Andrea Janda | littleREDelf
I looked upon his face through flame
and knew the shape, the curve of mouth
the bottomless eyes,
the puncture wound
left by his name,
but still the ache like silken hands beneath
a sleeve that only brushed my cheek
and how can I love
so deep
a boy who sings
as though to weep
and gather all
my heart in knots
of red red silk,
to wring it white and colorless
and sting my taste against
the other strangers I have never met.
~ Andrea E. Janda
I spent a lot of time today.
I put on stockings
. . . . . . and I never do that
And when I laid myself down on that long white canvas,
she traced my body
in all the fine details I liked and admitted
and those I could not see.
And we laughed and remarked
all those points in between where my fingers jagged
and how much I liked the empty slopes to be touched.
and how the pencil had a way of making points and triangles
where there were none.
The first time I tried this exercise
was in the 3rd grade.
There was no ginger navigation,
there were no points no hips no breasts to avoid.
And Timmy, did a fine job, and didn’t make my head too big.
Timmy with a beautiful brown birthmark
on the side of his cheek.
I called it Jupiter’s spot once.
He blushed and took it as a compliment.
When my outline was finished, I rolled it out
and hung it on the wall
And I began to affix things to it.
Scraps of poetry, beer caps, pictures,
Miniature snapshot flashbulb memoirs,
Tiny swatches of time I inhabited
Meaningful, in all probability,
only to myself.
Once my body was full of all that I was
I hung it on the wall at school for all to see.
I existed for a time in two places.
And it was disconcerting to see me everyday like that,
People looking at those scattered pieces of me,
unraveling me,
knowing me.
I felt naked and under scrutiny,
but I grew comfortable.
And that one thoughtless boy,
One of a string of so many like him,
I caught him pressing my profile
Waiting for a class,
I had to ask him, If he wouldn’t mind so much as to move
. . . . . . .
I’d rather he read me,
than lean on me.
You know yourself to be wise,
but it is a strange thing to resist:
to draw her up close,
to peel her back, a red skinned mango
the nectar at your mouth – stingy sweet.
fruit flesh untasted.
it is a strange thing to resist:
to be good and singular and granular
a quick drawing of sugar
but briefly . . .
like tea with honey.
He says, “You are awake.
to those waking, you are irresistable.
to those sleeping, you are beyond understanding.”
to be the Dream Brother,
or the Daughter of Stones.
seven over and over again . . .
knowing the joining would be
perhaps the missing voice
within the voice.
but they all come with songs
they hear you and join in
at all the right echoes.
“You are awake.”
We know where we belong
in those fleeting drams of time,
we take the hands, tighten down like locks
and know what it is to never forever BE.
To be tasty and know how you taste.
Turn those circles outward now,
ripples, vibrations in the waterglass
be sacred at every moment
throwing hands into a fire that understands.
Breathing into red connections —
tables are set for these strange gatherings,
might you . . .
shamelessly partake
of mangos and tea with honey.
Might you?
~ Andrea E. Janda
i went to bed as the sky was slipping open,
a silver blade across a dark canvas
the sun – a dusky, milk-white pearl,
a burnished tin coin
and the patter of rain.
i woke up late afternoon
a warm ivory cocoon
decided not to burst wings
but lay still for 2 hours
assembling dream collages
rewinding conversations
re-writing myself
two paperweight cats
held me warm and fast.
i had explained to him
that waking up is like being born
sometimes i come out screaming
sometimes i need more pushing
sometimes i cry . . .
i called three friends
from under the blanket-tent
with sleep and recline in my voice
and they asked if i were ok
and i declared softly
with a honeyed smile in my voice
that i was
indeed
fine.
in a slip of black satin
i padded the stairs, cats in tow
and made eggs and pancakes
for dinner
with peanut butter and toast
and drank orange juice slowly
marveling how far it had come
to be here now.
how far would I have to travel
to move this slow every day
in a purposeful dreamstate
consciously delicate
instinctually incoherent
to share a wishbone prize
while never having broken
a thing.
~ Andrea E. Janda
upon leaving Manhattan
the Christmas tree at the curb
wearing tinsel like a greenstick girl
who is showing her silvery gray
and beside it after midnite
a Champagne bucket.
the Holidays are over . . .
and now the winter
truly begins.
but I will find myself
in Tucson in 4 days,
stomping through the desert
sweating & trying to make sand
and cactus flower
visually appealing.
