Fifteen

A woman's outline was painted urgently onto the body of a girl
  in slashing red brush strokes.
She didn't notice then: the adults observing,
  deconstructing meaning in thoughtful stage whispers. 
It wouldn't have mattered.
She had no appreciation for art or animus
  and no patience for the obscure.
Yet she believed all abstraction was obscure.

   Girls mature faster...
 A vague warning when she first heard it,
  but by then she knew it as a vile lie.
Already the boys wanted mature things
  with an urgent curiosity once kept hidden behind oak trees.
Now it slithered up their legs, tangled in their hair,
  and marked them with its musk.

   The girl?

She wanted only to know
  how pigment gave art life,
  and why the woman was so frantic to escape
  that she rained in long, sad droplets from the girl's pores.
She wondered why a vine grew from nowhere
  binding her innards before emerging through her throat.
In retrospect, she will note the moment
and call herself ma'am.

                      ~Mari Nichols-Haining

Twenty-six and Five. (Or: Unscripted)

The day had been foreshadowed by that year,
  so my words were well rehearsed.
Yet I hadn't thought to practice your response.

Then:
  you were curled on my left thigh, your head against my chest.
Two siblings hugged a leg, while another,
  only nine,
  sat beside us. Afraid to listen.

 He knew.
He understood the meaning of the groaning sobs
  that escaped despite myself as I cradled the phone.
I didn't even try
  to learn how not to cry.

I spoke. Then you.
 He's dead-- ...?
 you were repeating more than asking.
Then you deflated into me.

Santa came on schedule one night later,
yet noone tried to catch him sneaking in.
You were all too busy with grownup concerns
too large for me to reach and too strong for me to fight.
And with grief.

Perhaps it was the grief who stole my memories
  of your sixth birthday only a week later.
     I pray I made a cake.
But that entire year is lost to me now
  --hidden in hole dug by the details of a moment.

My senses are my memory.
  Without effort, I smell blackened tomato soup forgotten on the stove;
  I see the shadows in the corners flinching from our grief;
  I hear a thousand pieces of your sister's heart;
  as they fall like rainstick seeds inside her chest.
 I taste the anguish in her questions
  and feel your brother's fear when he pulls away,
Angry and overwhelmed.
 
And you.
 Your tears still cauterize where they fell into my heart,
 watering the animal fierceness of maternal instinct.
Yet as important as wrestling bears (or battling grief)
  is my duty to show you life and beauty
  and teach you to recognize and to feel.
Because life is emotion, anguish and elation alike.

But your tears still fall,
  and I still want to make this a dream and let him wake you up.

I am achingly helpless.
Rehearsing this would have been a mockery.

  ~Mari Nichols-Haining

You'll always remember that first rejection.

In between school, solving mysteries with my best friend, and staining my skirts, I decided I would be a famous writer. I had no intention of waiting until I grew up though. I was seven years old, and Laura Ingalls Wilder was my inspiration.

A month after I made that announcement to my family, I finished a story. I called it The Sunday Run. It was about a Golden Retriever who chased the family car whenever his people drove to church. Every Sunday night, his paws were bloodied and he'd be near death, yet he would break out of the fenced yard to do it again a  week later.

Having recently learned that 'creamed' could mean dead, I thought I was particularly clever when I wrote about the dog eventually finding God after being creamed by an ice cream truck--on a Thursday--while chasing Mormon missionaries on bikes. By the time I finished writing it, the story had become non-fiction and I sobbed for at least an hour at the memory of  the dog I never had. Seeing my red, swollen eyes when I came out for dinner that night, my Mom asked me what was wrong. I gave her a made up a story about being sad for some fictional school friend whose father had died,  not only because I was creative like that, but also because it seemed less involved than telling her about Thumper. I realize now that I probably was not a fun kid to raise.

