We’ve just come back from three blissful weeks at Blackwater Lake. We’re already figuring out how to clear the calendar for eight weeks in 2017. That will be the longest stretch of time I’ve spent there since I first began going with Bill in 2008. We were dating then, and he told me he owned an island in Canada. I was immediately dazzled by the prospect of a picturesque cottage with evening cocktails and balcony views.

True love ensued. Good thing, too, as Dickinson Island, when he took me there for my trial run, turned out to be a one-acre pile of rock with pine trees and no plumbing. No electricity. No clean linens. No exit without a boat. Discovering the dead mouse in the water bucket could have been the end of the romance. But no.  

I passed the “test” and eventually married the man. Dickinson Island, it turns out, is where my Muse resides. When I go there, I write stuff. It is a refuge off the grid, where stillness creates big spaces for thought.

SAPPHICS AT BLACKWATER LAKE
 
Early afternoon and the wind goes softer.
Only poplar leaves have a way to whisper.
Somewhere waves are lapping against a rowboat,
thumping a rhythm.
 
Hear it? Here’s the poem you think you came for,
speaking artless syllables. Never mind your
inspiration. Something is making music
better than you are.
 
Song goes deep at Blackwater Lake. The burr of
insects eating into the fallen pine trees,
sparrows, bumblebees in the tangled bushes
back of the cottage.
 
You can hear the hummingbird long before she
swerves in view, a thrumming of small propellors.
Listen. Listen. This is the earth’s own poem
perfect and wordless.
 
Barbara Loots
Published in I-70 Review Summer/Fall 2013

Back in the 70s when I first began publishing poems, I subscribed to a “little magazine,” a poetry journal called The Lyric. I still do. This magazine, now approaching its 100th year in publication, calls itself “An Oasis in an Arid Age”–referring to the fact that it prints mainly traditional poetry, often written by people with other things to do in life, like working as accountants or engineers or medical technologists. No academic stuffiness here at all.

In the pages of The Lyric, I met a poet named Gail White. I wrote her a fan letter–still in the days of snail mail–and received an immediate reply. How many hundreds of letters have shuttled between Kansas City and Louisiana in the decades since then! In recent years, we’ve fallen back on the expediency of e-mail. Too bad, as capturing the “literary correspondence of two poets of the late 20th century” will be made that much more difficult for some future graduate student. Never mind. There’s plenty of material available. Gail and I clicked, as poets and as friends. By now we’ve met in person on a few occasions, and we’re still friends.

In her most recent book, Catechism, published by Kelsay Books/White Violet Press Buy Here , she includes a “joint effort”–a poem created when Gail invited me to add the second stanza to her first.

BROTHER DOG, SISTER CAT

 

Dog is dumber than a TV husband,
trusting as a cuckold in a Shakepeare play,
faithful as a nineteenth century butler,
sentimental as a drunk on New Year’s Day.

 

Cat is cagey as a fortune teller,
loopy as a starlet in a nineteen-thirties role,
sensuous as smoke around a stripper,
elusive as conviction in the soul.

 

Gail White and Barbara Loots

Reproduced by permission

 

You can’t cook up the magical properties of a friendship like this. It just happens. Gail and I have sometimes bemoaned the vagaries of fame (never mind fortune) in the literary community. But we’ve never failed to encourage, enlighten, and entertain each other as we pursued our poetry lives.

So…write a fan letter today. You never know.

There’s a (pretty stupid) quip you may have heard: “Inside every fat person is a thin person screaming to get out.” That’s wrong.

What it should say is: “Inside every thin person is a FAT person screaming to get out.” If you’ve been fighting that fat person ever since puberty, or if you’ve just noticed that your inner fat person has begun screaming now that you’ve turned forty, then you know what I mean.

Weight management is hard. That’s because everything we’ve been told about diet (and exercise) for the past half-century or more has been wrong.

I’ve done it all: Stillman, Weight Watchers, low-fat/low-cal/plus insane amounts of aerobic exercise, Atkins, Slim Fast. It was, I regret to say, the Fast Food “diet” that brought me to the moment of truth in my fiftieth year. After having given up the weight battle for a year or two for no good reason, I weighed in at 195 lbs, which is rather chunky on a 5-ft 3-inch frame. With the use of a drug supplied by my helpful doctor, along with the previously-mentioned low-fat etc. diet and massive exercise, I managed to drop 50 lbs. in the course of the year. Turns out the drug was the notorious fen/phen, which I’m happy to say did not wreck my heart. With unflinching commitment, I reduced to something near a “normal” weight. But here’s the thing.

Losing weight is relatively easy. ALL DIETS WORK. The problem is keeping it lost.

