Category Archives: Love

A Freebie for My Fan Club

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

THE POEM IS WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT

What matters is that you smash garlic, loosen its skin with your fingers. Standing over the steaming pot, you lean, nuzzle my shoulder—taste for salt and spice. What matters for certain is that I slice the onions and bright peppers— circle your buttons with my fingers, snap them open, and graze your lips with my teeth. What matters is that when we stir and stir some real thing, ethereal within us, becomes, and our entwined beings, in the refuge of the moment, make us more real too.

I have this poem formatted differently but the gist is the same.

Namaste.

Two Dreams of The White Horse (2005)

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

May 10, 2005

I dreamed of the White Horse again last night. In this new dream I was its master. On my command it leaped high fences topped with barbwire and lay still without breathing in tall grass to escape detection of the mafioso hunting me. When I’d fled the murderers, I strode into the house of The Don and walked directly to him. He was a thin, old man in loose clothing without a single gray hair. I whispered in his ear. The breathless hitmen falling over themselves to reach me were told: “Leave this woman alone.”

The dream that follows is the one I had February 5, 2005, which was my introduction to the symbol of the White Horse. I think this first dream of the White Horse could have been the awareness I had been chasing illusions and this second dream indicated I’d reached some mastery over my life.

Chasing the White Horse –Dream of 2/5/05

I had a psychotic break and was out of my mind for a year or many years. The years were black pages. I had to be placed in a secluded, secret house and attended by several plain-clothes, patronizing nurses. My husband divorced me and remarried a beautiful blond woman. My daughter simply forgot me. My ex had more children with the woman. I saw him and he was indifferent toward me. He said now, with the new wife, he knew what love really was and that the sex with his new beautiful wife was fantastic and meaningful. The most significant people in my life were unreachable, despite all of my efforts to remind them who I was and what I believed we meant to each other. I was totally lost and alone. The heart of my life dissolved. My loved ones had “moved on” and I was without direction. I had been fighting my demons only with the hope of returning to my family– but they were by choice through with me.

I wrote a book when I’d recovered my mind and gave the manuscript to the suspicious nurses reluctantly, but with desperate need that they would see that it got published. They smirked and took the manuscript. I escaped on a moonless night and ran barefooted through cold mud and unlocked several wooden gates to freedom.  I had no idea where I was. The place was rural and unfamiliar to me.

I attempted to be guided by constellations but my knowledge of the heavens was vague. I followed a river until I found a city. I entered a boutique that sold books, wind chimes and sterling silver picture frames. When a happy customer spoke to me I was surprised to learn I was famous. Many people had read the book and loved me but I didn’t know them and they meant nothing to me. I was helped my on my journey across America with money, shelter, clothes and food.

I arrived at my parent’s home. There was a wild, white stallion tearing up the lawn. My father held it tenuously by a thin string. The White Horse broke free before I could close the gates. I chased the White Horse. It ran into traffic and caused a calamitous accident but was unharmed. The horse bucked and galloped through my hometown and breezed into a weird pastel colored subdivision that looked like rows of storybook castles. I chased the White Horse into a house with an elaborate checker-pattern inlaid wood spiral staircase that rose into infinite space. I caught glimpses of the horse travelling upwards but it was far away. I was tired of running, so I climbed the staircase on my hands and knees. I became dizzy from looking up. Space tightened. I became disoriented. I couldn’t tell anymore which way was up and which way was down. The stairwell shut around me like a coffin. I woke up confused and hopeless.

Year Eight of The Writing Life Begins

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

SUN RISES IN A NEW YEAR

March 15th, 2004, our family suffered a loss–the death of my son, Adam.  In my grieving, I reflected on my life and his life and thought: “What can I do with my life to honor him?” I had always believed myself a writer but struggled with discipline, leaving many things unlearned and unwritten. I thought back then: “If I can do “this one thing” to the best of my ability and honor (not neglect) my God-given gifts, then such a choice would be the best way I could honor Adam.” 

Adam’s death, although hard to bear, was the catalyst for choosing to follow this life-path with dedication and passion.  I have grown personally and have had numerous wonderful opportunities via The Writing Life.  Dear Adam gave so much and continues to bless…gone from us almost 8 years. He would be 28 this year. Wow.

