Kate Sullivan has written and illustrated two children’s picture books. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in Rush Literary Magazine, Writers.com and The Newburyport Daily News.
Ode to a Teardrop
I am not a poet, but gimme a choice between an acrobatic clarinet line and a piece of dry toast, I’ll take the clarinet every time. Maybe that counts for something and I’d rather sing than talk. Remember the time I had to wipe my tears on the wide white sleeves of my surplus when we sang that Irish tune during the service? Or when we would jump over each other to be chosen by Mrs. Keenan (requiescat in pace) to go to the blackboard to scan the dactyls and spondees of the iambic pentameter of Virgil? Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Perhaps someday it will be pleasing to remember these things. I bought the sheet music for Rhapsody in Blue in Newton Center over a half century ago, when I was a junior in high school and have been working on it ever since - and to think he made it all up! I believe I’ve slipped through life without ever having read a sonnet. What a shame, but alas, choices must be made. Now seventy winters have besieged my brow, but 70 is the new 50 and I’m hoping to take a cross-country trip like my whizz-bang 72-year-old poetry teacher, Barbara. I want one of those little silver teardrop trailers big enough for one bed and a toilet and a place to heat water for tea. I could read my sestinas in little country taverns, then park my teardrop at the water’s edge for a skinny dip before cocktails. “You’re only young once!” my father used to say, and at 70, he died suddenly and peacefully in his sleep, taking us all by surprise. “A gift from the angels!” said one old lady at the party back at the house. I was 34 and wanted to clock her one. Now I know she was right.
Half Light
I turn out the lights and step on to the side porch, just to feel the air, cool finally after the heat has knocked the life out of us. But now we can breathe again, the night air is alive, a breeze coming up through the neighborhood from the water. I can smell the sea or am I tasting it, the clam flats, the lines of sea lettuce left by the high tide, a long curly shawl of kelp wrapped around me in an old black and white photo of my childhood, as though I’m headed to the opera, the slime of seaweed trapped inside my bathing suit. There must be more than the five senses that Aristotle granted us, overlapping in unexpected ways, the taste of the sea, the salt, the healing of it, the glow of my father’s cigarette in the dark evening screened-in porch, the earth smell of the lake, the head-spinning euphoria of love at seventeen, the sight of my newborns covered in afterbirth, then the bumping up against containment. I couldn’t name the taste of it, the gas-light of it, enough to explain to myself why I had to leave. I could only smell the stink of staying, the premature death of it. I can still touch the euphoria of freedom entwined with the twisting guilt of the exit and now swallows gather and swirl in the fading half-light of evening while our little lives, maybe re-incarnated from other ages, other beings, exuberant thoughts, forbidden in my childish church-bound days, but now, everybody’s wrong and everybody’s right and I suppose I should feel lost but instead I feel like the swallows, gathering, gathering to leave this place in wanderlust, longing to go, to travel, to see, to tell the stories while time is passing and yet the sea will rise and fall like it always has, even when I am no longer standing on my side porch thinking about it. I could swim in a warm, wavy sea and never turn back, ride the swells, thinking about nothing and everything like is there a God and what does it matter really, although my aunt Joan was certain because when I asked her Who is God (she was a nun after all), we stood under a gigantic beech tree whose limbs stretched wide like giant arms. Love she answered, without skipping a beat. Love. OK. I get that. New moon tonight.
BLACK ICE
The morning is heavy with the sweet smell of the linden tree. The gentle white-haired lady who walks by my porch every day, stops to say she was in a car accident and now finds out her car has been declared a total loss. She purses her lips, trying to hold back tears as she presses her fist against her solar plexus. But wait, there’s more. Her daughter was fired yesterday. The parks department is being disbanded. The DPW will take it over. “The DPW?” she scoffs in disgust, pressing her delicate, balled-up hand against her ribs again. I tell her I will pray for her even though I’m not exactly sure what that means. Our grandchildren are growing taller than us and are disappearing into their worlds, leaving cherished traces of history. We teach them how to play cribbage. The lady asks if I am familiar with astrology. “Saturn return,” she says, “is particularly bad for my birth sign.” On another day, she told me she had studied Jung with Joseph Campbell in the early 60s. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have another go-around? – to sit in that classroom, to drink in the persona, the anima, the shadow, the self, the stars, the moon, the all of it.
Saturn is a planet of rules, restrictions, and responsibilities. Time, patience, maturity, karma and hard work. Saturn return happens every 29.5 years. I’ll be dead next time. The planets teach life lessons, want us to take things slow. Drink in the woodstoves and the school plays, the envy and striving, the real estate deals and bankruptcy, the divorce, my one-woman theater plays and risky ventures, the love and sex, the secret yearnings and the macaroni and cheese. Other years, past lives, racing, racing towards the future. The thrill of Christmas Eve, the birthing of babies, The BeeGees, Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park, the blueberry pancakes, the warm waves at Horseneck Beach, the old fisherman with the long, aluminum pole, stabbing in circles through the hole in the ice, feeling for the black eels wiggling in the dark mud, the train to Avignon. Jung’s ancestral memories, not obvious to the eye, a merging of the conscious and the unconscious.
From the full moon in July to the full moon in August, the world is ruled by the greenhead flies. Queen Anne’s lace begins to swim white in the meadow. The chaplain sits by my aunt’s bedside for prayer. She wants to know if I would like her to receive The Anointing of the Sick, which used to be called The Last Rites, which used to be called Extreme Unction. The oil at the end. Sounds like a fine idea.
We sit in the theater. The storyteller sweeps us up into his old neighborhood, tells of growing up with sisters, serving cheese and crackers at their parents’ cocktail parties, of going to borrow a quart of milk from the neighbor but staying instead for blueberry pancakes. He tells of the doc who parked his car in the old garage with the green tin roof and the girl who lived in the alley – the one who thought she was dumb but got a scholarship and how he thought she was so beautiful. When he finally got up the courage to kiss her, she smiled and said it’s about time, and how later she died of a heart that suddenly stopped. He closes with the magic of skating at night, on the black ice, with the stars and the moon. Skating, skating, on and on into the night.
A young person’s tour of a symphony orchestra, introduces ten quirky animal musicians rehearsing for a concert. The players include an eccentric hippo flautist, aa farmer-dog double bassist, a prim poodle French horn player, and a hip giraffe oboist, with a self-assured billy-goat as the conductor. Children will have fun learning about the instruments and the distinctive sounds they make. And don’t forget to watch the accompanying YouTube video!
On Linden Square
"It’s the first day of winter vacation and Stella Mae Culpepper is bored. As she looks out from the window of her second-floor apartment, she can see all of the usual happenings on Linden Square, her city neighborhood. There are her neighbors. She knows them all by name—or by the names she’s given them, depending on their activities and what Stella Mae can see from her window. Stella Mae thinks she knows her neighbors but she doesn’t really. Everyone in the neighborhood is too busy minding their own business to pay much attention to anyone else. But now it’s the first day of winter vacation and a storm is coming. Not just any storm but a big, wonderful winter storm. It’s a blizzard! And when the snow finally stops and Stella Mae ventures outside to play, something quite marvelous happens on Linden Square."
LISTEN TO KATE’S grandchildren tell you about ON LINDEN SQUARE :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yQWWFjSIYw
