In direct Buddha lineage Name chanted reverently What of his mother? Was she the Earth-dirt body Flesh of his own body He had to overcome? John-sweat on his infant skin The suffering that took twelve Wheels turning to overturn? How long must he have been Sitting before he realized He could not un-cling to pain For her? But only For himself let go of her Whore’s weeping held Storming in his mind?
I sit efforting my eyes to stay Down and unfocused the smell Of john-sweat rises to my nose The grimacing gatekeeper of I might give birth to a roshi Back screaming in this broken chair Sitting straighter than shame Knees spread wide Hands an open oval Over my womb
The first cry Sweaty mother and destiny Kissed child is a relief The cord is cut the un-clinging Begun —a tiny red fist Opening unnaturally Separation sustained And dissolved Son of prostitute becomes Prostitute becomes her son Becomes a single drop of blood Mixed on the scroll chanted reverently Direct lineage of the Buddha.
My god a raft Naked lazy backstroke Beneath me water Washing over his chest I lie back Under my back The veil Clear and sweet I feel his muscles work Droplets on my lips As each arm Raises and lowers Behind us Honey sweet Drought-rain sweet Crisp the veil My dewy face His heartbeat Never not water enough For god to swim in Never a pleasure veil Thinner than this Rapid flood trickle The stroke Backward Nude Feet last Easy
Divine stereo listening with my eyes Closed in the sweet spot under the patio Not far from the hanging seed The crows confabulate in a Narrowing circle above my head The orange-breasted robins on the left and Plain brown wrens quarrel in the dense Mock oranges the gardener recently chopped The tops of making less space and more rancor. From somewhere on the right a bossy bluejay gets Off his feathery duff and regulates—loudly.
I sit so still a fat white dove comes to the feeder within Two arms’ reach and clicks seeds into his beak The sound of raindrops spitting against glass. My eyes are closed but I know he is fat because I have been Feeding my backyard aviary heartily—because his wing beats are Heavy when he flies away—and because the plastic feeder swings And squeaks on its rusty hook in his absence.
I know he is pure white because My imagination tells me so.
A too-warm-for-early-March breeze sidles In from the East—the one wind whose name I don’t know—and plays a single note on the Copper wind chime to my right before touching My hand the way a virgin who wants A lover with his whole body is only brave enough To suggest hand-holding One soft pinky tip to another.
The no-name virgin god-wind and all the bawdy Many-named and sun-shining gods and all the white And black and blue and brown and orange birds
And the magenta hibiscus—the coral The gold, the scarlet
And the topaz pool The empty terracotta pots All the cement the color of cement
Nothing separate—color, sound, Birds, flesh, wind. One Pulsing lover and beloved
And gratitude—the snake Who worships and adores his own tail His eyes half bliss slits as he consumes it Whole—too sweet for venom or bite And ever expanding this tail as it moves Through his body passing each one of his Seven humming hearts, emerging from Him longer and more glorious than before Expanding the circle endlessly Scale by glistening scale.
Seed by seed Petal by petal Feather by feather Melody by melody Ear by ear Both eyes closed.
My trick is a little garlic salt in the boiling water
My husband calls that the love
Garlic salt is my trick for everything holy in our food
My husband says it’s the love
Casino is playing in the family room
On our tiny television in the giant entertainment center
My mother bought thirty years ago when furniture
Was still real and heavy
One day I will get rid of it so we can have
A bigger TV, but today the little TV is enough
And I don’t mind the behemoth it sits in with
All my mother’s tchotchkes in the glass-doored
Cabinets and her ashes in a wooden urn on the corner shelf
The f-bombs from Casino float into the kitchen where
I am about to drain the garlic salt water pasta and
In my mind, I sing along with Joe Pesci as they come
My favorite movie, this scene one of my favorite songs
My husband and I appreciate vociferously his breath control
I drain the pasta and the salty steam rises to give me a much needed
Pore cleanser before billowing out of the open kitchen window
Into the twilight of a cool Southern California autumn that waited
Until mid-November to come but, blessedly, did come
I stop with the hot pasta strainer in both hands
Everything.
Everything.
Everything
Is perfect
Just as it is
The Goddess of All-That-Is
Has passed by my window
Come in through the open back door
Patted my poodle’s curly-topped head as she entered
Swayed into the kitchen
Stood beside me at the sink
Rustled her moonlight robes just enough so
That I could smell her whole dusky body
And her celestial perfume.
It smells like garlic salt, autumn, boxed pasta
Heavy wood, ashes, jarred sauce,
My husband’s day old Old Spice, puppy dog
And love
-M. Ashley
I am studying both Taoism and Zen Buddhism. In one of my Taoist readers for today, the author talks about how Taoists read and write poetry. That gave me a little kick in the butt to get back to it. And especially in a way that honors one of the strongest Is-ness or Flow or Tao moments I have ever had. The words still aren’t quite getting it, but it is a pleasure to try.
As if the merry current weren’t worthy As if anguish were worthy
I flail against it Take in great gulps Muscles give out Lungs fill up I go under surely The last time then rise Flailing harder
I end up downstream anyway The merry current is still merry
-M. Ashley
I have been studying Taoism which seems so natural to me and so lighthearted. Then I started flirting with Zen Buddhism which, by comparison, is difficult and austere. In meditation today it tickled me how this pattern shows up over and over again in my life: When something is easy and natural, I’m quick to toss it away because surely something that loverly can’t be truly valuable! I must SUFFER! I’m not sure if that’s a Puritanical echo or what, but such nonsense! The merry current is still merry and I end up downstream anyway. Why not relax and enjoy the flow?
