Intagliod Up in Blue

Happy Birthday Keith Rehm!

2012-01-24T19:15:00.000-08:00

Celebration

Brilliant, this day – a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green –
whether it's ferns or lichens or needles
or impatient points of buds on spindly bushes –
greener than ever before. And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along
the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

Denise Levertov

How better to go out than in gratitude

2011-12-31T10:47:00.001-08:00

2011 was hard on my household. My lovely-lovely was diagnosed with renal failure and his father passed away--all in a few months. I had my first set of scary medical test results and then months later, an okay. Still, things took their toll. But the house is warm with life and love and I am here, waiting on the edge of my seat for 2012. No matter what those Mayans think.

Because 2011 has been rough on us all, but as Rilke says: Love the questions. Live the questions.
To 2012! Love and best wishes,
Sophia

Six Kinds of Gratitude

1
I'm someone's small boat,
far out at sea,
sailing from what has so long sustained me
toward what I don't know.

My joy is the sound
of the water purling around me,
but is it my hull
or the great ocean moving?

2
Are those flies I hear, or a trick of the wind,
faintly human voices,
or a whistle of breath
in the nose of my sleeping dog?

3
Without me there is no confusion.
Buddhas see no difference between
themselves and others; Angels,
between the living and the dead.

4
At last I've discovered
the secret of life:
If you don't leave
you can't come back.

5
Deep in the Earth there are pockets of light
that did not come from Heaven,
and yet they are the light of Heaven
deep inside the Earth.

6
This bird is the birdness of a bird.

—Dan Gerber, A Primer on Parallel Lives

And of course, Rainer. Always Rainer.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”

R.M. Rilke is the man!

A Tinselly Farewell to December

2011-12-31T08:29:00.000-08:00

Holy Ghost
by Brian Brodeur

Next

My mother spreads tinsel snow over the kitchen sills,
sets the cedar manger in its place, arranging

the hollow plastic magi next to a cradle
displaying the baby Jesus missing an arm.

The little enameled figure of Mary kneeling
embraces something only she can see. Pinned to the banister,

our crocheted stockings sag. All afternoon
she listens to laundry click in the pantry dryer,

packing layers of chocolate cake and home-made cream
into Tupperware for the Heath-Bar trifle we love.

Light moves across the counter, almost touching her hand,
shattering over an open drawer of knives.

From "Snapshots 1," Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press, 2008).
Used with the author’s permission.

2011-12-31T07:51:00.001-08:00

"I should tell them
there’s a music for the lost, a song
that cannot be stifled, celebrating those who are.
It sounds like jangling, scraping,
a hacksaw through metal. But still
it’s a song, and its dissonance is lovely.
It belies the second-hand clothing
and the stubbly beards and the stumbling.
Through the jeers, the noise of machinery, the silence,
an anthem makes itself heard."

from The Refugee Camp by John Drury

Whose work I have long-loved. The latest continues to astound. Rarely have I met someone who has such a sense of the arts and their play and his own play with all of that knowledge in his work. But here's the really rare part: he writes it all as a poet would not as someone wooden who knows a lot. (You know the poems I mean, they sound smart but dead.) Drury is a scholar's poet and a poet's scholar. There is someone real inside all of that wisdom who still manages to say it all with warmth and sometimes, whimsy. I took any course that I could from him at the University of Cincinnati and left the classroom bowled-over by how much we learned and how much fun we had learning it.

Lady Alice is Her Name

2011-12-30T21:22:00.000-08:00

The mac book. I love it. Cindy-Lou taught me how to grab images and so I have. My desktop is sea of colorful minutia. It thrills to me to look at it all: paper lanterns, New Orleans, my lighthouse, a periwinkle crayon on an old piece of fabric of flocked dark red roses, a vintage taffeta and lace heart-shaped candybox, an amphora with a silhouette on it, oil slicks, spider lilies, Sophia Loren, three icicles, a gloved hand holding three tulips, a ship in a lightbulb, sno cones, tiny, tiny sofas and one photograph snatched from a friend's wall, of pomegranates hanging in front of a stone cherub built into an arc of a crumbling red brick wall. The photograph is shot perfectly from a kind of side angle and so fills the viewer with a kind of inexplicable longing. It is just enough and yet it creates a hunger. I am going to use it when I teach the ekphrasis class to talk about that effect--how writing should do that--ache you a little, make you want more and yet, feel strangely satisfying in that unquenched need. Very sensual. Like pomegranates.

Tiny Furniture & Au Lait Lotion & a Blow-Out

2011-12-29T18:46:00.000-08:00

Watching the first, wearing the latter (I love the way it smells) and counting my blessings that M wasn't hurt during the third. Far left lane and a total blow-out and it was night. Just finished writing a poem that does not love the halogen light but that very light helped save the day.

Not a wholly productive day but not terrible. Favorite lines so far: "I once saw him sitting on a crate of onions reading Osterling." Then, later:
"Poems are basically like dreams, something everyone likes to tell other people about but no one likes to hear if it's not their own. Which is why poetry is a failure of an intellectual community."
"It's not too poemy, which I like."

This film is making me miss my dangly earrings days. Tomorrow I will wear dangly earrings.

Earring
by Ales Steger translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry January 2009
The whole time he tells you what to do.
His voice is chocolate candy filled with hysteria.
He is a loving blackmailer. An owl blind in one eye.
It is enough that he sees half the world to command the other half.
He gladly inspects himself in the mirror, but goes crazy if you praise him
Before another. He is not your property. He is not your adornment.
Only when you dance and when you make love with him, he coos.
Then cages open. Then he is the white message bearer of the gods.
Gradually you detach him more often, hide him in a box, misplace him.
But his bite at the lobe still whispers to you.
As if Eros holds you with invisible filigree pliers
And solders words of guilt and the silence of betrayal into your ear.
A copy of a stone from Sisyphus’s mountain is set inside it.
You roll hope uphill. And you roll downhill drunk, despondent and alone.

Poem Disguised as What I Should be Reading Right Now

2011-12-29T06:16:00.000-08:00

Which is how to plan my courses (two of which are very new and exciting, but lots of new and exciting work and prep. too). And how to paint my wall called Toasted Marshmallow or French Vanilla, I forget which paint swatch I chose and how to prep the wall that will be Malted and do you notice a little bakery lust in my selection of off-whites? For the record, the accent wall is Mourning Dove, so let it not be said that I am focused on the lyrical, the melancholy, the simple carbs. Oh, wait...

I am wishing I were more here, less facebook. Here feels like the right ruminations about writing. There feels like self-billboardizing. I don't like it, and yet, I look. It's a clever way to pretend to friend and unfriend and it lacks the sense of consequence and courage, (like reality television). In fact, like reality t.v., it actually numbs one from feeling the sense of consequence. Thoughtlessness abounds and rarely does one stop to contemplate the actual emotional ramifications of things said and done. Here, I assume it's me alone plus maybe just a few of those wandering googlebot things that move eyeless (I first wrote "love eyeless" hmmm....) and gathering but never really gathering. (The instructional designer boyfriend assures me that such things watch the blog, too.) So here is like a way to type out what I think I am thinking and thus, cleanse the palate or rough draft out the next thing I need to say on the more official pages of my life. About those.
So New Years' resolutions are silly. They don't last. But a habit takes twenty-one days to form, so my reading tells me, so why not these twenty-one. Like starting today. I want to work on things in a more balanced fashion. My schedule allows whole days where I can paint and another day where I can sort clothes, if a deadline is coming up, I write like a fiend to finish something. Good writers, writers with good habits, work a set of hours a day at a writing project, then a set schedule for class planning, housework, etc. I read an interview with Donald Hall once and he said he advanced each of the many, many, many writing and journalism assignments a little bit with time meted out so that he might make his various deadlines. They are various and many and he always does. Plus he's said to be a damn fine teacher, as well. Even after Jane died, Hall continued to write and send his work out (I worked on a literary magazine at the time and we received a strange elegy that was later picked up by, I think, TriQuarterly.) Anyway, proof, that not even grief, much less that flitty, meandering mind of one Intagliosa, could keep a good writer from getting his good writing accomplished. With that, I leave you to a wonderful poem that was sent along to me by a kind woman who found the audio of my "Lucy" poem some years back and had always wanted the text. I was sent her note and when I responded, telling her how happy it made me that my poem stayed with her the way certain other poems had stayed with me, (yes Taije Silverman I am talking to you, also Eliot Khalil Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Richard Siken, Laura Kasischke, Simone Muench, and too many others to list)... she wrote me with this lovely title which I read, envied and shared.

Now to that new day I promised myself.

Matthew Olzmann

MOUNTAIN DEW COMMERCIAL DISGUISED AS A LOVE POEM

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

2011-12-14T07:05:00.001-08:00

Touche Today

2011-12-08T15:45:00.000-08:00

Because I couldn't stop the dead/they ambled up to me.

Or so it's been. A long year. A long, long year. But some of it still scarlet shawls, collected animal bones carved cryptically to read a thing about vintage quilts made into tipis and what it means to teach, to be taught, to have words amass loss into something meaningful.

The other day I pulled up a poem to show a student a certain tone and the lines and within it the line about the people who loved the speaker being sad since the speaker died struck me anew as a mean thing and it reminded me of a coffee meeting a few weeks back with someone who didn't like any of his wives or women or me and how I left reeling from it and thinking that literature should bring about the best of us. So today saunters in, a little stooped as a Thursday can be and with it, an elegy by a student who wrote of the universe's overcoat and another student urging him to search that coat for spare change and change and then this title little sonnet about sugar and our sweetness galloping away with us, consumed by our consumption, done in by our need for the lovely and honeyed and I am saved enough by that. But then the mail and that cranberry crimson shawl made for me by one of my first university students ever. A girl wicked-sharp, a teacher among students even then, and now, all degreed-up, married, a grown-up but still armed with the whimsy and knitting needles both unmetaphored, restored to a world where a thing can be spun into something both necessary and playful and warming a needful day into play.

I could say more about a snapshot of Glen Campbell or a poem called a canzone shared with me by a favorite poet or about lite eggnog and spiced rum or smoke kittens or tadpoles so tiny when they burst into froglets that we call them the preemy and they burst out like a dark star against the turquoise gravel. Or a sister named of all things Antonia, who is indeed My Antonia and my best friend and my light star in a world of dark gravel. Or that I live in a house now with a someone who loves me despite myself, sometimes in spite of myself but makes a night like this pitch-black from the city's distance, a little warmer, a lot brighter.

In light of that, here's a poet whose work I await in book form:

Conversion Blues
by CHRIS PEXA

– for Rachel

tell us about evening and about the bright
star tell us about the huge dark wall
where it is pinned so if no one is looking
the sky is really burning and tell me it is my eyes
that douse it all to soot, black branches
with one root in carbon and budding eternity.

explain that once a month a family of owls covers
the tree, winks at us, refuses to explain their singing.
when snow is thinly falling we see you there,
the slowest star, and I hear you thinking
of a story, that mute wetness spread across the field is you
clearing your throat, all stories being born

from silence. what story: the snowflakes
cut from the sun are large as cars in the darkness
and grow small and doily when licked
by January stars. what story: barefoot,
running in the wake of the plow,
cold black clods and white sun blessing your steps,
no Jesus yet to dream you into majesty, earth

being enough, no steeple secrets, no divine moons
to pin back your hair, no soap for your tongue, no lye,
no alabaster mothers to sew in a new tongue
and holy toast, cracked as headstones, for you to chew.
are you ready to climb to the top of the stairs?
to tell me about the star nation, the unnamed,
what some grandfather of the clean, glowing
cafes and dive bars of the moon

call morning, a newborn's grouchy hunger?
the dew its mouth and tongue sing for?
think of me in the low thorns, hunched like an umbrella,
my small ribs breaking toward the clouds like love.

Long, long time

2011-10-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

since I came here and said hello to myself or whatever it is that I am trying to sing into or out of in the specifics of this forum. It's one thirty in the morning, I am not home and I will be on a plane soon to be home. I am feeling that at sea feeling of not being where one lives and not feeling very at home in the transitional homes we make when we travel. So I went into my books, Lisa Olstein lately, and I found what home I always do in her kind of words. Tonight I am struck with how certain seasons effort in quietly and others crash in and no season really leaves us without impact. There will be another new baby in my life in April and what other chairs will be pulled after the music stops, there is no way of knowing. But I try, like another quietly-efforting poet, to dwell in possibility and when I can focus in, I also dwell in prose. Tonight, I think I should dwell in waiting sheets and the too-little slumber that precedes too long a day. But with luck and some portion of a blessing, I will sleep in my own bed tomorrow night, which as darkness sometimes keeps me from recalling, is really tonight.

Dear One Absent This Long WhileBy Lisa Olstein

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.

In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.

2011-06-24T18:58:00.000-07:00

Home from home again and it was a gorgeous trip. M and me bushwacked a trail through the trail-less and inching along tree trunk, through pine and juniper, we thorn cross-hatched our flesh and bled our way to the clearing where an ice-cold stream stood between us and a better trail. We took off our shoes and crossed, our feet a screaming declaration of ALIVE, as they thawed and the feeling was sheer elation. We took our empty water bottles and filled them with the purest clarity and drank. It was heaven. Back in our wonderland of a country-house, the fireflies are like a lite-brite board. I have never seen so many and the feeling is like the old opening of Disney movies--all that Tinkerbell wand-debris and firework. It's been hard to get back here, to the blog that kept company at my loneliest. Now there are foxes,chipmunks,squirrels, goldfinches, bluejays, frogs, rabbits, groundhogs, deer, skunks and two cats in the window to keep me company and busy. But I miss writing here and sharing the latest lovelies.

One Heart
Li-Young Lee

Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.

2011-06-01T14:36:00.001-07:00

Dear Someone
Deborah Landau

my emptiness has a lake in it deep and watery
with several temperaments milk cola beer

at night the selves are made of water
all the openings flooded streaming with rain

my emptiness has an aqueduct in it
selves rushing through channels

dissolving washing away in streaks

my emptiness has a fish in it
a piece of seaweed liferaft a rocky strait

all night the selves are breaking themselves
again and again on the sandbar

you can’t get out from the drowning
nightwatery the blacksparkling pools

my emptiness has a nowhere reef an island
at night the immersion comes deep-running and sudden

the selves
it washes us under and sudden

More and more it's deliciousness I want but all the time there's less and less of it.

2011-06-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

All Else Fails

*

Days, weeks, months,
why not use them for something?
I'm heading for a head on.
I'm revving up my so-called self.
I know my life is meaning
less. Strutting around
for awhile until poof.

*

Everything gets more and more absurd.
The office and deskchair, the skin on the neck
eye cream, love, the handholding and bungled
attempts, watching the clock all night 2 am, 4,
then daylight, sitting in my dress again
with cup and plate.
To work to work then back again
to bed, another night.

*

I read Pessoa and he confirms
my worst suspicions.
I read the entertaining novels
and they make me happy.
I sleep beside the river.
The river often sleeps when I'm awake.
Sky, water, I have not had enough of you.
Better be shoving off again and into the night.

*

More and more it's deliciousness I want
but all the time there's less and less of it.
What the hell do you think you are doing?
You should find something definite to subscribe to
so as not to keep drifting tossed aimless through the world like this.
At the party Stanley said for now factor in
gratitude, narrow the zone and see your life
which is what we call it as if it were a real thing.
I wear my street clothes. I accept the parameters.
Don't shout drink some wine at night
work is what is offered and sometimes love.
Another time there was ecstasy,
though many things went laughably wrong.

*

Those who don't feel are happy, says Pessoa.
Those who don't think.
The night has advanced. We figure in it so slightly.
Down the ice chute we go.
Say goodbye to your eyes in real time.
Get ready, get set. Say goodbye
to your synovial fluid. Your knees
will wear out in no time
won't hoist you nowhere.

*

And now our luck has changed.
There are a lot of hells in this room
but I put on my girlface
and we go to a café we have dinner
we creep into the night and hide
such a slight place we find
we can duck into it and not worry
it isn't yesterday or tomorrow
it is only for a time.
We plan to meet again later but.

