The Muse of Community

The Muse of Community must have chosen the little fishing village of San Pancho as her favorite creative project. “Let’s see what would happen,” says she, “if we throw together an ‘olla podrida’ —a spicy stew— of interesting people in a tiny fishing village on the West coast of Mexico. Take a handful of artists, hippies, environmentalists, a bunch of retired folk and snow birds from the U.S. and Canada, some young families from South America, four solid local families with deep roots in the land, a love affair between an American woman and the daughter of one of the local families who is related to everyone, throw in one young American mother with a gift for creating community. Stir.”

This is a recipe for an amazing community. Dan and I have been coming to San Pancho, whose official name is San Francisco, in Nayarit, Mexico, for ten years.

We have had the joy of watching the town transform and of feeling, for our brief winter sojourn, part of the excitement and the pleasure. Community is fostered by our hosts at Casa Obelisco, the small B & B we frequent. We have been hearing San Pancho stories from Barb and Bill, John and Judy every morning over delicious breakfasts. We heard the story about the lovers, Gloria and Trini, who opened a great Mexican restaurant, Ola Rica, with a shrine to Frida Kahlo by the table Dan and I consider ours.

Trini and Gloria

In recent years Gloria and Trini have added a beach restaurant, La Playa, where you can indulge in the best Mango Margarita known to human kind. We’ve heard about Turtle Frank, who has created a hatchery to protect the vulnerable turtle eggs and help the hatchlings find their way to the sea. Sometimes we’ve been lucky enough to be part of this event on the beach. We are drawn into community with other guests and into the vibrant life of the town. Of course we also hear about the feuds, the bad blood, the struggles over ownership of land and bad feeling over disappointments and betrayals. But there is a remarkable sense of possibility in this town that we don’t experience back home in the U.S. of A these days.

Nicole and Naomi

Many of these stories are about that young American mother, Nicole, who came here with her eleven month old son ten years ago, had another child, a daughter, got divorced, and found herself wondering about community. Bill, one of our hosts, who is very involved in Nicole’s organization, Entre Amigos, arranged for me to spend time with Nicole and hear her story.

She told me that when she came to San Pancho it was very small. She suspected it would grow, but was concerned about the lack of connection between the local people and their visitors. There was distrust between the two groups. She could feel people withdrawing behind their walls. The Muse must have come to her and whispered:” All you need is a little bridge.”

Dan and I remember the small store front she had when she began Entre Amigos, offering after school programs for kids. Nicole put it this way: “I just put my kitchen table out on the street and began teaching what I learned in Girl Scouts—sewing, cooking, gardening. I asked others to teach—the locals, foreigners. Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn, from tamale making to computer skills. It’s a walk of faith,” she told me. “It’s all about mutual giving.”

“Entre Amigos” has grown dramatically since those early years. It is now housed in what was the ruin of a fruit drying factory. It is made entirely of recyclable materials. I asked her about her environmental work—recycling, tree planting. “Oh” she said, “that’s not me. That’s Endira.” Endira, a Chilean, came early to work with Nicole. Her passion is the environment. She created San Pancho’s recycling program, and created a marked for recycled products.

Toys like this get sold in the little shop at Entre Amigos. Endira has also created an environmental curriculum for children. Twenty lessons in a box which anyone can teach. You just “read the card and teach the class,” Nicole says. “Why teach kids who have never seen a glacier about melting glaciers? Why not teach them to pay attention, to observe and imagine the life of the birds and the butterflies they know in their own landscape?” Her curriculum has been picked up by Hawaiian educators and by biology students in Mexican colleges, who use it to fulfill their social service requirement by teaching it to school kids.

Nicole walked me around the large spacious building with its open floor plan and differentiated areas—the shop, the library and computer center, the separate area for kids under five where local moms meet foreign mom and their kids play together with an assortment of wonderful toys.

I watched a boy careen in through the front door on his skateboard, pick it up and head for the library. This was clearly his place. I watched boys on the floor playing happily with a wooden train set. I watched boys reading. “So many boys” I commented. “They all look happy.”