Anyhow, sadly I had also just learned the word credibility, and I quickly determined I didn't have enough of it to tell my own story yet, fiction or not. But, longing to see my name on the cover of a book,  I switched role models and decided to admire Dr. Seuss. In a single afternoon, I wrote an atrociously-rhymed  alphabet book on wide-lined school paper, carefully illustrated Apples, Bears, Coconuts, Dogs (and so on) to go with the text, then designed and drew a book cover, making sure "By Mari - age 7" was prominent. I also included a letter  that went something like this:

Dear Random House,

I'm a kid who writes lots of stories like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Please  make this book and send me one. I have lots more stories all kids will like!
Love,
Mari -age 7

(At that age, I devoured Highlights for Children and the Scholastic newsletters. Kid-produced content always included the child's age, so assumed it was mandatory.)

After triple folding all 28 pages and using an unheated-iron to crease the whole thick mess in half lengthwise, I crammed it into a small personal envelope, stole far too little postage from my mom's wallet, and secretly mailed it off to Random House. I found the address on the back page of my favorite Little House book.

A few weeks later, mom brought in the mail and asked why Random House was to writing me. After I confessed, she stuck around while I opened the envelope and tried to make me feel better by pointing out it wasn't a form letter. The moment she left the room, I tossed it out. My very first rejection letter. It was kindly hand-written  by a (probably bemused) editor, who told me  there were plenty of alphabet books already published but to keep writing and send her something when I got a little older. I wasn't really upset; embarrassed is a better word.

Thus, at seven and three-quarters, Jodi Foster became my new inspiration and I decided to become a child actress instead. I assumed there was much less rejection in Hollywood.

Of course, by the time my 8th birthday rolled around, I was trying to figure out how to get NASA to let  a kid into their astronaut program...

Modern Words

Because of words
like doth and thee 
fame forgets to comfort me.

Thine and o'er 
and ere left out-
It's my vocaulary's drought.

Dryden's 'tis 
Shakespeare's 'gainst 
with eloquence expressed their angst.

Alone I stand
with does and do.
Frozen bards. No poet's hue.

No poet's voice
sings modern verbs
No poet's tongue speaks modern words.

A rock.
No poet with me stands.
Yet behind my pen--

a poet's hands.

-Mari Nichols-Haining

Lingering distractions

Well, Blogger appears to be back! This post disappeared for a while, along with all the comments. Though the post has been restored, the comments weren't.  If yours is gone, I'm sorry!

Lingering distractions

Between the waking and the sleeping
were the tiny daily deaths, interrupted
by instances alive with light.
Lingering distractions.

But between the birthdays and last days,
came you, and the instances became years;
All while the dying fell to memory in shards
 just dull enough to handle.

I hadn't thought to value the safety of love
until it granted me the refuge of reflection.

I had forgotten how an entire conversation could be had
in the rapid wordless exhale of a kiss,
or how a story could be told
in the whispering of fingers on my back,

or that electrons in the atmosphere could be excited
by two people simply passing in a hall.
I recall,

and am grateful now for more than love
 and moments that span much longer
 than dawn and dusk or a planet's orbit or a lifetime.

Now, I delight in the human ability
 to define the undefinable
 and to believe, with unpretentious fervor,

  in us and this emotion.

                     Mari Nichols 

I'm five hours late for One Shot Wednesday. Here's hoping it's still Wednesday somewhere!

Just more words

Unfinished

In the years before the gods died
the earth spun slowly,
It was a detail he'd recall in his later years,
when the sky had blurred to faint arcing lights.

But in those early Falls, the stars  demanded notice.

On the warmest nights he'd count them, pixel-by-pixel,
from the front seat of a parked station wagon,
until the numbers picked a cadence for his dreams.

But he had lived too much since then to consider
whether he should wonder where they went.
Instead he gave his effort to the forgetting,
as he had much to forget.

There was the night the heavens kneeled
and with misdirected kindness, whispered,
"Go home. You are a man. The Gods have died."

And so he did. And so he was.
Too abashed for questions.

Had he been watching from the Ford
he would have noticed then
the long melancholic droplets converging
into rivulets racing sideways down the pane,
leaving him nothing to count.