*

He keeps me waiting
and I start hysteria a little bit.
I start hysteria against everyone's advice.
I go into the street to drink air.
I've never been so thirsty in my life.
Another mouth, some fresh minted lips.
See, I can feel blue on half a bottle of jewels.
Sleep then wake then this then that day
and another night back on the bed
lying in an eros dumb and slackjawed.
The sound of hustling advances and retreats
as if someone were shuffling money
or unbuttoning a blouse.
Can you put that taffeta away now, please?
Please put it away.

*

As soon as he sits down I can tell I want to.
How long can I sit here not doing the thing
I want to do. All the youngish men all the etceteras
of desire etcetera.
There's a little hole in my boot.
Could you put your finger in it.
There is power in breathing.
There is power in a silent beat
before answering a question, in a leaning in.
But puts down her foot
every time (monogamy) you mustn't be
strident cheri stop that.
Across the table his mind right there
behind his talking face.

*

We are in a dirty place now when we get together.
We made a nasty city and have to walk in it.
Before we were wider wilder avenues but we made it too cramped and ugly.
Nowhere to go to tea. Only gin here, damn it this cramped and narrow
space and no god at any gate and no goodness.

*

Now our bed is not ample not fair. Now
we don't have a bed
only this corner blackred and backlit.
Something of me is a blind point, something of him too.
There's a little edge of pain here and we walk along it.
Don't cry don't kiss me either and also don't stop.
That's the way he looks when he wants to watch.
Why don't you go swoon yourself again into some fantastic
mood music. I am a small cup with a twist and you are liquid. A drink.
Another drink.

*

I'd rather watch you doing it than do it myself,
I'd rather hear about it, I want to be told,
I'd rather read about it, I'd rather just sit here.
Hold the mask over my face
while you do it to me.
I'll put on some music.
Now see how we grow aglow
so young and beautiful
all our capillaries lit up.

Deborah Landau is the author of Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and The Last Usable Hour (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press). Her poems have appeared recently in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Best American Erotic Poems, and elsewhere. She directs the creative writing program at NYU.

2011-05-27T18:53:00.001-07:00

Dear diary, I'm afraid I'm gravely ill. It is perhaps times like these that one reflects on things past. An article of clothing from when I was young. A green jacket. I walk with my father. A game we once played. Pretend we're faeries. I'm a girl faerie. My name is Laura Lee. And you're a boy faerie. Your name is Tita Lee. Pretend, when we're faeries we fight each other, and I say "Stop hitting me I'll die!" And you hit me again and I say, "Now I have to die." And then you say, "But I'll miss you." And I say, "But I have to. And you'll have to wait a million years to see me again. And I'll be put in a box, and all I'll need is a tiny glass of water and lots of tiny pieces of pizza and the box will have wings like an airplane." And you'll ask, "Where will it take you?" "Home." I say.

Olive from Synechdoche, NY

2011-05-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

"Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen." Minister from Synechdoche, NY

2011-05-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

Lullaby for the Last Night on Earth

When at last we whisper, so long, so lonesome,

and watch our house on the horizon

go down like a gasping zeppelin of bricks,

we’ll turn, holding hands,

and walk the train tracks to the sea . . .

So sing me that song where a mountain falls

in love with an octopus, and one thousand fireflies

ricochet around their heads,

and I’ll dream we’re dancing in the kitchen one last time,

swaying, the window a waystation

of flaming leaves, the dogs shimmying

about our legs,

dragging their golden capes of rain . . .

O my critter, my thistle, gal-o-my-dreams,

lift your voice like an oar into the darkness,

for all the sad birds are falling down—

Nothing in this night is ours.

Brian Barker

The First of Friday

2011-04-21T21:15:00.001-07:00

Fifteen minutes into Friday and I felt the need to update. In truth, I can't sleep for worrying a little over two someones dear to me, with some serious medical challenges.
I don't know really what to say here, but I rose from bed, needing the company of some imaginary company, the screen, these words anting across the white mock paper before me. I have thought today about centipedes or millipedes and called them the false eyelashes of evil, but perhaps they're not. The fluffy ones are said to keep other insects at bay. I have thought today about three ghost airports, cream of tartar, and mostly about a woman made of fire flung from a convertible and her next words all shattered and scattered on April's cruel highway. I've been thinking that there isn't enough poetry in this month of poetry for me.

An Old Man Performs Alchemy
on His Doorstep at Christmastime

Cream of Tartar, commonly used to lift meringue and
angel food cake, is actually made from crystallized fine wine.

After they stopped singing for him,
the carolers became transparent in the dark,
and he stepped into their emptiness to say
he lost his wife last week, please
sing again. Their voices filled with gold.
Last week, his fedora nodded hello to me
on the sidewalk, and the fragile breath
of kindness that passed between us
made something sweet of a morning
that had frightened me for no earthly reason.
Surely, you know this by another name:
the mysteries we intake, exhale, could be
sitting on our shelves, left on the bus seat
beside us. Don't wash your hands.
You fingered them at the supermarket,
gave them to the cashier; intoxicated tonight,
she'll sing in the streets. Think of the old man.
Who knew he kept the secret of levitation,
transference, and lightness filling a winter night?
—an effortless, crystalline powder
that could almost seem transfigured from loss.

I LOVE CCAD!

2011-04-11T11:00:00.001-07:00

Times New Viking - No Room to Live from Merge Records on Vimeo.

2011-04-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

Weeping Cherry abloom, seven bright yellow forsythias, white daffodils, some yellow, the vinca and creeping myrtle, Spring and Spring and Spring. And a wee bit of Fall:

Another boring post about my happiness

2011-04-09T16:34:00.000-07:00

But forgive me, this kind of boredom suits me. A Pandora station built around Hallelujah, that played yes, Regina Spektor, whom I love like I love Anne Sexton and I love that I am that which can love that. (Have had to fight the merit of both, believe it or not.)

Spent the day getting the sunroom ready for long summer evenings with the fireplace, the swimming pool and the hot tub M is getting all set up for lots of steamy nights under stars. It's sheer bliss. Everything is asparkle and I waited so long for it that I am silly with gratitude. I am lighting one candle for the good eyes of my dear friend and one for the ability to remember how lucky I am when stupid things like sleeplessness or my dumb terrors make me forget. Sunset is to my right and Wonderful World just passed through my radio station and I am thinking of New York and the trip back home and how much there is to fly to and how much to return to. To anyone reading, I wish us all the softest blanket of summer skies.

Apriling into May

2011-04-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

then June and Evan's baptism. The parents adored M--how otherwise? It was a wonderful visit and seeing Kate's work at the gallery made it moreso.

I am in a poetic state of mind in so many ways and I am thinking too, about how well it all works out. I mean the course of things and the way I used to every-so-often post something to the effects of a gratitude for the people in my life, those that stayed and those who've left, each giving me a major gift is doing so. I have a treasure chest of friends and family, rarely is the moment that I don't see them and think how stupidly-fortunate I am for what I do, who I love and what I attract to me. I am terribly grateful for my good taste and the suspect taste of those around me. :-) And I am proud of my peeps. One of my favorite poets ever, really I could get more superlative but I will spare her, is a serious finalist for a serious dream press for a collection of her poems. Should she win, I am flying north fast and we are celebrating! But she was won already, it is a tough contest and she is in the final round with her first book and who knows whic books by which famous writers are with hers. Only that it doesn't matter. She has won and I have won by getting to read her poems all these years and to say: celebrate this, celebrate now, celebrate everything! To Veace, I raise the first glass of our upcoming bubbly-fest!

There is much to be bubbly about these days. Things just took a serious right turn and I am feeling very good about the choices of the last few years.

At the Mall

It’s a long time now since the cedar tree
That you and Martha Spicer inscribed
With your twined initials was reduced to shingles
For a house later torn down to make way
For the Northtown Mall, the very mall
You walk now on rainy mornings.
In a few more weeks of the exercise program
Prescribed by your doctor, you should feel the strength
Lost with your triple-bypass finally returning.
Then you’ll confront the years still left you
With the zeal they merit, or the fortitude.
Be sure you’re in line when the mall doors open,
Before the aisles fill with serious shoppers
Intent on finding items more sturdy
Than their bodies are proving to be.
Could Martha Spicer be among them?
What you felt for each other back then
Didn’t survive the separation of college,
Though now it seems careless of you
Not to have kept in touch. Maybe you’ve passed her
Unrecognized as she’s looked for gifts
To make her grandchildren curious
About the world they live in, a book, say,
Devoted to local trees. On the cover
A cedar stands resplendent, the very kind
She carved her initials in long ago
With a boy whose name may be resting now
On the tip of her tongue. Try to imagine her
Hoping he hasn’t wasted his time on wishes
That proved impractical, like her hill house
Bought for its vista that proved in winter
Inaccessible to a snowplow. If he made that mistake,
Let him move back to town as she did
And focus like her on keeping her windows open
So a fragrance blown from afar can enter easily.
“Come in, come in,” that’s what you’ll want to say;
“I’ve waited for you all day, and here you are.”

Carl Dennis

Fireside at Dusk

2011-04-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

A lovely day with the folks, a little campfire in the yard and a day spent making cioppino and a new vegetable bed dug by mine own Daddy! We have this beautiful tricycle planter and my parents were so excited by our new place and all of the work we've done on it since the first of the year (and my amazing new furniture) that they are thinking of their own Ohio dwelling nearby. (They want to be some kind of Florida snowbird but where their northerly flights will go is still being negotiated.) Tonight the same Daddy and I had late-night Greek tea for the pre-sickies of M and himself. (Peppercorns, cloves, my swanky new cinnamon and sticks and more things plus the Cretan honey that tastes like something the best kind of wild.

Last night we ventured down to High Street for Gallery Hop and the amazing Kate's show at Roy G. Biv. The pre-springy skies are loaded with stars and shininess abounds. I am annoyingly elated.

Horses Running Fast

We married in an open field a wide
And open field a field of wild and run- / ning
horses wide a field of horses run- / ning through
we married in an open wide
Running and full of horses open
field / And in we married in and in we mar- / ried in in
one direction they the hors- / es they
disguised the wind as horses in the wind/The horses running
fast in one / Direction
as the horses running through / The horses as the horses run- / ning through
and each of us as me and you / As horses running fast
In one direction and
no animal outruns its past

Shane McCrae

Yardwork and Peaceful, Ease

2011-03-23T12:03:00.000-07:00

Soon to plant the bleeding heart: a throwback to my childhood and Evanston, Wyoming where it was the one constant flower to bloom each year. We lived on the industrial side of town, owned a motel, bar, liquor store and cafe. Our front yard was a big old wagon that sat under a crab apple tree. Needless to say, there was not much gardening in our lives, but there was the Bear River running through a kind of back yard that had too, the remnants of an old drive-in and the ticketbox that I made into my playhouse and there was in front of our "lobby" home, a crab apple and in our side year: the bleeding heart. I loved it for its crazy shape and of course, its name. Of course my first home had to have one too and so it will, very soon. I also found some white Peruvian daffodils--very spidery and curly in their petals. I can't wait to see them in bloom.

Tonight we refinish the bathtub, hang our gorgeous new shower curtain (hummingbirds, Queen Anne's Lace, dandelions!) and tomorrow we paint it in that tin-dreamy shade of jade and mint that I found in this new line of paints.

Chocolate Almond-Chrysanthemum Cake

2011-03-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

with mocha filling and chocolate-almond filling and deep Hershey's cocoa. A tray full of pansies: saffron and purple, peach and deep plum, bright sunny yellow and icy lilac, the yellow finches, the bluebirds, the colors as seen through some embroidered sheers and a big plan for a big celebration. Things are excellent and soon the parents arrive! I cannot wait.

Now off to buy white violets and back to Spring Break--but not before I pass out some pretty.

The Listening of Plants

On the buffet where she kept her celadon dishes,
Mother placed a vase of pussy willows
hurried out of their branches.

The buds were cat toes walking up a mottled branch,
miniature koalas hanging on their eucalyptus
in a scattered line.

I snapped one off the twig and rolled the bud
on the flats of my thumb and finger,
its smoky gray coat how I imagined koala fur might feel.

I rubbed the willow bud along the bone of my jaw
wanting to know how a plant can wear animal skin.
It was too small, like touching nothing.

I splayed my hand along its curves,
felt the hairs rise in the divot of my palm,
I would have needed a sweater of willow to be satisfied.

Instead I slipped it into my ear. How did I know
a pussy willow was the right shape for the foyer of my ear,
long hall leading to the eardrum and the bones behind?

The bud rested there and I listened,
wanting to hear what it had to say
which was quiet, which was the muted listening of plants.

When I asked Mother to extract a pussy willow
from my ear, I couldn't explain its presence
how I listened and heard its secret.

Copyright © 2011 Laura Shovan All rights reserved
from Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone
CityLit Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

On Such a Morning

2011-03-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

with coffee and peanut butter toast and 800 mg. of ibuprophen, what a breakfast.
So much going on, so, so much. Soon my parents visit (huzzah to the skies!) M & I are scrambling to balance some serious plans, including travel and well, other, and prepping the guest room, the sun room and deck,hanging curtains (you just wait!) with painting (there is a disturbing firework chrysanthemum of velvet red on the bathroom wall where I wanted to get a sense of the color and then just stopped.) I have now the most wonderful kitchen bench--beyond my wishes for it--gorgeous wood, a carving at the back and a storage bench underneath! All those wonderful aprons and kitchen extra sillinesses will have a home. I attempted to re-embargo my book (Teatime) with UC and found that I have little time to publish it and only one additional year of embargo available. This means editing poems and the book as a whole. I meant to attend Colerain for that, but the one and only Stevarino will be in town that very same weekend. Worth it.

And April awaits with all of its poetic responsibility. Chicky and I are writing food poems and I am trying to set students up to do the balloon launch and guerella poetry events all month. I would like the campus abloom with verse, if not all of Columbus. Anyway, lots of travel and well, interesting events up ahead. I am busy, a little freaked-out but generally so happy.

Found the site to register by hot pink bus found back in the days of Victorian Village. It is very much my kind of project and I feel happy again to have found that little playing card sized block of fucshia and bus-yellow wood.

I have excised a lot of overvigilance from my life and this finding of this hidden-thing and the artful and civic connections it brings, remind me that some sorts of watching-closely are still good.

Instructions for Vigilant Girls

Be the sleeping sister who sees no one.
Stay stuck in. Later, hand over

a list of suspects: the handyman,
the bachelor neighbor, the uncle

who was never really your uncle.
When there are conversations,

take notes in your secret diary:
She said she saw him look at things.

Wear the key in your hair. No one
will search there. Speak on behalf

of the soon-to-be-missing, but if they play
in the woods near your home, do not

trail them to an encounter with the man
in the conversion van who gently insists

you hunt for his puppy and means you
no harm through his pleated pockets filled

with stars and balloons, real pieces
of the moon. Resist. Try not to lick anything.

Bring your gum eraser and be invisible
as a grackle to the well-trained watcher

who follows your movements
but never reports them until

you are found veiled in a strip mall basement,
throat unfurling with threats and questions.

Erika Meitner

2011-03-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

Prayer
by Jorie Graham

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Thanky Veacy

2011-03-11T18:37:00.001-08:00

2011-03-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Blah Skies

2011-03-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

I've no real right to feel weary, the day has been gorgeous but I do. Someone rather close to me was attacked yesterday and is struggling and I feel a sense of her pain and violation and I feel helpless.

M and I have been very cabin-fever-grouchy and that hasn't helped the painting or hanging of drapes or feeling good about all that is so good around us.

