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Poem: Invocation
0Dominique Larntz * April 2, 2012
Invocation
By now we glimpse blossoming colors
opening into the sweet morning air.
May you delight in their dazzling array–
even in this desert, while the dew
sticks to your shoes as you walk from
your front door to your car door,
if those are the only moments you have
to observe them today.
May you rejoice as Winter’s dormancy transitions to renewal.
May you love as the flower opens–
fully, sun-facing, extending trust.
Time again for rebirth, fragrance, eggs, and colors.
May Spring enter your life wholly.
Poem: Bark
0Dominique Larntz * March 29, 2012
Bark
I felt like tree bark this morning,
peeled off and left rotting on the ground.
I could not connect to anything,
no light, no finish, no sparkle, no replenish.
Walked around moving stuff from one place
to another in my house. Not sure if I was
cleaning or replacing where the mess was placed.
Felt overburdened by the tiniest responsibility
because bark has no roots, man,
has no way to sink itself
into the softness of soil other than
through decay and decay is long.
Until at one point I realized this
ink of an emotion is my sentient soul’s
pivot point: I can choose to sink further
and that is a beautiful dark surrender
to depression or I can choose to do
some small act like laundry or invoices–
an act no one but my inner witness
will see and applaud.
My pivot point is so tiny and so daily
but that is the point
where I choose to live or to die.
Poem: Dance
0Dominique Larntz * March 19, 2012
Dance
Why I say nothing publicly:
So you are not caught cold in your mindless mass
of a mess, where you slashed the pad of skin
from the thumb of my outstretched hand
at the end of my arms, slowly curving
together to hold you.
Why I wait long and lovingly:
So you will have the opportunity to understand
and to try to make this right with me
and I may have the chance to help you heal;
therefore I will know my anger with you as a friend
and I will keep my lively conversation stable.
Poem: Still
0Dominique Jones * March 8, 2012
Still
All we do is stay still
in New Mexico and the light moves.
On one March morning I have seen
stillness shift into a hurtling
aluminum zia plate.
And then some trash that blew into
what I call our backyard
(because i live
and take seriously
this time frame
of a human lifetime
and i wave my language
around like tiny wings
in the big wind
and our economics
are like flocks of birds
crying out in the skies
together and my mortgage
is my flute note in that song)
became part of a blizzard flurry
dusting and dazzling the xeriscape like feathers
that squeezed the breath out from my eyes
and for a moment my muscles needed to stop
before the coffee cup reached my lips
and I needed to do nothing but look.
Look at the marvel
of the sudden morning storm.
The power went out and the sound of the wind
touched my ears as it wound
around the house like a ribbon.
I remembered the reports from all the watchers
who reported that the sun has sent excessive flares
today and I imagine its solar arc infecting
my body, my cells, my being
with radiation
and
the facebook post I will offer
if I die from the storm
but not now–not now–because
the power is out
and I am writing by hand
I am watching the evidence of the wind
I am swirling with birds
I am sudden and curling in the March
desert snow against the rocks
and concrete and zia covered steel
that we blanket ourselves with.
Still, I have done nothing.
A Heart Attack? Really?
0Tuesday, February 28th, I woke with an interesting feeling.
At 3 am, I got up to use the facilities and I noticed that it felt like I had a pinched nerve in the center of my back, and my left arm felt like it was asleep. We have a sleep number bed and sometimes my arm goes to sleep in the middle of the night. I tried rotating my shoulder, thinking I had slept wrong, maybe twisted in my sleep or something, and the circulation to my arm just didn’t feel right. Besides the pain in my chest and back felt like my ribs were poking into my chest. Still, could be a pinched nerve, pulled ligament, or something like that. Might even be heartburn. Since the tingly arm was a component, I started to think about a stroke so I went to the interwebs to research stroke symptoms. Smiled in the mirror, no droopy side of my face. Held out my arms, no falling arm. Did have the tingling left arm but it might still have been asleep. I was also able to recite a complex phrase without slurring my words. 3 out of 4, no sale. This had happened once before, about six months ago and I got up, took a couple of TUMS and went back to bed and never gave it a second thought. So, I ate a couple of TUMS and the pain abated enough to let me go back to bed until 6 am, when I woke up again with the same pain. I was still thinking nerve pinch and decided to get up and get ready for work.