“That’s Jasmin” said Nicole, and told me about the local woman who is a magnet for troubled kids, kids who aren’t going to school, who live in horrific family situations, who are abused. “Jasmin wanted to tutor them here. So we set up a tutoring program.” She pointed out Ramon, a young man working with four boys between eight and ten years old. They all looked attentive and engaged. She told me these were boys who hadn’t been going to school, didn’t know how to read. Now they’re in school, and reading. They come after school to Entre Amigos. Ramon, she said, “used to work construction. When he came here it was clear he was very bright, and a good teacher. We said, ‘Ramon, what are you going to do next?’ He has decided to go to college.”

Nicole pointed out a boy who is regularly abused at home. “There’s no Child Protective Services here in Mexico,” she told me. “He comes here. Of course, he’s difficult. He hits other kids. So we consulted with a retired psychologist from Canada about how to handle him. He helped us develop a system to empower the kids to run the building. They have to do social service—water the plants for example. Kids are in charge of the rules. If they do well they get a reward—a trip or a movie. Most of them haven’t been anywhere. Going to the movies is a special treat.”

Nicole is eloquent on a subject close to my heart—how essential creativity is to learning and teaching. She hopes these kids, who may not ever get to college, will learn to think outside the box, learn that all kinds of things are possible, because they have been exposed to so many different creative approaches, classes on everything from English/Spanish to screen printing and art making. She highly values creative expression. “There’s that moment when you see their eyes open to a bigger world. It’s amazing.”

Our friend Bill has been involved with the scholarship program at Entre Amigos, which invites folks to sponsor a child. In Mexico the schools have no money for supplies—books, paper, pencils, even toilet paper. So they charge parents fees. This is a hardship for poor families, as is buying school uniforms. For $600 a year you can sponsor a child, take the financial load off a family, assure that a child can remain in school, and support Entre Amigos.

At breakfast I learned that all of our fellow guests at Casa Obelisco, including the guy who swears by Fox News, had committed to sponsoring a child. Community seems to grow organically around Entre Amigos

But friends, I haven’t even told you the half of it. The Muse of Community has thrown some wild ingredients into the San Pancho ‘olla podrida.’ She has thrown in Cirque du Soleil, which, for reasons I couldn’t quite follow has decided to teach circus skills like acrobatics to the children of San Pancho, and is partnering with Entre Amigos. Nicole showed me the circus room, with its Olympic quality trampolines and equipment. I’d wondered where all the girls were. They were here, a few boys among them, in bright leotards, excited and adorable, training for a big children’s circus to be held on March 23rd.

The Muse has also thrown in some wandering muralists, who have covered several walls with colorful, often surreal imagery.

The Muse has thrown in Manny and Joe, who are music producers from Seattle, now mostly retired. They organize events around town, including a fabulous fundraiser Dan and I attended at the golf course, which for years, was off limits to everyone but the owner. He’s had a change of heart and allowed a big party to happen in his clubhouse at the top of the world, with views of ocean, jungle, mountains.

In the magical way that communities come together in San Pancho, “suits” and “creatives” gathered (though of course no one is ever seen wearing a suit in San Pancho unless he’s the groom or the father of the bride at the wedding). Entre Amigos, we learned, is in an alliance with a group called Les Fabricas des San Pancho to turn the old shells of factories into green buildings that will house workshops for artists and space for environmental groups. A group of architectural students at Mexican universities has agreed to help. We were there to raise funds for their bus fare to San Pancho.

Dan and I sat among the well heeled and the wildly creative, drinking wine, eating fajitas, and listening to the fabulous jazz of Bandieros de los All Stars. They were led by a small intense flautist who doubled as a Sax player. The bass guitarist was wild, experimental. We could be in New Orleans. The flute played the sun down—long holy sound of human breath.

The last and wildest ingredient so far the Muse of Community has thrown into the stew is, believe it or not, the Dalai Lama. Nicole has just received an award from him in San Francisco del Norte, on Feb. 23rd. Nicole is one of a group of “Unsung Heroes of Compassion” [link: http://newunsungheroes.org/2014-event/2014-unsung-heroes-of-compassion/nicole-swedlow/] whom the Dalai Lama chose to honor.