So I bring you loveliness in the shape of Nickole Brown and her poem that I just re-read and newly-adored:

" How to Become a Dyke, Step Three, Birds"

A book of birds. A story in birds. Each breath
a bird, each dream slipped from your ear
to your pillow out the window a song:
cardinals laughing at you—birdie birdie birdie—
on a lonely Valentines, then robins swarming
the last bits of red another February day,
so many of them on the holly tree the branches
tick with their picking and you stop
the car. But you are so cold, you have to get to the store,
and in the florescent buzz of the freezer aisle, you swear
you hear a flock of larks is called an exaltation,
but think no, that’s too pretty, that can’t be
right. Buy your frozen pizza and peas and try to
remember warmer days:
the surf shop with the parrot, big and green with a beak
full of fingers, your hair a dread of salt and seaweed
so you would run home to your grandmother’s
to wash the sand from your scalp. In the shower,
on the sill of the window made to crank tightly closed
to hurricanes, that porcelain bluebird—
all those years, she swore she’d die and come back
red-breasted, blue-winged, and singing,
but when the time came, it was only morphine
talking: white beasts stalking the hospital room,
with wings long as a Cadillac and tail feathers flowing like new
curtains, she said, and faces, they’ve got faces bright and sharp as a fox.
There is nothing you can do. The reincarnation you used to believe in
is a drag queen named Phoenix on Saturday nights at the bar
where a girl leans in to you with both thumbs cowboy hooked
to the pockets of her jeans, nothing more.
When she asks for your number, you make for the door.
There is nothing you can do and so you travel
to Brooklyn where birds sing louder, competing
against sirens and cabs and ice cream trucks.
Try to find a woman there who makes you forget
the woman before who took you to a red barn
to see a pony, the barn swallows
knifing the air between rafters. You will leave her,
you always leave, your heart a young hummingbird
who has learned that hummingbirds do not land
when they suckle the flower—only fledglings
claw the red plastic feeder. Say, I just can’t,
say it, then leave, say it,
then make your way to the headstone
of your grandmother. Her ashes are not
there, but her name is, and because you still believe
in some words, it is enough. You are there to seek
permission. Cool your face against the granite and ask
is what I have become okay?
After, feed the cemetery swans dandelion greens
and think their beauty is not unlike the hissing
swan of Lake Bled, the tidal swan of Galway,
all water the same drowning, no matter how far you go.
When you have the courage, take another woman
to your bed but wake on the porch
to a cathedral of sunrise singing, the boards splintered
hard to your back. Walk with her
to the park where a yellow bird follows alongside
in a sine cosine rollercoaster of flight.
Argue with her—it’s not possible, a canary
in Kentucky, but think why not?
What’s lovely in this world is no more impossible than what’s not—
when you were married to a man, three sparrows trapped themselves
in that porch light and cooked against the glass; later that first summer
as a wife, a mother jay—again, say it—trapped
in the garden pond, your face reflected in that fishshit water
dashed bright with blue feathers and golden coy.
You never did grow old enough with him
for the pink plastic flamingos to decorate the front yard,
never did see that hokey sign—Lordie, Lordie,
look who’s forty!—and it makes you cry like a peacock and shred
your flesh in strips to the black tower beaks—Take it, dear raven. Take it,
clacking black crow. When there is no meat left, throw
strands of hair and bits of cheap bread to a fast-food sparrow,
eat for years on the bland sorrow of grease and plastic and frustrated men
until you travel to a lilac-eyed cockatoo
that beats her head against your collarbone
to rush up a serving of hot fruit and seed, a vomit offering
meant for another with a beak to guzzle it
back down. You say, I’m sorry, but I think your bird
is sick, but the woman who owns her
simply cleans off your shirt, puts her pet softly back
in the cage. Nah, honey, that’s her way of saying
she loves you, she says. Can’t you tell love from sickness?
Go further north—there you’ll find a five-note song from one side
of the mountain, calling lonely for days before another finally answers.
You’ll never see that bird and never learn its name,
but it does not matter. When you hear it, a woman
will be waiting. Pack your things and come back home

Siberian Real Lives

2011-02-28T17:27:00.001-08:00

If not for having played one video game all the way through and finding that game to be nothing shy of sheer art, I could now issue a blanket statement regarding video games and how I believe they put people's lives in a deep freeze, but not one that preserves them fresh and whole, but one that makes for conditions unlivable for flesh and blood.

Upon first moving to Ohio, I dated someone briefly who was addicted to that other world--Any. Other. World. He was in despair about his life and acheivements but couldn't stand to be in his life--the one outside the computer--long enough to make any changes. The relationship would not have been a holding one for so many reasons, but to watch how he submerged himself in anywhere else, was painful to see and it was honestly beyond me: a huge fan of day-to-dayness: the varying skies, anticipating breakfast, good music, perfume, watching the neon streak of a bluebird as it crossed the dead winter yard.

Intaglio!

2011-02-27T19:39:00.000-08:00

Torrentially or "what spills blood spills spirit" indeed

2011-02-27T18:41:00.000-08:00

A great weekend birthdaying my BFF and enjoying a beautiful dinner in Kentucky. Tonight it's all indoors and thunderstorms and tomorrow, alas, a faculty meeting.

The second collection is nowhere near ready to go out tomorrow so I wish I had been better about setting aside some editing time. I have been teaching the WWI crowd in Poetry of Witness & Survival and from that, I bring you this excellent bit on Wilfred Owen:

“Every good love story has another love hiding within it.”

2011-02-25T06:39:00.001-08:00

/

Waiting for the snowplow to drive by so that I can get my nephew's recorded book in the mail. I miss him terribly these days. I am long overdue for a visit.

In other news: I put buttermilk in my coffee this morning. Distraction, you evil cohort. I am about to finish filling out my faculty enrichment grant and with luck, I will have contest entry fees and postage enough for the season.

I am still high on the Arctic Zero. Coffee is their best flavor, though Vanilla Maple with kosher salt or luscious Trader Joe's raisin medley and rum extract makes for a fine faux Haagen Das Rum Raisin.

I am driving us all crazy with the color swatches. The living room is not going to be apricot and the kitchen moves from a color called soft drizzle to a creamy honeydew mix. I never thought I could drive myself crazy with the range between Fresque and Pure Periwinkle or that now, evil Martha Stewart has a color called tin that is the softest buff aluminum you ever saw. See? Madness! Here is a taste of Rainwater:

Here is a cool vintage kitchen in many of the colors that I have to work with in mine. And here is room in a shade of blue that I adore and that M just cannot like. These are our challenges: color and food incompatabilities. There are worse things.

But I got a great new set of photos from a student at my school and upon posting one at facebook, I feel like I am right to think that it would make a great author photo. Too bad the new books aren't making the rounds or getting much love when they do. I forgot how much patience the process requires. Still, it must be done. I think of Julianna Baggott's output, she with her academic job, her successful marriage, her nom de plumes, her four kids, her so-much life squeezed into this one lifetime, and I am ashamed.

Speaking of: I cannot wait to get my hands on Bridget Asher's Provence Cure for the Broken-Hearted. The one quote from it has been really resonant lately with the new life, home and the way that I am so happy about my big old Bear's life too and that his daughter and his girls all are more love and happiness in my life, too. And M: well, some days M just stands for miracle or madness and most days it is both.

Information Paradox, Event Horizons

2011-02-21T19:28:00.001-08:00

and the smear of the self on the lip of a black hole. Or universes like sneeches in a Seuss book but instead of stars on their bellies, there would be universes with black holes and some that have not. Just watched a special on Stephen Hawking and felt like my own brain is the size of one particle of finely-ground glitter comparatively. My old friend and momentary roommate used to try and explain Hawking's theories to me and the beauty and elegance of some equations. Those talks captured my imagination and I would rush out to write poems that made some pretty facile connection between science/math and some emotional or aesthetic calculus. In retro., the ideas were naive, but I enjoyed how my mind went all teakettle-whistle when I thought I found common ground between the theoretical, intricate space of ideas I understood barely and could prove less and the playground of invention that writing could be for me. It was fun to think that way and I was like a little kid tugging at my friend's sleeve and asking about this concept or that, string theory, Schrodenger's cat.
Anyway, after that spring day--wasn't it just two days ago? tonight finds my world all whitewashed and my commute an ice capade of cars. It feels unreal enough for me to release the thought-tangle of ruminating about S.H. and the nostalgia of recalling how I used to work everything that caught my ear or eye into my writing. For now, this too-often-insomniac is going to wish for the pull of the black hole of slumber.

Shovel of Rain

2011-02-21T09:38:00.000-08:00

Another rain-drenched day, soaked through to its bones with drizzle. Outside a tipped shovelful of rainwater. Inside, a strawberry-shaped timer goes off and four brown hard-boiled eggs, crisp in their starched-jackets are rinsed cold, then placed in the Hall refrigerator box that I got in a set of three perwinklewhiteperwinkle from my Mom for this past Christmas.

This morning's coffee is not chocolate velvet, nor even chocolate silk.

The rain comes down in such a way is to make cursive signature scrawls on the puddles outside.

Pink Lady apples taste like watermelon.

I am loathe to leave a bed which contains the sound of rain, two cats, and the cozy good sheets the color of late-dusk.

The twilight chimes paint will be too purplish for the sunroom and maybe just right for the bathroom. The sunroom, in good Southern tradition, should be a Carolina blue. The bird on the bedroom deck was not a male or female nuthatch but my first Carolina wren.

I saw my first cardinal in Carolina. I first drove to Alabama with a boy from Carolina. Then I met a boy from Virginia who I nearly married.

I will not forget the winter cemetery nor the four deer running on the last of the iced-reservoir.

Not watermelon exactly, but inexactly, like the flavor manufactured at the flavor factory off I-75 in Cincinnati, just before the St.Bernard/Mitchell Avenue exit.

The St.Bernard soap factory is the most gorgeous thing.

My best friend lives off that exit and our favorite gone-place was called Chili Company but we always referred to it as Chili Time.

I have always loved the look of the Bicycle Playing Cards Water Tower.

As if Spring

2011-02-20T05:57:00.000-08:00

Spent the day out in the yard yesterday, raking through all of the promising places of myrtle and what might be planned-vegetation of some sort. The work felt good and imagining what I might plant where, even better. My daddy says that he will be out to help build the grape arbor and start the forever-process of growing the vines to fill it in. Today is all sleet and cold rain again, but that little moment of respite, that little porthole into Spring was a great reminder.

M's parents' anniversary is this week: FIFTY-NINE YEARS! They have such a kindly and strong bond and it is inspiring to see. I sent M-solo to celebrate as I don't like to do overnights at their house until I am officially fianceed-up and in honor of their celebration, I made a double-tiered anniversary cake. The initial plan was to use genuine Italian meringue icing but, I started late and as I was also using fondant and planning to stack the two layers of red velvet cake with a layer of chocolate-cherry filling and then bake a smaller cake and stack it on top of those, and elaborately decorate the entire thing. In light of that, I thought that an icing that I have never made and that had a danger of failing, might be less wise than an icing I know well that would leave me time for any unforeseen mishaps or extras. I must say that the final result: white fluffy, whipped icing with white fondant stripping around the bottom and a white heart and white roses for decoration (which, despite my sorely-lacking art skills, looked to any-eye, like roses and hearts)did my girly-girl heart good. If we have not spoken of my strange attraction to domesticity, one that kicked in after I got my degree, than post after post about food and decorating and entertaining should clue you in. What you don't see is how I stare at the china cabinet where I have now, a complete set of the very china I chose to be my wedding pattern when I was only fifteen. (But as there was no wedding then and has not yet been, I caved and registry-be-hung, bought my own.) Inside that same cabinet, is the better part of another set by Vernon, the dreamiest twilight and lilacy-smoky-mauve, plus a dash of ivory and butter and mint. In fact, the set looks like a very gourmet box of buttermints.

Friday began the good weekend with two former students driving all the way out to my pretty little home and taking photographs of me for one of their senior thesis shows. They brought the most delicious Greek food along and I made my feta theologos and cut up some gourmet peppers and tomatoes and we dined. The photographs were sent to me this morning, and for those of you who have seen how unphotogenic I can be, you will understand my shock when I say that the pics were wonderful and that it hurt their beauty for me not one bit, that the background of the one the student chose for her exhibit shows my kitchen table (have I waxed rhapsodic on it yet?) and yes, the china cabinet with its shelves of white on white roses, blue in their shadings and the aforementioned buttermint-ware.

The weekend has been a subtle bag of goodies.

2011-02-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

Off my running-mix, I bring you the beloved (and also poetically-charged) Mr. Berman & bright co.

The Unspeakable Sweetness

2011-02-14T14:47:00.000-08:00

of some days. Spent the day hearing love stories. Worked at school with K and D at a Poetry on Demand booth. We asked for a name, some pet names, inside joke, a symbol, a color, a memory, a pet, a shared-thing or whatever we could be told to write a poem from one person who loved another. We had a husband/father/grandfather/great grandfather buy a poem for each of his four ladies and a cool faculty member tell of meeting his dancer wife when he was fifty, she: six months along and he fell in helpless, life-changing love. Now they have two kids and a life full of color and motion and he seems happy every time I see him. She is "the dream of my life" he said, "the mother of my children" and D and me, romantics from way back, we just beamed and began cutting out hearts (she) and writing the zillionth custom poem of the day (me). One lovely young woman who ordered a poem up last year for the same beloved who, having lived overseas much of this year, is finally coming home. She had sent him her grandmother's china teacups from the set that he wanted to drink from and know that it would be reunited with the set in the home they would soon share. It cheers a girl to think of all that love and the fun of writing a poem for lovers new and old and children (two little girls named Mila and Nina, the daughter of a new interesting friend). Nonetheless, this girl is as wiped-out as her own beloved who is still himself, ailing from the a cold. The reservations for the much-anticipated Cinco de Mayo (camerones diablo!) will have to be cancelled but there is something dear about a night indoors, bundled up and needing nothing by way of love.

Selections from Borrowed Love Poems

3.

What can I do, if a red meteor wakes the earth
and the color of robbery is in the air

Now that I dream of you so much
my lips are like clouds

drifting above the shadow of one who is asleep
Now that the moon is enthralled with a wall

What can I do, if one of us is lying on the earth
and the other is lost in the sky

7.

To some, the winter sky is a blue peach
teeming with worms

and the clouds are growing thick
with sour milk

What can I do, now that the fat black sea
is seething

now that I have refused to return
my borrowed dust to the butterflies

their wings full of yellow flour

8.

What can I do, I never believed happiness
could be premeditated

What can I do, having argued with the obedient world
that language will infiltrate its walls

What can I do, now that I have sent you
a necklace of dead dried bees

and now that I want to
be like the necklace

and turn flowers into red candles
pouring from the sun

9.

What can I do, now that I have spent my life
studying the physics of good-bye

every velocity and particle in all the waves
undulating through the relapse of a moment's fission

now that I must surrender this violin
to the sea's foaming black tongue

now that January is almost here
and I have started celebrating a completely different life

John Yau
(reprinted from Boston Review)

Leviathan & Lonely

2011-02-12T11:24:00.000-08:00

Sunshine on today's snow and a walk is in the works for I need to work on my wintered-up leviathan proportions and my cabin fever. I keep looking at Pratt & Lambert's Velvet Red for the downstair's bathroom and the intense Va Va Voom for the laundry room. For lunch, I had the final half of my Arctic Zero Vanilla Maple and with a shake of kosher salt, disgruntled reviewers be damned, it makes a fine ice cream substitute.

I can almost taste Spring on the way, or maybe I want it so (hot tub! swimming pool! rooftop reading! firepit dinners! and a Disney cast of birds, deer, flora and fauna here now and thawed into view.) Plus, I miss summer-arms and little vintage dresses with the boots I never put away but sometimes choose sandals over. And music festivals--a new thing I do and can't get enough of.

Josh Ritter will be at Southgate this week and I am working on talking M into. (M is the reason for today's song post as he began to tell me about a dream he had last night and immediately the song below began playing in my head.) M began singing John Prine's song but for me, Josh Ritter's song will always follow "I had a dream last night..." But because I do love JP so, too and saw him not long ago in concert, I will post two of my Prine favorites.

Hit post too soon and wanted to mention how here at 37 degrees, we are actually thinking that a walk in this warm weather would be nice. The plan for tonight is to watch The Graduate, which, embarassing confession: I have never before seen. There are others. Such as: for Thanksgiving this year, my good friend C, wanted to come to the house as it had the look of a house that was a big gathering place "like in The Big Chill". Confession: I have never seen The Big Chill. Or had not until M decided to remedy that.

There are more, despite the fact that I worked in a video store and hung out all night with my then-roomate and watched dark, psychological drama after d. p. d. or foreign films (which were not necessarily not dpds). Somehow I missed huge swaths of classics so that the other night when TCM played An American in Paris, I was riveted. I must walk out into this afternoon before it further darkens. Adieu.