When I was just finishing up in the shower, I felt pretty light headed and decided that now would be a good time to lay on the floor so I did. Lay there for a few minutes, felt a little better and got up, finished toweling off and got dressed. Damn pain would not leave me alone and it seemed to be getting worse so I came out to the living room and told Dominique that I think she needed to drive me to the ER because I may be having a heart attack. She wanted to call 911 but I said I’d be fine and who wants to pay $800 for a fancy cab ride? She got dressed and we went out to get in her car.
Once I was in the passenger seat, it felt like my heart was going to erupt from my chest, ALIEN style, and I said, “Y’know, the $800 cab ride looks pretty good to me right now,” and I went back into the house to try to get comfortable to wait.
Dominique called 911.
Tried everything, lying on the floor with my feet up on the seat of the couch, no joy. Feet on the floor, no joy; knees bent, same result. Tried standing, sitting, leaning, nothing brought any relief. I started to get scared. Dominique sat on the couch and held my hand till the ambulance came and then things got kind of crazy.
Suddenly, my house was teeming with emergency healthcare professionals whose mission was to save my life. And save it they did.
First thing was oxygen through a cannula. Almost immediate relief. Then came two baby aspirin. More relief.
The pain scale was brought into play: 0 to 10, 10 being the most excruciating pain in your life, where was I at? Had to say, at the worst, 8.5—almost broken bone kind of pain but scarier because this is your heart you’re talking about, and nothing is more important than your heart. My vitals were stable and the pain almost non-existent so I was now at a .5, which the ambulance crew thought was hilarious—nobody ever broke it down to .5s before. Then when James, one of the firefighters, was setting me up an IV, he missed the vein. To which I said, “James, how could you miss my vein? It’s a junkie’s wet dream!”, which it is. I have great veins! They hadn’t heard that one before, either and hilarity again ensued. They figured that since my vitals were good there was no rush, so we leisurely drove through the early morning traffic to the VA Hospital Emergency Room.
Once we arrived, I was immediately whisked to a holding room and I bade goodbye to my saviors, Jason and—regretfully, I didn’t catch his partners name.
Kay, my new nurse, gave me a half an inch of nitroglycerine from a tube and popped a plastic patch over it. The relief was almost immediate, since the pain had started to come back again. A few minutes later a cardiology team came in and decided that I was suffering from a blockage of one of the major arteries and then proceeded to lay out the plan.
After a few minutes more I was whisked to the Cath Lab, wherein a balloon catheter would be inserted in my femoral artery and snaked up into my heart, blown up to remove the blockage (95% as it turned out, The Widowmaker, if not resolved, I was ominously told later) and a stent would be inserted to hold the artery open so blood could flow.
They popped a hole in my right femoral artery, in the crease between my right leg and my side, gave me drugs so I think I pretty much slept through the whole thing, except for when I looked up at the monitor and saw this explosion of dye filled blood once the stent was in place. I am going to try to get that visual texted to my phone so I can look at it whenever I want a cigarette, which I have since ceased. I used to say that the main reason I didn’t quit is because I didn’t want to be wanting a cigarette for the rest of my life, but now it seems that the rest of my life actually depends on me wanting a cigarette for the rest of my life, so I’m going to deal with it. I’m hoping the feeling will pass, but hey, if it doesn’t, it will still be better than being dead, right? It seems as if that’s where the stakes are now: craving or death. No contest, eh?
Speaking of which, today is my fourth day totally smoke free. Still fighting the craving…
After the angioplasty at the Cath Lab, they took me upstairs to CCU where I exhibited all the best possible results. All my vitals were normal to the point being downright boring, almost as if nothing had even happened. All of my caretakers were amazed. No pain, perfect vitals (98.6 temp!), everything more normal than it should be, especially considering what I had just put my old, creaky body through.
Thank God for small mercies.
And so I do.