About 1999, as my weight began slowly creeping up again (The Weight Creep is a very real entity to me!), I rediscovered Dr. Atkins’s New Diet Revolution, the revised edition of his original 1972 “fad diet” recommending low-carbohydrate eating. Up to the moment of this writing, medical professionals around the world are still horrified by its recommendations. Obese people and diabetics claim they could NEVER live without bread, potatoes, and brownies. How can orange juice be a killer? Bacon and butter are perfectly healthy foods. Previous “common sense” just isn’t.

If you are in a health category where losing weight and keeping it off could be a life-saver, then here’s where you can go for real help: dietdoctor.com

Everything you need to know about healthy eating and becoming your best you.

Meanwhile, I keep the Weight Creep ever in mind.

HER FORMER FAT SELF SPEAKS

 

The clothes she’s wearing now are hers, not mine.
But nothing’s bagged up for the D.A.V.
She’s practical. I take that as a sign
that she’s a long way from forgetting me.
God knows I put up a terrific fight
against the slow erosion I endured
or months, while she observed me day and night,
the history between us oddly blurred.
The image she admires is youthful, svelte.
She claimed to love the loveliness within,
but more when solid flesh began to melt,
as though our very nature made us sin.
I’m gone. For now. There’s nothing to forgive.
But we both know she has to eat to live.

 

Barbara Loots
published in Lightpoetrymagazine.com
winter/spring 2014

What is the foundation of the earth? My favorite question. Among the belongings of my beloved mother-in-law Hazel McMullen Dickinson Bahret, who died at the age of 100, I found the following essay, carefully stowed as a bookmark in one of the many books she clearly enjoyed:

The origins of the turtle story are uncertain. The most widely known version, which obviously is not the source…appears in Stephen Hawking‘s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:
 
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”—Hawking, 1988^[1]
 
Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court discussed his “favored version” of the tale in a footnote to his plurality opinion in Rapanos v. United States (decided June 19, 2006):
 
In our favored version, an Eastern guru affirms that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When asked what supports the tiger, he says it stands upon an elephant; and when asked what supports the elephant he says it is a giant turtle. When asked, finally, what supports the giant turtle, he is briefly taken aback, but quickly replies “Ah, after that it is turtles all the way down.”—Antonin Scalia, Antonin Scalia. “RAPANOS v. UNITED STATES”. Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute’s Supreme Court collection.
 
The anecdote has achieved the status of an urban legend on the Internet, as there are numerous versions in which the name of the scientist varies (e.g., Arthur Stanley Eddington, Thomas Huxley, Linus Pauling, or Carl Sagan) although the rest is the same.

In the lake surrounding Dickinson Island, among the nearby lilypads, there lives an ancient turtle. At least one. As I sit on the porch at the lake pondering the origins of the universe and other mysteries, I sometimes believe the answer lies in his old brain, and in the story of the great boulders beneath me, dropped here eons ago by a melting glacier. Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Maybe it’s the biggest recycling project ever!

ON THE BEACH AT THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA
(A sonnet in trochees)

 

Rocks live slowly. Human life can happen
fast, too fast for what we call our senses.
Happy to have my ashes take their chances
coming back as rock, I’ll start a mountain
spewing hot from underneath an ocean.
Rush of dust and steam to stratospheric
heights, I’ll make the very air choleric,
smear the sky with primal self-expression,
then subside to wait for tide and season,
seed and bird and vast subcontinental
grind to move me through the elemental
molecules the universe has chosen,
make the dust I was into a diamond,
or fist of granite resting at Port Townsend.

 

Barbara Loots

Kansas City, Missouri, where I live, is a sophisticated big city with the proverbial small-town heart. Sometimes I feel like I know everybody, which is one reason I read the obituaries in the newspaper every day. Usually, if someone I actually do know happens to die, I hear about it another way. But the obituaries bring to my attention the details (or not) of the lives of people I might have known in the past, or wish I’d known and never did. I’m reminded that for someone out there, my obituary will be my one and only statement of what I learned, believed, and lived out about the meaning and purpose of life. Heavy!

This puts my little life in perspective. I’ve written and rewritten my own obituary a number of times. I keep the document on my computer desktop–relatives reading this, please note! At the moment, my obituary is admittedly a bit tongue-in-cheek. But what a good exercise in setting today’s priorities.

So…sit down soon and write your own obituary. Please keep it short and sweet.

THE SOURCE

 

When first I walked out of the ocean
I took with me currents cold and hot,
and silken hands that slid like summer
over the wide back of the sand. I took
the fringe where fishes dart,
the whales’ slow rhythm, struts
of lost ships bringing treasures, and
a singing of the conquests yet to come.
I took the rivers’ penetrating flow, the deeps
where none but eyeless, breathless
creatures go, the urgency of huge migrations, life
that comes in countless little deaths I do not know.

