Shooting Ghosts

A thing that could look like an old midway game, the kind with the piano player and the target on his back, the kind with ducks rolling by like, well, moving targets. But for me, tonight, it is the kind that I usually use as a shield, the ghosts of what hasn't worked as a block against the living things that could. Kind of like planting a big shrub over the wildflower seeds you threw down, but a thorny one. One that scratches when you walk by and lets nothing grow in its shadow.

My friend, "Rhoda" asked me if I wrote something on my birthday and I had been writing a short story and a little note to myself but nothing so formal and captured as a birthday log, a formal account of that day every year. I wished suddenly, that I had. But this isn't that. It's too late to recapture all of those, just like I can't move forward into the sudden-promise of some good things with the old sorrows hanging from every tree. I like too much, linger too long and long, long, long after the lingering's good.

Lately there have been daisy-days glazed with the fresh sweet, shininess that hot donuts wear. A treat to the senses and something so simple to that, too. I am tired of the mean-broken who accuse the sad-broken of something sinister. I am tired of working very hard to stop seeing broken or naming broken or loving broken and having the mean-broken make ugly every possible joy.

I wish us all something light, full of color, and the promise of hope and dare-we-reach happiness. Even the ghosts I had to shoot deader so as to keep them from smothering everything that might live in their pitiful, and once-beautiful stead.

The Forms Forgiveness Takes, a Poorly-Painted Chair the Color of Twilight

I meant to write about the movie I saw with L-Bo, how it walked such a tightrope between gratuitous sorrow, schmaltz and every danger of employing children, the old and the notion of what means and loses its means and so on.
What a tightrope walk! I said to L-Bo within moments, "I will have to own this" and I will. To retired magic and magicians, to women who dance on one leg, to the ways we find to forgive and get forgiven, I blow a stream of rainbowy bubbles.
I miss my big friend who has moved away. He is in a swirly memory blizzard from a gallery hop in January or February when the streets were wild with snow and he walked in the quiet of snow-globes, all that good quiet he contained and that he inspired and it was what winter in Ohio must be.
My garden grows prettily and the seedlings even are peeking out. I have a wooden chair that is sloppily-blue-lavender and I am sitting in it now, writing to all of you--whoever you might be--and listening to a song about chiropractors. I have eaten a bunch of mini rainbow marshmallows because it is the food of such a day.

A Rich and Varied Week

I'm floored again and again by my students and my students who are more like my friends, because, after the grading is over, why wouldn't I hang out with people who live in art and who work in the world as if they are not entitled to something more because they are artists but instead, provide the world with more beauty and wisdom because they feel lucky to be able to create art and be amongst like-minded people.

That said, I found a lot to admire in the youtube postings of katereadsbooks She is the smart cookie and funny, besides. This morning was a workshop on how to start into publishing and tonight, a movie and dinner with my dear L-bo.

I feel free of the heavy burdens of certain not-good-for-me persons and grateful at the new friends I am finally finding here.

My garden is growing so prettily and with home internet--at last! I get to go out and enjoy it and write beside it.

The Insipitudes

They come in like wrens and go out like finches or maybe
it’s the other way. They come in like tornadoes and exit
like divas. When we tell them about black tulips, the imagination,
Plato, the crazy things that happen there, they take-over,
want a spotlight of crazy, want to pluck the black tulips from our gardens
and arrange them in their sickrooms. Every room they enter
is a sick room and they like it that way, less pressure.

They walk by way of pity, even mercy, they press, sure,
into us like handprints on wet cement in May
and often in July. They peddle their miseries
like flowers and they watch for us, hoping we’ll buy.

When I think about suburbia, I think about streets that are named
after trees and I am reminded of my friend’s late wife
who said “love like a tree not like a bird”
Another one was born soon, they’re everywhere
and when I think to forgive one I recall that the last time
I might have seen Tom Waits and was sold-out.

Because Veace was So Kind

and generous to the BT poems, I will finish some of the stragglers and post them. Perhaps we're looking at a chapbook. From where I sit, I can see the nightdarkmoist soil of the freshly tilled and watered garden. It does a heart (even a depleted, robbed one) good.


