working notes #5

Still a little ragged around some edges. Doesn't want focus

#5 working around what happened when I died last week

I begin to wonder if I would have ever really begun life if it weren't for grandmother neilsen. She knew I was real
taught me to tie my shoelaces
taught me what it meant to know bad habits
mine and others

like
theoretical arguments
based on theoretical ideals

Norm's our minister's wife
should have been black
according to his theory

--according to my grandmother---

but Barb the minister's wife
was as plump
as an Oregonbeaver
with nice pink flesh under
her decorative bristles

dangerous
as a beaver
with big sharp teeth
and a mouth
that rightfully frightened
every tree in the Willamette Valley.
a very dangerous tongue


Didn't scare gramma nielsen much
my grandma knew the importance
of reality


She loved my poetry wife
the way we were

"you're sleeping together, aren't you?" she said
upon meeting us the first time.
We had been told by my mother to deny such things
It was such a pleasant meeting
and greeting after so long
a time of being existing barely
on the fringes of mother's
vacuous queenhood.

At least three of us smiled.

My mother knew nothing of loving reality
denied it,
and sort of brushed us out of her life.

Mother could have learned many things if
she had been as brave as my grandmother
who once described the church she attended
as being a giant gasbag
full of nothing.

Granma was so full of uppitey ideas
and a love for earthly medicine
that it was impossible too look down and see her
as being below anyone.

my sisters seemed to view life
as if it were from the top of the
Seattle space needle a
constantly revolving blur of detail.

The other young morse women are boisterous, honest and would knock the stuffing out of anyone who dared misunderstand us lucky Morse men. That's where love is. Right there in the middle of controversy.

Yeah we don't always make sense
You got a problem with that?