized that and began to discover that I too was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident and capable, I no longer yearned for a soul mate. I could stand upright and free even while fully committed to our marriage. We did not need each other, but we chose to be together. We were committed to creating a life that we both could love and enjoy together.
I had always loved what Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet had written about marriage, and came to see the wisdom of his words:
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I also came to realize what Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Gift From TheSea” wrote:
“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
And finally, I whole-heartedly embraced what Madeleine L’Engle in “The Irrational Season” wrote:
“To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take . . . . If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation… It takes a lifetime to learn another person… When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.”
My husband and I are celebrating our 50th anniversary today. Here’s what I’ve learned about lasting love:
That marriage is a journey, not a destination, and the way will be hard, and filled with obstacles and challenges and heartache. That real love is not “true love.” It’s not a given. It doesn’t come ready-made. You have to fight for it, you have to work for it, you have to shake it out from time to time, and mend it and keep adding stitch after stitch, row after row, if you want to make it big enough and strong enough to last a lifetime.
Our marriage quilt is a tattered thing, but beautiful in its homeliness, in the places where its obvious rips and tears have been mended over and over again, the places where it’s grown thin and threadbare and had to be reinforced, as well as the places where it’s warm and soft and scented with memories that bring deep pleasure.
Loveliest of all are the stitches we are still sowing day by day, moment by moment, hand in hand, together.
I will end this series of posts on love and marriage with the last love poem I wrote my husband, two years after our marriage had almost ended. And two years before we began our grand adventure of sailing around the world with our kids for 6 1/2 years. But we’d already done some warm-up cruises on bare-boat charters in the Caribbean by then, which this poem mentions.
It is a simple, playful poem, meant to please a man who is not a lover of poetry, but loves the woman who writes it.
To Dale, On Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary
Sometimes you ask me if I truly love you, Like the answer’s hid behind a lock and key. You are my love and all the world must know it For it’s scattered ‘cross the land and half the sea.
There’re winds and waves much sweetened by our pleasure, Rocks and sand well smoothed by hips and thighs, Grass that grows much greener from our nearness, And trees that rustle still with our sated sighs.
If you climb a certain stream that flows near Big Sur, You’ll find a rock well made for lying on, It knew our love before it was made sacred And longs to feel our lover’s urge again.
While high along the rugged spine of Baja, Where boney cliffs fall far to find the sea, We saw the world stripped bare of all but beauty And we alone like Adam and his Eve.
The moon once tipped the hills beyond Coyote And laced Conception Bay with fluorescent light, We swam out naked through silken waters where You wound me round your hips and held me tight.
And cupped within the palm of Virgin Gorda Lies an island and a secret, sandy cove, where We waded from the sea like mating mermen And stretched upon the sand to prove our love.
The wind once made an early morning visit As we rolled upon a hook in Carib Bight, While sweeping down the hatch it caught us naked And added its cool breath to our delight.
Now wind and sea and rock and tree can tell you The answer that you say you do not know, You are my love and all the world’s a witness For its sung wherever winds and waves do blow.
NOTE: This ends a series of posts celebrating 50 years of marriage,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love,erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.If you missed any in the series, you can read them by clicking the links above.
Not long after I decided to leave my husband I met someone new. I was working part-time at a book store and he was a publisher’s rep. We would go for coffee or walks in the park and have long, stimulating conversations. We spent hours on the phone talking about literature, philosophy, the arts, religion—things I loved but my husband had no interest in. I could feel myself falling in love with him, thinking perhaps he was the “soul mate” I’d always longed for. He seemed to feel the same way about me.
I had already asked my husband for a separation, suggesting he move out. He only laughed and said he wasn’t going anywhere. I knew I would have to be the one to go and began planning my escape. Soon, I thought, terrified by what he might do if he knew I was already seeing someone.
Then he found out. When he confronted me, I told him the truth, that I had fallen in love with someone else. I was astounded by his response. It was so unlike anything I had imagined. He said he did not blame me. He had always known that I was “too good” for him, and if this man was better, he’d step out of the way.
But after confronting the man too, after meeting and talking with him, he said the man wasn’t good enough. He was the better man, and he wanted me to give him another chance. He was sure he could make me fall in love with him again. And while I knew that was impossible, I felt I had no other choice but to let him try. We had been married ten years by then, and I felt I owed him, and our marriage, at least that much. I figured eventually he’d realize it was futile, and then he’d have to let me go.
It was hard at first, to stop seeing the man I felt I had fallen in love with. I felt I had put my real life in limbo, and was living a lie. I mourned my lost love. The life I imagined spending with him was like a shadow that followed me everywhere. I feared it was a life we might never realize together—at least in this life time. That’s when I wrote the following poem.