And although much of my posting on the Internet is self-promotion, I think it is important to share this story and the bountiful blessings I have had in these remarkable eight years. Self-promotion is necessary because I want you to read my creative works.

I want to move you with my poetry.

I have had many struggles—some from which many people could not recover. I have recounted many here in previous postings, if you want to look back.  Right now I am looking forward which I believe is necessary for true healing.

I am grateful to God-Creator-Universal Force for Good-Power of Love or whatever it is that I do believe in for pulling me through, shoring up my confidence and for putting people in my path who have aided me with loving care, support and friendship.

I am excited about 2012. I am a mother of a 16-year-old who is smart and beautiful. She inspires me everyday.  I am married to a loving, strong and honest man.  I couldn’t ask for more, but for me there will be more in 2012—more writing, more reading, more learning and more teaching.  The momentum is with me as I continue my lifework.

I am on a path and I do not allow much to divert me from it.   

 

Thanks for reading. 

~Clare

A Blessing

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

A Good Fire

 ”A Good Fire“

Blessings for all who are in need, and gratitude for the comforts we have and the life given to us.

~Clare

What has my life taken out of your pocket?

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

I have made something.

(Although it is small and nearly imperceptible.)

It signifies my existence. It signifies

love I have given and received.

It signifies the things I have accepted

and that which I reject.

This lifework took years

and it has worn me.

I rise from bed dark mornings

because the desire to become

more real hunts me and haunts me—

even in sleep—that dark dance.

The desire to create is the desire

to become more real.  It is the desire

to deepen understanding

of Self and Other.

I am ready again, again, again 

to succumb; to give myself

over to the art engendered

within and without.

30 years from age 13

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

I was a bit anxious before we set out–I had not been to New Orleans since August 2005–a couple of weeks before The Storm. It was so good to be in the city again and to experience needed psychic healing by seeing a vibrant, energized city. Maybe it was the great weather but the peeps seemed joyful all around.  We didn’t have any negative experiences. Everything was cool.

My first visit to New Orleans was when I was 13 years old. I went with my parents and we stayed on St. Charles. I fell in love with the city–it wasn’t just a teenage crush–I rode the streetcars up and down the line over and over again and longed to live there when I grew up. Something caught my eye in a small NOLA newspaper I picked up on that trip back in 1981. A notice for a poetry reading at The Maple Leaf Bar. Wow. Poetry. Cool! I was just beginning to write pimpled and hormone-soaked lines.  I BEGGED my parents to take me or let me go on my own. I had never ever been to a poetry reading before. I had never ever been to a bar either but that didn’t factor into my comprehension of the potentially incredible, once in a lifetime possibility. A poetry reading sounded chic and exotic compared to my just up from the country-boudin and cracklin upbringing. I was really messed up when my parents wouldn’t let me go and I considered sneaking to Oak St. because I wanted to be there so badly.  (Same thing happened when the Stones played the Superdome in 1981. It killed me that I couldn’t go.)

My old, fuddy-duddy folks were so lame! So I didn’t go and wouldn’t go for another 30 years.

Today was my first time ever at The Maple Leaf. Today I was actually a featured artist there thanks to Jonathan Penton of www.unlikelystories.org   The Everette C. Maddox Memorial Prose & Poetry Reading held every Sunday at 3 PM in the courtyard of the Maple Leaf Bar is the longest running reading series in North America.  It was a great high for me to read there and be a part of the Louisiana tradition.

We arrived during the third quarter of a home Saints game and the bar crowd was wild to put it mildly. The Saints won and the Unlikely Saints did too. Our readings were sublime in my humble opinion. I hated leaving at the start of the open mic but tonight’s a school night and we had a long drive home.

This weekend in New Orleans, among many things, I experienced the Good that poetry is and the Good it can do. There was “good” poetry (and prose) for certain but I think our group the Unlikely Saints (Jonathan Penton, Michael Harold, Frankie Metro, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, and Kristina Marshall) and our audiences experienced the Good Vibrations that can occur in optimum circumstances when lovers and makers of art gather to expeience creative work.  Thanks to everyone who came out to listen, read, laugh with us. Most especially thanks to Jonathan for the invitation and all of his hard work.

