Meredith Oakleaf
Bio – Meredith Oakleaf
During my junior year of college, I suffered emotional trauma that resulted in hospitalization and diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I don’t romanticize the condition or feel ashamed of it, but realize that I perceive and behave atypically, i.e., process stimuli and respond differently. My emotions and experiences run deeper and wider than those I know and love. I’ve done many types of work: guitar instructor, classified advertising, human resources, teaching. I now enjoy helping aspiring writers. In 2002 I published a novel, Protocol 9, and in 2003, a children’s book (which I also illustrated), A Flamingo Named Flannigan. Interestingly, these works were completed in my “Golden Age” when I was able to be off medication. I dabble in artistic crafts and photography. Love music and dance. For me, poetry is distilled soul. When it happens, it’s almost effortless.
The natural world is my greatest comfort and inspiration.
About these several/severed selves
MWN is walking dead: wounded, diseased, maimed.
She presents a public face for public causes, friends, former students, family.
Her jaw is clenched for domestic harmony, peace.
She notices her tiny angel with lightly glittered wings
has fallen face-down and rights her —
propped against a little smoky topaz bottle —
one of three —
a gift from a secret friend.
There are desert seeds inside.
Suffocating, but hopeful.
They are seeds, after all.
The bottles need dusting.
She stops writing to get her camera.
Photo op.
Someone will care.
Meredith is the creative one.
Bold. Outspoken.
Tender. Empathic.
She lives a life of service to others, to wild things and places.
She shares her passion and despair,
and frets simultaneously for too little time,
fleeting energy, and the rest and quiet she must have,
that solitary time to curl beneath a patterned blanket
on a single bed open to her backyard sanctuary (Pax Meredith),
to rain and songs of birds-who-sing-in-the-rain — mourning doves
and bright cardinals, the raucous jays, the courting ospreys, the versatile mockingbirds — to an overwhelming flow of blessing and love
from far away and far ago,
from just down the street where you live
to across oceans and sub-equatorial.
She loves the world
and hates civilization.
Merry Ruthe is the deep, dark well; the untamed Id,
the abyss, the wellspring,
the child of the plains,
the reluctant transplant;
the mother lode.
She holds and bears and suffers
and rejoices all.
She is dark and reclusive,
and if you catch her in the sun,
consider yourself both privileged and cursed.
She will love you immediately and forever
and you may never know.
Perhaps that’s best.
Miranda is the wise, wry looker-on;
the detached observer,
the last-born triplet. Or quadruplet.
She hides Meredith’s work and messes,
And MWN’s pain.
She engages in little
but loves a game, a quiz, a curiosity.
And mermaids.
She’d like to sweep you up and
drag you down —
then leave you panting on the rocks,
exhausted, exhilarated,
half-dying, begging for more.
But she won’t.
©Meredith Oakleaf 2011
Mine Before the World’s
Precious Yeshua,
you were mine
before you were the world’s:
I would have held you forever,
sleeping beneath my heart.
But Yahweh beckoned you:
the elders astonished,
the priests appalled,
the Romans bent on murder
while our simple people
adored and marveled,
fell upon the earth,
my precocious one,
their eyes streaming fonts
of joy and wonder
What child is this?
(O Gabriel, wingéd herald,
why was I not told?
Could you have better warned
my betrothéd Joseph?)
To bring you forth
in such a place
meant certain death
that through God’s
timeless workings
made us one forever.
©2007 Meredith Oakleaf
Lead Crystal
I am lead crystal:
It is the poison in me
that throws the light
back at you,
glints the rainbow,
and I hate you for
making me feel young again,
then fading away,
you idiot, you coward.
It is the poison in me.
I am lead crystal.
©Meredith Oakleaf 2010
My Place
The good life I’m trapped in
Is me in black-and-white,
pastels, at best —
and don’t give me pink,
I hate it
all girly
and bubble-gummy
and sickening sweet
I am none of those.
I am a loft open to the salt bay breeze
where I glide naked
except for a well-placed scarf,
where books and sketches mess the place
with happy chaos
a faux fur rug
welcomes a love long absent.
©Meredith Oakleaf 2010
Roughly Sketched
Fleeting thoughts visit my mind but don’t stay.
To corral them is like catching a B-52 in a butterfly net.
So there are always writing things around:
by my bed,
in a kitchen drawer,
the night stand,
the computer desk,
in the little pouch where I carry
plastic bags for dog poop
during walks with Miss Brindle Beast.
She eyes me curiously and strains to pull me on
if I pause to jot or sketch or frame a photo.
