Ask Me
William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

My People, My People

If you follow this blog and if you have a soul (with one exception these two things are a given) you would love these daisies. If you do not, you have not seen them. If you care for my mental health and well-being (again the uninvited, un-friend, un-souled this obviously excludes you, though it begs the question why you don't find a different form of entertainment--pushing daisies, maybe?) you will watch this show, vote in the correct, good and only reasonable way, and check in with me Mid-November as me, my persimmon bread, my creamy sweet-potato soup, my slippies and soft jammies and cozy world of colors, good music, gorgeous words and amazing friends are happily watching Our Show under good leadership and feeling the security of swaddled babies and bassinets.

Thank you and happy Monday.

Why We Are Truly a Nation
Because we rage inside
the old boundaries,
like a young girl leaving the Church,
scared of her parents.

Because we all dream of saving
the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,
shielding the herd with our bodies.

Because grief unites us,
like the locked antlers of moose
who die on their knees in pairs.

William Matthews, “Why We Are Truly a Nation” from Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991.

William Matthews would want you to get out and vote and not leave us in the Republican locked-antler hold for another four years, on our knees and dying of grief. (Our late and esteemed poet was born in a battleground state that begins with an O--coincidence? I think not.) Come on Kiddie-Cats, make my day.

Off the Wall

Words on Walls is going to be going through some big transformations. We had a major technical issue and are now re-configuring our idea of the whole enterprise. Please accept our apologies for any work we accepted, email we held too, too long, etc.

Kathrine and I are moving in some very new directions and we want that concept to be a part of them but we also grow tired of editing in that way and that format. More soon on all of this.

Tonight I make creamy sweet potato soup and persimmon bread. Today I make good on all the deadlines and commitments that this time of year brings.

Chinese Box
All night I climb in dream rubble,
wind cracking sleep
like a sheet left out on the line.
But this morning is the world again.
East light heats wooden floors,
my long hair winds comb's teeth,
my husband's blue shirt drapes a chair.

They say if you live long enough,
you, too, will live alone, your love
like a Chinese box. Inside the roar
of longing, a great November storm.
Inside the storm, a small, new music.
Inside the music, a wild, red fox.

Copyright © 2008 Carmen Germain

Loveliest Day & Night

A long, long hike. A picnic at the top. Another starlit bike ride. I will sleep the sleep of whiskified babies tonight.

Big Clear Skies Bright Balloon Blue

A gorgeous day here filled with all manner beauty. The last debate behind us and for now, I feel careful in my hOpe but hOpeful nonetheless.

What lovely days these. Why did I wait so long to make them happen. More vacations, more music, on my shoestring budget just after the dissertation is complete. I am at the stage where it's coming together and I feel excited about it like you do in new love. New love vs. old love has been on my mind a lot lately. To this, I raise a poem:

No
I see you in daylight, an impossible moon,
and in my night a sun, unreachable.
So I refuse to love you.

In my mirror I see you, the silhouette of a tattered sadness
that my eyes hold captive.
And on my scattered papers I see you,
the traces of tears I have yet to shed.
And I refuse to love you.

I see you as a prohibited dream
that combs my innocent hair into sinful braids,
and when I awaken,
your luminous kisses
drip on my pillow
one star after another
to put out my shyness.
And I refuse to love you.

Because I love you
I refuse to love you.

Because my thirst for you is fire,
and because my heart does not deserve
the fate of a crazed moth.

Because I love,
and because you love me,
let your pride refuse my ashes.

Copyright © 2008 Joumana Haddad

Dreaming of my Sun Bicycle

in liquid blue, and of the Rocky Mountains that I soon see and then see again in November. Here-things, lost-things, last-things and being airported back again. It's a good week up ahead.

Watching for Kristy Bowen's Latest Book and the Reason Why:

Tongueless, I was paper white, present tense.
Heavy wth vertigo and a violet nightdress.
--from "ornithophobia"

These poems are like a fabulous dessert, rich like that, but their intricacy is balanced and clean, too. I am waiting and waiting on this book. On another horizon but with major brilliance and beauty too: Alan May's latest: (anything-but-) Dead Letters. I watched these poems from a distant hillside the way you do fireworks and I am still dazzled and afterburning... Sparkled tassles and pom-poms of light.

Strange Bird Landing in Columbus

tonight and maybe, just maybe some much-desired Italian food or that Vietnamese joint I keep meaning to try and waiting for a certain local species of creature to accompany me. I am happy to eat solo and to go to movies and concerts,etc. by myself but some kinds of places require some kinds of company and my favorite weird friends are good for those kinds of adventures.

Yiasou Lefteri

My uncle in Crete,the one whose name means freedom just died. I was remembering how he was what I recall of childhood in Greece, his trikiklo: this mechanized man-size tricycle and his appetite--a large man in every way with a large, large laugh. Saying it that way makes me think that it wasn't just my slick, sharp-featured, bad-boy Uncle Louis (of course) to inform my own "appetites" but also this uncle (and his son, Anastasi--one of my first five-year-old-girl-crushes) to make a large spirit, uncensored and unforgettable be something irrestistable to me.

Yiasou Theo Lefteri. Filia.

If I Could Take One Moment Into My Hands, Mister

it would be another Springsteen show, another Columbus, another me, another you.

Today was its own day with its own rights. It was a good day to be around like-minded people remembering what it was like to be around like-minded people. My world is spinning all new and I'm just trying not to get dizzy.


Blow away the dreams that tear you apart. Blow away the dreams that break your heart.

Ray
Hayden Carruth
How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.

The Daffodil Man

at North Market gave me free bulbs. I bought all manner lovely peppers and fresh tomatoes.

Sunday Afternoon to be all kinds of music to my ears

The Boss: Accoustic and endorsing my favorite senator.

For now, I should motivate myself to away and then gym or run. Perhaps an herbivore wrap for incentive? mmmmmm....Clintonville deli are you calling my name?

I vOted tOday!

Felt a little breathless when I saw the ballOt.

Here's tO hOpe--I'll drink tO that and sO shOuld yOu!

The Life White-Water Raft Rounds the River

Some interesting life-stuff up ahead. More as the waters name themselves. A new old collection of poems seems to have come together and I can't wait to send it on its little way with a kiss on the seal, crossed fingers and plans to celebrate with my favorite poet.
It's chilly--almost and the crickets and planes are competing for the evening's tone. One more phonecall before bed and then dreams, dreams

A quote from Season of White Flies:

"Anastasia had to concede that maybe she never knew anyone as well as she imagined, but what she knew the individual components that comprised him was enough to celebrate that he happened at all, much less to her.

What summer brought to light was not so much endings as over whether by pole vault or final curtain, the word was too crucial to be two-tiny syllables and fewer than a handful of letters."

More Shouts Down into the Canyon

But with days so quiet, one must feel one has companions and so whoever you are, it's Saturday and the first of my little 24 hour rituals in three years that I am doing solo. I feel like I am returning to a portion of myself that I haven't visited in over a decade and it's not bad this return as I have lots of things I know now and some new stuff to bring but the days and the lust over a bicycle that I am trying to work on the side to earn (oh the lusciousness of it, the periwinkle electricity of its hot little frame, the vision of me on brick streets from here to German Village and beyond...) all of it, a return to a self-certainty, no drama and this growing meditation about love--what it is, what it isn't and the care and feeding of such a rare, wild, glittery thing when it lights on your windowsill. I have learned much about that and with luck, I think it will be good, applied knowledge.

I have to write now. I have to right-now. More as The Rub and Teatime in Heaven with the Crazy Ladies round to completion and are sent off to judges and to committees. Then a new deadline...sigh... Much, much to do. W/Ri/gh/t/e now.

Lunesta

J.Crew, sushi, & my shrink on speed dial

Fueled my anthem, "She's a rich girl,"

With a light sorrow,

Today. Tiny fists pummel the cherubs

That cruise this ashen noon. This is

Par for the course.

Plus everything that kills you softly

Melting into heavy, wavy traffic.

It is misting on the mountains

Greener than lobster eggs in my heart.

Naturally, it is snowing in the cafeteria

Where you live & I am just this

Tear-stuffed piñata for your love

& every session every thing you say

Has me sleeping in clouds of fire

Like the sun.