The Other
It’s amazing how you multiply as time moves Everywhere I see your face appear It grows more clear the longer we are parted Like time itself conspires to bring you near.
Sometimes I feel your presence close behind me Where I could turn to find you standing there Turn toward arms pressed close about me As if mere motion was the answer to my prayers.
Sometimes your presence seems to float before me Upon a sea of bright tranquility I watch my soul swept out to meet you And marvel at mind’s sweet complicity.
Sometimes I feel as if I were a twosome And one of me moves never far from you, The other is mere exercise in motion Eclipsing everything in me that’s true.
Someday I pray that we shall sit together Before a sea resplendent in the sun We’ll eat a little morning meal together Before we rise into new life as one.
Eventually this sense of sadness faded. My husband and I began “dating” again. We spent long leisurely weekends together going to concerts and museums and strolls along the beach. We began cultivating a taste for California wines and listening to jazz music together. We chartered sailboats in the Caribbean and renewed our dream to sail around the world together.
Little by little I began falling back in love with him. It began with a deep respect for how he had reacted when I told him I’d fallen for someone else. There was no anger, no accusations, no recriminations. No jealousy or hurt feelings that I could tell. Never did he hold it against me, or try to make me feel I had wronged him. He absolved me of all blame. All he wanted was the opportunity to prove he was the better man, prove he could love me enough to make me want to stay with him. How could I not love that?
I realized I had deeply underestimated him. He revealed a strength of character and depth of love that I hadn’t realized he possessed. A dignity and humility and gentleness I hadn’t seen before. This was the foundation upon which the renewed love I felt for him grew. And it was the stronger and richer for it.
Now looking back, that period in our marriage seems like an aberration, a mirage almost. I barely remember the name of the man I thought I’d loved, and his bitter assessment of the whole affair—that I willed myself to love him to have the courage to leave my husband—may have the ring of truth.
Despite this happy ending to that episode in our marriage, it wasn’t the last time our love was tested and bent near breaking. But never again without the hope that this too would mend in time and make us stronger. And it did.
Love is the hardest thing we can ever do—love for our spouses, our children, our parents, ourselves, each other. Love for the world we live in. Love for that which created all of this. If we think love’s easy or should be easy, that it won’t have radical mood swings, won’t lift us up and throw us down, won’t drift away when we’re not attentive, won’t wither if we’re not feeding it, or spring back, full and fresh, when we water it with patience and kindness, then we don’t know love at all. And maybe we can’t know it, until we live it, and let it live in us.
(To be continued) In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love,erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.
When I first fell in love, it was a hot thing—urgent, possessive, almost feverish at times. I truly saw love as being two souls in one body. We were opposites that complemented each other. He was my missing half, and I his.
But I wasn’t content with that. In some fervent way I wanted to be him, become him, live inside him, feel my heart beating in his body and his in mine. I wanted to meld with him.
Not surprisingly, I discovered this just wasn’t happening. There were times when our love felt like that, when we seemed so close, but then it would slacken and drift away. And when that happened, he seemed almost like a stranger to me, someone I barely knew, and did not understand at all.
That’s when I wrote the following poem.
Love’s Duplicity
I look at you and see Incredibly A face at once slighted by closeness, yet Dimmed by the distance I hold you; A face overlooked and over known, yet Laced by fingers, fearful to possess you. And you look from eyes Half-halting Wary that you know me.
I look at you and see Incredibly, How the lines forming you Flow not into my own But lie separately, falling On planes apart. Reasoning makes no clearer, No nearer That we lie two, not one.
I look at you and see Incredibly, How the brown hollow of your eyes Will ever haunt mine, and I cry for me, for all whose heart’s desire Is held ever at half embrace: Half wanting, half waiting, Half knowing What we’ll never know.
I look at you and see Incredibly, How these feelings we are one Or we should be, How we are strangers Never touching, Lie at odds in me. Is it odd I reap of love the bittersweet?
Eventually I realized we weren’t soul mates and probably never would be. And while I still yearned for us to become closer, he was content with the way things were.
While I wanted to know everything about him, there were parts of me—important parts—that he simply had no interest in. Like my passion for the arts, literature, philosophy, religion, writing. He knew I wanted to be a writer—that I wrote poetry and short stories and kept a journal—and he liked that about me. But he had no interest in what I was writing, never asked to read anything. Never seemed interested when I offered to share what I wrote. He wasn’t curious at all.
Finally, I let go trying to become closer, and we drifted away from each other. Our marriage became almost sterile, perfunctory. We shared a house, children, a bed. That was all. I realized that I no longer loved him. At times I barely liked him.
A veil of sadness descended over me, a yearning for something I feared I would never have. I felt my soul mate was still out there somewhere, waiting for me. But I realized I may never find him.