Oh, there was one possible speed bump. On Wednesday morning they did an Echo Cardiogram and we found out that where everyone else has a tricuspid valve at the base of the aorta, I have a bicuspid valve and it seemed to be a bit enlarged. So they decided that I needed a CT scan to see what was up with that bicuspid thing. Side note: Abraham Lincoln had the same thing, which somehow made him so tall, or so they said. Anyway, went down for the CT scan at midnight Wednesday night, the docs read the results Thursday morning and said the equivalent of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” but we’re going to keep an eye on the condition. Good thing too, because it would have meant open heart surgery and I would not be sitting here in the comfort of my living room sharing with you right now.
Again, thank God for small mercies (and BIG ones, too!)…
Poem: Passive Aggressive As I Understand It
0Dominique Larntz * February 20
Passive Aggressive As I Understand It
When aggression supplants moral conscience,
we discover alien life right here on this planet.
O secretly, haven’t you wondered if the enemy
isn’t a different species? Our media croons
to this part of our evil soil, watering the seeds
of our hatred because they say it sells. Our
sellers say that selling is what supports us
because making money is how we survive.
Our money makers make money out of nothing
and then make nothing out of our soil and water
leaving us destitute when before all this aggression
at least we had soil and water. O poison, at least
we have the sun even if our species spits its last
breath in aggression, opening its own stomach
to prove it has been victimized.
Poem: Flu
0Dominique Larntz * February 19
Flu
Taken in the morning,
my vitamins and peppers crown
the feeling of this congestion
with interlaced leaves of fire throat
and coppery chest woven between
a bouquet of nose linens
I wish I could unfold
and wash clean.
Poem: Waking Tune
0Dominique Larntz * February 10, 2012
Waking Tune
I love to listen to the morning–
the rush of thoughts in my mind
like a tide that builds quick footsteps
and then quiets into silence
in the shower.
Then the coffee grinder
along with the bird that shouldn’t be
here just after Candlemas.
I wouldn’t expect him until Spring.
Poem: Injury Roadsong
0Dominique Larntz * February 9, 2012
Injury Roadsong
Take your hand
and the rest of yourself
and hold me here
where I am mortal.
Tell me again
that you know
the same truth as I.
In youth, we have glimpses
of our singularities.
However, these injuries of age
engage a handsome brake
in our soul’s engine, giving us
our own acceleration rate
and there is no speed limit
imposed anymore.
I can finally slow down,
ignore the lines,
get off the road.
Poem: I Am Moss
0Dominique Larntz * February 8, 2012
I Am Moss
Tempted again to exacerbate my need
to reach heights I was never made to reach,
I would like to remind myself
that moss’s weathering process is what
made our earth’s atmosphere cool,
absorbing a planet’s worth of carbon dioxide
and cutting our temperatures in half.
In case I think I need to be seen from space
instead of cling to the solidity of rocks, let me
turn to the truth of what is right beneath me
and when I wonder why I can only breathe
at a lower altitude and why why I have to be
so low in this life when I would like to believe
I am as cherished as a begonia or a sequoia,
let me remember the security in being
close to the earth.
Let me hum quietly with
this feeling that forms
an intimacy with life,
more solid than a bloom
and more withstanding
than a tall tree trunk.
So it’s not attention I need to complete this mossy feat;
what I need is the transformation of heat into coolness
to form an atmosphere for evolution. We moss are making
the future environment with each of our small reactions
and our grounded and giving florescence.
Poem: Corporate Man
0Dominique Larntz * February 4, 2012
Corporate Man
He’s not thinking; he’s just working.
In the late middle of his shift,
he waves his hand and doesn’t look up
and a symphony of technology erupts.
He’s deeply inside his task
and does not appear to hear and see
the elegance or beauty or magic
in his newfound capabilities.
He doesn’t compute the trade-offs
from magical maneuvers like that.
He keeps the books abstract,
like the rest of the world,
while he depletes resources
without fully accounting for them
or understanding them
or listening to them.
After all, if you take them up
another taxonomy level,
aren’t cows and water
and silicon and human effort
all mere resources?
It’s that abstraction that allows
corporate man to lie to himself.
Pretty soon he will take off the smock
and the smirk that helps form the mask
that hides the constant limbic fear
that drives an existence spent
working working working
to dominate the efforts of others
so fully that he cannot even appreciate
total surrender so he has to kill off
even those who hold onto nothing.
Someday, that man will end his shift.
He will look up at the time, stretch and yawn.