Jeni Olin

Truly? Madly? Deeply? Sexist or Feminist?

I think lots of you watch Mad Men out there and as I was thrilled to see it receive Emmy after Emmy because I think that it's savvy not only about the sexism where women are victims of ignorance and sensitivity but also all the subtle forms of power and power dynamics of the late 50s early 60. I think that those have morphed into other versions and that the show shows awareness of that to me, at every single turn. There was a real driving force in the sexism that came from women and men within the Madison Ave. advertising world and the women, men and families connecting into it and that force is employed variously, uncomfortably and surprisingly from episode to episode. Don Draper, for example, is slowly grappling with the difference between the smooth, debonair above-it-all figure he thinks he is and is starting to realize that he is seedier, more darkly-violent and weak than he ever imagined himself to be. I see that as deep indictment of the "heroes" that world. But because intelligent people don't necessarily agree with this reading of the show, I am wondering what all of you think about it.
Do you think its characters are self-aware and interesting in their gender relations both socially and personally? Do you think that the series is reveling in some way in the sexism it displays?

Ghost in This House

Alison Krauss is one of the million sparkley things that someone sewed on my soul. Sewing involves needles and thread and some serious pricking and yet... sparkles like a night sky filled all up with the pearls that a child told me (just this week) better represent stars than any old diamond. My friend: he was not any old diamond, he was exquisite. Here's to that, to the first breath of cold that just last year brought a lovely though brief weather on.

Cold rain through the driver's side window but light. Ms. Krauss from the dash and a sense of sore muscles and weary well-being. Ah Autumn, I love thee.

Early Morning Sojourn

down the street, to the park, i-pod accompanying and that early light that lacks pink and orange and holds lots of blue and yellow. The autumn air was perfection and I came home and crashed for a half an hour but woke up feeling pretty happy and energized. I hope the day keeps on this way and that Obama debates McCain into oblivion. Oh November, I await thee with a little dread and acres of hope

Happy Friday My Little World.

Coloradoing Soon

and can't wait. Also visitors throughout October and November. This means the third floor (the Zelda room!) will have to be all set up. I love the Zelda room. Once my expensive repair for my turntable happens, I think I might just move it up to floor three where I am more likely to listen to it. Floor two's music climbs down the stairs so clearly and curvily that I don't know that the first floor will need it anymore anyway.

Thanks to the good bird for a little link about Sen. McCain.

I want to capture a poem here for today. And who better than M.G.? It's been too long:
Sestina Aguilera

Christina Aguilera has a blue
tongue. That scream you hear when you drop her in
boiling water is actually just steam
escaping her shell. She invented the word
agnostic in 1869 because she was tired
of being called an atheist

by Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
To wit: she is the only platinum singer who, at room
temperature, acts as a liquid. The odds of her being injured
by a crowbar are somewhere around 13%, yet in
coal mines that percentage rises to a whopping 75. The word
Aguilera actually means dreams

with one eye open, while the word itself tastes like cream,
which tastes like beetles, which tastes
like apples, which tastes like worms,
which tastes like sleep deprived. You
cannot fold Christina Aguilera in half more than 7 times, yet in
Iceland it is against the law to keep her as a fire

arm. Ditto Siberia and in a Boeing 747. When her wires
kink and cannot be straightened by a team
of skeptics, this is called dog leg, which she sings beautifully of in
a number of her hit songs, including Dirty, I Got Trouble,
Slow Down Baby, What a Girl Wants, The Way You
Talk To Me, as well as in her cover version of Word

To Your Mother by Sir Vanillus Ice.
Aguilera is the longest single syllable word
in English, and the only one that rotates on its side
and counterclockwise. As the youngest
Pope ever, (11 years old), she instituted one slot machine
per every eight citizens in Vegas.
Contrary to popular rumor, she keeps her heart in

her head like a shrimp or a pregnant goldfish. In
the Animal Crackers cookie zoo she appears
as 15 different animal shapes, including a herd
of red blood cells, lighting bolts, and the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was said she trapped the wind like a tired
man. The HOPE radio station in Sweden continually beams
her lyrics into space. A bylaw in Utah

bans her from unionizing or having sex with a man in
a moving ambulance. Or so it would seem on her
coat of arms, which reads: In the beginning was the word...
give me your tired, your poor, your huddled Aguileras yearning to be free.

Copyright © 2008 Matthew Guenette All rights reserved
from Sudden Anthem
Dream Horse Press

Here, After All, This Weekend

The debate is most of what I think about besides this other internal debate about what the finite should mean and what should matter most and how in very many ways, this is not the world I ordered.

Take the blonde with the SUV at the gas station fighting with the older man about how rich she was and therefore better and these quotes, right out of the blonde's mouth:

"I know I make more money than you and I'm only nineteen.
I belong to a country club.
I am a Republican. Someone is going to shoot Obama...."

Lovely. And my hatred was like a kind of creature that welled up of its own accord and threatened to wander the streets with mouth afroth. Then I pulled away from the station as the man had driven away in a more-than-modest vehicle and the blonde was still pumping gas into the red behemoth and leaning up against the pump weeping...

Hey Mr. Arnstein!

Last night after the storm cloud of the last couple of days had been endorphined to the door, I was walking back from the market, all i-poded and pretty happy when "Don't Rain on My Parade" made its round. I thought of my lifelong obsession with Funny Girl--a movie that sort of belongs to my family (along with Fiddler on the Roof and Dr. Z). I think we ought to break into song--at reading q & a, at faculty meetings, tomorrow over lunch. I think we should campaign for Obama in pillbox hats with swelling music and large hand gestures.

Read with L-Bo Today

Thanks to Josh the audience contained about four people.
Today feels grayish not like a soft old sweater but like a hurtful weather. I think I have to go see Lucinda Williams and listen to her sing it all out--like a stinger.

The Sunday Afternoon Awfuls

were coming for me at home. I love editing my work and the work of the lovely and talented Eliot W. too, but some sadness was stalking me. It's all German Village and some Michelle Shocked playing overhead. The brick streets make me happy.

How Welcome You Are, How Richly Missed You

Have Been....


Taurus
Someone from your past might pop back into your life today without you realizing it until you're face to face -- but there's no reason not to welcome them with open arms! Be friendly and show them that you don't hold any grudges or expectations (even if you do). No matter how things were left between the two of you, the future is a blank canvas, ready for you two to create whatever picture you want upon it. Think the best of them, and they will think the best of you.

***

I'll take a little superstition with my minor miracles, thank you. Plus heaps of gratitude. It's been too long, Old Friend. I can't wait to see you again.

Friday Night Lights

up--neonly with the memory of neon. Tonight I buy one new c.d. (first paycheck!) and I'm not sure if it should be Feist or Allison K. In the background "let me touch you for awhile" is talking me into the latter.
Lots of visitors coming in very soon. The apartment will have to ready itself for all of that. I am glad to be home this weekend and able to deal with home's demands.
Dinner plans later where I believe that my favorite wrap will be part of the plan. Tomorrow means groceries and dissertating all weekend. I love that kind of plan--having to push everything to the side to write and arrange. It's what I'm good for and what I trust.

Poof! I unhappen you!

or should I say un-know? What would the old glam world of Jazz Age literati look like if someone undedicated a poem to someone? What about using an image without permission. The lawyer I spoke to said pulp and damages. Consider the saga of Writing Your Heart Out at the Moon Winx and the ensuing heartache for the author. The difference: Geoff Schmidt doesn't deserve heartache. The struck planet of disappointment and lack of integrity does. Here's to taking the high road every time while trolls wait under the bridge. Here's to the million stories of hatred and disgust of the women stupid enough to wish themselves into your line of vision, Blind One.

I've always been of the Before Sunset sappy-hearted way of living where ex-boys having been good friends then remained cherished beyond that. I have often dated boys who deserved no less. Not always and therefore when a rat enters the field outside the palace, it is always tempting to twirl infirmly before the rodent and wonder what the next dance should be named. I name it If-this-were-Eternal-Sunshine-I'd-Erase-My-Brain-to-a-Spotless-Shine-from-You. As it is, my heart's been wiped clean for ages and until someone points out how tacky, how perfidious and I see the evidence of it, I don't give you a moment's thought. Save for two stops: 1. A phonecall to the lawyer 2. An erased review and the erasure of any intention to read or promote any future literature.

