Beware the Ideas of March

Image: "Through the Fence" by Lisa Gale Garrigues

It's March, uh-huh, and here come all those dangerous little ideas that spring forth like budding leaves and flowers...like hmm, maybe I need to change my socks, I've been wearing them all winter. (ok that was metaphor folks my feet really don't stink that bad :)) Or maybe I need to change my attitude, or my home, or my job, or my lover, or get a new lover if I don't have one, or maybe I just need to change my mind about what I thought I knew all winter and now seems all wrong, the comfortable sock of the mind that I have gotten so used to. It is spring, and the wind tickles the canyons and cactus and astroturf inside my brain, urging me to slip out of my bag of comfort and go forth, into the world, with or without mind-socks, bare-brained if need be, like the beginner, the beginner's mind, the sprout of knowing that only knows to grow and nothing more.

Sometimes the dangerous change of spring is slow, almost imperceptible, like the struggle of the green leaf against the red fence, and then suddenly, pop there it is, doing like James Thurber when he said, "The Best Way Out is Always Through."

So yes, it's time. Time to burst through your red fences and into the open air where the green breathes free,

I will  meet you  there, maybe for a cup of coffee,  not the lousy kind the French call 'sock coffee', but one that has the exquisite taste that only the early days of spring can provide.

Happy Ideas of March.

The Sidhe Have Visited My Room Again

I was inspired by watching a documentary about the poet Gary Snyder at tonight's San Francisco Film Festival to return to my poetic roots and post a poem instead of prose.





(Originally published as "The Visit" in So To Speak, George Mason University, Winter/Spring, 2002)



The Sidhe have visited

my room again, moved the pieces

of furniture, left footprints

all along my floor and walls.

Petals from a strange and sudden

flower still float on the water

in my sink of dirty dishes.

It is morning and I

press my face against the air

trying to see in. The room is quiet.







My great-grandmother was small

and dark, and nobody knows

where she came from. Learn

from me, she says in her night voice

the web of moon cast

upon the earth. Feel it

trembling in your fingers

like a fisherwoman's net, and pull

the silver fish upon the shore.

They are heavy,but they are all

yours, every one of them speaking

an undiscovered language.



There is singing, the Sidhe said

brushing their lips against my ears.

It is all

Around There is a symphony

of wild sound beneath the surface.

Unmeasured and chaotic, the river

is always longer and wider than

you thought, and the bridge is never

where you expect it to be.



The Sidhe have come and gone.

They have rearranged the night

taken off my skin

and folded the difference

into my bones.







My great-grandmother lays the fish upon the sand

the ones with torn bellies and gaping mouths

the ones with knowing eyes

the ones already turning into flowers

She moves her tongue behind her teeth

and names them, one by one.





It is morning, and I am full

of forgetting. I drain the water

from the sink and begin to wash

the dishes. A single petal clings

to white porcelain. I leave it.

The rushing water sings. And I

in my waking slumber hum

the dim memory of an aching

distant music.



The ocean breaks.

My great-grandmother with her muscled arms

pulls, and hauls the net upon the shore.

Silver scales still luminous in dark waters.

Learn to cast the web of moon upon the sea.

And bring the fishes home, she says.

They are all yours.



---Lisa Gale Garrigues





Image: "Sidhe Queen" by Angie Bowen.

Nobody Goes Anywhere Anymore, We Just Transmute

Is "transmute" a word, or is it "transform"? My English is suffering, I'm afraid, after the year and a half speaking Spanish and the occasional pidgeon Quechua.

I am now physically in Berkeley, Ca. Yes these are my arms and legs and this is my head and I do believe I am all here in one piece.

Yet I go to this electronic box..and presto changeo..here are my friends in Peru, Argentina, Colombia! With all of their passion and problems and interests, just as I left them before. With You-tube I can even see them dancing or hiking or doing inane things around the house if they want me to.

In our electronic world, we don't go anywhere anymore, we just transform ourselves into bits and bytes, into emails or jpeg images or You-tube videos and do our work or hang out with our friends that way.
In Bolivia once, I traveled by bus with a 19 year old and reminisced a bit about what it was like travelling for me at her age. "Yeah," she said, her eyes wide like I had been to the North Pole and back in a bathing suit, "You traveled before there was email!"