It was a strange night. Phone call before I went to sleep with the news that someone I love who has been in the hospital for several days now might need a serious surgery. I slept just below the surface waiting. The phone rang and I was wide awake talking to my partner across the miles as she told me that S was out of surgery- had survived the surgery but it looked bad inside. They are thinking pancreatic cancer.
I woke up this morning, checking my phone- no calls missed. I'm still watching my phone obsessively, wanting it to ring, wanting it not to ring. Wanting to hear that it's something else, that her pneumonia is better, her kidney's aren't failing that she's younger now. She's so very good. One of the very good women I've known who raised her children and loved other people's children with compassion and acceptance in a way that some parents do. Maybe lots of parents do. The people who have passed away in my family have all been difficult people. These are people I mourn (sometimes)- I did not mourn my grandfather- the patriarch of this diseased branch of our family tree. But I mourn my mother- though it's what they call a complicated grief. I love S with a wide open love. This will not be a complicated grief. Just clean ache and longing. Just wanting to be across the table from her, laughing. She's a funny woman. She's smart. She surprised me and delighted me when the prize for donating for my training that she claimed was an erotic story. How I love the women in my life who surprise me.
So I'm still thinking about phone calls in the middle of the night. It always seems like a bad omen. I always wonder who is injured. Who has died. Sometimes it's a wrong number, a drunk dial from an old lover, a silent call- a heavy breather. What happens when the phone rings in the middle of the night for you, or a character?
a poem with a different sort of phone call...
A Phonecall from Frank O’Hara
“That all these dyings may be life in death”
I was living in San Francisco
My heart was in Manhattan
It made no sense, no reference point
Hearing the sad horns at night,
fragile evocations of female stuff
The 3 tones (the last most resonant)
were like warnings, haiku-muezzins at dawn
The call came in the afternoon
“Frank, is that really you?”
I'd awake chilled at dawn
in the wooden house like an old ship
Stay bundled through the day
sitting on the stoop to catch the sun
I lived near the park whose deep green
over my shoulder made life cooler
Was my spirit faltering, grown duller?
I want to be free of poetry's ornaments,
its duty, free of constant irritation,
me in it, what was grander reason
for being? Do it, why? (Why, Frank?)
To make the energies dance etc.
My coat a cape of horrors
I'd walk through town or
impending earthquake. Was that it?
Ominous days. Street shiny with
hallucinatory light on sad dogs,
too many religious people, or a woman
startled me by her look of indecision
near the empty stadium
I walked back spooked by
my own darkness
Then Frank called to say
“What? Not done complaining yet?
Can't you smell the eucalyptus,
have you never neared the Pacific?
‘While frank and free/call for
musick while your veins swell’”
he sang, quoting a metaphysician
"Don't you know the secret, how to
wake up and see you don't exist, but
that does, don't you see phenomena
is so much more important than this?
I always love that.”
“Always?” I cried, wanting to believe him
“Yes.” “But say more! How can you if
it's sad & dead?” “But that's just it!
If! It isn't. It doesn't want to be
Do you want to be?” He was warming to his song
“Of course I don't have to put up with as
much as you do these days. These years.
But I do miss the color, the architecture,
the talk. You know, it was the life!
And dying is such an insult. After all
I was in love with breath and I loved
embracing those others, the lovers,
with my body.” He sighed & laughed
He wasn't quite as I'd remembered him
Not less generous, but more abstract
Did he even have a voice now, I wondered
or did I think it up in the middle
of this long day, phone in hand now
dialing Manhattan
Anne Waldman, “A Phonecall from Frank O’Hara” from Helping the Dreamer: Selected Poems, 1966-1988.Copyright © 1989 by Anne Waldman.
Any lines from the poem resonate? You can pick a line or a phrase or a word and start from there.
Or here-
The phone rang in the middle of the night...
***
She just knew....
***
The breather on the phone wasn't ...
***
Is today a writing day or a day of rest. Will there be quiet in your day? An afternoon nap?
Writing every day works for some people and taking time off works too. There is dreaming, visioning, seeing, wondering- that's all part of writing too.
Whatever your day is- I hope it's good to you and your creative.
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