P.S. It's on, Sister.

Ferrily I Say to You

I want to keep this poem. I want to give it away. Both these things are true. I want to devote one entire NY trip to Staten Island kisses, to ferrying back and forth and writing on the little keyboard given to me by a boy I once knew and liked mightily.

For now, I give you (and keep for myself too,) Ms. Millay.
We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hilltop underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Like a Cheesy Tourist I Have to Add

I've been to NY many times by now and the ferry too, a few. But I tell myself (as I was reading Ms. Millay's bio. during the whole trip) that I would never dully walk by those blue letters and not notice their perfect neon strips of dusk alphabetting the sky. And I know I would never numb to the bit of Millay verse about going back and forth all night across the ferry that NY knows is something a ferry needs painted on the station. I feel certain that Staten Island and I miss the same things.

Here's a Song: it's in my head

I am madly in love with Martha Wainwright and it's not just because she can strap-on the Edith Piaf and drive it home, it's that voice, that humungo-ness of spirit and presence--she is so very, very alive.

The show: oh how I hate to do this to you, My Pretties, but it was on Pier 17 (NYC will you marry me?) so tents--kind of Parisianly dim and lights on water and then Martha and yes, did Rufus jump on board for a duet and was there (in honor of my crazy ladies) a song called Blanc (some word for blouse, dress and coats that I will likely botch and say something like white blows or something dreadfully deaux entendre--anyway, White Coat/Dress--so it is the memory of her white dress days and the white coats coming for her and then this laughter--warm, Anne Sexton, Edna St. Vinny warmth, prismed laughter--so rich and spooky-crazy--that's how MW ends this song: acackle. I thought I would attack her but alas, her bassist husband (yum) was there, also so many family members. My life would have been tinier without this night. Me and Veace hung over the whole city of New York like something heroic. Watch for us on the bright horizon--we have plans, we have schemes.

I was out until 3:30 am and caught my airport taxi at 6:00 am. The power is back at Chez K and the world is fall-pretty.

I am currently trying to track down this French song (folk ballad did she say?) that translates When Will You Return? Any hints: Chicky? would be most welcome.
I am revising my life now.

Where Only One Thing's Missing: Farewell Lovely Reginald

Blue by Reginald Shepherd
See my colors fall apart? Green
to yellow with just one shade gone,
the changing tints of your sun-struck eyes,
if there were sun. Today the prism held to mine’s

a prison, locking in the light. In one of those mirrors
the colors are true. In one of these pictures the pigment’s
my own. The sound there is aquarelle and indigo,
and dripping distant water, the day’s habitual failure

to be anything substantial. Today a blank like color
by numbers, filled in with fog that frames the lake
in transient tones. That’s the color I mean, some mist
painting the shore pastel and pointillist

rain, painting the shadow between window and light. Today
each hue dissolves in humid air, transparency
I try to grasp and then let go, clear overflow
of waves on gravel. The mist with its single-dipped brush

smears itself across the canvas of the pines.
The pines, knowing no better, run together on a morning
palette. Today the scene’s dismantled, that can’t be
dismissed. I once was blind, but now

I see my landscape attenuate itself, drowned lake
of evergreens. On a morning like this with new crayons
I drew a man, that red valentine
in the side. The picture of two hands scrawling the outline

where only one thing’s missing; the crayons scattering
from childish fingers. Color me or leave me vacant

Sheepshead Bay, Thai Food, Veace,

the smell of fish off the waterfront, a part of NY that doesn't remind me of anyone and hasn't been occupied by anyone and doesn't hold memories of cell phone calls with someone on the line whom I carried with me into each memory. This is all new and fresh and the sky a blue so royal that it seemed rather unreal. Tomorrow we Brooklyn Bridge our way into the city. I want to walk a million miles--into something and away from so much.

Countdown: Little Sparrow Flying from Martha's Mouth

That's right. I may be a little fish, Little Ones, but I am a little fish with my first post-grad. student paycheck for full-time Assistant Professor labor.

I love my students and if I get to Chinatown on Monday, little presents will be scored. (My favorite candystore and its golden plastic good luck cats, its reddish pink fish, its fruits that might be plums or peaches or apples, all with bellies of chocolate at their cores.)

I get to see Veace and just be where one's breathing is always all coloratura. The right kind of chaos, texture and days, and it's my favorite season besides!

L-Bo Has it Covered, but I might also add:

Hit your own turf. This goes along with the idea that we vote by narcissism and familiarity ie: when I can see the me or the reasonable version of what I think is me in you, I'm with you. When I'm with you, I'm with you at the polls. Hit your neighborhood first and hardest. I'm so and so, I live on Starr and I'm wondering if you're registered to vote.

This election is crucial and it's being fought hard. I learned about identity while being critiqued rather harshly by a Republican recently and what I learned is how attached people can be to status as them and how fiercely and unkindly they will fight to maintain all that that status represents for them. I also learned enough compassion to not let the attacks turn to hatred but to see--for the zillionth time--how fear fuels the most terrifying, and unfriendliest of fires. "If I am my house, car, status and those things keep my sense of self, accomplishment, family safe and secure, I will fight you and anything that threatens that with all that I have. The issues get lost and my own biases go to the forefront." I can kind of "get" that even if I feel that writing and my friends with all of their ways of being that have nothing to do with class but more to do about what they make and do and what they love, are what make me feel like me and sort of bad-ass, besides. From that, then I can only imagine how frightening it would be if I were my fancy neighborhood and all that that represents. (I am not reducing all Republicans to this observation, just the one that spoke to me--but I am using this realization to help me positively re-frame the conversations and maybe make a difference somewhere along the line as we move too-swiftly towards November.)

I Caught the Bouquet

for the first time ever. What does "next to marry" mean? Like in the world? From that party? Is there a shelf life to "next?"

Bless the Beasts and the Ashleys

There have always been a million reasons to read Ashley Capps and here are a million and one.
And this.

Of the Freitag Triangle

"Oh, I thought it was the food pyramid."

But they're not stupid--they could name all of its parts. They're just fun and spontaneous and opinionated and I really like them these painters of the dead.

They're artsy and practical--my favorite combo.

And the styrofoam columns comment, too

Sorry L-Bo and Filo

:-( I offer you Feta Theologos in apology...

Lukewarm broth--the day

Technical difficulties this day. Seeing L-Bo will be good. My life is surreally isolated lately. It's strange. Friends always in flux, busy or ill when I'm moving. Moving or the act of really changing kicks my emotional ass and so it's ironic. I have set plans to see some favorite persons soon and that always feels good. Money--there's some on the horizon--not quite into view yet but out there, I'm told. And WD has asked me to judge a next round--much less work, more cash. There seems to be no downside.

So it's Thursday, that's that. I'll pull myself from this little funk with some nice L-Bo time and maybe a cat-nap before my dinner plans. Insomnia thy name is scribe...

I'm Sorry I'm Always Late: I Work in a Zombie Warehouse

Gesturing to paint-splattered clothing...

Teacher: Did you say in a zombie warehouse?

Student: Yes. I paint the dead.

And if that can't be an excused tardy, I'm not really sure what is. Some days, I seriously love what I do. If this doesn't work into my new poem about a city, I think it will have to be its own teacher poem. The new book doesn't have one yet and though I tire of them, what can I do when my students work in zombie warehouses. On other days, I sometimes feel like I do, too.

Today has been pretty good. Long phone-call with my injured Georgie. Dinner plans tomorrow night. An attempt to live here and claim here and forget how the town hums with an old energy that used to send me all magnetized to the Broad Street exit.

Now it's Neil Avenue and as Steve Earle (b/c you haven't heard that name yet this day, have you?) says: "let's magentize this mo-fo." Let's magnetize every f-ing mo-fo, indeed.

Kali Mera Mora Mou: A Poem and a Place Should Be One

The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets darkness comes down
and the poem is dark .
It's strange how seductive the poem. I am trying to work on prose these days and everything I've ever learned comes back to the poem and the way those of us taken by it young and the throat, have to write so, so, so much prose just to get at its freaky little contours, the way it turns its corners, and its side-streets--they are the dangerous, magical places within it. It's as close to my awe for music as anything gets this--strangeness of rooms and staircases that is the poem.