But he wasn't watching.
In time, the comets were just a habit;
even their fecklessness went unnoticed.
No matter. In truth,
their final leave was concealed years before

in  Providence's passing...

~Mari Nichols

This was my contribution to  One Shot Wednesday, the Web's poetic flashmob.

Of course, I have a thick skin and constructive criticism is always welcome. As always, I encourage (read: beg for) all comments.

Mother & daughter, a dialogue in poetry

Mari and Heather - June, 2006

5/14/2011: Update, in response to reader feedback:  

I received an email that suggested this would be richer with some context. I appreciate the feedback! As requested/suggested: when I wrote this, the deaths in our immediate family included two infant sons and Heather's dad. When she was 7-years-old,  he made me a widow and left behind our gaggle of half-orphaned little ones. Heather is my second eldest child.

---------

This started when I posted a poem as Facebook note in early 2010. Heather, my talented and beautiful daughter, responded with comments that were much more than comments. Her responses are in blue.

On the Anniversary of a Death in the Family

~Mari Nichols-Haining

You have asked:
     And where are the people?

    Where is the rhythm of hands and feet

    pounding life and beating holes into your words?
You have asked,

although you did not speak those words.

And I have answered with a mumbling sadness

that crescendos into the corners

and fills the spaces between the breaths.

I have answered:

   They have fallen into the face of the leathered ocean,

   swallowed by the different symphony of the desert.

   They died with the lilacs and geraniums and

   conversations laced with caffeine.

I have mentioned the romance of poverty then,

the salt-white Bakersfield heat a painted backdrop

for barefoot towheads, shirtless in overalls.

I haven't told you of the drowning though,

as words rose up into a monumental wave

and swallowed the poets and artists

and lovers. Always the lovers.

But you have asked.

A response:

Heather Nichols-Haining

Mother,

my scarred knees are tired

of pleading to God Almighty

at swollen geranium-covered graves

of too many friends

after maybe too much coffee.

That golden whiteness fills my memories

of the meaningful days

and I swallow your romantic poverty

as if I was starving

(and what if I am?!).

The lovers weep and the children grow

and the poverty disappears

and in the end all we can do is ask:

Where did everyone go, Mom?

The devil raids our innards

as if he's got any right to be here

and even that's better than the alternative,

because at least he pisses us off.

But I've always loved the beach,

(and haven't you taught me that?)

despite and because of the crude waves

and the fierceness of their eternity.

~Heather Nichols-Haining

My response to your response...

 ...my lovely daughter  
                          ~mnh

Oh sweet woman-child,

I haven’t forgotten how to bandage up your skinned knees,

and with more than muscle memory and love

I can kiss away the scars and blood and pain

but leave the grains of sand

embedded

in your memories.

That is where they belong.

Where did they go? My child,

they went to where the whiteness turns to gold

and to a place where little children learn to roar

but never forget to dance.

They walk with you along the shore

and they whisper through the seashells

urgently. Urgently

reminding you

to tell me about eternity.

There, on that beach and in that forever,

the lovers never really weep

although the children always grow.

And every day is meaningful.

Where did they go? My sweet,

they never really left.

We stayed up too late too many nights

to learn this by rote and heart.

But don't you remember?

  (and haven't I taught you this):

they carry your heart with them.^*

~Mom

A response to your response to my response to your beautiful piece of art:

As we wander the golden globe in search of them,

our restless feet munching the ground beneath,

a generation and maybe eternity

between the two of us,

what've we got

besides mocking seashells

and anxious seaside dances?

Of course, there is that golden dust, .^*

that sand stuck in my hair

despite the work of your tireless fingers.

And of course we've got all those hearts,

and the persistent lovers,

the stories told way past bedtime,

the people breathing white geraniums.

I cling to the stories now,

as my scalp once clung to golden sand.

They're dirty, gross, gritty

but I like the feel of your fingers

kneading through my scalp.

I even like the grit.

These are my stories

and my sand

and even the calling of the seashells

lends flight to my soul.

We dance with the beating waves.