When my fiancé got into bed with me last night he started talking about how he used to tape whole albums off the radio when he was a kid. He got specific. He had to have his mom buy him TDK 90 minute blank tapes—the solid gray ones in the gold wrappers, $2 apiece and sold in packs of five. Maxell was so-so—he would settle for Maxell, but Memorix with its clear tapes and groovy shapes all over was the worst of the worst and he wouldn’t put a single note on that.
He talked about cataloguing the tapes—one album per side. Listening to the DJs talk about the albums and all the music trivia. He still listens to music talk, constantly. He follows about six hundred rock music podcasts and can DJ every song on Sirius with about thirty times the DJ juice as whatever has-been they’ve hired. He is an encyclopedia of rock. Sometimes I’ll turn on classic rock stations that I only marginally like just to give him the opportunity to fan his feathers for me, and it is glorious.
He told me he tried the guitar and piano as a kid because those are the types of instruments a blind kid is supposed to go for, but it wasn’t until someone put him in front of a drum kit that he thought yes…. I can really find my way around here. It all clicked along with the click track and he was a drummer, through-and-through forevermore. He started doing session work in LA by the time he was 14. At 50, he plays in three different bands and bursts out with drum solos on his knees randomly while I’m making dinner, while we’re waiting on an Uber, and even sometimes in the bathroom, (don’t tell him I told you that).
Music, and rock music specifically, and drumming even more specifically than that is the way he makes his way in the world and he has no internal conflict whatsoever about that. I admire that. More than admire: I envy that. More than envy: I am deeply jealous of his soul’s love for its native art. And I wish my soul were that way about writing. It’s getting there, but it has taken a long long time.
Sometimes, when I’m depressed, I find myself doing “depressed” things long before I ever acknowledge I’m depressed. I stop taking care of myself and dressing in nice clothes. I curl up in bed and watch a lot of nostalgia bomb reruns I’ve seen ten thousand times. Walking from room to room makes me tired. I cook the simplest things for dinner—lots of blue box and ramen. But it isn’t until days and days later, when I find myself wrapped up in my blanket cocoon in bed, barely able to move, that I think, “Oh wow. I must be having a depression.”
It’s kind of like that with me and writing.
While Angel was obsessing over TDK vs. Memorex as a kid, I was writing. I wrote my first real poem in the fifth grade and the teacher loved it so much, she posted it in the window for the whole school to see. I still remember it:
The moon is a jagged diamond
Hanging and waiting in suspense
For someone to pluck him from this mine of darkness
That holds him captive
Captive in a sea of stars
That no one dares enter
For fear they’d never return
We were learning about metaphors and similes when I wrote that. I chose metaphor.
I used to ride the bus to school composing poems. As I grew, the poetry onslaught continued. I’d type them on my little Canon electric typewriter that printed a whole line at a time, and put them in packets in the kind of folders you’d put school reports in. I’d give the packets titles and slip them to my teacher on the sly.
I put my poetry in the front cover of my clear-covered three ring binder in high school and changed it out regularly. I wrote down song lyrics from memory and broke the lines apart the way I thought they should be broken.
I wrote satirical pieces in junior high, high school, and college and got in major trouble with teachers and schoolmates over it, but kept doing it anyway.
I sat in the wood-paneled study room in college with my left hand pressed against my forehead writing short stories longhand for hours as day turned to night, turned to very late night. I’d dance around air-conducting baroque music thinking of what next things my characters should be doing and what most clever ways I could say it.
All through the eight years I was trafficked—even then during that horrendous abuse, I spent so much of my “free” time alone at the keyboard writing endlessly about what was happening to me. I filled countless file folders on my shiny new Gateway computer and more spiral notebooks than I could ever keep track of. Words words words as Shakespeare would say. They didn’t always make sense during that time, but they kept me anchored to something, even if it was just my own hands moving, the click of the keys, the scratch of the pen, the flick of one page to the next.
I went to the Iowa Summer Writers’ Workshop twice and found my joy and my people. I didn’t bring an essay for class. I wrote it while I was there. I stayed up late in my hotel room writing it. I dashed into the college computer lab the day it was my turn to be workshopped, typed it out at emergency speed, and ran in to class with my ten copies, wet ink drying on my fingers.
And after I survived the trafficking, while I was barely surviving survival, when I was desperately poor and living in an apartment that had roaches in the dishwasher, when I was working at Walmart and smoking with old Southern ladies and bitching about customers, managers, and my swollen feet, I never stopped writing. I started a blog about my Walmart experiences. I started a blog about world spirituality. I started a blog about my burgeoning Paganism. I started a blog about 12 step recovery. I started a blog about tarot. I started this blog. I started more blogs. I started a blog… I started a blog… I started a blog…
And now, twenty years after the trafficking ended and nearly forty years after I wrote my first poem, and probably over fifty blog starts later, I am still writing. And I am reading Writing Down the Bones and realizing for the first time, after all this time, that I am a writer. I am a writer all the way down to my bones and always have been. I am a writer the way Angel is a drummer. I am a writer the way Natalie Goldberg is a writer.
It’s how I make my way in the world. It always has been whether I wanted it to be or not. My passion for the written word has burned for decades in spite of myself.
I wonder what will happen when I embrace its burning as myself.
M. N. Ashley 