 

 

Barbara Loots
published in Cedar Rock

When I look in the mirror these days, I see my dad’s face. He lived past the age of 90, and I’d like to do that, too–but without his struggles with greatly diminished hearing and macular degeneration.

For a time, when I was in high school, my dad would drive me to school on his way to work. Although I can’t remember specifics about our conversations, I’m sure many parents will affirm that car talks with their kids can be deep and disarming. So we talked. He told me that when I was a little kid–perhaps five or six years old–I once leaned over from the backseat and asked, “Where do they get the things to make the things to make the things to make the things…..?” At that moment, he said, he knew he was dealing with a philosopher.

My dad used to begin every day by working out the cryptogram puzzle in the newspaper. Now I do that, too, partly because it makes me think of him, but mostly because I believe that a little brain workout helps keep me in shape for that ninth decade I’m aiming for. The big puzzle, of course, remains, “What makes the universe tick?” I’m still working on that one, too.

AN OLD MAN MAKES CHILI FOR LUNCH

 

“Do you have a poem for an old man making chili for lunch?
Like watery eyes from onion crunching–sneezing
from pepper thrown…”  e-mail from Dad 5/5/05

 

He shoves the onion pieces in a pile
to one side as he chops and chops some more.
This cutting board has lasted quite a while

through salty tears of choppers gone before,
but no use buying new equipment now.
Sometimes there’s comfort in a kitchenette
that holds what downsized spaces will allow
of former habits. He will not forget
those other hands that held this knife and chopped
for slaw and meatloaf, casseroles and stew,
and apple walnut salad. When they stopped,
he stepped up, making chili, making do,
sneezing on pepper, living on his own.
He cooks for one, but never eats alone.

 

Barbara Loots

Got your attention, right? Early on in my poetry publishing attempts, I learned that you can almost always hook an editor’s interest with a poem about sex or cats.

Considering my reservations about personal privacy, that left me with the prospect of writing a lot of Cat poems if I ever hoped to get published. Indeed, my very first published poem appearing in The Lyric was a Cat poem. I had Cat poems in The Ladies’ Home Journal, Cricket Magazine for children, and…well, you get the idea. So if you are considering a career in poetry, first get a cat.

When Bill and I first met, I was already owned by a cat named Lily. Bill often said, “I’d like to have a cat.” So one day, I placed in the foyer of his house a new litter box containing a bag of litter, some cat food, toys, treats, and so forth, with the following note:

INSTANT PET KIT

JUST ADD CAT

That very day, Bill went off to the shelter and adopted “Bobbie.” Bobbie was a girl cat with a bowling-ball belly and a very short tail, whether natural or accidental we’ve never known. Bill thought Bobbie sounded wimpy. So our cat became Bob forever after. She doesn’t care if we explain it or not, as long as she gets the Fancy Feast twice a day, and plenty of lap time from both of us.

As I write this, Bob the Cat is snoozing on my desk next to the computer screen. If she were hungry or needy in any way, she would be walking back and forth across my keyboard, with surprising editorial consequences.

SCIENTIST AT THE WINDOW

 
The indoor cat who never has seen snow
chitters at the fluffy, drifting flakes as though
they were a swarm of insects of a kind
that till today had never crossed her mind.
Her curious temperament dissatisfied
with speculation on the world outside,
Lily assembles self-sufficient poise
and turns to the purpose of familiar toys,
abandoning what is mysterious and true
for something she can sink her claws into.

Barbara Loots
The Lyric Spring/Summer 2014

Please feel free to send me your cat story. That’s the way cat people are.

For several years, I’ve been active in an American 501(c)3 organization that supports a number of high-quality schools in the Punjab region of Pakistan. You can read about it from the link in my Interests and Activities.

For the record, I’m placing here the message I wrote for the 2015 Annual Report of the Friends of PEB, where I have just completed a term of service as board president.

When people find out I’ve been to Pakistan, they often react with astonishment. Why Pakistan? Sometimes I ask myself the same question. The quick answer is, ”Because someone invited me, and I said Yes.” The “someone” in my case is actually three someones.

 The first is my friend, Renee Neff-Clark. Renee, a member of my church who first caught the vision of PEB, invited me into a helping role when the Friends of PEB was in its formative stages. I was, in a sense, an innocent bystander. Renee introduced me to Mrs. Veda Gill and other PEB supporters. While learning about the schools and the many organizations and individuals already committed to them, I found myself moving along a new path in my life without really knowing where it would lead.