He will gather up his things
and leave his workstation.
You have to wonder if he knows
what he’ll go home to.
Poem: Less is not more
0Dominique Larntz * February 3, 2012
Less is not more
The implication imp flutters around my day like cutting raindrops telling me I should, I could, I might, I would do more more more. There is something in me that is so simple, an umbrella of laziness, that is something other than peace–a defense mechanism of too many hours of television to fight this imp. Only the smallest tasks are done today. it is a mystery, because I am happy to do more.
Poem: Light Dreams
0Dominique Larntz * February 2, 2012
Light Dreams
In my recurring dream
I am a small angelic light
one of many embodied
at this time on this earth
to fulfill some purpose
maybe just to love a little
bit more today
Poem: A Little Physics of Preparation
0Dominique Larntz * February 1, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
A Little Physics of Preparation
The untied shoelaces of momentum
have me confused the past few days
as if I could run forward without
knotting up these sneakers.
There is a point in preparing
when you stop and crouch
to carefully tie your shoes.
If, instead, you slip your feet into
the rubber-soled foot skins
without taking the time
to loop over and under,
and to pull the ends together in a bow–
perhaps thinking momentum more important
than the feet doing the running
or the process steps themselves–
what clarity of experience you will miss
as you trip on the long untied strands.
Outfitted for excursion,
I am almost ready to go.
Poem: Simple Book Binding
0Dominique Larntz * January 31, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Simple Book Binding
Holes are made in the spine.
Push the point through
the outside of the fold
in the center hole
and then pull it inside through
to the top and count
the number of times
you have dreamed
of riding in a car with no driver
or of protecting others
from a mad killer on the loose.
Next tighten the thread
and pull the needle
through the center hole again.
Now push it into the bottom
and note the waking moments
when you screamed at a child
too near an electrical outlet
instead of picking her up
or covering up the plug;
or when you dated a boy
just to go to a spa and get
a 2-hour hot stone massage
knowing you didn’t like him.
Pull the thread back to the center
and knot the two ends together.
This is the simplest way
to bind a book.
Poem: Liar Butterflies
0Dominique Larntz * January 30, 2012
Liar Butterflies
I wonder sometimes
if the collective boom
of media lies
has the wing span
to cause the kind of winds
we saw last Spring
in this desert,
depleting our soil
even further
without any cause
for an increase
in water level.
Poem: Lung Cancer
0Dominique Larntz * January 27-29, 2012 * “Love Letters to My Body”
Lung Cancer
No one paid attention when I was getting dressed
so I put on my tap shoes and smoothed my finger
along the top convex toe after I laced them up
with a little girl’s satisfaction.
In the California desert hospital they
clack-tapped for each step I took
but my grandparents didn’t look once
at the shoes that were so shiny
you could hardly believe they were black.
Despite the widening volume
made by each of my footsteps
along the fluorescent-finished tile path,
the hallways and turns ended
in my great-grandmother’s hospital room,
as cramped and dark as a camera.
Lung cancer was somehow a conversation
my memory stumbled into focus.
Suddenly carpeted in my own invisibility
I had my first portrait of death, too warm,
and full of unopened windows
and plastic tubes I felt I should ignore
as if they were not there–
a stopping point I had not expected at all–
and dense panic in the breath of
my family’s unspoken grief.
An unmeasurable time later we left, and I pretended
this never happened. I did not ask
the thousand million questions a curious child
must have had after such a visit,
perhaps because a kind child
does not want to intrude upon growling adults.
I still don’t know if I felt unsafe
or if I did not know how to ask.
Perhaps there is a time for questions
and a time for toe taps–
and our best efforts to act just right
play very little part, despite
how we choose our shoes.
Now I can feel free to visit with these
serious pictures. The echo of spirited footfalls
linger in my memory sometimes
when I am as quiet and gentle
as a hibernating bear.
I can recall my eight year old girl’s
confusion at unexplained experiences,
and realize it would have been nice
to enjoy an adult narrator at the time.
Now, in middle age, I can project
what it might feel like to take a grandchild with you
on one of the last visits you will make
to your parent in the hospital.
What possible words could you tell a child
about the sacred bond between generations?