The Piano Teacher Muse

I saw “The Pianist of Willesden Lane” recently at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. This one woman performance piece is a variation on the Jewish refugee story I have told so often about my own family in poetry and prose (The Motherline, The Sister from Below, Adagio & Lamentation). Mona Golabek tells her mother’s story of escape from the Nazis as a child via the Kindertransport—a British program organized by Quakers and Jews to save Jewish children and bring them to England. Golabek is a pianist from a potent Motherline of pianists. She tells her mother’s story in music as well as in words.

Mona Golabek

Her mother, Lisa Jura, was a brilliant pianist—a prodigy. When we meet her she is a child of fourteen, played eloquently by her daughter. We’re in Vienna, 1938. She is dressing up to go to her piano lesson. She is excited. She loves her piano teacher and has been practicing a difficult piece in preparation for her concert debut—Greig’s Piano Sonata in A Minor, op. 16. Her teacher turns her away. The Nazis have annexed Austria and it is forbidden to do business with Jews. Her mother, Mona’s grandmother, offers to teach her herself. That is until it becomes clear that the Jews are in terrible danger. It is difficult to get a child on the Kindertransport but Lisa’s parents manage to find a place for her—the oldest of their three daughters—hoping that her musical talent will protect her. In miraculous ways, it does.

Kindertransport

Mona Golabek is a marvelous pianist, accomplished in the lush late Romantics—Debussy, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Grieg. The family story she tells is in many ways my own. It is the story of how music can hold people in unbearable times, how music was a religion for high culture German and Austrian Jews—a way to access divine ecstasy without uncomfortable questions about religion or ethnicity. That is until that terrible moment dramatized by Golabek—Lisa’s rejection by her piano teacher. For my mother, it happened when she was 12, in the German woods with other school children, lighting a Christmas tree and singing carols. Hitler was invoked, and everyone looked at her. Suddenly she knew she was an outcast— a Jew. Being Jewish had never before been an issue.

In Golabek’s story and mine, classical music is a vessel that carries refugee Jews back to the familiar, the beloved—their lost worlds. Music lessons were essential, initiatory—a way of transferring cultural memory and values to the next generation. Ambition, creativity and drive found their outlet practicing difficult passages over and over until the passion flowed out of one’s fingers and one crossed one’s left hand over the right and back again in a crescendo of emotion, tossing one’s head and striking the final chords with bravura. This was Lisa Jura, Golobek and also my father, who was well on his way to becoming a concert pianist as a young man, until he injured his hand. He played the piano all through my childhood, played like Mona Golabek plays, though he was more likely to play Bach’s Well Tempered Klavier than Grieg or Rachmaninoff.

adagio and lamentation

when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow
our dead came in and sat with us     a ghostly visitation
and my grandmother sang lieder     of long ago

this is how prayer was said in my childhood     solo
piano     arguing with god     adagio and lamentation
when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow

music accompanied us into the valley of the shadow   and lo
Bach was torah    Mozart was our rod     Schubert led us into contemplation
my grandmother sang lieder     remembering long-ago

my child’s soul was full of glimmerings     the glamour of the gone   the glow
of candles borne by children into the dark German woods     the illumination
of the evergreen   all this I saw and more     when my father’s fierce fingers made Bach flow

my mother’s dead sister    my grandfather in a cattle car    woe
permeated shadow      stirred the curtains     took up habitation
in my grandmother’s body     filled every song she sang     with how she longed for long ago

long gone now     my grandmother      my father      although
sometimes I call them back     by villanelle     by incantation
come    my fierce father     play for me    water my soul in Bach’s flow
sing      my sad grandmother     your song is my covenant with long ago

In other ways my story is different from that of Golabek or her mother. I never looked forward to a piano lesson, as Lisa did. I never got dressed up to see my teacher. In an author’s note Golabek writes:

My mother…was my best friend. She taught my sister, Renee, and me to play the piano. We loved our piano lessons with her. hey were more than piano lessons—they were lessons in life…Sitting at the piano as a child, I would close my eyes and listen to her lilting voice and imagine her world. 

