Oct 26
I have loved rivers, I think it's because, unlike ponds and oceans, they go somewhere, passing neighborhoods and docks and homes.  They have stories.  Some like the Charles River in Massachusetts have a significant history of lending their onrushing to an industrial revolution. My little Toms River, where I live now, meanders as a little stream through lowlands and suddenly opens to a broad estuary, turning gradually into a bay. It has a history rum running during Prohibition.  A torpedo and a shark have ventured into it. The founder of the town of Toms River, Captain Tom, married a Leni Lenape woman and founded a family that until two generations ago occupied the little village of Double Trouble where cranberries were harvested and cedar logs were sawed into planks at a sawmill powered by Cedar Creek.  Captain Tom is buried there in what is now Double Trouble County Park.  There are not one but two stories about how this village got its name.
. 

October 5

October 5

Walking by my other river today, Toms River it's called and I can see it from my dining room window. 
     Today is sparkling, cool.  As I cross the street I see again, at the foot of the tree, the small memorial created by his friends for a motorcyclist killed her as he took the curve that follows the curve of the river too fast and and smashed into the tree.  A growing collection of plastic flowers, poems in plastic sleeves, photos and foil balloons.  We must leave our mark, or others leave it for us.

I remember when my cat first came to me out of the woods, where she begged food from campers to feed herself to feed her kittens, she’d look at me out of round eyes, as if to ask me can it be?
     This daily bowl set down.
     For me?
Then she would come into my bed at night after I'd gone to sleep and wet me. Warm I’d feel it, then, the feral reek.  I‘d cry out and slap, until I sensed that it was love she offered, and gratitude.  Possessing me. 
If she were possibly—behind the face that all cats have—extraordinary, gifted, she would have written poems on my body:
     lieder, pop songs:
     “Sea of Love…”
     But gifted or no, all she could offer was her warm urine.

That is past.  She eats now out of little golden cans, and stares unblinking on her good fortune, expressed lately by sudden leaps up to the mantle and little fantasies of chase up stairs and over couches

Why is it that we need to leave our mark?  Painted in caves, spray painted on derelict walls and overpasses…what?
     Our pain, our love,
     excreted, scrawled.

October 3

For nearly Half of my life I have lived near a river that called me to its banks.  First was the Charles River, when I lived in Waltham Massachusetts.  I rode my bicycle there with a friend, who has since died.  We entered through the Mount Feake Cemetery and walked among the old graves...

In the 'Seminary' as we called it, by the Charles River, we pondered mortality, among other things.  She was just thirty when she died, we knew from our subtraction.  The epitaph is unclear.Shakespeare, I wondered, led down a garden path  by Hathaway.

Near the entry by the railroad bridge there is a monstrous copper beech all carved with messages, a sign prohibiting:

Bicycles, roller skates,

picnics, plastic flowers

between April

and October.

We wouldn't have been caught dead on roller skates, or bringing plastic flowers, but we did bring sandwiches and. sometimes, bicycles.

The graves begin with some small markers:  For the military dead:

Here Cpl Dennis Ryan received

a musket ball in his leg and died

in 1887.

The Civil War it must have been. We never knew why they're buried here. They weren't local boys.

And, up the hill, the Yankee fathers: Isaac Watts, the Robert's family:  Mother, Father,

a child dead at fourteen months; another, eighteen years...They had a paper mill,

The Roberts family, where Brandeis is today, are gathered within a spiky iron fence to keep

the rabble out.

Here, Nathanial Weeder,

Fngineer, and .

Wife Rebecca

We Will Meet in Heaven..

Sometimes we climbed the grassy slope to where the railroad passes, a Swedish neighborhood.

Swedes came early to work in the watch factory.  Then higher up are the French, the Irish;  Here the earth is raw. Like the New Rich, the New Dead disturb the neighborhood. These stones are crisply chisled, shiny.

we liked the old ones, softened by the rain. .

But usually, to avoid the homeless sitting by the tracks, we walked below, along the river; and you

looked under milkweed leaves for Monarch pupae. Redwings flitted and the reflection of the old watch factory wavered in the water.

And we walked out to where the little spit of land protrudes into the river, where we'd lay our bikes down,

sit with our forbidden sandwiches. The stone is rough pink marble, with a plaque attached:

Anne Hathaway Abbott

She was above all things

Glad and Young.

It’s at the end of the little point; the river reeds are just beyond.

But it was actually ee cummings, I found out many years later, just as I was about to forget you,

another friend quoted it at the top of an infrequent letter.  That’s, however, another story.