~ Andrea E. Janda
Years ago i read “Death of a Moth” by Annie Dillard and was so struck by its communal feel for nature and humanity and mortality. The essay appears in a collection called “Holy the Firm.” One interviewer described Dillard’s themes as “beauty and cruelty, intimacy and horror, extravagance and waste” and i think that puts it succinctly. There is ecstasy and suffering in her fluid, lyrical, mystic and intensely contemplative words. I think about that now as the seasons change and I find myself saddened by the images of nature dying off and bedding down for sleep. I want to tell of it, reflect on it, write it – not take its picture . . . but i may reconsider if the composition calls out.
Annie Dillard was stricken with a near fatal attack of pneumonia in 1971. Years after she recovered, Annie decided that she needed to experience life more fully and so spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, taking up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with “one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person.” For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God.
She spent her time outdoors, walking and camping, being there with nature in an area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and a myriad of animal life. When she was inside, she mostly read. After those four seasons, Annie began to write about her experiences there by the creek (challenged to write a book herself because the one she was reading at the moment was particularly bad).
She started with a journal, then transposed it all to notecards until the journal reached 20-plus volumes. She was timid about presenting what would become her book publicly and even considered publishing it under a man’s name. It took her about 8 months to turn the notecards into the Pulitzer-Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She was so absorbed that she spent 15-16 hours a day writing, cut off from society, world news, living on coffee and coke. She lost 30 pounds and all of her plants died. After her Pulitzer win, all those who had rejected her works before she was famous, now clamored for her poems.
Seeing as how much i do love my winged creatures, and how much I admire Annie Dillard and her experience with nature and writing, i thought i would share the above linked title to the short story and the excerpt below, written in 1973 and printed in The Atlantic Monthly in 1977.
ENJOY!
…..
The Force That Drives the Flower
by Annie Dillard
…..
I wakened myself last night with my own shouting. It must have been that terrible yellow plant I saw pushing through the flood-damp soil near the log by Tinker Creek, the plant as fleshy and featureless as a slug, that erupted through the floor of my brain as I slept, and burgeoned into the dream of fecundity that woke me up.
I was watching two huge luna moths mate. Luna moths are those fragile ghost moths, fairy moths, whose five-inch wings are swallow-tailed, a pastel green bordered in silken lavender. From the hairy head of the male sprouted two enormous, furry antennae that trailed down past his ethereal wings. He was on top of the female, hunching repeatedly with a horrible animal vigor.
It was the perfect picture of utter spirituality and utter degradation. I was fascinated and could not turn away my eyes. By watching them I in effect permitted their mating to take place and so committed myself to accepting the consequences—all because I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted in on a secret.
And then the eggs hatched and the bed was full of fish. I was standing across the room in the doorway, staring at the bed. The eggs hatched before my eyes, on my bed, and a thousand chunky fish swarmed there in a viscid slime. The fish were firm and fat, black and white, with triangular bodies and bulging eyes. I watched in horror as they squirmed three feet deep, swimming and oozing about in the glistening, transparent slime. Fish in the bed!—and I awoke. My ears still rang with the foreign cry that had been my own voice.
Fool, I thought: child, you child, you ignorant, innocent fool. What did you expect to see—angels? For it was understood in the dream that the bed full of fish was my own fault, that if I had turned away from the mating moths the hatching of their eggs wouldn’t have happened, or at least would have happened in secret, elsewhere. I brought it on myself, this slither, this swarm.
I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.
…..
for the rest of this story . . . go HERE.
you have a new name
you NEEDED a new name
and maybe the old one
hung off you like a bad suit.
so did you ever wish
you were named differently?
or just gimme nonsense.
do you remember your favorite book as a child?
either one you liked having read to you,
or impacted you as you read to yourself?
i liked pretty much EVERYTHING by Shel Silverstein:
The Giving Tree
A Light in the Attic
Where the Sidewalk Ends
and i enjoyed Judy Blume.
you?
while my camera is charging
while i am re-charging.
i’ll just start scribbling the words down,
and deliver prose.
i always liked writing.
pictures are not provided –
well . . . they are coded in symbols
that make words
that hang together in sentences
and create meaning
one has to invent the image in their head.
i hope you can see
what i saw.
everyone you come in contact with needs something from you.
they don’t always know what it is,
but they know you have something for them.
the balance occurs when you learn to embrace
that which will move you forward
those who will genuinely love you
and inevitably to learn to say NO.