Today is Victoria’s birthday. My mission was to write a birthday poem using words Love, Beauty, and Truth. I spent fun, odd time working on acrostic arrangements thereof, but came to feel that simple and ungimmicky would be best. Here, then, is
To Victoria on Her Birthday
In LOVE we find both Hope and Fear.
The tragic BEAUTY of a tear
Reveals the TRUTH as something felt:
We want, we need, we give, we melt.
Happy birthday, dear, dear Victoria!
My incredibly word-adept poet friend Victoria H. has a birthday coming up. I texted her to ask for three words to use in a poem for the occasion. She answered “love beauty truth.” I then asked her what she wanted for her birthday. She answered “world peace and clean water . . .” I answered, “By the power vested in me as a child of the Universe, I give you Europa, a world at peace and with clean water. Congrats.”
But what I will really give her is the best poem I can do. I’m working on it . . .
I did a butterfly for Beauty, two adult humans embracing for Love, and the profound phenomenon of the Earth-Moon system revolving around the Sun for Truth. May or may not show up in the poem. Stay tuned for Part 2!
Most of my life I’ve been proud of my stubby,yet muscular, legs. I will always cherish being objectified, sometime in the 80s, by a girl in a car, who saw me walking next to the road and yelled “I LIKE YOUR LEGS!!” Long before that, when I was about 8 years old, I noticed that the bulge of my calf helped create a harp-shape in the negative space formed by lying down and resting my right ankle on my left knee.
Kindly Dr. Ash diagnosed me with short/tight ligaments early on. I will always be inflexible due to this. And I was often walking on my toes (we call it that, but it’s really the platform of toes and foot-ball) and I am sure that is why I ended up with heroically-proportioned calves.
Now I note, at first with dismay, and an exclamation of “Holy Crap!” that when I flex my calf muscle, it reveals the crepiness of my 61-year-old flesh. Forever in the rear view are my firm, un-lumpy limbs of yesteryear. The odds of anyone yelling their like for my legs are vanishingly small.
But dismay fades. My legs, bless ’em, have walked and run me tens of thousands of miles. In 1991 alone they ran 1,891 miles. In their prime, June of 1984, they ran 186 miles–more than 6 miles a day, 7 days a week, and this in a hot, hot Phoenix spring/summer.
So my poor skin has been inexorably stretched and strained; and the aging process thins and devitalizes the flesh. There is also sun damage, which is rife among citizens of Phoenix.
Georgia O’Keeffe grew more and more beautiful with each passing year. Her old face, which I saw in person in 1975, was a network of lines of power, a direct connection to cosmic revelation. Her eyes saw into and through all that drew her attention. Wisdom glowed in them, not to mention asperity.
The flesh reflects a life well lived–or not so well lived. Got Laugh Lines? Got Sourmouth? Time, and the process, will tell.
As for me, my “Holy Crap!” of initial dismay is now the “Holy Crepe!” of earned pride.
When Truth and Beauty Got Married: a Febrile Fable
Once upon a time he said Wow are you Beauteous and she replied That’s me and us. He was taken and thus was she, and before Friend Time had much of himself to muse, Truth said I do even if sometimes harshly and Beauty said What the hell, count me in. They lived in a house called Upward, mixed it up in the Upward attic, and nine non-months later Rosie Roseglass was born a half hour in advance of her twin brother Duck F. Yuno-Wadsgudforyu. In no Time at all the twins divvied up the world, inadvertently separating their parents, and a good thing: they no longer got along, despite poetic propaganda to the contrary. The world was puzzled as to why half of it was just fine with horrendous conditions, while the other half was constantly creating and enhancing horrendous conditions. And they lived happily ever after, except for them. The And.
Afterword
1. Grateful acknowledgment is given to Joseph Arechavala for the what-if that prompted this Fable.
2. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the creators of Fractured Fairy Tales, a feature of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, for influencing my child’s mind in the mid-60s. Without that influence this Febrile Fable would never have been written.
3. The illustrative sketch was done on a piece of cut-up scratch paper during my shift at the Village Gallery today. That is why there is faded reversed lettering on the image; it is from the other side of the paper.
4. After I did the sketch I looked at it and realized that I must have subconsciously modeled Truth after Arthur Miller and Beauty after Marilyn Monroe. Funny how the mind works…
One with Clay, Image and Text 