This morning I walked to the bank--a mile and something from my place and it was all city, morning commuters and it was bustling and fragrant (onions grilling for some omelette, the vanillaness of waffles and the other smells human and bus and heavy), there were bikes and beautiful bicyclists spokes all spitting silver and so on, and there was a woman in the bus-stop cubicle on a cell phone "size don't matter" pause, laughter "oh, just something I pick up somewhere--but I don't believe it..." and the man at the bank that always makes me feel pretty even if I'm bedraggled from the walk (so muggy, so hot) and there's the line for coffee and the stand-up-and-say-good-morning coffee at the place next to Mojo. I loved the way that there were suits and little wonderful dresses and the click-click of high heels on the sidewalk (I thought of you, here) and a man sitting at the bus-stop alongside all of this polish, looking liberal arts professorial--long, grey ponytail, s & p beard, and reading a book while sitting on the sidewalk amongst all of these standing corporate or retail others. The small pigeon crouched by a building where someone had been leaving black sunflower seeds. All this was Columbus, Wednesday morning eight to nine a.m.

My meme: pick a town unglamorous (Brooklyn don't count, you mean thing) and write about it thoroughly. It can be a shorter poem (Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg) or long like Paterson.

You Can Have Your Poem Tomorrow

For twelve full hours, I hate the guts of everything. Good night.

Blogs, Blogging, the Self and the Other

This thing was a gift me upon the publication of my book. My friend, Chicky set it up and I meant to use it as a way of sharing beautiful words--poems and prose and lyrics that moved me and beautiful days: qualities of light, sounds, the texture of a Tuesday in March, that sort of thing.

With such a crucial election, I decided to take my hot-headed passions to the street and fight for my candidate. In doing so, one set of friends jokingly referred to me as a Socialist and others not-so-jokingly as anti-woman. Either way, it's my fault. The most persuasive people do their lives with grace and conviction.

Obama doesn't need me here, he needs me door to door. Here is easy and preaches to the ten people that may or may not even read these posts, most of whom are already sympatico with me on some level or other or why bother?

I like my life and I like my words when I'm using them otherwise. Blogs can be all opinions and narcissism and I fear that I have erred terribly on both fronts.

Later today I'll find you a shiny poem, Dear Readers. As for November, like the old Burger King ads: have it your way.

Tangled Up

in so blue.

Almost set my apt. on fire. Counting pennies until Sept. 15. Not ready for this week.

The candied asparagus and brown rice are not even lifting my Eeyoreish droopiness.
Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Further: Columbus Ohio Loves Neil Diamond

and will vote for Barack Obama
and is proud of Joe Biden
and forgive the Clintons for a wee bit narcissism
and buy Lesley Jenicke's fabulous Ghost of Fashion the minute it can
and will listen to Arrow Sparrow every chance it gets
and to Steve Louis' flock of thousand brilliant songs
and calls periwinkle blue its favorite color
and loves poetry
and Steve Earle--there cannot be enough praise
and cats--independent, beautiful. Columbus Ohio knows this.
and eats its vegetables
cleans its room
takes a hundred of its dresses to Goodwill
feels goodwill towards all--even those that once hurt Neil Diamond's feelings
but now sees the path to redemption
Columbus Ohio cannot disappoint me--we were all love at first sight
and it's diminishing points by vexing my dear L-Bo
Columbus Ohio is sorry and promises to straighten up, Neil Diamond
It hangs its head, please forgive it.

Thanks to Veace for This

http://staceylynnbrown.blogspot.com/2008/07/less-than-auspicious-debut.html#links

This is about a press and a book contest. If you're "shopping" one (or two or three) manuscripts, please note this story. It is so expensive--in every single way--to muster up again and again and send our work (selves) out in those envelopes and with our hard-earned and too-little money. I don't want my peeps with all that talent to waste the precious secretarial energy it takes and end up more disappointed. For what it's worth, (other presses out there) Ms. Brown's book sounds very cool and interesting and I can't wait for someone to find a way to publish it anyway.

In the meanwhile, take care of yous.

Today is rainy Columbus, some Silver Jews, some waiting to hear My Man's speech. I love how the Dems are coming together and I am feeling so proud and positive. All you naysaying ninniepants please hold it. We have Republicans to conquer and we need some entry fees and gasoline if we're going to fill the world with your lovely poems, stories and song.

No matter what else you think, you must know that any vote other than Obama is a vote for that other guy (who is the same exact guy, BTW) and which guy do you think values art and music and education more?

To poetry! To song! (And what about the collective pretty of that first family--would it kill us to get some pretty around here?)

Shame on You Ohio Neil Diamond "Fans"

Whole childhoods, marriages, lives were played alongside the Jewish Elvis' lyrics. A penny a day--even at my tickets' prices would not come close to covering the years that his music, his whole amazing story inspired. I am not asking for one penny back. The night was extravagant in every single way and utterly worth it.

Oh How I Love My Diamond Child

Neil Diamond, my mom, Louie-Louie and a million memories of Uncle Louie, my daddy's diner: Theodore's Cafe, Salt Lake City and the orange naugahyde of the seventies. The fall in the air on my porch tonight makes the evening's "rightness" nearly perfect, nearly unbearable. Tomorrow school begins--I can't wait.

Also this:

I miss you.

The Cicadas Made Way for the Crickets

My mom's in town and I'm up late while she sleeps. I'm out on my front porch with its two hummingbird feeders and I'm thinking about blogs and identity and how much of ourselves we show other people--the little stuff and how much we do it to endear ourselves in ways that are and are not cool. I'm thinking about people that I've sent bits of the self to, and if I hoped in some dark little corner of me that they would be charmed and if that's okay, especially if in the general course of things they would never see me in those ways and maybe shouldn't as they were not mine to be dear to... or shouldn't be.

Then endearment and identity and how hard I've tried to matter to so many of the wrong people and how futile and how what hasn't loved me well-enough, enough or at all maybe shouldn't occupy a moment, a poem an anything, as I have a general disregard for those who need a lot of attention from people that don't really matter to them finally or shouldn't because how much time do we have for all of this matter after all? And about matter and endearment and how objects too, become storied and the stories make things matter and make it hard to take that circus scarf and donate it or that bear pencil holder or that thunderstorm on a t-shirt torn now and overwashed. It's hard to part with anything when everything becomes some key thing.

It's late. I'm being too serious. I should sleep.

Skulls Can Be Checked Out of the Library, but Skeletons Must Stay

Every faculty meeting has one such jewel and if that meeting is six hours long, no one will say it doesn't ease a little of the sting.

Our dean is hilarious and I like our little college. It's easy to be proud of it and so few of my recent decisions can boast the same.

Toy Soldiers might be the name of my latest project. Any opinions?

Also, it seems that Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett and some humiliating enthusiasms of mine are all touring now. And I am going to visit both NY and Colorado within two months. The wallet wants to know what I think I am doing.

Bluebottle Kisses & High Bars

This self-published book award judging has become more difficult. I'm dragging to the finish line in picking my final books. But this morning held pancakes and good friends and Chicky's surprise appearance and a lovely present. Everyone's scattering like dandelion seeds and I'm trying to see the pinwheel-pretty and silver-spoked spin to new fields and more lion-headed yellow blooms. I have the best friends in the world. I am the lucky, lucky girl.

Goodale Park, Long Walks, Mangos with Cardamon

a dash of balsamic, unpacking boxes, planting discount plants, trying to find a way to get a twenty-dollar goodwill couch home...In honor of my dear L-Bo, things that August affords me. I made a heap of dinner last night with homegrown basil and chilies donated by the community garden and tofu, cauliflower, broccoli, garlic, onions, tomatillo...yummy plus red potato horseradish salad. Then mornings on my new porch with my plants and some of my (amazing, if I do say so myself) iced chocolate velvet coffee with french vanilla soy milk, and stacks and stacks and stacks of self-published books of poetry on which I am meant to rank and write a minimum of two-hundred words apiece for a pittance per book. Still, the Columbus fairytale is missing something major and yet, I love my new pretty, little life there. There's a texture to my days.

Second Row, Never in My Life, Second Row

"So don't you get your hopes up if I call
Because I always catch myself when I fall
But I got to admit
That I'm a little bit in love with you"

I'm a little bit in love with you too, Steve E.