~Heather

To Heather (who is one of my most beautiful pieces of art) 

I’ve wondered how it is that we can take
a generation of our time, squeeze it through a sight of thumb and forefinger
to make it small
  -as long as we are one eye blind -

yet still the words, and all that is the story,
overflow these thimble memories.

I love you,  ~Mom

^* Heather and I spent many of her childhood nights reading poetry to each other. Here, I referred to one of my favorites, ee cummings' ' "I carry your heart with me "; Heather recalled  Robert Frost's  "A Peck of Gold."

The monsters have taken names

Back then, the gremlins under my bed were not a concern.
What I feared were the stuffed bears that shape-shifted after dark
and the demons who threatened from corners
where the walls and dust and shadows intersected.

The monsters in the closet were less threatening than empty spaces.
Those voids hovering between the church dresses and Sunday shoes,
wedged between the boxes of clothes I'd grow into
and a summer of childhood I'd never wear again,
those voids scared me into insomnia.

Even then, it was too obvious a betrayal
when a snake formed from the trinkets on my most loved bookshelf
taking my diary key for a tongue,
while my Just So Stories and Little House became angry eyebrows
over stern lips from The Great Brain and Nancy Drew.

Now, in my unkeyed  journal
I've written my fears without mention of closets or trinkets or books.
But obvious, too, are my lies by omission --
without darkness or shadows now
the shape-shifters remain animate; the voids still hover.

While my demons avoid the cobwebs and corners now,
my serpents don't bother to hide among the books,
        and the monsters have taken names.

       ~Mari Nichols Haining

Check out other poetry posted on this blog.

Hungry for more? A host of talented contributors participate in  One Shot Wednesday - it's a online poetic flash mob. Go check it out!

And as always, comments, constructive criticism, and links to other writing are encouraged and appreciated!

Forty

When it was young, The Story wanted to tell her
    with elegant wrinkles in the final chapter.
Gentle lines that framed her eyes with wisdom and sadness--
    not cracks that split her face and whispered of capture,
    nor crevices to remind a gentle reader
    of furrows like dried Arizona mud,
dug by the wild madness of the sun.

By the time The Story became the story,
    it asked the narrator to leave editing
    to the children or to another day. She agreed.
She could let the climax stay, though discrediting
    her truth: lives not plotted intersect long before merging.
She feared only that the gentlest would read
   of destiny between the lines.

Soon enough, a studio was completed
in one bare room marked by a red glass door,
  somewhere between the attic and the root cellar.
There, the story danced on the parquet floor
   while waiting for her to begin transcribing.
Instead she paused to ask, "But who will write the end?"
    as though she hadn't wondered it before.

And as though it hadn't also considered this,
the story shrugged and gently, gently offered
                                                              "Destiny?"
   before mutely deciding she needn't write at all.
With an elegant pirouette, the final elegy renounced,
   it danced her through a vast hall.
Spinning, she found it easy to ignore memory
   as it fell from the stairs and dared her to catch up.

Now danced, she doesn't care to understand
   why life tried so hard to convince her.
Instead she paints rivers and moist Arizona mud
   on glass with colors that wouldn't dare to occur.
She ignores the narrative when it chants
   and she can't find the straight lives that once intersected
   so she doesn't try to paint the people or their truths.

Through gently wizened creases, she sees the irony
  of pigment drying on stiff brushes
   as she tells The Story, climaxes too.
Words pause, hopeful she'll give them consideration.
In time, the end will offer its own narrative
 but she'll be too busy painting life between the lines
   to hear the storyteller.
------
Loosely related: Before this, came Fifeteen.

The Fall from an Almost Empty Nest

(Here)
            "And now for something completely different..."  ~Monty Python

Gravity seems weak, but weaker still here--
     is his grip.  I'm free-falling toward the stars.

     Minutes hail from the rails of the clock face,
     while my boys find time to hand out blue cigars.

     The air? It is thin enough to drink here,
     where the horizon falls away to give me view.
     My girls stop playing for a moment, or a decade,
     to pen an honest analytical review.

     The atmosphere gulps in another year here,
     while paper dolls are decomposing in the lawn.