2011-02-10T18:30:00.001-08:00

On Keeping One's Sense of Humor

2011-02-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

Up at six this morning, prepping for class and opting out of my first lit. class as the Minute Clinic nurse wanted me to stay home for two days and rest this virus away. Since my job is not exactly strenuous, I decided I could not, in good conscience, miss two days of school or life. But my first lit. class requires some lecturing and the pattern has been to go in, do that, and then head to fiction workshop where I think by then I have fully awakened the cough. Anyway, and onward, I went to workshop and found that an entire group had NOT prepared their stories for today and that of those being workshopped, as one student put it after class, it seemed as if one story was written the morning of class: no proofreading whatsoever.

She wondered how one could bear to teach on days when it seemed that the teacher was the only one to care about writing in the room. Most days, it is easy to love what i do, to really adore the way these people I am fortunate enough to have in my classroom think. But some days are harder.

I try then to maintain my sense of humor.
my engine is the only noise I herd
causes me to say: I like this, it brings to mind horsepower, though I think you mean "heard."

Or when I get excuses so incredibly elaborate as to make Tolstoy and every Spanish soap opera writer break into open weeping no greater tragedy have ever they encountered. My all-time favorite, the one that I ask that any student choosing to "author a fiction" to tell me about his/her absence must outdo goes something like this: "I am sorry I missed class, my roomate's father died over the weekend and I was up all night preparing the funeral feast.
Teacher: The funeral feast?
Student: (earnestly and without breaking stride)Yes, and then I was so tired that I partook of the feast and forgot that I had used pepper in preparing it and that I am allergic to pepper...

Dude, you had me at partook!
I love it, because it would have been enough to console a grieving friend but just in case, one must apply the more is more rule and go on to add ingredients such as sleep deprivation and allergies, all under the larger awning of self-sacrifice, martyrdom and compassion. Who would fail compassion? Only a monster. The best part about it is that I quoted my dear student and years later he returned to my classes and we had a great laugh about it. I never felt resentful about the story, because I have such a love for them overall that their well-meaning but sometimes lame moments remind me that they are even then, creative and indescribably innocent in their larceny. Most days.

But there are those double-u tee eff days when I wonder what must make someone not bother to do a story for fiction workshop? Under what hopeful star slept they the night before they showed up to face a tired, sick women who drove forty-plus miles to be denied the stories for the next class workshop. And I wish then for that old wonderful Thomas Wayman poem:

Did I Miss Anything?

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything, I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered
but it was one place

And you weren’t here

Singing the Praises

2011-02-08T21:33:00.001-08:00

of Minute Clinic, of all things,and CVS Pharmacy for having such a thing.
I am all medded-up and bedded-down and ready to call this night a night.

Because I love anything begun with an accordion and if any instrument is a kind of lung, I believe it's a likely candidate, I will offer both music and verse to shut down this Tuesday prettily.

Drugstore

Don't be ashamed that your parents
Didn't happen to meet at an art exhibit
Or at a protest against a foreign policy
Based on fear of negotiation,
But in an aisle of a discount drugstore,
Near the antihistamine section,
Seeking relief from the common cold.
You ought to be proud that even there,
Amid coughs and sneezes,
They were able to peer beneath
The veil of pointless happenstance.
Here is someone, each thought,
Able to laugh at the indignities
That flesh is heir to. Here
Is a person one might care about.
Not love at first sight, but the will
To be ready to endorse the feeling
Should it arise. Had they waited
For settings more promising,
You wouldn't be here,
Wishing things were different.
Why not delight at how young they were
When they made the most of their chances,
How young still, a little later,
When they bought a double plot
At the cemetery. Look at you,
Twice as old now as they were
When they made arrangements,
And still you're thinking of moving on,
Of finding a town with a climate
Friendlier to your many talents.
Don't be ashamed of the homely thought
That whatever you might do elsewhere,
In the time remaining, you might do here
If you can resolve, at last, to pay attention.

"Drugstore" by Carl Dennis, from Callings. © Penguin Poets, 2010

"There are ghosts out in the rain tonight..."

The Ys and What-nots of Bacteria

2011-02-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

or "why my trip to the gym to shake the cough out of me was not the notion of geniuses."

So back in the early days of me and M (early 2010) I got my annual flu-thing (and no, I do not believe in flu shots in any case) and because I imagine myself a sturdy specimen and believe that sheer stubborness can evict any illness or must, I decided after days of coughing, congestion and bedrest, that I would accept the lovely M's invitation for a winter hike. Of course, the friends of Intaglio came unglued and protested. But they did not yet know M and I did not let him know how sick I was or how unhappy were my associates. The hike was gorgeous, a true winter wonderland of a day and we ended up in downtown Yellow Springs in small bookstores and coffee shops and I knew I had found a good idea and was instantly on the mend. I spent time out in the freezing cold and came back feeling as if recovery was finally reaching me.
I was "well" in a day.

This gothic, grotesque, illness requires too much thoughts about that hideous word: phlegm and the colors of such a thing. Polite people say such crude things to me as "mucinex" and I am transported to cartoon boogers on seventies La-Z Boys and I am thinking about fedoras on snot-men and I am tired of all of this repulsive goo-speak. But when the wise Gretchen M. wrote me and said that I would not ever be better without medical attention, I did some research and it turns out that if you are coughing up a little Christmas, you might have a bacterial infection, you might be a walking pneumonia in hot black boots, after all. And just because you have promised yourself a Valentines' red lipstick if you go to the gym at least three times before Saturday, you will not be spared lung damage from your refusal to go to a doctor.

Turns out, sheer will won't chase this ghoul away. Only antibiotics and unless one of my two readers know of a street-dealer in penicylin, I am destined to deal with the medical community, with great disappointment and soon.

Sigh...
I have found this wonderful new treat called Arctic Zero, a lowfat, low calorie icy dessert that comes in flavors like Vanilla Maple and Pumpkin Pie. It is a Whole Foods product, which means I sell a kidney to buy some but I am liking it enough to consider that fair enough.

Brown Lung
Sometimes I’d spend the whole night coughing up
what I’d been breathing in all day at work.
I’d sleep in a chair or take a good stiff drink,
anything to get a few hours rest.

The doctor called it asthma and suggested
I find a different line of work as if
a man who had no land or education
could find himself another way to live.

For that advice I paid a half-day’s wage.
Who said advice is cheap? It got so bad
each time I got a break at work I’d find
the closest window, try to catch a breath.

My foreman was a decent man who knew
I would not last much longer on that job.
He got me transferred out of the card room,
let me load the boxcars in the yard.

But even though I slept more I’d still wake
gasping for air at least one time a night,
and when I dreamed I dreamed of bumper crops
of Carolina cotton in my chest.
© 1998 Ron Rash. All rights reserved.

Grateful

2011-02-06T19:33:00.001-08:00

to be curled up on this couch, on this night, computer in lap, zima tomatoes in fridge and despite the cough that I thought I had conquered but which lingers and troubles all day and for a portion of the night. So far I have a pulled muscle in my upper back from trying to avoid the headache the comes from coughing and the burning lungs. But I have a plan to go to the gym tomorrow and to force myself to do a real run and see if I can shake this gross gathering of ickyness that has invaded the isthmus of lung reflected. And while I did watch the game, and have developed a late season fandom/fondness for Aaron Rodgers and so am happy for Green Bay's win and for Mr. R's MVP award, I can't claim enough attachment to football (now basketball...) to give this post its gratitude.

Lots of things are responsible, the first is a simple appreciation for my friends and for Spoon of NY who sent a ridiculously-generous housewarming gift and somewhere up ahead, I get to buy pails of vibrant paint and zero-in on what I think will be an apricot living room, a twilight chimes bathroom, a leaf green bedroom, and a kitchen that varies depending on how much we hate the cabinets on any given-week. But really I am thankful for friends that still care for me after so many years and so many different types of lives. Spoon in New York, Bear in Denver, my dear Liz, Kathrine and Karima regathered in my hometown. Between them, the better part of my life resides.

I am really loving Shawnee Hills, too and I logged on tonight determined to do a review of a place we just found and love, so bear with me as here goes:
Cinco de Mayo Mexican Grill is my new favorite find in Powell. It is run by this very cool family and Manny, the owner, makes a wonder of a margarita called appropriatly Manny's Margarita. It has a real high kick to it and doesn't forsake a fresh tart and salty flavor. And then the shrimp diablo dish was amazing. The best shrimp dish I have ever eaten, spicy but tangy and the shrimp were large and fresh.
The decor is comprised of these colorful, carved wooden chairs with intricate scenes that made the whole room look vibrant and happy. The staff was fun and friendly and the place was filled with regulars. I have told M that it is the only place I want to go out and eat around here although I have a real fondness for Iacono's and Shanghai Lily--all places that I would never have frequented if I had stayed in my old neighborhood. Spring means we get to investigate Delaware, Ohio, which is just a little up the road from where we are now. Adventures up ahead, good, interesting food in our little town, a hope that most of the worst storms are mostly behind us, all good things for this early February.

Marshmallow Creme Coffee & Black Gladiolas

2011-02-06T07:32:00.000-08:00

Sunday morning and M is making my favorite Sunday breakfast: Soldiers, a dish I'd never heard of before M and one that will make me always think of soft-boiled eggs and sticks of toast as his dish alone. I use Frank's hot sauce with them and it is a breakfast that generally makes me happy.

My marshmallow creme coffee tastes neither like marshmallow nor creme, but it is acceptable, if only. The window to my right (a sliding glass door that leads out to a rooftop deck area,) makes for each season practically a part of my bedroom so I wake to what felt all winter-wonderland to me in December and by now, is going a little winter-weary. But Gladys is here and adores watching the birds that I have left food for, even the starlings are still a treat for her, while I feel a bit remorseful that they have found us and in their large numbers devour every kind of food I put out for the various customers of "Cafe Zozo."

A jay just absconded with a heel of Italian bread much larger than his head and I am content, if baffled as to how to get back to the kind of routine I had in Victorian Village with long walks to school and the gym and that supergirl feeling I had of being fit and strong. And writing, more writing has to happen. This morning's paper had an article with a woman who died and whose family could not afford a funeral. People banded together and someone made her a beautiful coffin of aged poplar and blue lining. People raised money for the expenses and while I still feel a bit stung and saddened at the Ted William's fiasco, I needed good news even if it came wrapped (like one of the mysteriously-dead rainbow trout and sunfish of Salon, Ohio) in the newsprint of abject poverty, of people so poor they cannot afford to retrieve their own dead, it illustrated good will and the days seem so lacking in it.
In other news, I am planning a trip out here for my mom soon and I need to get to Florida and see that wonderchild-nephew of mine. For some strange reason, I am loving sending random Valentine's treats out. For The Bear and his lady J, I am sending Trader Joe's dark chocolate almonds with sea salt and turbinado sugar plus a beautiful cumin/caramel/toffee scarf with gold elephants embroidered on it. (Straight from Bangkok and from my bird-boy.) The Bear still feels pretty beat-up by Alex's death and while midnight-dark-chocolate almonds are no cure, they are certainly a Sartwellian-endorsed grief response.
For Penny Rose and Maya I found these necklaces made up of pennies and coral hearts. For the lovely Ms. Lyla Wren, I have sent a red tutu and heart leggings of a valentine's outfit and for Juniper, there are journals and gel pens. I love that all of these children are a part of my world if not my own than good for the borrowing as if anything isn't.

Thursday, Chickadee, Warm Room, Nuthatch, Home Safe, Robin, Trees Spun of Glass

2011-02-03T13:45:00.000-08:00

I am baking chicken for dinner and the house is filled with the golden smell of it. Outside the trees are strangled in glimmering glass and when the sun hits the branches there is a crystalline cursive to their cries for help. They've written to the sky and the sun lights a reply but the air is still freezing and the bath of hopeful glow is deceiving.

All the words to and from Tuscaloosa are slowing-down. I have taken the story to those who didn't know and heard enough to know that what I know is what most know. Alex was a riddle in certain ways and to love and respect him meant you let him, in some respect, remain that way. You didn't ask his age and you didn't probe about his health. There was a solitude to him and he could fill a room with friends and company and keep that solitude intact.

I am home for the week, for the weekend and planning a strategy for knocking out my story and trying to feel completely well again. To my right, sliding glass doors lead to a roof with the leftover whiteout of snow and on that winter's page, there is the sanskrit of bird feet as they visit and revisit the flat of peanuts, raisins, melamakorona that I have left for them. In one day they have made short work of the offering and thinking of them in the bitter cold, I am glad for what fat I can swaddle them in. For myself, I miss my summer arms, the tone of them and the way I was consistent in my attempts to keep strong and driven. M is so great about me, so accepting and so celebratory that it is easy to lie down and rest in all that regard. But I feel noodly, all wrong for the opening of the pool in May and dreaded swimwear it implies.

In the time that I've been writing this post, the cool breeze has danced feathers of ice over the melting roof-snow and what was liquid just moments ago is plumes of ice-panes and a reminder how deep runs this cold.

Ice Storm
For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being…
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister…

I am a guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader… The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body…

It could be for beauty—
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God;
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.

Jane Kenyon

Alexander Sartwell

2011-02-01T08:22:00.000-08:00

I hate death's guts, I really do.

There is no elegy elegant enough to address the death of Alex. Some of the happiest days of my life were spent around his table, listening to his stories of old muntGUMree and the stories and dishes of Evalina. There is a gone-South that I would never know any other way and I felt honored to be in his sunny kitchen, watching light play through the cobalt vases propped in the window. I felt lucky to be invited early, help prepare the food, to laugh with him and to drive to Birmingham, to flea markets and thrift shops and with Alex in tow, for treasures to feel more treasurey. The Bear loved him dearly and he, The Bear and I felt kind of safe and caverned up in a cave of quilts when I was with them both.

Alex could tell a mean tale, write a brilliant passage and cook such food as to make you "slap your baby brother" when you took that first sensuous bite. I heard the south in all of its conflicted dialects, understood race and class from the inside. Alex made me feel less like one touring Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, as one who got it and was in certain ways, dumb yankee no more. His backyard was alive with the gorgeous collection of plants that only a professional can whip up and when we left, hearts in hands, it was the French tarragon that dear Bear dug up and planted for Alex that made the leaving behind of such a glorious plant a bit more bearable.

There is no way to say goodbye to what knowing Alex gave me, or how he made me feel transported through time to where good manners, lovely clothes and books and recipes and stories reined supreme. To have one more day in that dining room, the crazy-good chickens that were melting off their bones and swaddled in flavor, the good china, the bright silver, the candlelight and the peals and peals of laughter. With him goes a whole era, a continent or two of knowledge, a gift of gab and memory and a, for lack of a better word, bonding-force. Alex made his table and the selected guests a work of art. He built friendships like cities that interconnected and expanded both the history and resource of both. Some people are spokes, others are hubs and Alex was a super-hub for a wheel so large, that time and space are both along for the ride. I felt, and still feel, as if I knew the living-Evalina for the way she was brought back to life through Alex's telling. She, the Sayres, my beloved Zelda, Tallulah Bankhead, whole swaths of neighborhood where I had never walked and ghosts long-dead before I ever arrived, were vivid, breathing-again and before you when Alex invoked them. I hope some of us can do the same for him. I was so lucky to have known him.

You were truly one of a kind and you cannot know just how you will be missed, Dear Friend.

2011-01-31T19:45:00.000-08:00

Hummingbird
by Elaine Terranova

What with foresight and dancing,
gypsies would seem to pass easily
between worlds. The hummingbird too—

only a moth with a beak—
Have I ever heard it hum?

Yet it's everywhere welcome,
coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water,
for we are devious, in our desires.

And the dead, we embody them
for our own purposes. I can't talk
to a shadow, to an abstraction.

A sun worshiper, my brother,
always raising his face to it.
One touch and the body roar quieted.

Now, though I walk the length
of the park, he is not there.
He is nowhere under the sun.

I want the dead but I am with
the living. The tulips raise up their hands.
The lunch crowd swallows me.

Waiting for the Ice Storm

2011-01-31T17:25:00.001-08:00

and the aftermath of that, and my drive in to work tomorrow should be an Olympic event. Ever since the one terrible tornado and black ice incident in Alabama of all places, I live in fear of freezing rain, sleet, and automobiles. Odd that this Utah girl should be a chicken after her Alabama winter and not all of the years of blinding blizzards and snowfalls so heavy that they routinely brought down the trees that wore the enormous white parkas of them. Beautiful enshroudings, if deadly.