Nelsonville, Ohio, Stuart's Opera House, some dark lovely in tow and the highway, the sparkiness, I wore my heart around my neck--coral and gnarled--and just for you.
I'm all swoony and feel like the fortune cookie semi-truck hit a bump and dropped all the folded-golden-sweetness in my front yard. Only one thing would have made the sweetness complete.

Why I Love Joanna Newsom and L-Bo for Introducing Me to Her

I wanted to say: why the long face?
Sparrow, perch and play songs of long face
Burro, buck and bray songs of long face!
Sing: I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay
Just to lift your long face

And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave
Your precious longface
And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate
- why the long face?
And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil
- why the long face?

The City in Which I Love You

In the city, in the city, in the city there's a thousand things I want to say to you
P. Weller

The word city seems exciting to me just now. Maybe it's the NY-jones coming on again and the fact that the move and the dissertation must be done so that I can get there before summer's end.

I dunno what to tell you, Marge! I don't think about things. I mean, I respect people who do, but... I just try to make the day not hurt until I get to crawl in next to you again

On Glitter and Doom

Working on a new Michael Field poem for my dissertation and somewhere some hundred miles from here Tom Waits is scratching out those first few notes and if I imagine well enough, I feel like my dress might just drop off me from here. But I am in a public coffeehouse and I am writing verse like a T.W. himself would endorse as a response to art and its numerous ways to break a heart. Give me a grapefruit moon and a ruby-red sunrise on the day called tomorrow.

Flowers to Give to Someone You Love

was a sign in one of three pails of water with bunches of freshly-picked flowers in them. The gaslight district is a special place and I have been so grateful to live here. There is a true village sense to it and the neighborhood is so beautiful as to seem almost Disneyed-out on a daily basis--pink skies, blue clouds, bits of fiery dusk, butterflies everywhere, birds, children, all manner of summer on an avenue.

My Lovely Hooligan

the cry of a crow is (indeed) an inarticulate thing (S.B.Louis)

I miss you. And Elvis is right, this could be our finest hour.
Caw, caw, caw, come back.

Dream About Dream About

Me, Geek Love, February, garbage plate, Richard Thompson, May, Darth Vadar hanging on every note.

Sunday morning oatmeal, some time spent with Pearl and Amy and the last of my slow-cooked oatmeal. A whole day before I road trip again and I am strangely looking forward to it. I have been known to drive there at insane rates of speed just to head to a house numbered forty-three and wait a century for the door to open.

His Music and His Music and a Garland of Figs and a City

I'm leaving and city that in which I'm beginning to love. And the days don't pass for nothing do they? Even if I'm one beat too late and unlike all this music (new to me) I'm a little off-key, but guess what? Not too much. I mean I am sad, sad, sad about goodbying this town but I spent a whole day and clear into the night in my new city and was loathe to leave and this kicking and screaming may be for nothing, my new life might be kind of wonderful. Last night's electrical storm was amazing, the sky had just given up most of that sunburnt end of day color when this really dark sky crawled over the east side of the horizon and with it: strings of copper-colored lightning--how that? But it was and it was so gorgeous, I wanted to send it to all of you. Today I yard-saled myself into the hottest little Simmons desk for my new dwelling (yes, Babies, I said office--home office and work office--a girl can't be a loser her whole, long life.) A little deco coffee-table and the coolest old medical diagram of the human body muscle and bone. In the ottoman I bought to keep at my temporary home, I packed away a kitchen kiss with its vertigo that had not a thing to do with the gin.

There's a someone in New York (maybe the Jersey coast tonight, actually) and a someone sorry. There's a someone late to the station but there nonetheless and here completely. For whatever it's worth.

The Things I Meant to Say

Involved May, a convertable Mustang and ocean flanking us; involved motorcycle cop sunglasses dirt-cheap and bought where we bought the t-shirts and Who (after all,) Does Speak for Zack? Involved kisses that send the whole world spinning doubly; involved an older couple sitting on the sidewalk outside the ice cream shop sharing a bag of saltwater taffy, and two birds--greasy-looking and prismed--feeding one another an earthworm. Involved a door that reads Dr. Intagliod.

Never enough of your words.

A Rare Thing, Fine as a Beeswing

What a strange, lovely happening.

HAPPY BEARDAY 2 U!

Few things are finer than today's good news.

Every day made better with verse

Me and Cindy King we got a thing goin' on.

Thank you Dear Cindy for sending our work out and for seeing to it that Team King-onakis gets all Hellenic and Asiatic on poetry's fine naugahyde ass.

Thanks to Kristi Maxwell for the shout-out that led me to find today's good news.

I have these friends see, and they amaze.

Thinking of You in the final throes

The silver shoe saga comes to an end. There may be chocolate brown shoe polish on my knuckles and silver paint along my cuticles...

Overcast Sunday

and today's dining has included strawberries, one pink lady apple, and some slabs of gefilte fish. I'm thinking of getting crazy for dinner and having some spinach, an apple, some gefilte fish, and strawberries...

In other stimulating news, I'm working on the dissertation which was due around yesterday. This will be the first degree that I "walk." I am still hunting for decent silver sandals for the wedding. Tea-length puts pressure on the beauty of the shoe. Ah, weddings...

Shout Out to Alicia

whose email I just found and who I am writing pre-hitting-highway-for-one-day-of-cabining away... I will write you upon return. For now, all my blogger friends. Look up, watch for Alicia Holmes any and all of her writing rocks and rocks. And she is a chick for chicks in the best way.

Hitting the road and missing a certain leggy, strange bird... Happy Wednesday!

Sad Annie

If I were Anne Sexton, I'd spend my days reading and re-reading some of my most fabulous poems (and burying a few in the yard...) and today it makes me sad that Anne doesn't get to look over her own work and do a couple of cartwheels in this almost-spring grass of Ohio (for she'd be hanging out with me, of course we are the circle of the crazy ladies) just because she is she.

we are the circle of the crazy ladies
who sit in the lounge of the mental house
and smile at the smiling woman
who passes us each a bell,

(Anne Sexton (1928-1974), U.S. poet. Ringing the Bells (l. 9-12). . . The Complete Poems [Anne Sexton]. (1981) Houghton Mifflin.)

"That Special Place in Hell" Madeleine

mentions "for women who don't help other women."

And it resonates, yes, even with my not-so-private endorsement of a man for president--but beyond that or in addition to that--and especially in the world of poetry where I have tried hard to help anyone I could (man or woman). Still, it was so often those like my friend L-Bo to write a complicated, ambitious review and to place it well and my friend Veace to shape the manuscript in a fashion (and market it and pay her hard-earned cash for my entry fee) that would inform the shape that made the ms. into a book, at long last. By shape, I mean hours of arranging, typing and re-typing, table of contents to acknowledgements. I mean hours of love and care that is hard to muster for anyone's work. And yes, my friend at I Should've Been a Locksmith with her amazon review, and boys, there were those: Steve Fellner (not even acknowledged in my book as we were having one of our famous "friend break-ups") reviewed me carefully, fairly, and who could forget Prabhakar who gave me entry fees (sometimes many) for every birthday, who hit with an amazon review and who cheered me on when I was about to stop bothering with "the book dream". Other friends have taught the book (I believe even Matt Guenette whose own book Sudden Anthem should already be in your hot, little hands or wishlist at very least.) Many more people--Simone Muench, Kristy Bowen, lots. And I've zeroed in here and focused on women (though acknowledged the men--men weirdly, whom I've helped not at all with their careers) because it's extra crucial in the arts that we continue to help one another, Girls. At the first book level, things are often pretty good for us. We have some exclusive contests, even whole lit mags and editors like Kristy Bowen who are Super Women and super women-promoting. But it does get skinnier as we climb. There's still an unspoken belief that making it in the big leagues of verse means being endorsed or accepted by the men in verse, not that only men are there, there are women (check out Paul Guest's blog for some of the star-girls of verse) and women like my own dear Eleanor Wilner are no slouches either, but when we think of really famous living American poets, I hear many more male names at the very top. Here's my meme: write a review for a woman writer today--if time is limited, jump on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If not, pick a journal that does reviews and publishes your writer and one that you want to get into. Query or write a review for her and score a little frosting for you. Another time: review choose one of the boys who do nice things for us (Steve Fellner, Matt Dube, Alan May, Matthew Guenette, Anthony Robinson, Ander Monson, I'm just getting started) and write a little something for one of them. Teach the books of emerging writers you like, esp. women, shore them up for the career ahead. Do this--be you a boy or a girl--because it should be done and because, most of the people I've done things for do not correlate with the ones that have been so (ridiculously) kind to me. That's karma, the gift of it all, not the keeping-score.