The following poem expresses that feeling of waiting for something that may never happen. It was originally published in a college journal.
Hot Hills in Summer Heat
I watch them every summer, the hot hills
Crouched like a lion beside the road,
Tawny skin pulled taut across
Long, lean ribs.
I would take my hand and trace
Round ripples of male muscle,
Feel the hot rise and cool dip
of his body.
I see the arrogance—rocky head held
High against a blazing sky, the patient
Power unmindful of the heat
that holds me.
One day he will rise, stretch his sensuous
Body against the sky with one, low moan.
On silent paws he will pursue me.
And so I wait.
by Deborah J. Brasket
We’d been married ten years by then, but I felt I could no longer live like this. It was time for me to leave.
(To be continued) In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love,erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.
In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.
Part II – The Geometry and Geography of Love
I wrote these poems while still quite young, and very much in love, and loving the way our bodies “meet and mingle” when making love. I loved the “lean lines” and “anxious angles,” the patterns we made spread across the bed.
I was fascinated by how the masculine and feminine forms complemented each other. It inspired the following drawing, something I was playing around with at the time, enjoying the lean look of pen on paper.
A Pleasing Design
I find satisfaction in form, In bare geometric patterns, In line upon line bisecting line, In spacious planes spread out and open.
I like this silky stretch of skin, Simple curves and supple cones, I like the firm feel of your flesh, Swollen contours, anxious angles.
Mostly I like the intricate pattern We create, stripped bare and essential The piling planes and lacing lines, The way we meet and mingle,
When one fine ray of you cuts Clean through me, and within that intersecting interlude we come To a common and satisfying point.
By Deborah J. Brasket
Several love poems I wrote at the time involves the “topography” or “geography” of love, exploring each other’s bodies as if exploring an intimate landscape, with all its hills and streams, forests and caves, and vast flowing deserts.
Even then, so long ago, I was fascinated by how the human and natural worlds interconnect, and seem to complement each other.
In Exploration
I like the lay of your land.
You stretch before me in large and rugged proportions.
The sheer volume of your mass with its vast and varied landscape is an irresistible invitation to explore you.
You are shaped of firm and fertile earth pressed lovingly round solid granite.
I lay my face close to smell the sweet and salty scent of you And there I hear low, deep rumblings of subterranean waters.
I trace you with my finger to find Sudden softness, deep impenetrable forests, and parts of you so finely chiseled I must stop and marvel.
When I touch you my hand spans continents, for there’s no lusher garden, no sweeter field, no depth more resounding, nor peak more pure than what I find in touching you.
I rise and hover over you like a cloud then slowly, gently, cover you with my body. I feel the touch of skin on skin, your warmth rising through me and press so near I hear Your heartbeat in my body.
I am spilling with the rich fill of you, Knowing all my sweet and wild secrets lie Ever open to the finger of exploration.
Then I find within the far-off orb of your eye a space so vast and distant, and long to explore the intangible reaches of your mind.
In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.
Part I, Some Silly Little Love Poems, Loosed at Last
He was a young handsome marine, fresh from his tour of duty in Vietnam. I was senior in high school, a flower-child who wrote poetry and read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. We were the opposites that attract. I dropped out of school to marry him because he had to move away for work and I couldn’t live without him. But as an Ironworker building bridges and topping off sky-scrapers, his work kept taking him away from me. And as a freshman in college with a baby on the way, I could not follow, so we were constantly being parted. I wrote these poems to mourn his absence and celebrate love’s sweetness. The last one shows too the fear I felt of losing him forever, for his work on the high iron was so dangerous. These poems lay in a drawer for decades till published here.
Now, While
Now While the love-light of your eyes Shines upon my face, And your bare-bodied shadow Presses close to mine,
Now With the moonlight and trees Spreading patterns across our bed, And the corners of the room lie dark and drowsy,
Now Let us kiss and love.
Then While our bodies still hungrily cling Let us sleep,
Closely breathing, Closely dreaming, Close in love.
Gone
You’re gone! And though I know You’ll be back Monday The word gets caught between The empty of my arms
Just Asking
We loved We came to be like Mirrors, reflecting like
I saw myself An image in your eye.
When you’re gone I find myself And empty likeness
I question, are you gone Or am I?
Would That Love
Would that love move me once That it move me far enough Would that love move me now In all I do.
For the way is far too strong That would push against the throng, Cut me loose to lose myself In loving you.
Since the day will surely show When I’ll have to let you go What a waste to love you then With clutching arms.
So let me meet your every wish Make myself a selfless gift That I fill to overflowing Loving you.
And when we part, if part we must, I’ll unclasp in loving trust, For Love spent us to the full In every way.
