My daughter wants to learn
to play the piano.
It is a worthy goal; music is a path to many
wonderful places.
She doesn’t like to practice,
however.
She wrote the names of all the notes on her
keyboard, with a sharpie, on pieces of tape.
She wrote them wrong, and has been playing the notes
a little off. E follows C which leads to A at the wrong moment.
At practice, after trying, and failing, to fix the error with
another sharpie, we resolved to tear away the tape.
The tape stuck tight. Refused to budge. My daughter gave up.
Left to play with the computer. Said “You finish it.”
I think of the looks the piano teacher gives me,
her suspicions of my lacking parenting skills.
Like a mom trying to be good, I continued, doggedly, to pull at the
shredding scotch tape. Little “plinks” and “hums” of electronic
keyboard answered my efforts.
It sounded like some frustrated improvisational Jazz.
Coltrane, but without the theory. Or talent.
I thought about my own music lessons of many years ago.
How I hated to practice. How I never really did it, but
was good enough to fake it. To mix with more loyal musicians. To have fun.
To be in the Symphony. But always,
at the edge of being revealed: fake.
Remembered Tchaikovsky. The victory of the final swell of marching music.
Think about hating to practice anything.
Get the labels wrong.
Jazz. That’s what it is.
KAW Oct ‘12
I once wrote
a poem for a friend’s lost marriage,
the hot kisses of temptation that chased love away,
she, a small horse bolting from the herd.
And one for another
whose lover’s kiss of betrayal
landed her not one piece of silver,
not one memory of comfort.
There was another about my own young love
and what we held close
dying in the summer, unnoticed.
This one was funny. It made
people
exclaim
with surprise at its
final sentence of reversal.
I’ve written poems about sex, about death, about
sonogram pictures. About tears
about rage about tiny
green lizards tasting
white flowers
and bee laden hummingbird feeders.
You know. Innocence. Experience.
That story.
There are too many about Goddesses. Especially
the ones that taste red fruit, find it worthy of winter.
And so, trying to sit, and write about
the loss of a friend’s mother,
(too soon.)
Trying to find comforting words
something to soothe the tears, the need to push away
knowledge of being the root, now, no one else
above to shelter (us) from that last long breath.
Only the sky, and clouds, and a moon that is still there.
So. Instead of something needful,
I find lost poems, like a little lint in an old coat pocket.
KAW, 2012.
Rising, golden through the trees: the moon.
A bride revealing herself slowly, shy, peeking.
We stand and
we stare. Like children,
we are moonstruck,
never having seen
something so magical before.
Remember that,
people still cry, fight, die, shun, include, live, breathe, exclude.
All these same old battles return to us again and again.
this never ends, this longing to know, to feel, to share.
The moon again reminds us that we are
only this,
small, we are only ending, finite.
And yet, we are always here.
We can see each other, sometimes, but not touch, not know.
And we envy the moon.
KAW may 12
Maia found out how to type a story into a word processor today. This is the story she then wrote:
The cat who is missing a tail.
A cat was missing a tail who wanted it back. Then it realized it was under a spell. So, it was going to be hard to get it back. And he went to get it back. He went and bumped into a forest that was on fire!
The cat backed up. He looked behind him. In a tree, he saw a knight’s clothes. The cat put the knight’s clothes on. The knights’ clothes fit! And the armor was strong enough to go through the fire. And the cat will not get hurt. And the cat can go right through, and went on.
Soon…The cat was so hot. And then, the cat saw a lot of water, and they were shapes! Two kinds of shapes! A triangle, and a circle. He ran to a circle. Then he jumped off very fast! The water turned to ice. Then he jumped to the triangle; the triangle did not turn to ice. Then he looked over he saw a enchanted forest. His tail must be there! The cat must get past the puddles! So the cat jumped only on the triangles. And then the cat was at the enchanted forest. And went off. He went by some bouncy mushrooms. Then the cat bumped into a giant mushroom. It had a mouth. It opened it. The mushroom was so big, the mushroom is going to eat the cat!
Will the cat get away? The cat ran for its life! The cat saw a knife. The cat ran to the knife! The cat gets the knife, throws the knife at the mushroom and kills it! And that was the guardian of the cat’s tail. The cat puts the tail on and when he opens his eyes the cat is home.
THE END.
Damn. I am totally impressed. She's not even 7!!
