Vineyard Girlhood: Emotions Turned Me On....and 3 Lincoln Avenue was the Whole World

...And when I think of you,and all those to whom I sang,for whom I wrote songs and letters or acted out my life..if I can tell you my story perhaps something will change,not the past,but the future?  

That summer I was almost 17. I was living on my own for the first time.I listened to Judy Collin’s  album “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” and the wonderful song ‘My Father”. I think of my father.We were not close,my Dad and I. It was my first summer living alone on Marthas Vineyard and the little house I lived in on 3 Lincoln Avenue.I read Rod Mckuen like he was Beaudelaire.All summer long I played this Judy Collins album as I am playing it now….and Dusty Springfield’s “A Brand New Me” lp and Bobbie Gentry’s”Ode To Billie Joe”lp...and Laura Nyro,Joni Mitchell,Carole King. Though I was a late-comer to those albums (or at least Gentry and Collins)they were constant companions to the summer there.All the adults (at least the cool ones which were the ones I came in contact with) were hippies:anti-war,friendly,warm…it was a new world.There was a commune next door and on the other side a wonderful journalist who was also a master chef.There were record shops on Circuit Avenue,Head Shops,India Clothing stores;incense and tiger balm were necessities.I lived on Dannon Spice Apple Yogurt and occassionally fresh mussels.Phonograph records played in the upstairs apartments on the Avenue and their hallways smelled of old wood,incense and marijuana. We were all tanned and the bottoms of our feet were stained of beach tar. “First Boy I Ever Loved” plays. “Pretty Polly”.
The sun’s light relinquished its hold on the street.The breeze barely made its way room to room,breathful gasps in the heaviness of August.The ocean swell slowly heaved.
Mason Jars filled with gin and limes in a beach-house….sandy wood floors,sheer billowing white curtains at open windowsides…salt and dampness in the air,in the linen, in my hair,on my body.Memory. I was eclectic,insightful,sensitive,soulful. Emotions turned me on.


--As always, for JPP and his lovingly guiding the story out of me.

On Ne Badine Pas Avec l'Amour.......

My Springtime Boots and Pearls:My Barefoot Summer Hills and Fields

enthralled Summer is here.Green trees..blue sky. Robins flying,peep-toads singing,flowers growing.  Balmy window screen breezes… birdsongs and sweet dreams of promise. April showers in June. Vicarige vampyre graves and angel climbing towers..My long-gone grandfather’s birthday.  Springtime in Pomfret and Rice City.Sterling Hill….fields and lakes and ponds and forests. Highground and hollow turning from their gray and brown animal-fur coat to rolling light greens and yellow. Strolls. The fabled old man in the north wind relinquishing, giving a bright face to the clouds and sand of a hill watch beach..the female languid luxury of the southwest breeze. Wind,sky,sea and sand come alive…a spring dream in a cat’s eye. Brown Earth born again. Exeter and Canterbury. My eyes to the horizon as I waunder these ancient fields and hills in my boots and pearls and long black skirts…the smiles of lost love in the patterns of my hemline.The one in my rooftop eyes.The boy with the warm Portuguese heart became the Man who took me home.The dream of love as warm as the soul of my womb…my unbourne star,the colour of sweat..memory centuries old that spills from this mouth,these eyes,this heart and weaves a lovespell of timeless design,native-winged of a fashioned mind,slipping this dark kiss half-naked through rhyme and this blue note of mine in a waterfall yearn for the spring of lustcrime. I am. Daughter of the wind,homeless Indian.

Benidorm Journal: Waking and Walking

"It seemed as if someone sent you to me and as if you knew me we picked up where we left off in another life."
-"Ever Since" by Lesley Gore

.....(I found myself) walking down a narrow street where I heard someone playing Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" on a sterio or cd player high above my head. That song, the memory of that song, the lyric "You are in my blood like holy wine, you taste so bitter and so sweet. I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet...I would still be on my feet." (J. Mitchell)  haunted me and became an animated collage sequence in which I became the central walking figure in this surreal journey through the neighborhood, accompanied by warm, embracing spirits: warm, protective, ancient......
an active animated hallucination, another of my many deja-vus.
Reality/dream now blur but the feeling of a kind of holy communion with the elements of music, landscape, architecture, presence, history and great love continued to companion me.....waking and looking at the sea and feeling an ancient part of it all.
...and...once again I became clearer, more certain, of how deep, profound and what a blessing, this love I have shared with him has lifted me higher.
The strength, beauty of JPP and I together will never be diminished inside me.
Everyday I can keep loving him more than I did the day before.
My ultimate act of selflessness,unselfishness, in the name of loving...loving him.
I could begin to take it in, be present in his absence, really experience what he had taught me, experience love with him right there and then with me, walking my journey with me.

March.2011.

The Guesthouse Window Over The Irish Sea

"I am you and you are me; where you are ,I am. Whatever you find, it is me you are finding..and when you find me,you find yourself."
- from "What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire" by Antonio Lobo Antunes.


A wild, cold wind runs a bitter winter's havoc in the trees and wires,neighborhoods and streets this black night. People slam doors,noisey footsteps on the stairs.
I pile quilts,blankets over me.
I unpack the carefully wrapped photo of him from my suitcase.
I look at this photo of him and laugh and love and yearn and try to stop feeling, to cut quick that sob in my heart. Earlier,I stood in the cold confines of  aeroports...with the phone in my hands. Lisbon,no... Germany?..Paris?..Cornwall?
A ceiling fan...I switch on to fill this room with a constant,comforting sound..a spinning humming....
a vibration out into the North Atlantic night from the Irish Sea to the Massachusetts and Buzzard Bays,from the Bay of Biscayne through the Channel to the North Sea.....through  Marconian tunnels of long distance that echoe in voices that unite in words of love,in a history of ancient ocean winds, the music and sighs and screams of all lovers cascading into the endless unwritten pages of space and stars
.....the re-emerging, reincarnating life of a kiss.

December's Boudoir

Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux
mais c'est notre amour a tous deux.
-Louis Aragon

 December's Boudoir: La Femme Americaine

I am humbled by his love,
by the greatness of his spirit
and tenderness,thoughtfulness.
He is outrageous and crazy and fun
and laughing and dancing,
devouring and strong and willing.
In the width of a hushed word
curls around my longingness
and cradles me with kindness
and fierce love.