     I write in crayon on the moon I find eclipsed here,
then fall to watch the majesty of dawn.

~Mari Nichols Haining 

        It's another One Shot Wednesday.

her first untimely death

her first untimely death
   (Or: A teenager mourns a death)
 
She couldn't have known it was Childhood's last night.
So she stood on the wet grass and sang to the evening
as though it was any other.

She should have realized when she noticed,
in grown-up thoughts,
the stars arcing above her had shifted
and were marking time like the hands of a clock.

Then somewhere far away a boy died
and the moon winked a minute.
She could not have known she was waiting for a shooting star
to note the second on the asphalt sky.

In ten hours, the phone will ring.
She will step outside her body without effort. To watch,
because events like those need historians.

Detached, she'll consider it theatrical.
And when she falls to the ground
she'll wonder if the wail filling the room and straining against the walls
really comes from her.

Somewhere, innocence just isn't anymore.
It will be too late for her to know
she's wishing she were outside, singing to the stars again.
Oblivious to the clock.

~Mari Nichols Haining

This is my contribution to One Shot Wednesday - a poetic flash mob. Go check it out!

Newly edited: The Second Kind

After you gave me her poem, the name replaced,
I said there were two kinds of women:
those who inspire sonnets
and those who don't.

And then I laughed;
the tension was too much to bear.
It's fine, I said.
I tried not to sound like a martyr
but thought,
Why have I never inspired
art of any kind?
Not even a charcoal sketch or quick haiku.

Once, I convinced myself I was a rough draft
living  in the coffee-stained pages of your journal.
On that occasion, I didn't mind --
because we were a draft
and romance can be rough.

I am aware of my own gracelessness.
Yet grace is required of a muse.
Still, consider that I have desire,
and what is love without desire?
And here is patience,
because what is art without patience?

I remember now. Again.
And the uneasy laugh escapes again.
I conclude aloud
(with melancholy, not martyrdom)
that if I had been the first kind,
I would have abandoned beauty and art
as just moments.

Moments as transient as our forever.

The grass sighs

Melancholy floats in the wind today.
Memories are deposited by the rippling breeze,
and the waving grass sighs.

I remember when fall winds
brought fairy songs twisting around me
teaching me to dance and fly in concert.

Later, zephyrs nudged me to the future,
before towing me urgently by my whipped umbrella.
Yet, aren't I too young to hear the sigh?

These days beneath the crimson,
I see the dust has settled now as crystal morning frost.
These evenings, no nanny in the wind
and no longing for the memories.
But the grass?
It still sighs.

From somewhere: a bird.

I am cold, my sweater damp,
but I am only here.

Without decision,
I stay to watch a leaf parachute
and listen for the wind to shift

until the sighs fade in to day.

~Mari Nichols-Haining

One Shot Wednesday: A poetic flashmob.

Once Gold

Like Midas in this world
far removed from myths and gods,
your touch consumed it all--
time, the past, then even vague dreams.
In their places
are thoughts like statuettes.
They stare, unnerve me, remind me
that value is often measured differently.

So, once reminded, I think
Perhaps I didn't understand you.
But of course, I did.
And perhaps I didn't love enough?
But of course I did.

It is reflected in the obscene glint of all that is left
unconsumed.
It is in the grime that settles after droughts and dusty summers;
a blanket on the golden of the decayed.

In Passing: For my complicated friends.

A repost from my other blog...

It's time now to admit that if I'm lucky
these are my middle years.
That while watching the obvious enormity
of each morning rise,
this other life I couldn't watch
became the one I'm living.

Before I thought to look, four decades passed,
while people wandered in and out of doubt
and of these years.
And while I thought I was moving
(or knew I was standing still)
I met the people who will become
my old, complicated friends in another cycle of time.

In our complications then
we'll play chess and talk of now with nostalgic fondness
while watching the imperceptible shadow of each day fall.
And if we're honest, we'll admit we're content
with enduring our passions
and with the passing decades.

It's then, I think, that time will stall.

