Friday night

was ever-so-Friday night tonight.

Take Me Back Josephine to that Cold & Dark December

I am missing someone but I don't know who...

I love that song and the way that it reminds me of winter's onset, last year's stark and striking season, everything I found out about how beautiful the spare and silent could be. That feeling reminds me of my friend L-Bo's dream of an in-home theatre--and the way that I picture it: all heavy red-drapes, velvet, of course, the old, weighty kind, dense with dust and memory. I am thinking of fold-down seats, brocade or velvet themselves, and on the screen, at least one silent film, one black & white and any color will have the clarity of Cary Grant's bright eyes or Lana Turner's china face or Ava Gardner's intensity and India ink of hair and gloss. Plus that hushy-light, that near halo that comes off the shadows. That feeling, both cozy and melancholy, good and bad and intricate, intimate, lacing through the bones and pressing.

Last December the parting gifts began: the Caravella Orangecello, the spiral lightbulbs, all that light and what it lit up in me.

I love the word Sicily. Annie wrote on the margins of her letter to Sam. She still wrote them, bound them in green ribbon and put them in the top drawer where he used to keep his socks.


Dreamdrinks:
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Martini Sicilian Style
1 ½ ounce vodka
½ ounce Caravella Orangecello
Shake with ice, strain & pour into martini glass. Garnish with orange peel.


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Orangecello Cosmopolitan
¾ ounce vodka.
¼ ounce cranberry juice.
¼ ounce Caravella Orangecello
Pour into martini glass & garnish with an orange peel.


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Caravella Orangecello Caribbean
Pour 1 ounce Caravella Orangecello in a tall glass over ice.
Fill with tropical fruit punch.


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Caravella Bride's Bellini
2 peaches, cut into thin slices (may substitute plums or apricots)
1 cup peach schnapps
1 cup Caravella Orangecello
2 bottles champagne or sparking wine
Place one peach slice in each champagne or wine glass Pour peach schnapps and Orangecello over the peach, filling the glass halfway. Top with chilled champagne. Serve immediately

Serves 12

Sunday Morning Feeling

A subdued sky. Today will be another nice long walk, some buying of groceries, working on the book. Thinking of the bike again, how to budget for it,and when to get it. My trip north makes me want for more of that landscape. I'm investigating trails and how far one might ride and how far one might get.

Sad Dictionary

Llamas dot the hills. White rugs on a green rug.
You never had an iPod, so you can’t imagine how

much better it is now. We have been to the Moon
and made him our doormat. Painkiller of the night,

he still shines, though we have blackened his eye
by punching it closed. Perhaps his forehead shines.

Spain is better, too: yellow flowers, useless flowers,
a destination vacation. Pessoa might have been the

alarm clock of the mountain slope with his contingent
of sheep, lazily shepherding his multiple selves into

crooked pens, but you are my sad dictionary, César.
I raise my hoof to you. Crippled though it is, I am.

for César Vallejo
Richard Siken

Student One: Who is Katharine Hepburn?
Gasps, sighs, etc.
Student Two:"I heard someone ask 'who's Jimmy Stewart' the other day and my soul died."

"She had a completely new outlook on bears now."

Teacher: A forty-eight year old who plays Halo, Diablo..."
Student: What are you supposed to do when you're forty-eight?
Teacher: Just go wait in the cemetery to die.

Student One: (wistfully) Everywhere I've lived there's been a grumpy old person.
Student Two: (passionately) They're everywhere!

The Bells

Today the circus poster
is scabbing off the concrete wall
and the children have forgotten
if they knew at all.
Father, do you remember?
Only the sound remains,
the distant thump of the good elephants,
the voice of the ancient lions
and how the bells
trembled for the flying man.
I, laughing,
lifted to your high shoulder
or small at the rough legs of strangers,
was not afraid.
You held my hand
and were instant to explain
the three rings of danger.

Oh see the naughty clown
and the wild parade
while love love
love grew rings around me.
this was the sound where it began;
our breath pounding up to see
the flying man breast out
across the boarded sky
and climb the air.
I remember the color of music
and how forever
all the trembling bells of you
were mine.
Anne Sexton

Grief
by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.

Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.


In spite of the fact that real people can understand her, I like Mary Oliver but I like what Dickman's done here in response, too.

Newly Novelized

Woke too early and have been trying to really wake up since. Last night was pretty wonderful--gorgeous weather, the gallery hop crowd (I'd forgotten it was gallery hop again, already), some red hot apple cider sorbet from Jeni's some red hot apple sighs overall.

Early evening began with my lovelies from Botticelli and a pre-dinner meeting at Betty's. Now to meet our visiting artist/scholar. If I leave early I get to Cuppa Joe's as a perk-up and appetizer. Yummiest lattes there.

For now, I am writing a little longer on the novel. Two new things found their way into Anastasia's history and they are both very-needed and momentum-inducing. To deaf parents and motorcycle races. To crashes and a childhood so silent it was like particles on a Dickensonian snowflake.

To red hot sorbet, red velvet chairs and an uncharacteristically warm November night.

Poems Forthcoming

in Copper Nickel, Quarterly West and Boston Review. Some nice motivators.
Now if only I were writing more...

Still, soon I begin Sneakily & Samira Save the Day--a long dreamed-of project--with a student who is going to render that silver cloud of a cat and his Syrian-American friend in watercolor and colored pencil. Anyway, I can't wait to see how it turns out and to finally complete that eight year old project.

Columbus is odd--so much alone time here and yet, too some of the most wonderful people I have ever met.