So I am homed-away and happy to be less sickly than the virus that made me feel all Victorian with its fevers and the coughing-up of blood. I meant to fan my hair out against the pillows and go out in a way of wretched rose petals.

I opted out of the AWP conference this year and today's weather forecast is the only thing to console me about not attending. The conference is one of those things like family that one loves and hates at various times, but that in the end, one feels more at home connected to than not. Tonight finds me listening to World Cafe and my beloved Old 97s on the radio and getting to anticipate seeing them in Cincy AND here in April. Also, Woody Pines maybe this Friday and I am hoping to talk M into the Josh Ritter show.

I am wishing I had finished my Cold, Cold... story in time for the deadline I imposed for it. I did get comments back from Kathrine for my novel pages and her comments were good and sound and make me want to get in and write. If I can get all of my classes planned out thoroughly and this little lit mag up and running, then I can justify such selfish indulgences as some writing and re-writing.

I have been assembling a kind of loose elegiac collection, very lyric and white-spaced. I think I am going to call it Pink Lady Apple, for now and see how it fits over time.

I post a bit of winter tonight to coordinate with the freezing rain that begins soon.
Deer, December

One of thirty nights I can't sleep
I awaken to motion in the last dark
out the window, tight against the hillside.
I put on my glasses to stop
the glass in the old house from wavering.

Three of them, maybe twenty feet away,
they nuzzle new snow,
leaves and twigs not yet frozen hard,
a poor diet, winter just begun.
Foraging, chewing, staring lines into space.
Their necks bolt upright only to the slight
shift in what I imagine is wind,
to things I can't hear, couldn't,
were I with them outside and not still
warm on the edge of the bed

Then a cardinal is winter
red against the even gray of 6 a.m.
—cloudy, this time of year. I'll stay watching
until I'm late for another morning meeting,
my alarm clock not gone off—that must be it.
I can't know how little I'll be missed.

Richard Terrill

Saturdaisy

2011-01-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a bouquet of a day, the kind that seems incongruous in its individual blossoms but gathered up, makes for a pleasing visual harmony.

Strangely, I went to my first VFW ever. There was something cozy-cavernous to it and it was lovely to be there with an older vet who was so proud to be showing a place new to me and dear to him. On the way out, a really young man helped M's mother to the car and his innocence and sense of respect meant a lot to her and reminded me of some of my students and their true sense of decency. It was a lovely way to end the Dayton portion of the day.

The night could not have been any different from the day. A dive bar out in Gahanna called Mug and Jug and a cover band that played everything from Counting Crows to ACDC. It was as you might imagine such a thing, but it was also fun in a way. Back home M played cd after cd for me and we danced in the kitchen and stayed up until three. Needless to say Sunday morning was a sleep-in and by afternoon I felt the full weight of a week spent sick followed by a day so long and so rich.

Tonight I am trying to write but the words seem difficult and I am here to try and warm-up somehow or give up and turn in.

One Dark Ballet

2011-01-28T22:17:00.000-08:00

Date night tonight and after a quick stop at Crate and Barrel (for what is date night without the domestic, capitalist foray into overpriced home goods?) we went out to our favorite new New Year's Eve find of a movie theatre to see a movie (my pick). Because I have a lifelong fascination with the ballet and the bizarre lives of ballerinas, I chose, of course, Black Swan.

Portman's performance was spot-on, if relentlessly earnest, but the movie overall lacked control over its tone, with inadvertant humor and high melodrama. It might be that the years have bred an impatience in me for art and the sufferers of art or it might be that I was just put-off by the countless bloody nail scenes, but I felt like this was the type of movie I have kind of outgrown.

In any case, after a long week of what felt like walking pneumonia, I had to get out. And I do have a new cube-shaped plum colored mimic end table, all in preparation for my mommy's visit.

Where have I been remiss? Well, considering the sick week, I am still text-ahead. I have been staying away from my telephone and spending time reconnecting with writer-friends and writing goals. I am deep into a new story that is dark and exciting and I have been thinking as my novel's narrator and imagining more of her story into place well enough to have written the ending a few days ago (though only the first fifty pages and the ending are really in place, there's a whole lot of middle to write yet.) But my priorities are falling back into place, at long last and hurrah!

For Keith's birthday, I usually wax nostalgic over some undergraduate memory, usually a driving-related one. I recalled finding a slide of a meteor or some starry-thing on a gas pump late at night during one of our crazy drives and there was something mysterious and hopeful about that find. Something promising and wherever Keith is I hope that window of starlight was foreshadowing.

Tonight me and mine are awake way too late. He: trying to unravel the Botticelli website for me and me, posting I-know-not-what to I-know-less-who and it's the middle of the middle of those nights that remind me of driving closer and closer to dawn or memories so sleep-deprived that I can't exactly recall if I saw a play called Sea Marks in some venue I can only remember by impression and I am happy for the life I have.

If I Ever Mistake You For a Poem
No body was ever composed
from words, not the hipsway

of verse, the iambic beat of a heart.
Yet inside you, a sestina

of arteries, the villanelle of villi,
sonnets between your shoulder blades.

If I were more obsessive I'd follow
the alliteration of age spots across

your arms. But I have exchanged
my microscope for a stethoscope

as I want to listen inside you, past
your repetition, your free verse of skin.

How easy it is to fall for your internal
organs. Your arrhythmia is charming

hidden in the ballad of body,
your gurgling stanzas, your lyric sigh.

Kelli Russell Agodon

2011-01-26T10:37:00.001-08:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KEITH!!!

2011-01-24T15:26:00.000-08:00

2011-01-10T12:34:00.001-08:00

TEN THINGS I KNOW

The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts.
It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs.
The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble
song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true,
the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died
because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off.
Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already.
Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own
continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years.
There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was
so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk.
Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of
the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left
are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were
a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling.
When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling.
It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other
with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten
things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty.
How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny
wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future.
The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is
why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic
here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words.
I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath
away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates
a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered
a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins.
In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow
I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid
symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose
ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole
I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed
inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river.
The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out
each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our
hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when
thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year.
How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved.
Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where
his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it.
The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to
go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is
what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with
the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body
travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That
doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are
cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always
between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance,
I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if
our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river.
Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face,
or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all,
the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower,
with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any
breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.

Richard Jackson (but, of course)

2011-01-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

Happy Hour
A rabbi, priest, and belly dancer walk into a bar.
Everyone turns their way, recognizing a joke
when they're in one. The belly dancer, for all the swivel
in her hips, is modest, and asks the rabbi and priest
to go to another bar, but the rabbi and priest agree
that whatever bar they enter, they'll face the expectation
of a punch line. By the time they order beers,
people have gathered as they would around a burning house.
The priest wants to explain to the crowd that he
and the rabbi take belly-dancing lessons for their health.
The rabbi only knows one joke, a knock-knock joke
about a bris that isn't funny: snip who? snip you.
The belly dancer's also a black belt. This skill
combines with her agoraphobia in a sudden burst
of wounding. Someone calls the cops. An Irish cop,
a crooked cop, and a blind cop walk into a bar.
The blind cop says to the crooked cop, ''I'm into the theory
but not the practice of roosters." Everyone laughs
except the woman in back, who writes on her napkin,
"Why do people and animals in jokes always enter bars
in threes?" Just then, a hurricane, tornado, mud slide,
and stapler walk into a bar. She strikes a line
through her question and estimates how many nights
she's spent in this bar or bars just like it.
The stick figure she draws on the napkin
has hung itself with an extension chord from a cloud.
"She has a beautiful smile," the waitress says.
When the woman looks up from gracing the stick figure
with a skirt, she sees the waitress has a halo
and says, "You have a halo." "Yes," the waitress says,
"I have a halo." "I would like a halo," the woman says.
"I know you would," the waitress says, pursing her lips
the way angels do when too tired to shrug.

Bob Hicok
The Gettysburg Review
Winter 2010

The Public Private, The Private Public

2011-01-07T06:45:00.000-08:00

Both facebook and the blog give me pause. They presume an importance to my daily whims and fancies that I don't actually have. I would be less than truthful if I didn't suggest that in growing up and reading the diaries of writers, I did not wish to make a certain colloquial art in my writings of the quotidian. I felt that way too about the epistolary form, the gracious hand-written letter that took pains to consider the reader instead of only the wishes for the writer to be heard and noticed. I admire great storytellers and those who can remember and deliver-well a joke. I lack some of these skills, but I aspire, on the writing front, anyway, to keep a kind of writer's diary here. The benefits are many: I can craft things well-enough for a more polished first draft if there is the hidden excitement that anyone at all might drop in for a read. I can make connections that are not strong enough to be an academic paper or even a solid essay but that, in fun, allow me to dip into music, random poems, quotes from movies and daily, tiny events. If something is to ignite from laying all these things down in proximity, it will ignite here and I can scoop it up into a word file and keep working. I can ventillate the smokey, musty, stale rooms of my psyche. I can overlap six issues into a post, and rant to my heart's content. I can wash it all down with a shot of likewise poetry. I can not verbalize every thing that frustrates me, but can instead do what I do to make sense of my world: word it out, here, and mostly alone.

In that mostly lies a world of troubles. The composite is a funny thing. You can write about one event, another person, a mixture of observations and then just a bunch of your own storytelling thrown in to keep things, well, somewhat anonymous. But there's that qualifying again. It is hard to keep a shared intimate space wholly private. The very sharing that makes me feel just enough accountability for an audience, and the fact that after graduate school, finding friends and readers has been tough, married now too with the much prayed-for and finally-found wonderful partner, all leads to a lack of writing community and community in general. At my loneliest points, dear blog, just to call out to an epistolic "you" made me feel less isolated. Certainly hitting "publish this post" brought a world of typographical error and inelegant prose into light in a way that the private recesses of my handwritten writings or my good-intentioned psyche never could.

I have major goals to get this work of mine completed, get it into the light and like most writers, I am my own worst enemy in that regard. So there is this space and from time to time, I try to fill it. And this space, as I mentioned is mostly private. But recently, upon being treated pretty shabbily by someone who has been a great deal of effort and someone who no matter how much I poured into the advice-giving and attempt to comfort, found himself always back to the same behavior and when told frankly, what I (or other alienated friends and family) thought, grew angry and lashed out at them. It is an alcoholism of the heart and it was exhausting. Years of self-analysis made me question not his behavior but my own. During that same period, the holidays occured as did a frustrating few days inside them. I decided to write about a live event and deal with the anger and sense of deep ingratitude of the now estranged friend and his addictions. I wrote in a very veiled way about it and left genders ambiguous. Someone read it and of course, was not happy. It mattered not that the character was not the character I intended, but that the frustration and some of the similar issues were at the heart of things. The year was ending and I wanted as I want now, to focus on positive things and to do the work that makes me feel good about myself. The amount of time and drama unfolding began to make me question why I do any of these things if they are to come under the wrong scrutiny and when they do, to be demanded of me more time and energy explaining. But under all that was the sneaky sense that I had been passive-aggressive and that due to a number of factors, I could not say openly and directly what I needed to say. So after the blog post, I wrote to the party in question and told him all I had to say about the way his patterns (two and a half years of patterns and two before I even knew him) were exhausting, that he wasn't living honestly and I was tired of trying to address it all. The friendship is no more and I am not at all sorry for that. Then a week or so later, I received the second call-out and in that letter I was not asked what I meant or to whom I was referring, or if I wasn't working on both the novel and essays that I work on here. I was accused outright. I pulled the blog into an invitation-only place. M (the partner) wondered at this and asked why I would do that. I said I wanted to be able to use it without self-consciousness and that I felt now, that I could not. I went to bed certain I had done the right thing. But as I lay there and thought of M's discussion with me about post-it notes and the permanent temporary and the way that all kinds of things were rattling around inside me and begging to be written and how I love how when April rolls around all of the poets with blogs who had linked to me and many of whom I only know through the blog would find me MIA, I felt bad. Because I like that other writers link to my blog and that when I post someone's poem, a google search may send that someone my way and that that might make a writer feel not so invisible on a day when that reminder is needed. I like that a couple of students, some old friends, and a few mystery folk wander in every so often and occasionally make a comment that something I wrote resonated with them and that for a moment, I feel completely connected, concatenated really, like those dolls that stretch out in a ribbon of forms and what connects them hand to hand is paper, that desparate necessary friend and foe of any writer.

So in the interest of all of that, I am resposting this. I hope that whatever I write is read in the spirit of understanding that, cliche as it is, "I write to find out what I'm thinking." It's the only way I know, the only way I care to.

Second-Hand Risings

2010-11-19T20:38:00.000-08:00

Found the ingredients to begin to shape my plum cake recipe. I am still deciding whether a chocolate cream cheese icing would be too much or just what the damsel plum ordered. Anyway, I completed my china pattern, a simple pattern I chose when I was only fifteen and attended a Greek wedding where the bride had registered for the reasonably-priced and kind of innocent pattern (a white rose on white background with the hint of blue shadow to its folds). It's a little fifteen year old me still, but I love that this late date from then I still like it and that it isn't the dumb 24 carat rimmed Lenox show-off china that so many other of the brides chose that year, primarily for the fact that it was the most expensive (and least interesting) of the patterns.

Thanksgiving is shaping up nicely, thanks to etsy, some thrifty runnings-around but little actual thrifting. That's the thing: I am taking a kind of mostly-haitus from thrifting, that delightful verb that makes a Friday afternoon into a treasure hunt. Because I am good at few things, and because I was trained by the best (Thanks Bear!) a professional antiques picker and my co-seller on an old ebay shop that made grad. school bearable and even at times, deeply elegant, I rarely go into a thrift store and don't score or as my friends Kyle & Russel used to say: "swoop!"

It's an urban treasure hunt says my friend, and he's right. That's why I'm not playing right now, it's back to that quiet (and the novel-writing I've been sneaking in b/w unpacking and holiday-planning). I am trying not to feel the rush of the find, trying not to feel "better" because a thing plugged up the lacunas-various that make me feel like I need to feel. And there is something to be said for leaving someone else space to have things that he likes and space to be filled-in with our shared-finds. There are only so many cutesie things or gorgeous scarves or dresses so pretty that I never wear them for fear I will ruin them, or dresses so numerous, I forget I have them until some wrong season or other, I move and find the summer dresses in the late fall or with my many summer moves: winter clothes that make me prespire just to look upon. I love the stories inside them, the fabrics that lay colors alongside one another in ways that seem fresh because they're not, new because they are so old.

Tulips

That
tulip set
by the window

in its vase
of dusk is like
aflame. You

cannot help
but say — no.
Because a

tulip caught in
that glass is
a flame —

and once you
have said it how
to return to

bloomed stem
or soft spike
of anther

where now
is fire? Words
burn — bridge

colours away
from colour — so
while one

tulip flares
we lay waste
to night and

glimpse
our reddened
names — the way

Anne
cannot bear to
end — or as you

take your leave
of Mario that
ah

so missed and
strange. And you
sputter so

fierce with it
that you say it
again —

that this gift of
tulip is un-
like any

other — which
fires my lips
with a glow

already half
subsiding as you
turn to gaze — to

look with a mind
on the very point
of opening.

2010 Mario Petrucci

After Praising Silence, Two in One Day

2010-11-16T14:58:00.000-08:00

Because I meant to talk a little about assembling a home. About an umbrella I saw today with one of my most stylish students that caused me to think "what is yellow like that?"

I have my first grown-up kitchen, after scouring most of High Street, and ending up purchasing from Grand View Mercantile a sideboard and a china cabinet, both wonderfully 40s with little deco-like green designs and a wonderful oak with yes, chrome legs. Then Clintonville to find a table, that quite nearly (and to the detail)matched the atomic, rustic thing that my kitchen begs to be. Really, it's a kind of vintage country at the end of the day. I have favorite High St. shops and my collection of thrift stores that I stalked, inclusive of Flower Child and my beloved Mary Catherine's, one shop that I found great finds at but no longer visit as the owner and I find one another's presence less than pleasant, and a great little bank of North high shops where I found a stoneware bowl that I still dream of owning and a blue-mirrored table to match my coffee table. We looked and looked for a couch that met the criteria for somewhat divergent aesthetics, and the salmon-velvet couch I loved lost out to a big, new couch but with my upholstery picks and my mid-century accent chairs:one coral clam-shell back herculan beauty with day-sky of silver-threaded stars to its sun-setting sky and one torn to bits chair that had crossing legs on the side and made the upholsterer declare that for all the antiques he'd seen, he had never before seen a chair like this. It will come home all olive-velveted up with a throw pillow of fuchsia carved velvet and little chartreuse leaves.