There are these inevitables–death and
hospitals and vulnerabilities–
that may shock and dislodge
a dancing, exuberant child
but they will not interrupt our steadier steps later,
when we place our toe gently and then our heel firmly
through the same age as our grandparents once walked.
Poem: Needling
0Dominique Larntz * January 23, 2012
Needling
Let us be free of being
fooled by form
as we fumble a frown
down onto the fate
that has been
plated before us.
That frown–our judgment–is
the very tool we learn with.
The bias cuts will stretch but
you may need to drape the pieces there
for days before you adorn them.
If you go with the long and cross grains
your movement will depend
completely on the weave.
So if you wish to stretch
beyond your judgments
try cutting on the bias
by finding the edge
and creating a new fold
before getting snippy.
Poem: True Love
0Dominique Larntz * January 22, 2012 * “Love Songs To My Body”
True Love
There is a line in True Love
that goes:
You have the freedom
to choose me or not choose me
and when you say no to me
that is my opportunity
to sit as still as a gaze,
with all the urgings and functions
of my love for you kept in
the form of single drops
even though I know
altogether they make up
an ocean.
Poem: Groupthink Question
0Dominique Larntz * January 21, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Groupthink Question
Hey letting go
how’s it going?
I am just shredding
the checks politicians
wrote with their
contributions to me
that I cannot cash.
I am only steeping
in a clove bath of sass
trashing some neighbor
who helped me
really developed me
but they forgot
to cover up their
fracture during
the dance.
So we jumped on that.
We keyed on that.
We held on to that.
Mistake.
Poem: From Pond to Wind
0Dominique Jones * January 20, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
From Pond to Wind
My pond heart
reflects on the effects
evaporation
will have upon it.
Rings from the stories of
hitting stones have
expanded and shallowed
and slowly eased.
Sure the silt could get
stirred up again;
the potential’s
always there.
But the wettest heart faces,
in its later years,
a change in state,
its turning from pool to sky.
And I wonder as I merge
with the air, how it will feel
for each drop to let go of a tide
and become the atmosphere.
Poem: Still Well
0Dominique Jones * January 19, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Still Well
It doesn’t come as a shock to me
that I keep getting visits–
less frequently–
from panic and the visage of pain.
Dressed up still
in their Sunday bests,
I have learned to preach
from them and to them less.
I’ve discovered I am not
descendents of theirs;
they just stop by from time to time.
Since they exist, however,
they are as welcome
in the holy structures of my soul
as any other entity.
I imagine grief sitting there
stiffly on a wooden pew,
smelling a little dampness
from my pond heart outside
and staring through the complicated
stained glass of my eyes,
trying to be silent
as a Summer afternoon,
to hear my
higher self tell it
all is well.
Poem: Regression Analysis
0Dominique Larntz * January 18, 2012 * “Love Letters to My Body”
Regression Analysis
There was a physical tension–
squeezed and dry from deep inside my cells,
where my body was precisely pinched.
This morning I awoke–
and I was so grateful to feel open again!
I relaxed further by asking life to
soak me with good feeling
until I had extra happiness overflowing
like a newly submerged sponge.
Last night I missed a wonderful few hours together.
Oh, we snuggled and smiled–but my outpouring
was only as nutritious for our souls as styrofoam.
Today I feel delicious again.
I made us breakfast and joyfully.
It could have been anything for anyone.
I can be with you only when I am with myself.
The difference is in me; not in what I am doing.
Poem: More Traveled
0Dominique Larntz * January 17, 2012 * “Love Letter to My Body”
More Traveled
The concert of contentment
plays in the chaos
of this day when there is so much
energy and so little focus.
So what if I don’t finish
and I travel a path
on which I help a few folks
and it is hardly noticeable?
And those fellows
do new things for me,
teach me a couple facts,
and I come back
to this same chair,
write a few more notes to you
and you hear some little phrase?
Poem: Slips
0Dominique Larntz * January 16, 2012 * “Love Letters To My Body”
Slips
I am looking
at the bottomless greed
all around me.
It exists in my own heart
even though it has healed.
I have given away many more things
than those I silently slipped
into my youthful pockets.
I don’t even think about wearing pockets
anymore.
I understand now
the other bottomless thing
is everything.