What was I saying?
Something about the fleeting nature of thought,
the premature death of idea?
So it goes here in the swamp-brain.
There are hyacinths and alligators,
but I fear neither.
They are lovely conclusions —
no, lovely ongoings —
of mind and hope and perception and healing.
©Meredith Oakleaf 2010
Awaiting EquinoxAs leaves tremble shimmering
in dressy hues of death
and cling through drying,
the weakening flow of sap
and at last, when the breeze is exactly right,
fall in spiraling dance, lovely twists and turns,
to rest between the gnarling feet of parent trees,
so are concerns, worries, and alas—even passions—
disengaging themselves from the twines and tendrils and stems
and all life’s complexities, the concentration—
burning colors: saffron, cyan, russet for the last days
that’s all you see now: the rage long hidden
masked by lusty, productive greens
But the fury made them go, don’t you realize that?
And now passion itself departing
gracefully, after all
letting go is what we need to do,
we crones and grizzly-haired wizards,
that’s where we retreat for autumn and brace for winter:
to ideas and dreams and the comfort of
soft moose skin moccasins
and Hopi designs gently woven into blankets
all that hold me close
these days that tremble shimmering.
—Meredith Oakleaf,
September 20-21, 2007
Cactus Wren
passion evaporates
and you miss it
like the desert misses rain
so you grow bristled and bizarre
sporting barbs and leaves that
don’t look like leaves at all
but deadly spikes
and then the ridges and rills appear
like an alligator’s scutes
careful—sharp—
Nature’s way of saying “Do not touch,”
unless you’re a horned lizard
or an oddly browed roadrunner,
or a nervy cactus wren who
says you’re perfect and
burrows a nest hole
near your heart
then you can look up again,
into the sun
and maybe once this
lifetime it will rain and all
the other dry and dormant husks,
long waiting, will burst their joy
in softly waving color,
what delight
for bats and birds.
April 6, 2005
2:42 a.m.
O brother,
bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh,
belated twin,
you died as you lived:
smoke in your lungs
fire in your veins
leaving your bed aflame
crawling for deliverance
low, where it was cooler.
They said you almost made it
to your door.
How could your imbecilic neighbors wait
as windows flew in white hot shards
exploding on your tiny lawn
singeing frail grass
bruising pale roses—
how?
My cathedral, the sky
My table, the desert:
Stone to bread,
Rain to wine.
We gather like small grains
under the mesquite.
Pearl
I’d just begun to grow
out of my shell,
a jagged, barnacle-encrusted thing,
a trap.
I was young, and promise-filled,
when into my burgeoning flesh fell
lithos, a shard so ruthless
it tore a wound.
I lay dying.
In fitful stupor
pouring myself around the rock,
was soothed:
“I praise my destroyer,”
a wiser poet wrote.*
A layer hardened in my tender heart.
I wept, ruined, out of my mind with pain.
Darkness engulfing,
immense,
broader than a galaxy,
a universe, even.
My very blood, it seemed,
poured out again,
over and over that
hateful fleck,
to you, perhaps,
a grain of sand.
I lost all knowing,
down, down into the abyss.
Who knows how long?
Time is a fool’s construct.
Only pain awakens me now.
“How sad!” they mourn falsely
for they would just as soon
go for doubles,
pry me open,
drop another stone and wait,
knowing I’ll revive
to embrace injury
and make for them
something they call
“lustrous” and “beautiful”
something, finally, of worth
and they will kill me
taking it.
CR June 9, 2010
*Diane Ackerman
Untitled
CR 5 October 2005
The merry one you knew
died Friday, August 6, 1976
by her own hand
she loved you
when she summoned help
around 11 a.m.
as the yellowish ruin
of 100 pills
came upthroat
geyser-like
and she decided to stay.
"I thirst."
"You're going to get plenty of it."
No compassionate voice
as gagging, down the gullet
went the hose.
She couldn't feel the pump
but was pleased when poison
plumed violently
and hoped the surly nurse
got her share.
Since then, how many resurrections?
It's not easy to count them
but gratitude flows like honey into velvet.
Some other earned the degrees,
worked he jobs, sought out love in all
the wrong places
landing at last
more trapped than settled
but living
in medias res
child of Grace.
If One’s Life
If one’s life is
her greatest work of art
then I
am surely fumbling with pens
breaking pencil points
erasing the same lines
over and over again
at this point in
the poem
the picture.
My orchestra refuses
its conductor
and plays
in a din
the vocalist
hoarse and bewildered
marches away.