What's interesting about any of this? To me, it's home, the first one I've ever really made, and the first time that if I paint a wall, it's my wall. If I find something major to buy for it, it comes from some place I love to support and it is a gift to the home and to time itself, not forever but long enough to warrant the look-ahead. How long has it been since I could say as much?

Teaching lately has been really wonderful. My lit. class is full of some very special and especially bright students who are full of life and make me feel as if they are getting as much a kick out of the class as I am. My fiction workshop was so savvy and on in their assessments of one another's stories today that I felt like I was sitting in a grad. workshop.

Body of the Hour

To say, the soul

is like saying, the clock
lost its body and went on ticking.

Shadow-body, this one
who lived behind the bat-faced
bone of the pelvis

raised in the slicked-back hackle of blood . . .

To say, comfort me now in the hour
of my loss is

to be the hour, always.
To be Lord Almost.
Mother So-Close.

To be this time each time
you stop—put down the fork
or turn the page and look up:

The meadow in a lather of white
four-o-clocks, the birthmarked
butterfly moving

as if written—erased—written . . .
I remember once in this world
I was an absence,
like you. Like you.

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Where Have I Been Lately?

2010-11-16T07:29:00.000-08:00

The obvious answer is Shawnee Hills or New Home or Revising My Life. But that last one is apt enough to move me into today's post about not posting, not engaging, listening more, talking less, and the quiet of the new place I live that makes every sound significant. This, in striking opposition to the narcissism-dial to which our American radios are too often set.

I think I wanted this quiet for my novel, my poems, for the kind of serenity that me and mine can enjoy over our shared love of great music, books and the decor and wardrobe that were stuffing the draughty holes of me up, much in the shabby way that my old apartment's ticky-tack winterizing functioned (or didn't) so that I could stand in my bathroom, put on my lipstick on a windy day and look as if I were posing for a magazine with my hair blowing back slightly in mid-December, with closed windows. The people I really admire, really want to be like when/if I grow up, have things to say that are related to something beyond themselves and the world's perceptions of them. An old boyfriend of mine once said that people often grossly overestimated their looks--believing every good, inflated thing that they heard or tried to pull from people, and too, their sense of how interesting they were. He didn't say, but I went on to consider, that this often takes place in inverse proportion to the amount of chatter of the self or rather prattle about oneself in which a person engages or indulges him/her/self. I read for a time, the journals and poems of May Sarton, and from her I learned about looking outward, keeping the internal internal and watching birds and plants to deal with some of life's more intimate griefs. It isn't that she doesn't tell, it's that she doesn't make it the point of things.

I have been trying to keep what's mine inside and leave some room for steeping things up for the page. I guess I'm saying that it keeps me from this blog where I had the sense that one or two people that I might know in some way read me and that others might swing by and read something that would help to make them or me feel better understood. I had little life in Columbus outside of school and work and this was a way to have holidays with, if not friends, then company of some sort.

Now there are birds whose names I don't know that flicker in and out of branches and a new all black cat that I think I'll call Loretta after my favorite Cher character in one of my favorite movies of all time or Marlo or Ann Marie for That Girl and how I love her or maybe Romany because I don't know where she comes from and I love that word. And there are streets I haven't wandered and neighbors I haven't met and there is the real time to consider and how fast it is flying by.

This Is Not My Story

cereal boxes in the kitchen

cupboard nibbled through
the sudden appearance of

droppings, a mouse in
the house, her lover says
it has a very tiny heart,

you need only chase
it until it tires; he knows
the hearts of small creatures

having chased down a few
chickens in his youth, accustomed
to how birds wear out

easily — the human heart is
a wholly different animal,
we must sense when to give in

before the other gives up

Shin Yu Pai

Autumnal Rumination

2010-10-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

It is a grey day, the yellow trees standing out against the misty landscape as if they were dressed in something loud for a sixties theme party. I'm going to wear my new grey sweater bought on major sale at the E. Bauer warehouse and my navy shirt, all care of The Boy and our shopping trip yesterday for the "outerwear" sale. He bought the softest olive parka, a(nother) black fleece vest, and a grey down parka vest that makes him look all Redford and frosty. But it's not all that shopping that got me to thinking, but the sweet phonecall from my best friend and his comment that our night sounded really nice and the plan to barbeque together after we sign on the new place and that all that I have really loved is still here and that it just keeps getting added on to. My good New York friend (and first love) off to Berlin and healing after losing his wife two Thanksgivings ago when we cried on the phone together at 6 a.m. and I was brand new to Columbus and so alone that I went to Barnes & Noble when they opened and walked around there, lost, grieving, so lonely for four straight hours. And of course, there is the Bear and the baby bear and the cherished Juniper and her mother, J that have become dear to me, too. Not to mention the great friends that have offered to help move me to the new house, have offered us all kinds of help in building and repairing and how J brought boxes and M offered to dress like cat burglars for Operation Terracotta and it goes on and it's true what my friend said about an average Monday night when me and mine tried on clothes for each other and then went to the Y and then home again for our bevy of shows before the sleep that comes from the new chill of fall, which is also warm and extraordinary.

Condolence Note: Los Angeles

The sky is desert blue,
Like the pool. Secluded.
No swimmers here. No smog—

Unless you count this twisting
Brush fire in the hills. Two kids
Sit, head-to-head, poolside,

Rehearsing a condolence note.
Someone has died, "Not an intimate,
Perhaps a family friend," prompts

The Manners Guide they consult.
You shouldn't say God never makes
Mistakes, she quotes, snapping her

Bikini top. Right, he adds—You
Could just say, He's better off—or
Heaven was always in his future.

There's always a better way to say
We're sorry that he's dead—but
they're back inside their music now,

Pages of politeness fallen between them.
O do not say that the Unsaid drifts over us
Like blown smoke: a single spark erupts

In wildfire! Cup your hands, blow out
This wish for insight. Say: Forgive me
For living when you are dead. Say pardon

My need to praise, without you, this bright
Morning sky. It belongs to no one—
But I offer it to you, heaven in your future—

Along with silent tunes from the playlist,
The end-time etiquette book dropped
From the hand of the young sleeper.

It's all we have left to share. The book
Of paid respects, the morning's hot-blue
iPod, sunlit words on a page, black border.

Carol Muske-Dukes

There's something about weeping cellos and willows

2010-09-29T17:18:00.001-07:00

that my student said today and something about red taffetta and how September is a fragile month, palming a blown-glass carousel. Or it's not. Fragile. Blown-glass. What it is clear, intricate, wonderous and so on. Last month I started another blog, a secret place for trying on ideas, essay bits, a place to explore what it means not to perform or to perform anonymously like whoever left that painting against the telephone pole last month and what in me wanted to drive back for it--floral-beauty of a thing and what in me said "leave some pretty for someone else" so I did.

M makes me think about identity, how much people hang themselves out of windows and say, in essence, "look at me" but with no real art to it. Just talk and show. Just desparation so loud that it is hard to really look at. Facebook does that. The status updates that I too, indulge. How many bits of what I might be able to call literature lost themselves to the wasted moments of gossip, trivia and time-wasting and now, here, how I linger when I was just preparing manuscripts and which I will again soon. With luck, the little fragments I am shoring up will soon be stories, poems, essays, novel and will make of my time a worthwhile sacrifice. For now, back to it. But not before I share a pretty.

(Save)

The throaty jangle of pennies against
pennies against the porcelain belly
of a dressertop pig, or a train ticket
slipped into the space between book pages.
A sweater stretched across an empty seat
in a concert hall lit with pinball chatter
before the house lights dim. Pickling jars
on a pantry shelf, gold-lidded terrariums
to preserve the seasons: crooknecked
cucumbers, drifty layers of lemon wheels,
round red beets. It's time to reset
all the clocks, create a new architecture
of daylight and dark. It's time to stand
in the sun and stain our shoes with
cemetery dirt. Now we're parceling
the contents of the house, what's left
in this shingled shell. There are colors:
the plump yellow sofa, the empty gray
coatsleeves brushing against each other
in the hall closet, the fleshy deep green leaves
of the jade plant, stout stacks of white
dinner plates. There is a full set of sterling,
a pair of Eames chairs. There are old letters
softening in shoeboxes, there is everything
suspended in ink, and everything that is not.

Copyright © 2010 Alison Doernberg All rights reserved

Blessed Be & So on

2010-09-20T22:25:00.000-07:00

which run together just reads soon. By which I mean not a moment too

I walked down to the reservoir today, by this I mean: I walked through a house at the edge of the woods overlooking a body of water that will soon find me and mine on a boat of some type looking down at ourselves to see that this is really us, this is me, everything I couldn't have even known to want and at long, precious last.

There is no month more beloved to me than September, and to have it announced like this, against a sky that called a heron and its mate off the water's edge and mirroring one another from lake-skimming flight to sky-topping soar in a wonderful parallel symmetry was almost overkill on the pretty and the right.

If this were a beaded bracelet there are beads to ward off the evil eye: breaks in the pattern, deliberate fate-tricking "mistakes." We haul our big personalities in wheelbarrows and sometimes we bumper-car them about. We need open country and unassuming horizons to remind us how good the quiet and calm, how illustrative.

Soon I find what lives in 1965 again, what shares space with a curved countertop and a wood-burning stove with its ceramic starburst tile in every shade of mod. But not before we Tampa and parent-meet and Evan-celebrate. Such good verbs this life.

I am afraid of how good it feels to be this very me this very month.

Good Mail

2010-08-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

Imagine a package with a packet of columbine seeds and bachelor buttons, a little Chinese envelope tied with delicious coral ribbon and containing a pair of cloisinne Chinese fan earrings, a drawing of the most vibrant butterflies rendered in the most magical of magic markers and flying against a yellow construction paper sky. Imagine a little handmade card that accordions out and contains the most incredible little drawings. Between that and my recent addiction to Alberta Hunter and my late-to-the-game discovery of the newly-late Abbey Lincoln, it has been a week of gifts.

Stone Seeking Warmth

Look, it's usually not a good idea
to think seriously about me.
I've been known to give others
a hard time. I've had wives and lovers—
trust that I know a little about trying
to remain whole while living
a divided life. I don't easily open up.
If you come to me, come to me
so warned. I am smooth and grayish.
It's possible my soul is made of schist.

But if you are not dissuaded by now,
well, my door is ajar. I don't care
if you're in collusion with the wind.
I wouldn't mind being diminished
one caress at a time. Come in,
there's nothing here but solitude
and me. I like to keep the house clean.

Stephen Dunn

Almanac Magic
for John Wood

Believe in the bounty of drought,
of fire and locust. Count on
jackrabbit luck to grow your seed
and the tip of a dipper for rain.

If the man in the moon is late arising,
and your wife swells with your future,
she'll be craving clay and kneeling down
to eat that dirt from the root cellar.

But know your future will grow up
to leave you, to follow the magpie
with a song of honey and foil
from city neon alive in its eyes.

You stay to plow through days of sod and rock
and pray the rusty dray outlasts the harvest.

Let the wild oat drill into your hands
crooked from handles of shovels and hayforks.
Read your future in the cracks of this land,
in the bumble of tumbleweed and the stir of the hive.

Now listen for wind to shush your wheat asleep
and the scythe as it whispers its name to the sheaves.

Copyright © 2010 Allen Braden All rights reserved
from A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood

2010-08-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a day rotates on its axis and where we were
becomes a shadow of where we are, the day rotates, the axis
holds the place but we are cast across the room from ourselves
former or otherwise and we are cast in bronze, out of Eden,
off like a bad wig, in a role all wrong for us
but begin to occupy it, shout its bad lines with so much
sincerity, we forget the selves across the day from us
and then days gather so fast. We are matter's playthings
we are matter's peacock pyrite, dumb, pretty stones
all color in enough light, but where do we ever find
enough light to give the stupidity of stones insight?

Sometimes we pass a costume shop on a Sunday, Cleveland
where things are often set for the nonstatement of middle America
but in this case, the window, the closed costume shop and the boa
cheap feathers but regal somehow makes us want to break glass
in what really is Cleveland, Ohio, mid-August and on the run.
The car, black, being driven by someone we imagine into the rest
of our lives, and the boa, a blue like the blue that the Blue Men
honor, a blue so thick with a cobalt-intensity, nearing violet
but holding-off so that the punch of it hits miles after
we pass the thing and know that alone we would have found
a way to bring that blue home,us it against one a.m.
when the someones all sleep us off. Elegies are wasted
on the dead and the living alike.

A.Paine

2010-08-06T05:30:00.000-07:00

Migration
After the rain, trees burn with monarchs,
come this winter on dust-and-paper bodies.
Some of the dead cling to trash on the road,

frames of wings like frames of broken windows.
You say you never saw anything like them
in China, though you cannot say for sure.

As a girl, you leashed crickets with ox hairs
and baited bees with sweet tomato flesh.
But nothing like this, you say, like this orange.

This monarch generation lives three times
longer than its parents, than it would without
a migration to complete. They are given

time to break their bodies over mountains
and heave themselves onto warm trees
so they all might survive. Are you wondering

how much more time you have been given
to learn a language and forget a language, to break
your body over an ocean for this pale

redwood dusk and this daughter?
I know you were not drawn here to save
yourself. I cannot tell you that I have

nothing to save, nothing that waits for me
to be drawn, nothing that says, you must,
you must break your wings for this.

Melody S. Gee

2010-08-04T00:22:00.000-07:00

The patio door keeps flashing silver and it seems all Hopkinsesque to me, that shining, that shook foil of night on lake and the rumble that makes all the plants on the patio smear themselves against the backdrop of gunmetal and blown-lace sky. Everything's in motion out there and sleep seems to be tearing through the night too, swinging through those trees like a little boy playing Tarzan or like something called to the window by the lost boys and asked to fly the nightsky. Three flashes of light just made the trees shake-white and inside one girl types by the rectangular light of a screen and one boy turns over to a blank patch of sheet and pillow and wonders why that girl sleeps so little. It's nice to have a sleeping someone to curl back into and nice too, to trip words out on the wide water of the night, like flat-stones meant for such gliding.

Tomorrow marks the final day of my final summer course. I am a little weary. This one was an emotional wring-out in a lot of ways. There will be too little recharging time before I'm back at the gates and someone pulls the trigger and for so much less cash and three times the teaching, I am galloping, hanging from my weak arms by the horn of the saddle. The thunder is tripping alarms all over the parking lot and I am reminded of my deaf student on the day the alarm went off at school. Everyone in the room grimacing and her laughing as I walked in and she gestured to me a sign that I understood as alarm and she was enjoying being the one to translate the chaos that she knew I could hear too loud and too well and that she was mercifully-spared.

Take that, she might have said to music and the good noise of the spheres. Which is kind of me just now in ways it's hard to explain. There is so much scattered just now. Too much matter to shuffle about but the true matter lies miraculously in the next room and the prayed-for-this is not lost on me.

I am working on a first poem for Evan. Something about the way he waves goodbye as he sees the wave, at himself. How there is not greater thing to teach him about that. His whole life he will be trying to remember that that is how goodbyes work, your own hand facing you and the fingers opening, closing in a gesture that could just as easily be come here if the intention was not farewell and that farewell never so much directed as anything as back at yourself.

He is all joy, that baby, and all gift and the ten childrens' books I send along to him soon are what this aunt can most give: words and the way that at 3:35 a.m. even if someone you love dearly sleeps through the storm and to your peripheral right, seering electricity stabs the night into midday for one jarring millisecond, and you cannot sleep in all that white-heat, words, words, can keep you company for as long as you ask.