The child in me can’t imagine feeling safe with my piano playing parent. My father tried to give me lessons. He yelled at me. I didn’t practice. I didn’t take this seriously. Why couldn’t I remember what he had told me about the fingering and the phrasing? I don’t remember whether it was my tears or his frustration that ended that chapter. My mother began taking me on the subway from our home in Queens to Manhattan for piano lessons with the formidable Frau O who yelled the same accusations at me and slapped my wrists.

They were both right. I didn’t practice enough. I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t want to remember the phrasing and the fingering. Looking back I realize my father was sending me to great piano teachers, master teachers who would have been appropriate for a Lisa Jura or a Mona Golebek. No wonder they were so infuriated. No wonder I was so traumatized. Nobody was interested in what I wanted.

Luckily for me Frau O had a lovely daughter who was my dear friend. Sometimes I got to spend the night, and we cuddled together under her big red comforter. This daughter became a renowned concert pianist. I always wondered how lessons went for her. Was she as scared of her mother as I was? How did she manage to practice and practice until she became a master of her art? Many years later, when our paths crossed as adults, I asked her. She loved music, she said. But she had to carve out her own niche which separated her from her mother. She became a proponent and performer of new music.

Watching Golabek’s performance it was clear to me that her love of her mother and her love of music were the same thing. Now, I love music. I feel lucky to have been raised in a family that taught me that love. I loved hearing my father play in the next room while I drifted off to sleep. But it is a revelation to me that a girl could feel loved and held by her mother who was also her piano teacher. The child in me has had a belief that Hitler came to live in the breasts of refugee Jews, that loss and agony got locked away in internal concentration camps, only to rise up screaming in the privacy of family life.

Golabek’s piano playing evoked the warm glow, the gold and red velvet elegance of her mother’s lost Vienna. Frau O also came from Vienna. It occurs to me now that it was not so much Hitler in her, but her longing to keep the tradition alive, that made her so angry with this stupid American born girl who refused her beloved vehicle of transport. As for me, did I refuse to practice, refuse to take music lessons seriously because I got yelled at? Or is it that my creative libido took another form?

Years ago I remember a colleague telling me about her ecstatic experiences singing classical music in a chorus. “You really have to do this” she said. I was surprised at the hot flare of anger that rose in me, and heard the sharp edge in my voice when I responded: “I don’t want to sing other people’s music.” That flare of anger became the beginning of a poem, which became the beginning of my first book of poems, “red clay is talking."

Anger, I’ve discovered, is a great opening to creativity. It is how the piano teacher became my muse.

before

       life after life
       I stand by the road
       and look for a home
                       —Mirabai

she had been raised to sing
other people’s songs
but in the third morning of the new time
with the wisteria blooming outside her
kitchen window
and the shadow of the earth
about to fall upon the moon
she looked at the sky
the comet had inhabited
saw four geese fly east
toward devil mountain

heard the telephone ringing
the man in her house running
up circular stairs
calling her name

and suddenly remembered
the lips of the one who had sworn her
to silence
in dark waters
                           whispering
                                              wait for me
                                              one morning when the children are gone
                                              I’ll call
                                              put on your brown sandals
                                              wrap yourself up
                                              in your tree of life shawl
                                              come walk with me
                                                                 to devil mountain
                                                                         singing the song

                                                                         we were singing
                                                                                   before          you
                                                                                   were born


An Invitation from the Earth Muse

The San Francisco Institute is beginning an exciting series of eco-psychology programs. The first on is Saturday, February 22, 2014, 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM at the affordable ticket price of $35.00.

Indwelling: Our Human Participation in the Dream if the Earth

A workshop emphasizing the role of transformation in consciousness as an essential factor in addressing the environmental crisis. (With Barbara Holifield, MFT & Carol MCrae, PhD)

What Jung intuited nearly a century ago has never been more relevant: Western culture would become lost if we were not able to sustain a connection to nature and learn from the wisdom of the indigenous people, whose stories are deeply woven with the land. We have developed a split between ourselves and the earth.