Tuesday will be my birthday.  30 years from age 13, I have two completed manuscripts with good prospects, poems published in the double digits, a strong writing practice and lots of love and good energy surrounding me. This weekend was a circle completing and I hope to widen an (unbroken) circle in the future.

And I leave you with these humble words as a gift: 

Bless you, you who create art. Believe in your craft; give to it as much as you can.  Let it awaken you and be the matter of your dreams—

Your voice is both vulnerable and strong. Care for it. Bring the words which fly madly through you into the world through the discipline to which you adhere.  Share it. Give it another life in someone’s mind and heart.

And follow this creed—

“Each success, no matter how small, in the practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark.”

Clare

 

 

WHITE ROOM

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

The other day I walked into a white room and it was perfection. The wide, wooden floorboards shone. My footfall echoed in soft flip flop-claps. The air hummed coolly. White linen curtains glowed mellow light. I gasped; I felt punched because I recognized something in that clean, sharp room that we do not possess—an order, a becoming that was whole and indelible. (We live in squalor, awash in grief.) Could we be born again? Could we fit into a white, sunlit room of our own? In this room was a laughing wife, snuggling her beautiful son. Her clean-shaven husband entered their white room, kissed his family and sat beside them. There was no hardness between them. I don’t believe your promises anymore— you, who will not build me a white room. How long can I continue to sneak away to motley motels to luxuriate in aloneness, to delineate my own everything? There is someone else. There must be. There must be someone who would build me up bone by bone; fill me with a simple and clear eloquence, and renew me. Such is an interior white room. I am separating myself from myself from myself ad infinitum to find the door to the white room that eludes me and walk through it.

AT LAST

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

A green shadow flits across the wall. I grow old between breaths. The memory of you heartens me. You are the net beneath my aerial act—

As close as we are and as close as I hope we become, it was important for me to get away, to bury myself in cool sheets to stare at the ceiling–rain chattering above.  It was important for me to delineate myself; to work alone, eat alone. It was so important for me to lie awake in bed thinking of the long ago-summer in the south of France. I shyly spread my towel over the pebbles and sand and removed my top.  The old couple fished with nets in the water near me. They laughed and I lost my embarrassment. It was important for me to remember the lover I took—to remember myself young and unknowing.

There is a highway between us and through it we are connected. When you wake miles away, I wake. When a thought of me surfaces in your mind I am aware too of you. I believe in a psychic fabric that connects us all.

I wish I had brought an instrument to play in these lovely, lonely hours—a guitar, a harmonica; or even a great and grand piano, hauled miraculously on my very own back.

I will miss this place. I wish to return soon. I found peace here in the sweet Casita Azul.

Final entry from Retreat Writings–July 2011

Casita Azul, Grand Coteau, LA.

BEING HERE AND NOW

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

BEING HERE AND NOW

I have come here to pray.  I have come here to put thoughts into words, and with words discover meaning.  I have come here to be and sleep alone so that what is not me can come over me, and so that what is essentially me can emerge.

This moment is my absolution—this quiet, this gift of silence that is not silence but a lush response of crickets, wind sifting through trees, waves of soft traffic noises. I never want to come out of this mystical repose. “Save me, save me, save me,” she sings–

RETREAT WRITINGS
July 2011—Casita Azul

The second excerpt from Retreat Writings– I will post brief passages over the next few days.

She Retreats

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

I am happy to be without you, edging inward into solitary unknowns.

I have yet to become the woman who I was meant to be.  I am a mother.  I was a mother at fifteen. I am a wife. I am your wife. I am afraid–I am afraid to touch the core of what I mean to say.

What am I doing here?  What am I directing myself to do? 

I will acclimate to the space. I will let myself relax and give in to its body of quiet. There are eight walls in this room. I am expanding into the numerous corners, filling this whole space with my expansive self.

I feel that this retreat…

 

Excerpted from my “Retreat Writings” which were generated during my stay at Casita Azul in July 2011. 

I will post daily excerpts for the next week.

Clare