2010-07-28T22:16:00.002-07:00

Before and after all of this, remember that first fall, fat with colors and the swerves in canyon road that your body took for the car, and unafraid as if your mountain-birth meant mountain rights and your body recalled each jig and jag, each rick-rack heartlining the slope with what could only be a steady pulse. Before and after it all, there is just what you lean into or slow down from fear. I could never ski for this reason: body trust and terror, the certainty that speed craved more of itself and the body accelerated is a brittle, blown-glass thing. I did my extreme sports with my soul, catapulting it here, vaulting it there, the long stretches on French heights, the soul pedalling hard and finishing barely and far behind.

2010-07-28T22:16:00.001-07:00

When You Return
Ellen Bass

Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.

Ode to The God of Atheists
Ellen Bass

The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake
or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you
bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns,
or buy gold leaf and stained-glass windows.
It won’t insist you fast or twist
the shape of your sexual hunger.
There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it.
You don’t have to veil your face for it
or bloody your knees.
You don’t have to sing.

The plums that bloom extravagantly,
the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,
each pebble and fern, pond and fish
are yours whether or not you believe.

When fog is ripped away
just as a rust red thumb slides across the moon,
the god of atheists isn’t rewarding you
for waking up in the middle of the night
and shivering barefoot in the field.

This god is not moved by the musk
of incense or bowls of oranges,
the mask brushed with cochineal,
polished rib of the lion.
Eat the macerated leaves
of the sacred plant. Dance
till the stars blur to a spangly river.
Rain, if it comes, will come.
This god loves the virus as much as the child.

Wild Strawberries

2010-07-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

Relax
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she's a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn't plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you'll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

Ellen Bass

Days on Water, Babyskin, Grilled Lobster, Mirth Kitchen

2010-07-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

Days on water, on air and two if by landed, at last, albeit gently but arrived. Some holidays remind you why you live. Three sisters dancing with one baby boy in a kitchen full of so much warmth and not because the days touched the near hundred mark or the cooking. This what being alive was meant to be I felt as that little babyboy dancing with us and laughed and each of us, for once, had all this plus good love in our lives. It felt like the pay-off for years of work. Three sisters so happy and the husband/brother-in-law all we could wish for in chosen family and my boy: a perfect, beautiful fit and hit with everyone.
For our one beach night, we chose St. Petersburg instead of Treasure Island, and the water bathy and the sand a pristine white and in the mornings there were two ribbons of amazing seashells to be gathered. One so large and intact,rusty-striped, that it looked like I cheated and bought it from one of those seashell shops.

Days in water, the heat so heavy that there was only to submerge: a swimming pool lovely and fountained, an ocean with white sands and clean warm water and so much splashing and laughter that the days could not contain more, though they tried.

Back in Ohio, I keep dreaming Florida. How relaxing and easy it all was. How crazily right my life became all at once and without warning.
Now to teach and then to try packing some things. I don't know what my new address will be yet, but the adventure of that, plus days up in Dublin with a swimming pool and workout area on-site, plus the best garden patio, are things to be savored right now.

My sale-hydrangea is yet-blooming and if it hangs in with me, I will be planting it in the soil of a home I can call my own for a long time. Right now, it hangs on a third floor balcony over a lake loud with Canadian geese and teeming with ducklings and the background of only water and sky. Bliss.

What Two Oh Seven A. M. is For

2010-07-12T23:05:00.000-07:00

If not looking into the darkness and finding it line-broken, the caesuras and commas most of what life is: waiting rooms. The waiting takes more as the days get shorter and after reading Jackie Osherow's God's Acrostic again, and after considering all she says about how maybe God has hidden things in plain sight, down the vertical margins of our seasons and science and our eyes, dutiful drones, glide left to right while we lose the most pressing part of the message.

It's two a.m. again and I have been up twice since I went down. I sleep too little and fitfully, but there is good in this here insomnia and there are dreams. Just now I am thinking a student's after class conversation about how "whatever it is: fate or God or the universe, I feel like things are floating all around me and just when I need them, some drop down and into place." Never have I been more susceptable to such musings as this year, this everylargethingatonce year. The new babies in my life, the maybe-house-buying, and all the love, in various and unexpected forms but there and with people magical enough to know what it is and to tend to it.

The line breaks give the line another way of meaning, I told my class today. A visual moment of holding a thought and then, like breath, releasing it to the next unit of attention. The line breaks give a poem a way of being art with the strings of beads and the pattern of any given musical line of design, a way to pause for a minute and "hold that thought" while a line of prose would be lost to the paragraph, the line break allows that linger--however momentary and un-slowed in the reading--to give the eye a small trinket as it leaves the one line and serpentines down to begin the next. Only a poem does that, and sometimes, when we're lucky, a day.

In a few days, I hold Evan again and my sisters meet the boy and the beginning of the kind of unity of all that matters to me continues and there will be the sea too, some rented convertable and a stretch of stupidly-clear sky. What clouds find us, find us laughing.

For now, sleep.

Demimonde

She writes with lavender ink on cream vellum. A crow
takes roost in the monkey puzzle, is lost

in its formal bracts. It rains; the rivers rise.
Clouds drifting east swell with the monsoon

flooding Thailand; the woman weeps
as she writes. A cargo liner headed seaward

escapes the tip of a triangle. Fingers of rain
point down. A foghorn declaims the enormity

of ocean, its black fathoms. In a small town
on another coast, a man checks the sky,

puts on his raincoat, opens his mailbox — galvanized steel,
flag for rural delivery — inside, an envelope

that he slices with the knife he folds
and pockets before removing her letter.

He will know the spidery purple, the fine cream,
the strokes that slope left, slightly. See, the ink

on the letter is smudged, I just need to know
you are there, the envelope, rain spotted.

Copyright © 2010 Diane Kirsten Martin All rights reserved
from Conjugated Visits
Dream Horse Press

How Swiftly Fly the Days These Days

2010-07-08T22:31:00.001-07:00

Teaching all summer and gratefully-so but the days are gone before I know it and the things I meant to do gone with them. A special stolen afternoon with dear Les and the laughter from that and her good brain and heart and the wonderful "buddha bowl" of my old north star made an unexpected treat of the afternoon. Sad began it, her worries and devotion over her dearest friend, but the time itself was good I think, and I was grateful for it. Tomorrow I meant to Yellow Springs, to watch a movie in the art theater there but I may just meander here, make some time for the pool, pack some boxes, get my life into a portable mode.

Tonight I am enjoying the few minutes before I turn in and the last few weeks in this place and in my own place, too. We're off to new adventures. My adventure is the "we" of it and the address, and the house or the symbolic commitments to a place, a set of walls, a bunch of what humans do to say "permanence" while the seasons and the gods laugh. But aren't we pretty to think so? And aren't we beautiful in our attempts? In the face of so much that says no, not bloody likely, as my beloved-boy would say, we say, "if you don't mind, I'll try just the same."

I mean, I believe in the goings-ahead and I am thrilled to be up to the task for the first real time in say, nine years. I am excited to have a yard where what I plant grows and what gets buried can be decorated with my homegrown flowers. I am happy for all that has had to change and be grown and buried to make this new now possible.

Echoing Canto of Fixedness

The effort made by stars
to move for us is massive:
from our fixed point

looking up through crevice
or canyon, at the vast and intricate
patterning, appraising

from a cleared or blank space,
is frightening. `Miracle'
of tawny frogmouth,

aesthetic as torn wood
in its belying swoop, distending
mouth swallowing pinpricks

of gnat-light, is nudged
aside, or magnified if waxing
spirits move the display,

intensity of mortality,
to account for fireworks:
intertexts and skyshow.

Copyright © 2010 John Kinsella All rights reserved

Time to Make the Doughnuts

2010-06-10T23:57:00.000-07:00

It's 3:00 a.m. and I am awake only because there was iced coffee today and as much of it as I could down despite knowing tonight would read something like this.

Life is good at Intaglioville. Life is drastically-revised. By summer's end there will be new dwellings, a luscious new room-mate and happiness, laughter every single day or maybe I mean now on those last two.

Back from visiting the family, the roadtrip to Denver and now the big plans, including a visit to the sun and sea of some place I have never been. I will try to post something poetic soon.

Mostly Southern Appendages

2010-04-22T04:25:00.000-07:00

Today I was offered a list of payphrases, which I declined, but not before looking them all over. I love language.

Oh Poems, how I have failed thee. Still there is one coming for Matt G. that begins with "I have these feelings about spatulas." There are others. The world is a weird kind of poetic lately. I feel settled and un in equal measure.

But I am eyeball-deep in interesting reading. And I have no need to go scrambling about in the most mundane of activities, the most soul-stealing and futile (dating). So there is space, calm and some kind of simpatico to my see-saw.

More when I come up for air. For now, I grade and class-plan and wish to finish some more writing.

A zillion poems behind

2010-04-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

blame it on Denver, the catch-up of returning, the emotional exhaustion (for life-revolutions don't come cheap) the so-much to do and so-much that matters.

Plus, two poems that I can't post. They are not only my stories to tell. Even w/o those, I am behind.

I have begun a number, completed some little ones and kept up on much of the prose-intended. I have promised my California-ed away sweet-chimp that I will have fifty pages of consecutive text ready by the weekend.

For now, a little taste of Day 5/TMI, with apologies to GML for his cribbed-idea and stolen memory. I promise to share many memories to even the score. More than a few weeks or months can hold.

Facebook

He rakes the yard and gets angry at snapshots
blown from the trash and down the alley:
turned into a corridor
of personality and look-at-me,
wonders what happened to decorum,
or dated-though-it-sounds, modesty.
Wednesday his wife changed her status
to it’s complicated, today’s Friday
and she’s asking to separate. Four hundred
thirty-seven people knew as much two days
ago and he wonders when friend became a verb
how and when she unfriended him and a faded
shot of a Ford Taurus blows into the tam or the fitzer
he’s never sure which,a picture of a German Shepherd
posed in front of a cape cod in the middle of Ohio
appears against the chain link, somebody's swingset,
somebody's clothesline billowing with unmentionables
photographed, no doubt, for the way wind
blows up a garment, lends it form,
blows down the alley end over end.

April Prose Posies Days Three and Four

2010-04-04T08:39:00.001-07:00

3
Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in let’s call you memory and be done with it. But I won’t be, won’t be done waking to the thought of climbing those back stairs again, the black matte linoleum I painted to match the kitchen caught somewhere between a moment in 1930 or reawakened into the 50s, the mint green cabinets and the plastic utensils I spray painted around so that throughout the black background, it appeared that murders had taken place and the chalked-out bodies were those of forks, knives, spoons, all haloed out in shades of white, red and mint. The creaky wooden back steps and then bursting into this room, Sam there at the counter, Hey Annie, and it was all there: the things I couldn’t conjure up if asked, the blender here, coffee pot there, what ever happened to that pitcher—the one with the handle re-glued after the cat threw a bowl off the high shelf like a bomb to it. Sam there pouring the morning into our matching cups, Sam there, tall, cheerful, Sam there…and I’m stuck in that place in time again.

I am stuck in that place for a minute like something locking up a gear. What I know of love and memory are gears, how they grind things up or are only stopped by finding what to lodge in their workings.
(from Season of White Flies)

3

2010-04-04T08:36:00.001-07:00

Partly Due

to seven seasons since the satanic ritual
we called changing-my-life

to timing—as with automobiles, air travel,
fertility, comedy, marketing and yes, love.

yes, Love, partly due to the dew itself clinging
like a real diamond on a blade of grass;

partly due to all the cubic zirconias, bad flashy
rhinestones, paste sparkles and cloudy stones.

Partly due to death--its morning breath reeking
up the new day. Ask anyone: things die

you will and so will I, we are partly-due
for bliss in some fashion. Partly due to war

that nonstop party, partly due to the diminishing
honeybees, the vanishing gorillas, the faces so human

one can read the elegies inside their dark, wet eyes,
the requiems they compose across their own brows.

partly due to somewhere, in some language,
taking hold and letting go must be one in the same

partly due to a newfound fluency and passport
in need of renewal, a globe spun like a girl

whirling her frothy dress around just before
a dance, a thrill in wherever she’s going next.

Day Two April Poem by Guest Poet G.M. Lear

2010-04-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

You're supposed to every day drink a lot of water
I know it's very difficult, but you oughter.

April Day Two Brewer

2010-04-02T15:18:00.000-07:00

Geese scream the pond’s surface out of smoothness
a hand re-wrinkling the bedsheets.

To skim the season off the top of the lake
and hang it in the panes for a way to look out.

To look-out from the balcony to any god’s hand-mirror
and see the sky’s jigsawed countenance on the ground.

The rainfall that fell there, falls up, regives.
What isn’t earth, isn’t air, isn’t fire is.

April ala Brewer Prompts Napowrimo

2010-04-02T15:16:00.001-07:00

Not the Same as Being Alone

The wild geese collide with you
outside the window where she sleeps
and does not sleep alone
yet still you’re there, too.

Why here again, why now? If he’s there, again,
then how? So many places need you
more: country music’s lost
without you, love songs, too, a tumbleweed dress
falling hem over neckline and hem again,
an appaloosa tearing wild down a prairie. The cattle low
at twilight, where a woman does not sleep

solo, yet you: wandering as a cloud, a state of being
they believed left behind, come in now,
settle-down, lovers have always shared a bed with you.

2010-04-02T13:57:00.001-07:00

April Flowers

1
If not, winter remains, a stain where whiteness is the stain. If not, starlight intrudes on the dark, spots it, light dribbles down the nightness, bleached. If not, winter to skid Sam out of the living and into the otherwise. If not speed’s black ice or the seasons worn, not on the highway but on the blank stare of the impossibly-old woman who pulled out onto the interstate without imagining that what her peripheral vision missed and what she did not turn to see was my husband bound for groceries like any-husband but transformed now to involuntary stuntman, an Evil Kneivel who never trained for the moment when he’d swerve to save her antique bones and make of his body a kind of figure of resurrection, rising like a circus-Messiah sprung from a cannon but the funny part, the bent knee bounced down to the ground, the perky jump up to show his form and intention, that part got skipped, if not for that, what would remove him from me, I wondered. Not time, for the widowed never imagine that their love would end lamely, a cute bank-teller, a telling bank statement, a night at a hotel so extravagant, no wife imagines her body ever sliding down the luxurious length of such-bedding again.

2
The one with violets in her lap is the other, or child. The one with violets in her lap is never you again, when wooing has made way for the won-over, the once-over that finds you found. The one with violets in her lap in never wife, but widow, I think, while I take the funeral arrangements apart and throw them all over the living room floor. What I remember are the violets, delicate things we kept on a step-ladder that Sammy and I painted over in leftover colors: honeydew green, sockeye salmon, a color called puce and one eerie blue. We called it the Vomit of Key West but with the violets we tended in their various shades of purple, magenta, and plum, there was harmony to it.

2010-04-01T07:58:00.001-07:00

O Bless You & Bless You & A-choo

2010-03-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

Spoke with Evan on Skype tonight. He sneezed and his mommy and I both blessed him, which made him strangely-happy. He likes when things he does get response. He claps, I clap, I sing the little Greek song about clapping and braided Greek cookies in paper (koulourakia) brought home by the daddy. My own Daddy taught Evan the song, just as he taught Evy's mommy and her sisters which is yours truly, for one.

Yours truly is watching life steamroll in at the speed of well, something. Things she can't say here and things she can't say yet but there are life revolutions afoot, everywhere.

For now there are words and I have had some rattling around and some falling inkily-thud to the page. There will be more. There will be more. But the blog, is the blog a thing I use to keep things like wildflowers trapped between panes of glass? Is it a place I spoke to/from when loneliest? I am some things more than others but the loneliness tree does not grow tall in me. I can point to where it's planted, it will always stand but... I have lost the urge to say what I can't or shouldn't yet say.

But not to share beauty. My favorite phonecalls are the ones where Kat, Liz or Veace; The Bear, the Spoon, or even the old friend SF used to call in a poem to me. We would find something so urgently-beautiful that we rushed to share it, so pressing was the need to carry it to someone else.

How to Say I Love You
On evenings when my dogs and I circle the block,
if I am guilty of anything,

it's being distracted by the streetlamp.

I am visible in it.

If I look directly at the lamp, I can't see the stars.
I don't need the stars anymore?
I used to think

I'd cavern you, and grotto you, waterfall you,
and immense-rock you, solitude you

until rain Bristled the evening, lit
our roof to singing—

And of thinking too hard about what to say
when we're home from our walk:

my wife: welcome home high-wires
and habitual nightmares, lonely woes
and wooden shoes!