Just what do we do as concerned citizens? What are our individual stories and what might be a more conscious collective guiding myth?

We will allow what emerges to build on Thomas Berry’s idea that hope for our future lies in our human participation in the dream of the earth. Check out Patricia Damery's blog for more on environmental issues.

Bragging Rights

The Sister from Below is proud to announce the publication of 2013’s Featured Poet: Frances Hatfield in Psychological Perspectives. Hatfield is a sister Jungian analyst and a sister poet from the mystery realms. Read six amazing poems by Hatfield and an introductory essay by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky in Psychological Perspectives (v. 56 Issue 4.)

Also, please consider subscribing to Psychological Perspectives. 

The Muse of Mandela

 

If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there are also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness.

—Nelson Mandela

The Muse of Mandela

In the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death at the age of 95 I find myself musing about how much his life story has meant to the whole world and to me—living so far away from his South Africa, on the left coast of the USA. I am a member of the generation that came of age in the 1960s. Like many my mind was blown, my life was changed by that great crack in the zeitgeist through which flowed the civil rights movement,  the anti-war movement, women’s liberation, environmentalism and psychedelic drugs.

 We saw ourselves as part of a great awakening. We understood that “War is not Healthy for Children or Other Living Beings,” “Black is Powerful,” “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” and “Earth Is Our Mother.” We had seen molecules dance in the branches of a tree; we knew magic was afoot. 

We were young, idealistic and naïve. We thought we were crossing over Jordan on our way to the Promised Land. What happened? That sense of loss and confusion is a theme in my book, The Faust Woman Poems.

Here’s a poem:

Crossing Over

We thought we knew where

we were going the songs spelt
it out drinking gourd, no moon
night. Didn’t we sneak
past that overseer’s dogs, find
the silent boatman, listen to
the soft splash of oars on the way
to the other side ?

                                       Where
did we think we were headed
on board that train?
We sang the songs, imagined
country lives, city lives, switched
partners, took another toke
                                     of Acapulco Gold…

Long gone what you promised me
under the fig tree. And that key

                                                where
                                          did I lose it? 

The key got lost, our faith got smashed, by terrible events—the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy. Many of us bent our heads down and pursued the hard, important work of our ordinary lives. Reagan was elected. We lost our larger vision, our hopes for a future without war, poverty, racism, sexism or environmental degradation. What would our world be like if Martin Luther King had lived to be a wise old man with a sharp and witty tongue?

The Muse of November 22nd

Late November tugs at me, reminds me of a painful moment that changed my consciousness. A dark bell tolls. Like everyone of my generation I can tell you exactly where I was on November 22, 1963—I was in the kitchen with my baby on my hip. My upstairs neighbor, Andrea—a friend and fellow student at Berkeley—came slamming through my back door in a tumult of voice and feeling: “The President has been shot!” She had just been on campus where everyone was dazed and no one knew what to do. Go to class? Go home? Call Mom and Dad? I remember my own confusion, disbelief, fear. How could this happen in America—my family’s sanctuary from the terrors of the Nazis? I remember my own internal incoherence: I was so mad at Kennedy for the Bay of Pigs—his invasion of Cuba felt like a personal betrayal. Could I mourn him? I remember hours in front of our enormous old black and white TV, watching the recital of catastrophic events. I could not then imagine that this would become a collective ritual—over and over we’d sit in front of all the TVs of our lives, watching the aftermath of assassinations, church bombings, school shootings…

There was a lot I could not yet imagine. I was twenty—too young to be a mother and a wife. My too young husband was in medical school. We lived in the downstairs apartment of my Oma’s duplex in Berkeley. Until recently she’d lived upstairs, in the rooms she painted in that lovely watercolor that would much later grace the cover of my poetry book, Adagio & Lamentation.