For Veace--in Honor of Every Lost Lyric

Elegy for Tim Buckley

In the street we walk as beggars
In the alley faithless kings.
—"The River"
Scat singing for the sleep deprived—
it's what the critics called his
final music, his ship that plowed

some great uncharted dissonance
as if that's where he was headed
all along, to the restless distance

between an ear and its pillow,
between the wind guard of the mike
and insomnia that whispered low

one moment, then rose, cried out
even, leaping five plus octaves,
he would say, though in truth about

two octaves less—still a journey
heavenward and back, a space that grew
wings on his feet, his voice. Joy

became the thread of mercury
in the mouth of a fevered man.
A lie then, the mythical cure

that aged him as he walked bent
high inside the city of angels,
a drop of midnight in his blood.

How he hated the confinement
of old tunes, of the small beach town
that was his bliss. These things he made,

they shadowed him inside the hidden
bungalow he painted black,
the morning nocturne of its curtains.

If no mythology would take him,
there would always be the starless
mandate of the unwritten hymn.

To sail off the edge of the world,
off the end of a spool of tape
where it fluttered on its needle—

tick, tick, tick. Picture a moon
deaf above the sirens of dogs.
It's here where the lost songs begin,

on the brink of a sleep that fears
no less, that closes its eyes to sing,
Here it comes, at last—no, here. Here.

Copyright © 2008 Bruce Bond All rights reserved
from Colorado Review

Off to Color

-ado that is, bear country and near home. Finally, some time away. I plan to station with laptop and some lunches and coffees with friend(s) and enjoy the mountains that feel, always will feel as if they belong to me alone. I plan to Ethiopian and Moroccan and just linger for awhile.

To spend our days betting on three-legged horses with beautiful names
Bohumil Hrabal

Let me tell you how goodbyes arrive: gray ships on gray water--enormous.
Taij Silverman

Rocky Mountain Highs

The Spectacled Bear (Tremarctos ornatus), also known as the Andean Bear and locally as ukuko, jukumari or ucumari, is the last of the lineage of short-faced bears of the Middle Pleistocene to Late Pleistocene age.[1][2]

The Spectacled Bear is a relatively small species of bear native to South America. It has black fur with a distinctive beige-coloured marking across its face and upper chest. Males are 33% larger than females.[3] Males can weigh 130 – 200 kilograms (286 – 440 lb), and females 35 – 60 kilograms (77 – 132 lb). They are found in several areas of northern and western South America, including western Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, western Bolivia, northwestern Argentina, and eastern Panama.[4] Spectacled bears are the only surviving species of bear native to South America, and the only surviving member of the subfamily Tremarctinae. Their survival has depended mostly on their ability to climb even the highest trees of the Andes.
* * *

Ever wonder at the see-through cities, their citizens scurried, sly but nothing-eyed and nowhere-bound? Ever wonder about that Carolinian beach, the forms cameos on the sand, the wind wishing them scattered, the scattered grains that braille words for the blind tyrrants and their teacup poodles--what little yippings! what messages slip out, slip by, slip inside other envelopes and how many must be hired to decipher them? A mountain cradles the valley and no hand-blindfolds, no amount of closed-eye chantings make the mass of it lessen.

And Day Brought Back My Night
It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys
Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work
And started in: Item: it’s years, not days.
Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back,
In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you
Left her, remember? I did? I did. (I do.)
Geoffrey Brock

Half of It's You, Half is Me

Helloing again to my dear lost friend Princess Jellybean and it makes me happy. I am thinking of consistency and how trust is so much that and how my first boyfriend and his wife are attending my sister's wedding and how much good I have in my world and for that good, a standard has been set and sometimes, there's nothing to do but accept.

I am glad you are back, Dear Elizabeth.
I am sorry that You are under house-arrest Dear Homeboy.
Yes, Ander, you are to be birthdayed beyond--one track from George Harrison's own 33 1/3 for his own thirty-third year and because that's the length of an l.p. (But no 33 1/3 track exists--sorry, Spice Boy)

I've no plans to disappear.
--Eliot K. Wilson
(poet, true friend extraordinaire)

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood and I'm on the mend. So there.

Clouds in My Coffee

My peeps buy me the best presents. Even with so high a bar, some gifts transcend themselves--the thing you'd run back into a fire after. I have a silver gypsy pencil like that--one long winter's bear-sleep ago and it still moves me to see it--the gypsy dancing in the swirl of coffee steam, the boy who knew me that well and so early.

Last year it was a pink lunchbox full of Hello Kitty Pez dispensers and an I-Pod. The I-Pod sat all chrome and shiny for nearly a year--I couldn't bear to jeopardize it in any way. Then two weeks ago or so, I finally logged onto I-Tunes and now I am sitting in the dark, scarves over the lamps, tieing off my forearm and logging on...
Such questions arise as which version of Black Coffee to commit to? And which song that mentions coffee is your favorite? Do tell...

(Cafe poems are welcome, as well.)

I want to do mixes of key words like coffee or gypsy. I am all strung out and not at all sorry.

Flu Thru the Weekend

My best bird has three-souped me and taken care of my illin' self. I missed class today and am so tired.

Birds Again by Jim Harrison

A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.
I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosting within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye
and I’ll return my dreams to earth.

I miss Ethiopian food. I miss Maurice Manning singing Tecumseh Valley into the thickest Alabama night-air. I miss the sky's color earlier when it was all kinds of purpley-blue. I miss fresh figs & fireworks & homemade marshmallows & a big silver cat I loved so much and a big cowboy tomcat I also loved. I miss Riverside Drive and all of its various warmths. I already miss Middleton Avenue and the outdoor grilling that hasn't even happened yet this season but will pass quickly into a new life and one that the New Life Red Rover Kids keep calling me out to but I'm just not yet ready to shake this chain of hands and run forward, let alone fly through. I miss last fall and the one before and that big snowfall three weeks ago. I miss too much.

Virág
Like a name like

flower. Like a

country like the

sound of a state.

Once we drove

in a small car

through a field of

tulips so red so

red the sky had

to leave. The sky

was not itself and

all that was left

was gray so gray

that red could

seem more red

than anything. That

day so many cars

stopped, people

ran into the

field and made

intonations to the

tulips. It was

February. A good

month for tulips.

In a small country

with a view of

the ocean.

**
Amanda Nadelberg's

Just like a progressive ad

I was sitting at the light, on the corner, on the telephone with some tall, dark boy or other when a giant noise came at me and I realized I'd been hit right there in front of the fire station and on the way to a job interview for summer. It was really scary. Also, we all know that I love my silver dovemobile and though its injury was pretty minor and my acheyness will likely subside, the shakey tenuousness of a given moment was not lost on me. Scary. But it makes the world's good things stand out: my good friends, the phonecalls from that Big Colorado Spectacled Bear, my BFF and his get-well Korean food, lunch with dear L-Bo tomorrow, my good black cat-girls, (and even the ever-annoying Shorty and Bronte--my oldest friend in a shrug of fur and some serious mats), my IPOD and its ever-growing library of best songs, the Springsteen concert I just attended and Girls in Their Summer Clothes--a song that destroys me in the best way, homemade oatmeal, golden raisins, good mail (yes, Bear, I know,) and poems like the one below:

Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest I will not be there with you but think
of all the misery we've yet
to romanticize. Think of the train cars
rattling all night like the bones
of an epileptic. Think of the song
your mother sang to soap
and how her words drained away
with dirt. Think of the door
that screamed its rusted
warning each time you entered
and the last time you left,
your life knotted up in a red bandana on a stick.
Think of St. Louis, frozen
in April. Think of the girl
who does not know she existed,
that she throbs like a nerve exposed,
that she drains away
each night. I will not be there
to learn your names
or hear of the strange happinesses
beneath the sky
or to swear to return
but think of your feet by a mythic fire warmed
and the orchard around you
pelting the night with apples.
Think of those immense barges
singing like baleen whales
and think of your escapes,
which are legend,
of which I will someday hear.
And thinking of you
in winter the river
speckled with snow
will not be the slab where your body last lay.