Copyright © 2010 Gary L. McDowell All rights reserved

Flicks

2010-03-22T23:13:00.000-07:00

One of those "Amelie" moments came to me today in the form of an old candy that no one recalled but me.

The scene I am referencing is the one where in a phone booth, our heroine sees to it that the older man finds the tin full of his treasures from forty years previous. My moment was not so large and moving but it was pure nostalgia. As a child I recalled Flicks for their design and the vibrant foil tubes. The chocolate was, in fact, chocolate-flavored and even years ago, it tasted kind of cheap but uniquely itself. But the tubes, like kaleidoscopes in shape, like special, exotic gifts: metallicly-red, gold, green and blue. Stacked together they were a wonderful xylophone or the satisfying cylinders of a pipe organ. In any case, they moved me, reminded me of lives and theatres gone by of Evanston, Wyoming's one Strand Theatre that held all the town's romantic secrets on any given Friday night. Of the young girl always on the outskirts of everything, waiting in line.

2010-03-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Stray Paragraphs, February, Year of the Rat
After Charles Wright

Why we resist coming after, coming second, coming late
but not last
I cannot say, but we seem to, though we should root to, if we
had the sense of a brush pile, or the squirrels.

There are no gifts that are not dowries; etym- and archaeologies
like the first divorce—the division of day from night,
that coin of solace and
precursor to the watershed, to the neighborhood's
downward contours—define where everything runs
and where runoffs deposit their wrack lines.

What accumulates is not a reason, not debris but tablature,
adagia, apologia, full-stops and half-lives along with twigs and trash,
notations scratched-out in unremarkable fashion.
We have commissioned a longitudinal study, so give it time,

but try to avoid that ur-emphasis poets put on being,
where what is best left unaccented they prod into becoming
something else,
a thing at all, that wants nothing anyway, more or less,

like our lost baby, our would-be who would-not-be,
who will miss the seventh moon's scheduled swell
but asks for no condolence.
February, old rite-monger, this is how you will be welcomed,
in the name of those who won't be.

Ignore my firstborn, as I cannot, as he pries up the corner
of the living room rug
to reveal the filthy tape, the wood floor's bright parts,
and nothing else
the naked eye can see, however suggestive.
Even so it ties the room together
in a way you cannot, or will not, willfully bereft
of origins, middle sister who, like us,
awaits recombination, some saving throw, mitochondrial.

Copyright © 2009 John Estes All rights reserved

Sans Loneliness

2010-03-19T05:28:00.000-07:00

Have I nothing to say? I would like to think not but it's been hard to keep the blog going. April, with its poetry month challenge, that should get me back. Until then, or soon, or the next pretty I find to share.

Today I househunt, enjoy the sunlight that is, the grief almost blown-over for my Bronte, and how last Saturday she lingered still and I had to let her go.

That letting go seems to be the way lately. Something so long considered and then, a phonecall, a bit of news, a ripe May and so much changes in a day.

Not Yet
Give me, if you will, a little time
To understand how meanings come and go,
Resembling ants converging at an anthill
And then dispersing, each with work to do.
Meanwhile, the anthill rises and expands.
The sun comes out. The days grow ever shorter.

Give me time to sense how meanings perish
Like plums left unattended in a bowl.
Because their lives were finite in the first place,
That spreading mold should come as no surprise.
So it is with meanings, I suppose,
Though how and why I've yet to understand.

Copyright © 2009 Ben Howard All rights reserved
from Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt
Salmon Poetry

"In the Middle of the Night

2010-03-07T00:05:00.000-08:00

Sam rolled to my side of the bed and I pretended a sleep deeper than the one that I began so that I could feel his extra hold on me, the kiss into my hair that lingered a beat or two longer and said in no-words, I cherish you.

One night he pulled me so tightly against him, I thought he knew something tragic about me, was so close to me that he could see my blood's betrayals, some wild cell marking my demise.

There were whole tiny villages inside me even then, imaginary and dreamed up by imaginary characters living behind my spleen each of which held small flags in the street parades held in Sam's honor--even before his death. I am not worried now that if I should someday love again that the strangeness of the widowed will leave its obsessive fragrance clinging to me in ways that will cause anyone the slightest discomfort. The bond that I had to Sam, preposterous as it might sound, runs umbilical cords made of solid steel from each of the town's residents straight to him even now. They are that removed, those townspeople dreamed up by the dreamed-up villagers living in a burrough behind my real but unseeable spleen, that removed and that constant."

For Bronte Lynne W. Kartsonakis

2010-02-27T10:07:00.000-08:00

Labored breathing in the middle of the night, but morning finds you still here, still drinking all the special-milk I can pour for you. Nineteen years in the knowing. We were both young girls then, our first apartment, Salt Lake City, you: a handful of cat, protecting your brother by puffing up to the size of a large breakfast muffin and hissing with a mouth no wider than a fingernail, but for all you were worth. Your worth: nothing I can measure with your breaths-heavy, and countable but not, and value, but never enough. From Utah to Alabama to two cities in Ohio, I raise today to you and with luck, tomorrow, too.

FARM CAT
Dawn terror of songbirds, night-visioned devil,
if there is a heaven for animals, it follows that there be a hell.
And so, at last, I’ll know where to look for you.
There, at least, you’ll appear with wings—
though they’ll be gristly and bloodied in your grinning mouth.
There the nose leather of Cerberus shall bleed into eternity.
Furred city of the meanest fleas, if there was ever some cheetah
under your tabby hide, it died long before you did.
Time had your gold eyes cotton and haze,
farmers kicked and shot at you,
and packs of leash-less dogs put you at bay,
but I will wake in the dark morning one time more,
and tell the mockingbirds, though I do not believe it true,
that Wallace, my own, wakes in the Egypt of some albacore heaven.

Eliot Khalil Wilson
Buy his new book: This Island of Dogs
at AWP 2010 or from Amazon in April.

Wonderful weekend

2010-02-18T16:58:00.000-08:00

perfection, actually.

The week has flown by. The snow-day probably helped it along. Tonight, I write, work on the apartment, anticipate my Friday night and feel happy. Rare thing it is to feel so satisfied with so much.

Whitman today in the lit. class and for fun, I had everyone read a passage of Song of Myself. I almost teared up thinking how old Walt would have loved to hear the various voices, the genders, races, accents, inflections of the multitudes.

2010-02-16T11:47:00.001-08:00

OLIVER DE LA PAZ

Insomnia as Transfiguration
Because the night is a scattering of sounds—blunt
branches hurtling to the ground, a nest stir, a sigh
from someone beside me. Because I am awake
and know that I am not on fire. I am fine. It’s August.

The scar on my neck, clarity—two curtains sewn.
A little door locked from the inside.

Nothing wants anything tonight. There are only stars
and the usual animals. Only the fallen apple’s wine-red crush.

Rabbits hurtle through the dark. Little missiles.
Little fur blossoms hiding from owls. Nothing wants
to be in this galaxy anymore. Everything wants the afterlife.

Dear afterlife, my body is lopped off. My hands
are in the carport. My legs, in the river. My head, of course,
in the tree awaiting sunrise. It dreams it is the owl,
a dark-winged habit. Then, a rabbit’s dash
to the apple, shining like nebulae. Then the owl
scissoring the air. The heart pumps its box of inks.

The river’s auscultations keep pace
with my lungs. Blame the ear for its attention. Blame
the body for not wanting to let go, but once a thing moves
it can’t help it. There is only instinct, that living “yes.”

On Reminding SF that I Am Still Here

2010-02-16T11:34:00.000-08:00

I also like sunlight. I am a person who has to rush out of my home every morning into the sunlight to make sure the world is still here.

Harrowing drive back from The Road Trip, but the road, the trip, the West Bank Inn overlooking the snowed-over lake, the makeshift Valentine's dinner of smoked oysters, sardines, braided mozzarella, water crackers and angel food cake mmmwaah.
The fact that it is never a good idea to put bubble-bath in a jacuzzi and always too tempting not to. Sam & Ethels with cakes that look so homemade, a girl contemplates a day when she really will indulge. And raisin pie! Good music, laughter and more laughter. A magical turn-off to a set of graves and a whole glittering sea of whiteness. What heart-shaped, snow-colored days.

Thanks Michelle for all things Michelle and this Billy Collin's poem, too

2010-02-13T08:59:00.000-08:00

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,

The crystal goblet and the wine...

You are the bread and the knife,

the crystal goblet and the wine.

You are the dew on the morning grass

and the burning wheel of the sun.

You are the white apron of the baker,

and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,

the plums on the counter,

or the house of cards.

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.

There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,

maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,

but you are not even close

to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show

that you are neither the boots in the corner

nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,

that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,

the evening paper blowing down an alley

and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees

and the blind woman's tea cup.

But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.

You are still the bread and the knife.

You will always be the bread and the knife,

not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

Lovin' that Lesley Jenike

2010-02-09T16:00:00.000-08:00

If you haven't bought her book, you should. If you have, you will go straight to heaven, classier for the reading.

Lost Eyes or The Lost Art of Transcription
— for Hart Crane’s mother

To coax out your spirit I left a fifth of Cutty Sark
on the highboy, paper lantern in the cherry tree,

map of indeterminable coast by the bed, borrowed
Tempest, tattersall-covered, in the bed, full-fathom

five, a crushed Mexican lily, born of paper from
our tax holiday you lined the sea with, a stop-gap,

while I sheltered upstairs on a cool wide spread,
waiting for you to die. Love-making was never easy,

but to transcribe it? Minus a mouth, your tear-jerkers
turn to gas and fly. I sink into your syntax one

antiquated line at a time, as if I understand. But I
never did. You are too much for me, even dead

Wondering if any other poetry lovers

2010-02-08T06:45:00.000-08:00

noticed this. (Thank you wonderful Kate for drawing my attention to it. I had not seen the game and would have missed it.)

Wedding Vows

Eliot Khalil Wilson

...and I'd like to add that I will mind like a dog. I will wear whatever you like. I will go wingtip. No more white socks. A necktie stitched to my throat, turtlenecks in August. New York gray or black, only colors that dogs can see. I will know of squash, vermouth, and wedges. I will do all the grilling because I love it so. I will drive the wagon, man the bar, weed-whack compulsively. I will make money, the bed, never a to do.

I will build like an Egyptian, a two-mile pier complex, a five-story deck. I will listen like a bat, attend to the birth of sounds in the back of your throat. I will remember like and Indian elephant, recall requests made of me in a previous life. Your date of birth will be carved in the palm of my hand. I will make good. I will do right. I will sleep on the pegboard on the wall in the garage.

I'll have a tongue like a sperm whale, eyes like a harp seal, biceps like a fiddler crab. I will have gold coins, gold rings, stiff gold hair like shredded wheat. I will be golden at receptions, gold in your pocket, Paganini in your pants. Money will climb over the house like ivy. Excellent credit will be my white whale. I will always. I will everyday. I will nail the seat down. I will let you pretend I am your father.

I will be a priapic automatic teller machine, never down, never a usage fee, a stock prophet, a para-mutual seer, tractable, worshipful no matter what. I will always want to. I won't notice what you don't point out. I will entertain your friends, say how your love saved me. I will convince them. I will talk, really talk, to them. Deep meanings will be toothpicked and passed around.

I will need zero maintenance. I will be a utility or a railroad. There will be no breakdowns or disconnections. I will allow you lovers, Moroccan teenagers and Turkish men. I will adopt them. I will not cry. I will respond to grief by earning more. My sweat will smell like drug money, like white bread baking. I will be as clean as a Mormon, wholesome like Iowa. I will lead. I will be a star, a rock, like Rock Hudson.

Snowed-Out

2010-02-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

which meant too, snowed-in and the roadtrip something yet to look forward to for a later weekend.

What can be said here is that there was no sorrow at the plan-change. There's in fact, little sorrow, save for my uncle's death and my father's sadness at having no living brothers. For today, all that I love lives and breathes and feels close at hand. Plus, were I the girl to believe in answered prayers or that I warrant any such personal attention from something more fantastic, I would say something large about how much I had hoped for so much of what is right and right here.

It is so much harder to write about happiness without sounding like you are naive or walking a tightrope that only the crowd can see is frayed badly at one end. To the first I can say that being happy is some amount of work, in the initial laying of foundation if not in the subsequent care and feeding. To the latter charge, sure, we are all on a tightrope like that, it is called mortality. But for the first time in years, I feel like I really went after what I wanted and trusted myself that I knew what I knew. It's hard to be happy and harder to admit it. It's hard not to feel like fate would like to have a shot at that target you have now named and propped up for display. But it is harder to stay in a state of skepticism, self-sabatoge and chronic waiting for what might ensure more of happiness' opposite or indifference, at least.

Loving this song.

Such a weekend

2010-02-02T19:18:00.001-08:00

It has been some time since there has been something I have looked forward to as much as I am looking forward to Friday afternoon when I get to be picked up from school directly and head off on a road trip, carefully-planned to include such perfect picks as a cafe called Sam & Ethel's. Then as dusk approaches, lakes, motels, the perfect meandering to find our way there. There is talk of a hike and farmland, (silos!) and the kind of days I used to seek all through my time living out west. It is no wonder that my favorite kind of soul resonates to the landscapes too, of Wyoming and "gets" the kind of diners and drives that make an afternoon flat-out holidayed. My BFF said that a street in Cincinnati smelled like vacation and this weekend is steeped in holiday.

I am so excited. Tonight, I sleep and tomorrow pack then dinner with my co-road-tripper. I cannot hurry the hours off fast enough.

2010-01-31T21:18:00.000-08:00

Watched Oscar & Lucinda and shared my beloved Amelie, and the kind of weekend that makes other weekends jealous. There were floating churches, glass, water, there was good coffee and so much astounding music, parts of me are still singing along.

It is cold tonight where I am and the space heater only agitates the air and moves the chill around. But I am happy and bound for bed and warm, warm, warm.

Good stuff happiness. The best.

2010-01-31T20:13:00.001-08:00

Every Little Siberia

Nothing should be so expensive and so cold
when the heat bill arrived and you sat in the last month
of your lease, in your parkas and ski gloves, your knit
scarves and Russian hats. Years later, you would wonder,
if she meant the apartment or you, because death
makes you retrace the years between you, the fortune
of finding her at all, not lost on you, years after
you had both moved and moved on. Nothing again
would hold light as did her eyes during fights
or love. She was not so much a believer as a fanatic
not so much a recollector as a human-instamatic,
her memory of a thing spit back quickly and taking form
almost mystically, rising up from a black square
into the familiar shape of what it was she meant to hold.
The last night, someone told you, she held your severed
ponytail, kept for years in the small wooden drawer
at the base of the folk-lamp you bought her
at the fleamarket, she held the empty bottle of brandy
but not the prescription pills she washed down with it.
They said she wore the brocade jacket with onyx buttons,
and the fabric takes you back to the old place,
freshly-showered: remember her there,
her wet hair: tentacles holding ice-picks.
Her look at you across the bay,
the day, like something that could only reflect up
from water or hell. After the news, nothing will wash
it off: the picture of winter, your words holding
phantoms of themselves against the frosty morning
the light othertimes golden but chilled-platinum
where she stood, where she could have been nothing
less than happy to have met you, nothing more.

HAPPY (dumbly belated) BIRTHDAY KHR!

2010-01-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

When I plan ahead, I forget that I am not the kind of girl who plans ahead. So I forget that I planned ahead knowing that JANUARY 24th the day of the birth of a certain very special old friend of mine, would come and find itself all empty of a blog-post, all because I forgot to hit "publish" on that day. SO for that, new post or enhanced anyway.

To the boy who gave me his Tolkein collection, that I have and treasure still, plus Lolita, and Solzhenitsyn, plus days as fanatastic as the word dodecicosidodecahedron
and all its gorgeous angles. To math boys with wonderful libraries, you have set the precedent for my current happinesses, Birthday Boy. Here is hoping acres and decades of the same to you. You have a seat in the road trips of my mind for the duration. Happiest Birthday, Friend.
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.” A. S.

2010-01-25T14:16:00.001-08:00

Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.
— Vladimir Nabokov