The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Breath

  • How to Relax

    No point in pointing to made one’s way
    each momentous breath passes coming
    in spaces between arriving & leaving
    you learn to breathe with the tummy.

    To breathe is to fall loose
    into mattresses of surf
    full of air bubbles drifting
    to shore with a slow tide
    as light as moon goes
    in the sky and on the sea.

    Sitting on the wooden bench under the lilac,
    while Chloe plays in the age-old schoolyard,
    Papa awaits the second coming, not knowing
    what to expect, unable to recall the first coming.

    I will write you flowers
    every morning to read
    with your bitter coffee
    a bright yellow squirt
    of sun oily blue green
    froth on top.

    You sleep with a cat
    whose soft purr
    gives you pleasure
    all the joy of color
    impressions for the day.

    You are soft like warm
    butter barely melting
    down a scone topped
    with a couple of gummy
    candy raspberries.

    The butter wets the real
    fruit jelly rounds to light
    pigment an open place
    for lips to play and tongue – wait
    you didn’t think this
    was really about flowers, did you?

    Here are two flowers
    the one calls a honey bee
    the other falls asleep
    petals open softly fictile.            

    There is so much silence
    hear the rustle of ants
    hustling across the counter
    for sugar and sweet
    stuffs, see the apple
    blossoms opening feel
    the bees approach
    touch the molten lava
    freeze it you can
    but no matter.

    Once we admired multiple
    uses of one another
    of the now tossed
    cast off laugh
    tassels flipping
    flopping bouncing
    from rear view mirrors
    windows all rolled down.

    Now we adhere
    to this new silence
    deafens touch
    asks for something
    that is nothing
    blends with the wall
    wearing night caps
    and socks to bed.

    Outside cold winds blow
    bare branches whip
    the rain’s violence pours
    mercifully out a kindness
    allows for sleep and sleep.

    The rain falls and falls all
    night long soaks through
    the ground walls fills
    the basement rises
    up the stairs
    floods the living
    room wicks up the wallpaper
    and pours out the windows.

  • Belly List

    Belly List

    Sucking on garlic buttery snails, after shooting a Bandersnatch on Crete, drinking a cup of French Alps chestnut-colored wine.

    We had just jumped from a small airplane, freefalling in a creeping phlox sky losing petals over the hot green valley evening, landing somewhere in France or Italy – we weren’t sure our exact location. We unpacked and set up camp for the night, and a local farmer who had seen our parachutes hiked up to visit us with a bottle of his wine and a round block of mountain cheese. And Jack had about a dozen dried Mediterranean sardines, and that was dinner.

    “Serpent slug sardine?” the winemaker asked, and we all laughed and enjoyed the evening sun, emerald blue behind the disappearing phlox, the air on the ground still as hot as a bull’s back.

    It was only a week after we had been skin diving off Fiji where I had touched the snout of a shark.

    We came home for a rest and check ups, Jack’s bucket near empty, and that was when they botched the test, and I wound up with a secret surveillance camera permanently installed in my belly.

    A friend of mine, still a stranger to gadgets like cell phones and caller ID, recently told me the most exciting part of his day is answering his house phone; because no one ever calls him, he has no idea who or what it will be. He listens as if boarding a train moving in the wrong direction.

    The Fiji trip was a cruise plan, the shark a rubber fake. The farmer supplemented his measly income from his grapes with work for the travel agency. He was quite the actor. The wine was good though, and the cheese, and the sky and ground were real enough, but when Jack finally had the guts to tell me about the facades, at a McDonald’s with sidewalk tables in Provence, I said next year we should parachute onto the Matterhorn at Disneyland.

    Wasn’t there somewhere on Earth we could go to experience real risk, bare of marketing and sales tourist traps? Yes, of course, and people are dying or worse to escape from those places. You are at risk wherever you are. There is no sanctuary safe from the microbes in your soup.

    Deep belly laugh, a bark. The bark repeats through the sleeping night.

    There is only one thing, Jack says, in the morning, left for us, not a last adventure, but a true adventure at last. To be still and to relax at the same time. Finally, emerging from our middle ages, without even thinking much about it, we begin to learn to breathe.