~Mari Nichols-Haining

This is not supposed to happen.

 A friend wrote: 
I still can't believe it. Honestly. All day today I spent not believing any of it. Does that ever go away? I mean,I can't believe that he's really gone. That this has happened to me. This is not supposed to happen.  

Sometimes, I think it would be wise for me to remember my own response to hm:

--clipped--

 You know, I started a response a few days ago and fell asleep while writing it. I'm glad I did, because today seems more right. My answer today is No. It never seems exactly real...
I flipped on the news this morning and came across a story about a little girl who died. Her parents said that right before she died, she was  reaching and grabbing at the air from her bed. When they asked her what she was doing, she said she was trying to catch the butterflies she could see everywhere.
Ron died 15 years ago this December, yet hearing this made me wonder what he saw as he died. It left me crying. The kids are at a sleepover this weekend, so I did the 'talking out loud' to him thing I seem to do when I'm alone and get into moods like this. 
My secret craziness goes deeper. This is how sick I am: sometimes, I'm mad at the world that people can give birth to 8 preemies in a small hospital in PA and every one of them survives and are healthy. But my one preemie, who wasn't even THAT early, couldn't make it out of a top notch Children's Hospital in LA. WTF? I'm not saying I wish anything had happened to other babies, I'm just pissed about the randomness.
So my answer is that the bad days go on forever. But they become a comfort, because to hurt this long means I've loved intensely. To have loved and lost is better than having never loved at all is really true on a much deeper level than most people realize. To have known the kind of love that can touch you randomly on a Saturday morning 15 years later is astounding. It's weird to be so pained and so grateful at the same time.

So, I hope you're having better days. But I don't hope you're not sad anymore. And I hope that if you're dating again, you're having fun and enjoying the people you meet for who they are; but I don't hope it erases the joy of loving Antonio or the pain of losing him.

And I really hope I explained myself well enough that my last paragraph made sense and doesn't sound like I'm just cruelly wishing you endless pain.
 --------

The Grown-up Me

Feb. 2009

Growing up taught me there are no gallant steeds.
White horses, though they exist,
just aren't commonplace around here.
And though I could fill my rooms with round tables
the knights I hoped would visit
all died in the plague.

I understand that sleep can not be cast by spell;
a kiss can not restore the tragedy of death;
a frog is a frog, or more likely --
a mistaken toad. And warts are caused by virus.

I've learned
wicked witches aren't always ugly,
the bad guys don't always wear black,
and poisoned fruit is sold in darkened doorways
by scruffy fallen boys.

Growing up taught me that crystal slippers slice my heels;
ball gowns suffocate;
wolves don't take the time to huff and puff
(nor are they limited to forests);
and mirrors only talk in whispers
to those who listen.

I have learned there is a genetic law:
once born a duck you'll never be a swan.
And while the mallard is a fickle lover,
it is the swan that mates for life.

Growing up taught me, most importantly,
that fairy tales are absolutely never shelved
with non-fiction
between biographies and history.
Which is where you will someday find

the grown-up me.

~mnh

In Time (revised)

There was a time 

...when I needed to name the moments
   so each could be filed in a memory
   that is too worn and weary to recall without cues--

...when my throat, inflamed and rough,
   couldn't hold my voice;
   when doubt strangled my thoughts before words formed--

       --Because minutes don't pause to be mourned

I keep postcards from the past in a worn leather briefcase.
They were ribboned and packed only after
I did my business with time.

Now, names I assigned to the moments then,
fall into my head
as dead as the browned autumn leaves.
And as easy to ignore,

         --in time.

~MNH

Your Photo

You are frozen in a frame above the mantle.
Your face thin, I notice now; but though it seems
not for the first time.

There are things I want to ask you; when I'm alone
I do. You haven't answered me yet-
this is the first promise you've broken.

It's been too many years for me to keep talking
to ink behind glass.
This photographic love must end.

My sweet memory. I should forget.

The 5:00 pm. haiku, after a dreary day of editing:

I hate this red pen.
These words are not mine, and yet
I'm forced to own them.