In her eighties, beginning to fail, Oma had moved to a sanatorium in Saint Helena, the closest thing she could find to the sanatoria of Europe, where, before the Nazis came to power, people like she would “take the waters.” Once a month, as regularly as a ballad, we’d go to visit Oma in the wine country, my husband, my baby and me. She and I would take walks. She’d tell me, in German, the stories from the long arc of her life. She spoke to me of the changing light. Years later I would remember this scene and put it in the opening poem of Adagio & Lamentation:

OMA

I wish you could stop being dead

so I could talk to you about the light    so we

could walk among the vineyards    as we did

forty years ago     near St. Helena    and you

could tell me    again        how the light of late

afternoon is so different from the light

of morning     I was too young

to grasp your meaning    but I believe

you said     it is all about the fall of shadows

that when you paint    it is not light that streams

from your brush but deep purple    violet      blue

you shaped emptiness      and there was light

Oma    come visit me   sit at your easel as you always did

your brush poised    your eyes as fierce

as a tiger’s    show me how to create

the luminous moment     among so many shades

of sorrow   so many dead     how to gather the light

of all the windows    from all the houses of our lives

to make this bright trail I still follow     along the gleaming

floor of the room in which you showed me how

to draw    out the french windows to the unseen

garden        a river of light that lifts

                                                        the Persian carpet into the air 

My Oma, like Rose Kennedy, knew what it was to outlive three of her children, to be given the gift of a long life shadowed by unbearable loss. Jack Kennedy never got to walk with his grandchildren, telling them stories from a long rich life. Neither did his brother, Bobby.

I see myself sitting in front of that old TV, as if in one of the early tree rings of my life, surrounded by the many greater tree rings of who I have become. I had no idea, that day, that Jack Kennedy, though dead, would soon change my life. He had given my generation a treasure—the Peace Corps. Many of us would be shaped by it, becoming world citizens, with an international sense of kinship and responsibility and a passion for travel.

In a later tree ring I’d find myself in India, with two young children and my husband—the Peace Corps doctor for volunteers in Hyderabad. In the next tree ring—consciousness blown wide open by the beauty, the color, the soul of India, amidst so much poverty and suffering—we’d adopt a third child, our Indian daughter, Shanti. I could not then imagine that years later, when that child was in her late twenties, my second husband Dan and I would take her to India. Dan had also been shaped by JFK’s gift—he had been a consultant to Peace Corps in Kenya. Our pilgrimage was powerful for all three of us, and I came to recognize that Old Mother India was an early muse who shaped my essential being. She insisted on a chapter in my book: The Sister from Below.

Old Mother India remembered my time with her as a young woman, when I was younger than Shanti was at the time of our trip. Here is part of what I wrote: 

We opened our house in Hyderabad to Peace Corps volunteers. There was always someone sleeping on the floor, always several of us around the dining room table talking American politics, Indian politics, philosophies of life. We were there when Martin Luther King was assassinated. We were there when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. 

India held us young Americans with curiosity and compassion and deep kindness. She mourned our fallen leaders with us. Sheela, who washed my floors every morning, and sat in the kitchen deftly removing rocks one by one from our daily rice, had lost three of her five children. She asked me about Rose Kennedy—how many sons she had lost. Three I told her—one in the war, two by assassination. “Abah!” Three grown sons! And she wept with me. She told me she had a photograph of JFK in her home, next to her photograph of Mahatma Gandhi. Now she would add photographs of RFK and MLK. 

Jack Kennedy never got to look over a long life and trace the tree rings of his development. Neither did his brother, Bobby. It was Ted, who got into that trouble early on, Chappaquiddick and all, Ted, who never became president but did become the Lion of the Senate, the beloved voice of us aging liberals, who was granted the gift of a full life, and was able to bring forth what was within him. In the end it was he who spoke for the values of so many in my generation—healthcare reform, civil rights, social and economic justice. 