Paul Guest

O Boy

If you heard this speech and can deny that we have an opportunity to choose a president that is more direct, more honest,brave and real than any we've had any chance at it for a long, long time, then you deserve the tacky, corrupt and self-interested leader you will choose.

I have never heard anyone speak better to the complex and often uncomfortable shades of grey within these issues and do so with more command and an intricate, intimate understanding of the ways race is a tangled and unsimplifiable issue. It requires admitting that some of who we are and some of what we love is complicated by race and indeed, racism. It is difficult to admit, as Obama says, "in polite company" but race, race "priveleges," any advantage or disadvantage that is impacted by race im/ex/plicitly brings things out in each of us that require re-examination and sometimes taming and tailoring. Instead of suggesting that everything or nothing is or should be about race, gender or sexual preference, Obama is candid enough to admit that we do contain all of the things that we contain--genetically, biologically, historically, intellectually, culturally and emotionally--and those things bump into each other in the dark hallways inside us and that is undeniable. It's what we do about them, the rooms we assign them and the ways we direct them that make the difference between truly being and acting in ways that help us to evolve into a "post-race, post-gender" place. But whatever I can say is nothing next to what I've just heard. I love that, like L-Bo, I can be made to cry over a speech by someone alive in my moment of living and the chance to really make something truly inspiring happen.

Glistening

Tiger said why are you
so pretty. I have seen you in pearls
and laces. At night
kissing each part of your nothing.

We break the window
before he can.
His snowball his weekend
turning to weekday.
He laps up the water from our gloves,
too full to lick the temples.
Leaves our house lightly
like a man who has forgotten.

It is not a straight line.
It never has been.

The flowers you made for the goat
are eaten by your roommates
who feel like fruit.

A walk in shallow water?

Further than the spirit trembles
they are eating snow on the moon.

In winter we lie
in the curious river
without matches.

Only the chain is broken,
not the pendant.

Who laughs so fluently?

The mate is a flute played in the wild.

by JEN CURRIN

Down to the Last Few Bites

of so much that I love. I'm banqueting on poetry b/c it feels like I'll be living in skyline of essays and service and such. I'm banqueting on an afternoon in milkish light with Drusilla asleep in the curve of my legs and the way they make a C meant just for such a shape. And there's the rub of it, the C and sea and seachange and all the acres of always I wanted to devour. It's Monday, I'm sleep-deprived.

The Touch
I want to hear the slap
of your shadow
as it hits the floor,
the pins and needles
of water falling
tap to tub. I'm tired,
and what you know
about me will soon be written
on a postcard and passed
in the night.

We're down to the last few bites.
Those who are in the habit
of eating parsley off their plates
will not help us.
Wine has cast its blood-shadow
across our cheeks.

I've come in off the street
to confess these crimes.
We have several mothers in common,
and while they plot our deaths
I want to give them something
to talk about.

I've misspelled my own name so many times
and still I remember every syllable
of every spell.
Still I remember you humming
along as the ghosts
drank water in the kitchen,
as our mothers counted our fingers and toes.

Jen Currin
The Sleep of Four Cities

Falling Asleep to the Sound of Rain
Understanding where you live is first of all
knowing its noises which are memorized
without you knowing that they are, for instance

weather: starting after midnight after stillness
is the clink-clink Irish rain makes on its journey in
a garden in the suburbs, falling on out of season

jasmine then iron railings between
my neighbor's house and mine; which began at sea.

I loved small towns—they seemed to come from
a kinder time: shop blinds lowered on weekday
afternoons, peaceful evenings with beds turned down,

shoes gathering, two by two, under them and in
the cellars of nearby farms, stopped up, ready
to be sold on market day, oily, sharp cheddars,

getting sharper, growing older. But the truth is
there is no truth in this. I never lived there.

What would it mean, I used to wonder, to leave
everything you knew, leave it altogether, never mention
memories; start again inside that reticence?

I once drove into Tarbert at dawn. Everything was gone.
No distances; no trees. Only imagined ones.
I had to begin making my own pageant of

small hawthorn flowers, elderberry. We love fog because
it shifts old anomalies into the elements
surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing.

It is the gift of sleep or the approach to sleep,
to make component parts of place and consciousness
meaningless and, as breathing slows down,

to do what water does, announce a source in cadence,
repetition, sound, allow a gradual dissolving of
boundaries between the actual and evident and still,

when all that is done, I know there never was
a single place for me. I never lost enough to have one.

I want to live where they refused to speak—
those first emigrants who never said
where they came from, what they left behind.

Their country was a finger to the lips, a child's question stopped.
And yet behind their eyes in eerie silence, was an island, if you
looked for it: bronze-green perch in a mute river.

Peat smoke rising from soundless kindling.
Rain falling on leaves and iron, making no noise at all.

Eavan Boland
Domestic Violence

Lightfall

All the light was north, snow on skylights,
the year I lived in the painter's studio.

Scrub forest behind the dunes, a litter
of deer tracks and shotgun shells.
I tied an orange bandanna around
the husky's neck.

//

I knew the dark place was wrong. I walked the letters
of my name, which I did not recognize spoken.

Low corridors.
Me. Her. The I
I could not find.

All the trees had fallen the same way
in the storm. A landscape pointing.

Anyone could happen like that.

//

The husky ate a bee
out of the air, snapped herself shut
on compound eyes, wing-blur, button
of darkness and buzz.

//

A rabbit streaked from under my feet.
Its nest fit my loose fist.
A cup of winter grass, still warm.

Home is the first everywhere,
the place we go out from.

//

The bee flew lower. Pollen graining its legs
drizzled onto linoleum shine. The room

was a different color for each of us. My shadow
bright blue-green in bee sight.

How could it not recognize the window
colored open?

//

I longed to be among trees. They wavered
beyond glass, beyond wire. They could not
be changed into words. They could not be changed
into anything. Even a camera couldn't see
the thick air around them, how it carried
sounds whole like water does,
how it supported slow birds.

//

Bee against pane, translucency
of wings. Centuries flew
against the glass. Then we found
the larger place: earth, that blue ark
afloat in the wilderness of space.

We cannot count ourselves out.

//

How beautiful it was
before we knew. How sweet how

A faint music falls from the stars—

no it does not.

Pamela Alexander

Slow Fire
Ausable Press

And Love for You Too, Frank

For Grace, After a Party
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

Frank O'Hara, of course

L,O,V,E and the Other Twenty-Two
A.
Without you,
an ass would be just
a snake, amore
would be too demanding,
and there’d be no
Aphrodite.
B.
Love is one person
in two bodies.

C.
Not quite a ring—
more like a Cracker Jack prize
or meeting the parents.

D.
Divorce: B loses
its better half.

E.
Almost B, but not quite.
Or perhaps B,
unbuttoned for a while.
F.
Keep watering
and it’ll grow
into something sweet-smelling
that we can call B.


G.
Closer to the gold band
than C— met the parents,
now moving in together.
H.
Eyes locked,
yet a handshake
that’s merely political.


I.
All brain, feet,
and business—
no time to be a poet
or lover.

J.
Add some mascara to I—
wink those lashes.
You’ve caught his eye.

K.
Unrequited love.
L.
J, turn away.
Play hard to get—make Jove
follow you to over to Love.


M.
Mars denies
Venus is imbedded in his self,
even as her slim waist
is in his arms.

N.
I’ll lead the dance
toward Z, falling
and bringing you with me.

O.
The ring that C
aspires to be.
Caution: D only
a straight line away.

P.
Formerly B,
now a poet.

Q.
Love can grow
and grow,
but don’t let it stray
outside the O.
R.
The poet
attempts to repair B
again
and again.


S.
When you dance like that,
wearing close to red or nothing,
you almost look like B.
T.
You make love true.
Then again,
I feel that way
about R, U and E, as well.
But I suppose only you
have that kiss.


