shamash says...

After the Party

"AFTER THE PARTY"

You’d think there’d be remorse

or regret

or homesick longing

at least some evidence I was there

 

but really it’s just me, the nocturnal nessy,

leaving the continent

around my neck

a string of grandmother’s pearls

I never should have worn

 

try to spot me, pirate’s eye,

I’m not really there

I’m somewhere in my dreams

introducing the moon to sea monsters

 

wings, feet, scales: indestructible amphibian

part air, earth, water

prophetess neither leaving nor arriving,

unwelcome in her own country where she

once shook the dust off her sandals

of all the the towns

she left

 

and now she has no shoes

 

flying fish-friend, wing-ed fairies

who skim over the dark surface of things

come find me comforted in the weight of water

in the sea between homelands 

 

on this ocean floor

I stand breathing, listening,

practicing my underwater voice

 

©2022 Kat Shamash

 

Image credit:

Illustration from the book The Tuning Fork by Edward Gorey, titled “The Sea Monster - The simple creature was aghast” via.

 

The Way of Tea

"Water can quench your thirst and wine can drown your sorrows, but only tea can refresh your spirit."

- Lu Yu, Tang Dynasty, "The Classic of Tea", 760 CE - 780 CE

While contemporary cosmopolitan coffee shops are known for 24-hour wifi/caffeine and jolts of espresso for high-energy boosts for a better and faster life, tea houses celebrate the slowing down of things: a stepping away from sidewalk traffic into a ritual that honors that which is timeless.

 

Gov. Bill Richardson, New Mexico, and the 7th Hill of Rome

Dusk has fallen, and we’re at the foot of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill. MB, G., and I are freezing in the damp Roman air, so we button up our jackets and prepare to head off to the celebratory street dancing and music promised for the 150^th anniversary of the Unification of Italy.

Rome: Prosecco, Espresso, Caffe Greco

We are not Caesar, and we avoided the Forum, so I can say with confidence that The Ides of March was by far our best day in Rome. After days of clouds and rain, the sun and the moon both showed their faces. We couldn’t seem to tear ourselves away from the Piazza de España and by dusk, we were still there, drinking prosecco at a café under moon clouds.

“How do we rearrange our lives to live in this magnificent city?” we ask ourselves. There’s something about Rome at night, especially under a waxing moon, that causes me to think that reinventing my life and steering it against all the plans that drive me forward is the most natural thing in the world to do. Here, in this city of fallen empires and lovers on Vespas, going against the current of one’s well-planned life seems possible, even wise. The words of Keats, once an expatriate in Rome,

Steps of Broken Stones and Temples

Here in Rome, tsunamis and earthquakes seem as distant as the dated letters of the 18th century Grand  Tourists- the young British noblemen who came to Rome to study Italian art and to carry marble busts and statues back home to England. 

Here in Rome's historical district there are no skyscrapers, no billboards, and no high-speed expressways.  Instead, we walk over streets and sidewalks of cobblestone polished smooth by centuries of moving carriage wheels and the shuffle of pedestrians’ feet. One, red geranium peaks over a windowsill high above the street. There is more marble here than tarmac, and more cafes and patisseries than fast food. Our hotel has ornate, brass handrails and well-worn, marble steps leading all the way up to the 6th floor. In this neighborhood, there is no evidence, thank Artemis, of America: no McDonald's, no Starbucks, no strip malls, no Hummers. Instead: family-run ristourantes, cafes, small specialty shops, and Vespas.

As I walk on the very stones on which Julius Caesar walked on his way to the Forum, 

On Love of Great Journeys and Small Beauties

  You journey to foreign lands for the big things- stores of oil, piles of gold, barrels of spices, land for colonies, wars to win, people to conquer. Spaniards and Brits, Portuguese and Greeks, your history revolves on moving constellations and the spinning needles of compasses.

 

photo by shamash: Moyingyi Bird Park, B*urma (2008)

Oh, the ship charts drawn under a whirling sky; you are guided there through all your mistakes. So many night journeys, Odysseus, through sea storms. So many months without green food, so many miles of salt water, so many lives measured out in the movement of oars, the shifting of sails. It is the quest- the dream- that gets you there.

But once your feet touch ground, it is the tiny things that keep you. The small beauty of a brown-skinned wrist as it weighs the saffron, the lemon grass that grows tall along your fence, the call to prayer, the bittersweet scent of the market, the face of a woman at a window.

It’s your tired feet against the cool tiles of Morocco, the lapping waves, the waters of the Bosphorus against Istanbul on a new moon that reel you in. It’s the wafting scent of sandalwood, the way your knees kneel in those silent cathedrals so alive you can hear them breathe. It’s the cobblestone you trip over each morning on your way to the shipyard, and the broken finger from the door jam, and the way that finger always bothers you when it rains.

It’s the gecko that lives on the bedroom wall, the tarantula that dwells in the drain, that keeps you from buying that one-way ticket back to your homeland.

Of course you still sing the songs from the old country, the hymns from your childhood. But the exquisite words of a new tongue begin to form in your soul. You learn a new love language. You join the fraying fabric of your life with sacred offerings, tiny gestures, small sacrifices.

You become a whirling dervish.

You honor where you are.

With each footstep inland, with each heel dance, you stitch yourself to the land. You sew yourself onto the continent. In the same way your toes hug the earth, you surrender yourself to the weight of gravity. The tide doesn’t pull you out; the land pulls you in.

The quest brought you here.

The beauty keeps you.