 The second “someone” is Mrs. Veda Gill herself. To know Veda is to fall in love (that’s the only way I can describe it) with her and with her unrelenting vision. She exemplifies the meaning of commitment and service, energy, and hard work. Her faith in the goodness and providence of God is a shining light.

 The third “someone” is God. I know beyond a doubt that God has invited me or called me into a relationship with God’s children in Pakistan. Clearly there are many—even endless— ways to serve in the world. I simply trust that this is the one that has been given to me by God, and I try to stay focused. I just keep on saying YES day by day.

If you’ve been wondering how you can step up the effort towards world peace in a meaningful way, please consider becoming a Friend of PEB. Education for children everywhere is, to my way of thinking, the key to hope.

Art museums can be very intimidating. I’ve spent decades of my life avoiding them, with the best of intentions. I’m indebted to my mother, who marched her children through every museum, cathedral, castle, concert hall, and Roman ruin she could find, so at least I got a hint of cultural education. And it did take, Mom. Really it did! I claimed a (weak) Fine Arts minor in college, and began my own journey of art appreciation throughout my early adult years.

Upon retirement from my professional career, I knew what I wanted to do with my “spare time.” I wanted to become a Docent at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, a renowned collection established in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1933. I was accepted into the intensive training program–what I considered to be a “free” degree in Fine Arts–and embarked on my new volunteer career as a Docent in 2011.

Most of our tours during the school year engage students from second grade through high school. Schools arrange field trips to the museum according to the curriculum. The museum offers certain subsidies, such as bus service, for underserved students from a wide area in and around Kansas City. Many children have never been inside an art museum, or anything like it. Hence the “intimidating” factor. I know! I know!

My job as a Docent is to engage the students in looking and talking. Who cares about dates and names and historical references?? Well, we do, of course. But the main thing is to help the children realize that they have the right to their own thoughts, and that someone is listening as carefully as possible to what they have to say.

Meanwhile, I have subversive thoughts of my own. Once you begin to engage with art, the impact of human history can be stunning.

DOCENT

 

The art museum behind the big bronze door.
The yellow buses lining up outside.
The little children eager to explore.

 

The chirpy docent: Who’s been here before?
Please pay attention. I will be your guide.
At this museum, behind that big bronze door,

 

there’s nudity, depravity, and gore
to take your little psyches for a ride.
You children will be able to explore

 

the beauty born of fear, of faith, of war,
of ancient ritual and genocide
that cannot hide behind a brazen door.

 

Beheadings hardly happen anymore.
Most artists have avoided suicide.
You children are encouraged to explore

 

the human drama we cannot ignore,
the shape of visions and the forms of pride
collected here behind the big bronze door.

 

You’ll find despair, anxiety, and more.
Your eyes will bleed. Your skulls crack open wide.
Have fun. Enjoy yourselves as you explore
the art museum behind the big bronze door.

 

 

Barbara Loots
Road Trip

In 1946, John F. Dickinson, a resident of Ohio, purchased an island consisting of approximately one acre of rock crowned with pine trees in the middle of Blackwater Lake in Ontario, Canada. The purchase price was fifty dollars, under the Homestead Provision of the Canadian government for unclaimed public lands, with the requirement that a domicile be established on the property within eighteen months.

With the help of friendly farmers on the surrounding lakeshore, Dickinson located an abandoned cabin, deconstructed it nail by nail and board by board, transported the entirety to the island on a flatboat, and put it back together again in a cleared space at the highest point on the island.

For many years, Dickinson, his wife Hazel, and their three (then four) children traveled from Ohio to Ontario every summer during a two-week vacation period, and made improvements. A huge stone fireplace, constructed by hand with rocks collected from around the lake by the children, warms the cottage as the legacy of John Dickinson’s strength, skill, and endurance.

I first met the cottage in the summer of 2008, as the guest of Bill Dickinson, second son of John and Hazel, who subsequently became my husband. Stepping into the cottage is like walking into memory itself. Although those memories are not my own, I am embraced by them anyway.

AT THE COTTAGE

 

Sequestered by the rain, inside all gloom,
I look around to find a metaphor
to play with in this musty, cluttered room.
And there it is, covering the whole floor.
Tattered before they ever came to rest
here at the cottage, patterns vaguely Persian,
assorted carpets are the weariest
of all the stuff that made its last excursion
to this remote and water-bound retreat,
remnants of parlors they once occupied,
the sturdy weaving scruffed by countless feet,
the shreds of past prosperity and pride.
And yet, however beaten down and old,
something in them holds out against the cold.

 

Barbara Loots