U.
Venus
of Willendorf.
V.
Venus of Willendorf
was too lonely
to eat. She became
an inverted Aphrodite,
now solitary only
when Mars is red.


W.
Venus wages fierce kisses
on her husband, temporarily
forgiving his polemic demeanor.
X.
Knees weak,
K finally gives in
to a kiss.

Y.
Playing footsie
over a martini.
Z.
N, with feigned left feet,
half dancing, half falling
towards bed.

Jeanette Marie Sayers
Virginia Arts of the Book Center

Ah, Calgone Take Me Away

Thanks to my favorite bird for pretending to be tolerant, if not amused at my new crazily-strident streak. I will leave today's comments to Mr. Chait and with luck, after a big, deep breath, I will switch back to the poetry program. It's aswarm outside with winter and I am going to eat Vietnamese food and then slide back home in the slush of it all.

The New Republic

Go Already!
by Jonathan Chait
Hillary Clinton, fratricidal maniac.
Post Date Thursday, March 06, 2008

DISCUSS ARTICLE [124] | PRINT | EMAIL ARTICLE



The morning after Tuesday's primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign released a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency." I eagerly dug into the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton would obtain the Democratic nomination despite an enormous deficit in delegates. Instead, the memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton should run against John McCain--i.e., "Hillary is seen as the one who can get the job done"--but nothing about how she actually could. Is she planning a third-party run? Does she think Obama is going to die? The memo does not say.

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The reason it doesn't say is that Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn't going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton's Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.


That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama's. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama's general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim ("not as far as I know"), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified.


Clinton's justification for this strategy is that she needs to toughen up Obama for the general election-if he can't handle her attacks, he'll never stand up to the vast right-wing conspiracy. Without her hazing, warns the Clinton memo, "Democrats may have a nominee who will be a lightening rod of controversy." So Clinton's offensive against the likely nominee is really an act of selflessness. And here I was thinking she was maniacally pursuing her slim thread of a chance, not caring--or possibly even hoping, with an eye toward 2012-that she would destroy Obama's chances of defeating McCain in the process. I feel ashamed for having suspected her motives.


Still, there are a few flaws in Clinton's trial-by-smear method. The first is that her attacks on Obama are not a fair proxy for what he'd endure in the general election, because attacks are harder to refute when they come from within one's own party. Indeed, Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is: He's inexperienced, lacking in substance, unequipped to handle foreign policy. As The Washington Monthly's Christina Larson has pointed out, in recent weeks the nightly newscasts have consisted of Clinton attacking Obama, McCain attacking Obama, and then Obama trying to defend himself and still get out his own message. If Obama's the nominee, he won't have a high-profile Democrat validating McCain's message every day.


Second, Obama can't "test" Clinton the way she can test him. While she likes to claim that she beat the Republican attack machine, it's more accurate to say that she survived with heavy damage. Clinton is a wildly polarizing figure, with disapproval ratings at or near 50 percent. But, because she earned the intense loyalty of core Democratic partisans, Obama has to tread gingerly around her vulnerabilities. There is a big bundle of ethical issues from the 1990s that Obama has not raised because he can't associate himself with what partisan Democrats (but not Republicans or swing voters) regard as a pure GOP witch hunt.


What's more, Clinton has benefited from a favorable gender dynamic that won't exist in the fall. (In the Democratic primary, female voters have outnumbered males by nearly three to two.) Clinton's claim to being a tough, tested potential commander-in-chief has gone almost unchallenged. Obama could reply that being First Lady doesn't qualify you to serve as commander-in-chief, but he won't quite say that, because feminists are an important chunk of the Democratic electorate. John McCain wouldn't be so reluctant.


Third, negative campaigning is a negative-sum activity. Both the attacker and the attackee tend to see their popularity drop. Usually, the victim's popularity drops farther than the perpetrator's, which is why negative campaigning works. But it doesn't work so well in primaries, where the winner has to go on to another election.


Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.


Some Clinton supporters, like my friend (and historian) David Greenberg, have been assuring us that lengthy primary fights go on all the time and that the winner doesn't necessarily suffer a mortal wound in the process. But Clinton's kamikaze mission is likely to be unusually damaging. Not only is the opportunity cost--to wrap up the nomination, and spend John McCain into the ground for four months--uniquely high, but the venue could not be less convenient. Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn't create a more damaging scenario if you tried.


Imagine in 2000, or 2004, that George W. Bush faced a primary fight that came down to Florida (his November must-win state). Imagine his opponent decided to spend seven weeks pounding home the theme that Bush had a dangerous plan to privatize Social Security. Would this have improved Bush's chances of defeating the Democrats? Would his party have stood for it?

Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.

I too, wish to quit devoting more space to Hillary

(here, here, Crazy and L-bo) but this Starr stuff, it is more dirty politics, more dishonesty, more broad generalization of the variety that leaves nearly as bad a taste in my mouth as the thought of McCain in office. You can bet that McCain was counting on it, that the way Hillary Clinton runs a campaign, the things she says and does recommend him to the most unexpected of voters. After what the Republican party has done to our country over the last eight years, it's hard to even fathom voting for them. But Hillary, her shadyness, her unattractive boundless greed and self-interest makes her "experience" look like one more deficit. Of course, her "experience" is hers alone when it suits her and first-lady behind-the-scenes "decision-making" when that serves her better. I move that we Ouiji board Eleanor Roosevelt into being and ask that she campaign. Better still, I'll write her in. Come on America, the shady, the tacky, the class-less, the lowdown, and selfish--isn't that the president we already have?
BTW: To those Hillarians that enjoy (with the exact same little smirk in voice or text or expression) asking (passively-aggressively as their sorry leader) what exactly makes me support Obama and then wait (ever-so-long-sufferingly) in expectation for me to say "He pretty. He pretty-speak. He rock-star. He c-o-o-l," allow me now to answer: It is indeed Hillary's experience and my experience of her and her absolute un-winning ways and the way she makes the prettiest boutannier on the lapel of John McCain in a shade so vividly right for him, that she brings out his eyes in the most compelling way. I mean, (for I do not want to be accused of using language too effectively as though it is the stuff of laws, bills, and every preliminary and crucial "move" that any president will ever need to make, it is apparently upsetting to some) I mean that I am interested in a candidate that can win this election and one that I am proud to support and endorse. The issues (yes, including that barely-mentioned HEALTH CARE) are not much different and where they do differ, I prefer a candidate that can admit that there will be challenges and he will fight hard to make change and do as he says he will do and not say anything, anything (including Kenneth Starr and invoke SNL to make a serious political point) just to try (however pitifully) to win at any cost to his party and finally, to his country.

Oh Ohio

sometimes you're so slow. That's okay. We'll catch you on up. L-Bo, every spare hour must be spent hitting the streets, those t-shirts, both poet and emu, and anything and everything that can be done to see to it that the candidate I find most representative of my wish for a president has an honest chance at it.

Obamarama

Tonight. Sitwell's Coffee Shop. Me and mine watch what kind of history we're in the middle of forming.

6:30 a.m.

found me at the polls where yes, GIRLS, oh yes, yes, yes, I did in fact vote and vote for Obama.

I felt as near to that sickeningly-simplistic concept of "patriotism" as I have ever felt. Proud to be there. Proud to be in bright, reasonable, considerate and gracious company. Proud of the young woman--seventeen y.o.--who was voting on a provisional ballot as her birthday was not until May. And maybe she was a Hilary supporter or worse...and maybe she will grow up to tell all of her women friends whether or not they are or are not feminists, but for now her motivation, will and momentum exemplify a good citizen if not a good feminist--not for me to say. As an Obama supporter, I feel it in keeping with the spirit of his campaign that I set out to do what I need to do and what is within my power to change and complete. I do not throw stones and I do not resort to every low trick in the book when I am not getting my way. But it has been a bit exasperating Gyrrrrllllssss, a bit wearisome really, the insults, the assumption that me and mine are all lipsticked and oblivious. I have completed all of my artistic goals, I have done so at great personal expense and instead of talking my "feminism" through a critique of other women and how they look or act or love, I have lived alone a long time and have w ith no traditional outs or ups. Having one's own mind means defending it even in the face of other overbearing and self-righteous WOMEN as well as men. It means knowing you are and what you love no matter who questions it.

Give me a bitch I can back, Tina Fey.