full speed

we gather around the table
eating chicken off the bone listening

to the old man tell us stories

the snow
melting off the mountains
comes toward us now
full speed

#katyamills

holding on

prints in the snow

breath frozen on a pane

of glass was as close as we

got all winter

i loved you even more i

clung like an icicle

to the photograph. your

words like a child drawn

on the back

#katyamills

slow

Slow falls like snow. Not pelting just touching and melting. Slow is not weak or worthless or lazy or wasteful. Slow is not what they say in our fast culture USA. Slow takes the time to truly understand. Is seen and sees. Patience. The world doesn’t know what it wants.

snow me over

snow me over a lather of denial

There is always me and my mindbodyspirit. The spirit cannot be touched nor seen, yet is the cornerstone of the experiment that is me… this truth left the subunified districting in the hands of the mindbody to battle it out for supremacy. The mindbody was not unlike (me) at all, and so much the same it made my mind a furious, raging llama, so furious I decided one day to call the stumbling, hulking mass of idiot flesh and networks of tubes full of bloody hell, something other than what it truly was. A vivid space I typed between the subunified essence of me, smiling when the typewriter rang its little bell. The angels are calling, the angels are calling! The message is here.

A pond of correction fluid grew larger as time (another construct of mind yet several epochs before, the mind says with conviction) went on. The result was the contemptuous subdistricting between which a fence then wall was constructed to keep the obviously related, deep-rooted elements, superficially apart. The divisions grew stronger and the roots were cut off, and soon the sea of humanity institutionalized the damn thing. Children like me were encouraged at a terribly young age (despite our knowing better) about the mind and the body, distinct from the spirit. Groupings of disparate parts could then be made possible for the sake of fun and games. Mindbody. Mind-body-spirit. Psychosocial. Bio-psycho-social-spiritual. Each part could be ritually washed and cleaned and manipulated per se.

My mind had me over the ropes, snowed over a lather of denial, in a plate glass window of time. It was truly obscene! Which I only realized when I finally woke up to the truth.

patterns

half out my mind
i fall
down again
into my own – imprint – in
the
snow

(you gave me) your word

i said what
you heard
the cat killed
the bird

the sprinklers wave
water wands

they
cross us
in third

i don’t really know
the thumb
told
the toe

decidedly situated
at odds
in
the snow

the bird killed
the cat
now how about
that?

the fingers crossed
toes and the
half

and the
half

had to laugh
having heard just one
third of the
word

you gave me
your word

you said what
i heard now
say…

what good
was that?

snowed in and data mined -ii)

My grandmother sold antiques out of her big red barn attached to her little red home. This was long after my grandfather passed away. She lived the remainder of her years in Melvin Village, which was across the lake from us. My father would go down to the dock in the summers and turn on the blower in our powerboat, which meant the engine had five minutes before ignition and my brother, mother and I had five minutes to get our sandals and shirts on,  run down, take the lines off the cleats, push off, and jump in. Then on our way past the 20 mile bay en route to Melvin Village.

The lake was wide open as the sky back then. Kinda like the landscape created by the internet. Both could be dangerous, too. Lots of rocks and shallows needed be marked off by buoys, and many boats still got lost at night, and some still struck the jagged glacial remnants jutting up from the earth but hidden below the surface of the water, and some got hung up and a few still sank. Often the larger berths, the sightseeing boats whose lineage had been photographed and put on walls behind glass, ended up driftwood floating across the broads and past rattlesnake island.

Every winter, the lake froze over completely. At the height of winter it was often so cold we could drive out on the lake in a Jeep, and the ice was thick enough to hold us. We would skate the frozen lake, and dad would load our arms full of pine wood he cut down and we stacked in the summer, by the woodshed. I remember holding my arms out like a forklift, and he would ask is that enough? and I would say, just one more before heading back to the house and dropping the wood in the bin next to the giant hearth, for the great fires we would build to keep us warm at night. We would need to be prepared for the storms, the nor’easters, which powered over and knocked down trees and power lines, snowing everyone into their homes.

I remembered all this in great detail, after watching the news this morning. I turned off the television and sat out on my back porch thinking about it. I closed my eyes and tried to feel that feeling I felt so long ago, of being snowed in. I live in California now, so it has been a long time. But the feelings remain strong. The quality is insular. With all that snow around you, five or six feet high, the home becomes  even more protective and warm, like there’s an extra layer of that fluffy pink stuff they packed the walls with back then, along with  asbestos covered piping. Reminded me of cotton candy we got at the fair.   tbc

by Katya W. Mills  @ katyamills.com  06/13