If one’s life
is her greatest work of art
the marble
defies the chisel.
This is
a furious time
a furious standstill
in my life
my greatest work of art.
Kindling Point
A wise adviser
with plastic hair
once wrote
“Love is friendship that catches fire”
(and you would quip
“I didn’t know it could run that fast”)
And so we sat
gazes locked
a pile of twigs and fluff and leaves
between us
Doesn’t seem the gathering
took so very long
nor was it shyly,
but more slyly
and I wondered
if you had Cooties
where you kept them
so well hidden.
2006
Breakfast, interrupted
Life needn't be a garment that fits
too tight across the neck
cutting off air or pinching at the
waist denying
nourishment.
Rather, let it be flowing so that
not the length but the width
of it be the proper measure.
Come then, sit in the folds of my
apron, bury your face at
the nape of my neck, under my
warm, fragrant, freshly washed hair
yet damp and tickling your eyelids.
2006
This book in your hands
You held this book in your hands and
so, briefly,
I touched it front and back,
measured my palm to it,
splaying fingers of my left hand.
Perhaps you gently removed the dust jacket
and ran fingertips lightly over the sleek hard cover
clever: ridged like corduroy
pale gray,
the spine plus an inch
in mock denim
faint blue-gray.
You held this book in your hands
near twenty years ago
(what is time but an interval
between two events?)
and holding this book
in my hands,
between pages 24 and 25
snuggled in the groove
where stitches hide
almost imperceptible
one fine dark hair,
slightly bending hear the tip.
Not mine. Not the dog’s.
Yours, or another’s finely coiffed?
I gazed, mesmerized
as if discovering the sacred
before returning to its secret place
a remnant of you (my choice to believe)
holding this book in your hands.
June 21, 2006
Summer Solstice
Not a-Mused
I am dead, exhausted, trying to sleep—
Muse slips into bed with me,
tousling my hair, running his fingers to my scalp,
massaging, teasing lyric from my brain.
I hate him.
An hour ago, a poem so bad it could suck
chrome right off that trailer hitch:
two old fools with no damn good sense,
meeting in a wedding garden (of all places), dancing,
grinding like teenagers
to some melody he murmured in her neck.
Okay, not grinding; they were dignified and loving and had been
appearing for years to dance and sway in their Sunday finery,
despite midsummer heat and humidity and
catching her heels in the hexagonal tile sidewalk
then leaving each other and heading away in separate cars, in separate directions.
Who knows how long?
It was so awful, I should have called you up at midnight,
and you would have said, ‘Yeah, it sucks. Go to sleep and write in the morning, when you can.’
Thanks-a-friggin-lot, my literary friend.
Furious, I throw off covers
(a faux embracing weight)
and “Fiona” (still resembling a
long-eared rabbit)— a gift to help me convalesce—
now, my ragged alter ego, snuggles comfortably
’til I’m back to try
again to dream a life of tatters and shards and bits of heart
to wholeness.
I storm through the empty house and
noisily assault the keyboard.
With any grace, I wouldn’t be this insomniac wretch
knowing neither her time nor place,
dancing to “The One That I Want” in a frumpy
housecoat, bare-foot and graying,
feeling 17 again, and wondering why he wasn’t here
to feel (almost) 15 with me.
2008
Awakening the Crone
She was faded, diminished, nearly transparent
a mere shred of bark peeling from its tree:
moving only in the wind,
dry as parchment,
anticipating only that final descent
and hoping the fall would be feather-like,
and that she could lie
for a short time
at peace, the sun warming her face
and perhaps, a thunderstorm in late afternoon
to quench her thirst.
She was ready to die even as she lived,
to go silently, without protest.
Then you:
Calmed her fear.
Made her laugh.
Piqued her intellect.
Roused her heart.
Such good care. How could you?
She gently rebuffed your flirtation,
your flattery.
No matter. You:
Chased until you caught her
innocently enough in a ‘farewell’ hug.
She wept for you.
What worth an aging woman’s tears?
What now, upon awakening?
She’s found hunger again.
She’s a living font, a spring in the desert,
your cactus wren.
But…what price. What cruelty.
Life has maimed and poisoned her.
She’ll do the same to you.
Tread wisely, you who dared—
even unwittingly—
disturb her death sleep with a kiss.
For all the Sleeping Beauties and their Charming Princes, 6/19/08
Even the Sand Weeps
Sometimes
even the sand weeps.
You can hear it now
crying out to its Brother Moon
bathed in his light
never touching again.
for Daniel
CR 7/1/10