I cut your bangs here once. Life was so heavy for you then.You missed an appointment at the beauty parlor;

and some occasion called for grooming. Your hair was thick and lovely; you were lovely, though you wouldn't believe; yours was a body that refused to hasten after mind; it tipped a weight that year, though previously you had been glad and young..

I think you wanted then to die, though still you rode your bike and clung to most of all the victories

that you'd won the year that you decided Jesus was your friend.

You couldn't work, but painted in bright colors at the day center where you curled back into childhood, and you still cooked for us sometimes in that apartment that increasingly reflected mind's disarray.  Your parents came a couple times a year to straighten up, as if that ordering could work on brain cells.

A problem in the temporal lobe. The disorder shook you with violence a day you helped in kindergarten,

frightened you that you might harm the inconceivable…a child.

But we still had our jokes and ate our sandwiches.by my river. You always call it, your river,

you objected. It's mine because I love it, I’d reply. If it were mine, I'd keep it cleaner, you said.

Well, I'm working on it, I said. A great responsibility to own a river, I. And we, all of us who loved it,

were pulling mossy supermarket carts out of its murk, until one day that it was cleaner and I waded into

its tea colored water, swam a stroke.

You, who earlier would have followed, were afraid.

But you liked my flights;

and so I came to own conglomerates of places that we loved, and means of getting there: the Red Line and the Blue: a futuristic bullet streaking through its tiled corridors to

WONDERLAND

But my chief possession was the river and the "Seminary." And I wonder, sometimes, did we really ponder, there, mortality?

Not, in my case,

.

Your mother wrote four months ago to say you'd lost your battle as you waited for another surgery.

You were just fifty, but I think the battle was half hearted.  You were tired from that struggle

with your body which began the day you first stood up to toddle, or even earlier.

And I am old and trying to be glad—It is a duty I have set myself.  But I ponder now, when I remember sitting by that uncut gravestone lifting up your heavy hair to cut, mortality.

October 1, 2011
I just hovered over a button and threw my dawning blog into a language with beautiful, undiscipherable characters.  Magyar?  It took awhile to get back to plain old English.  Characters in most languages are so pleasing.  Once in a workshop I created twenty five new characters on huge sheets of brown manilla paper. It was a workshop run by a friend to give adults a second chance at kindergarten.  There never was enough of it  she believed.  There was a psychiatrist there, I remember, who corraled a whole pile of wooden blocks on a large table, and announced, "These are all mine!" A man who was an ex priest built a chapel out of enormous tubes of cardboard.  A woman who sat blocked through most of the day finally wound huge balls of multicolored yarn; another woman painted all over her clothes.  The business of learning to add and subtract and read and write, it seems causes us to lose all of this too quickly. .   

What a joy to be writing again.  For the past three years after my lovely month at the Millay Colony where I wrote my final drawer novel...six is enough, I thought.  Until I publish one, no more already!  So I've been typing, polishing, correcting, adding bits... 
     "Typing is not writing,"  Truman Capote supposedly said. 

If they were potboilers, it’s too late for them to boil any pots.  Let them stay in the drawer.  If they were meant to be bestsellers, my back cover photo is too aged to attract and my grandmotherly self too staid to go on booktours.  They are literary novels, deeply sharing of a troubled life masked in characters who then took on their own, different, lives.  I glory in them.  Novels that came back with encouragement  to rewrite, to hone these characters that are not me, take them to a new place..

They sit in drawers .  Recently I read Emily Dickinson’s diaries.  Sealed in a wall by a interior home improvement of her house in Amherst, then unsealed by another workman, and kept secret for years.  Once I buried an out of print novel in a tin box in my garden.  A fine novelist I knew once turned her talents to pottery.  Pots to be dug up by a later people and admired.

But lately I think there may not be a later people.  A new thought for me.

 I follow the news like a sportscaster following a crucial game.  What will save us?  Recently I read an article feeling the outlines of a new industrial revolution.  It is being previewed by the internet.  Electric power, like words, will be generated by localnodes: each building, with one of the new powersources like solar, sharing the surplus with a web.

It gave me hope.

So I put my five unread novels on Kindle.  Off to the ether, to the cloud.  They are fledged and flown. And maybe all the dense life in them will be puzzled over by aliens.  It’s a fine feeling  

This is the first entry in a blog called SKYWRITING.  There must be many writers out there who share these thoughts.  Let me look at your work.  I'll show you mine.  Let us be nodes of power...