In a recent tree ring of my life, I found myself at my mother’s home in Chicago, glued to the TV. It was Ted Kennedy’s funeral. He had died of a brain tumor. I was filled with grief for this survivor of so much horror, so much personal tragedy, so much self–destructive behavior under the pitiless gaze of the TV cameras. For haven’t we all been self–destructive? I was filled with grief, also, for my mother, who, after years of living a full, creative and independent life, playing the violin and viola in chamber groups and orchestras, giving music lessons, and working with poor young children and their often too young parents, had begun to lose her way. This was revealed to us, her children and grand children, in a particularly painful and humiliating way for her. She got scammed. It made me furious to see the tree rings of her life—which had expanded so gloriously after she ended her marriage to my father—dented so violently and cruelly. It made me unspeakably sad that she should feel so diminished, so shamed.

It was a typical magazine sales scam. She thought she’d won a lot of money. Offshore con men sweet talked her on the telephone, got her to send them money. Luckily, the manager of her bank, who knew her and her cautious spending habits, got suspicious and called my brother.

As the tree rings of our lives get larger, they gather all our themes— our contradictions and complexities—wisdom forged in the School of Hard Knocks. For some of us, at some point, that richness of personality darkens, falters, loses its way. Here I was with my sweet, competent, funny mother, tracking her anxiety and her confusion amidst a gallery of her mother’s—my Oma’s—paintings. They track the tree rings of Oma’s long, difficult and creative life. As I watched the TV coverage of the death of another Kennedy I began to realize that the twang in my mouth was a tooth going bad. The pain grew and resonated like the dark bell of November. If physical pain expresses emotional pain, my tooth was eloquent, and led me to a poem which gathered many of the themes of my life. My Oma, my mother and the Kennedys are among those who have shaped the tree rings of my life. This November, as we passed through the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, I found myself musing about how the Kennedys are intertwined in my life. I want to share the long poem that came out of that visit to my mother. It expresses my gratitude and my grief.

Root Canal

1. Security Line

We are pilgrims on our way to see Mother   among travelers
in flip flops     with bluetooths     carrying babies      We walk
in our radiant bodies     One of us is about to crack

a tooth     Only the babies can see     old light
from past lives    Only the babies can hear
the song lines     We are pilgrims passing through

the metal detector      We remove our shoes     remove
our coats and shawls    Some of us will be hand wanded
silver bracelets    seven quarters    three dimes provoke

the security gods     The Kennedy who just died
is speaking thirty years ago on TV     His assassinated
brothers still bleed into our lives…


2. Retirement Living

In Mother’s eighty-eighth year she got scammed     Sweet talkers
from the islands poured delirium into her ears     drained her purse
A Great Lake swimmer lost face     A late Beethoven violin

bowed to the gods of security     We’ve come
to see her new place among the formerly eminent
Hyde Park intellectuals     We walk the round of her days        She

gets lost     forgets her song lines    wants to sort through
scores of Mozart Bartok Bach. What goes where?     The Kennedy

who died
is talking on TV     It’s his funeral     His widow pushes back her dark

hair    She’s known him on her belly, in her thighs     She knows
his secret smell     When is it my tooth cracks?
When does that big bully nerve take over?

3. Roots

Oma’s paintings dominate this place     She painted
herself painting all her ages      painted herself losing
her grip     She looked straight into her own mirrored eyes

and painted the edge of her nerve     We make a pilgrimage
to see her painting of German snow on roofs in 1931
The naked larches scrape the sky     Her sons are dead

Her sons are dead     Her sons are dead     Trees
save her     Trees leave     Trees bud     Trees flower
Trees know her secret smell      They cleanse her dreams

Trees grow by rivers     by canals     by lakes     They reflect
on themselves in oils     in watercolors     They burn orange
in the deep wood     They burn gold under water     Mother loses track

of the song lines of her Mother     Her brothers bleed
into brothers not yet born     Mother says we live
too far away     that we’ve been swallowed by the State of California


4. Going Home

I am losing my own grip     My finger prints fade     I forget
your name     All I know is the scream of a nerve     I’ve no idea
how the widow got into Mother’s TV     no idea

how an endodontist removes a dying nerve     no idea
how a plane leaves this earth     no idea
how I’ll live in the State of California
                                                    while Mother loses track of herself

(first published in SierraNevada Review)

Watercolor by Emma Hoffman