Orange Sun Oozing

like a popsicle left in a hot car,
a crayon or a lifesaver. Big star
stuck in a vast pond, big orange slice
congealed in the blueberry jell-o skies.
Her heaven’s sexy, vibrant, as the words
risqué or tangerine. Her heaven’s armed
two-lipped, black nightied, sassafrass, sweetass,
and heavened again, a twin-star: juicy
with wishes; the mind’s eye disrobing one
planet then the next, the constellated
pores sprayed out on the ever-midnight
chest, celestial shout-out to suggest:
let nothing go uncelebrated.

for KW

Day of Great Gratitude

Happy Bearday! Happy Bearday! My life is a children's book and the characters include my big bear, a bird, a talking spoon, three dreadful whiskered villians, plus one a ways away with fangs and warm flames in its hot lime eyes. Some tough Utah wild-girls in the form of what? A star-gazer with a comet's risque heat, a boomerang moon-girl with spiral locks and a horse they call Wildfire back to the state that is a sheetcake with one gone piece. There are more, a veacey vixen in Brooklyn with a heart that blooms sunflowers...

The Bear is the big, gentle being that feeds the rest, by heart and by mouth. Prettiest thing, he makes the world better by casting his brilliant, lovely, talented shadow on the grateful ground. Thank something for him. Stop now and do it. May 10, 1965 was an inspired day. One day in Alabama some thirty years later would change my life forever and I never stop feeling lucky for it. Good work Gloria and Jack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Happy Birthday You Wonder, You!

To all my dear ones who are also Mom-ones, Happiest Day to you. How I envy you your crayoned cards, your goofy love gifts with their smudgy prints.

To Magda, Dora and Mollie, my borrowed kids. You have a great mom (who is a bit sad today, no doubt,) but special beyond, like all of you.

To my students, I happy mother's day your moms--without them, no you and that is pretty unimaginable even to a crowd like us whose thoughts are tropical birds.

The gratitudes stroll by in twos and twos of twos like Noah-beasts or the participants in a mass cult wedding. They are vintage salt shaker you toaster, you two slices of bread, perforated. Birthday cake. Meringue. The park with the pond at the center and the fountain that spouts a true water lily. The seed pods left behind in late winter that rattle like maracas. The December day when I wintered there, warmly and wishing.

Ah Craig, Rebecca, Jackie, and World, Most of all You...

Terrible news just found me.

from A Place of First Permission


AT a still point of the turning floor
there is a dancer you would know her
even across a crowded room
the way she sways is so familiar
She weaves with the easiness and grace
of someone so completely in
possession of her body the beat
she lays down with her hands and feet
is all that keeps the cosmos in its groove

She is a lash of flame
spiraled to fire-colored hair
Her hands unfold a flower out of the air
If you reached out to take it if you came
closer you would liquefy like wax
pooled in a candle's crater you would spill
past possibility of shame
She says
Smoke me a bass line to go with that
thick as blackstrap molasses she says
Give me the buzz of oboe between your lips
the tingling tambourines the sweet
percussive patter of palm on palm she says
The whole world is poured into the deep bowl of my hips

Now get on up she says and shake
the creases out of your clothes she says
Your life is nothing but the thread
you spin behind you every step
a turn a loop a figure-eight
until the day that blind witch Fate
opens her scissors and snips you dead

What would you do if you could take it
between your fingers if you could feel
every knot and snag and tangle
loosen and gather softly round the spool
What would you do with such permission
how far would you wind it what decision
you made or didn't make

You can sit the next one out together
here at this table you can share
a glass of white vermouth pretend it's absinthe
green as venom green as Eden
seawater wormwood pine-needle
and watch the dramas and the comedies
playing around you you can ease
into one of those silences
that never feel the need to fill
And you can say what you've been so afraid
to put in words what's tied your tongue
for years of useless reasons and excuses
the apology you never made

Love from you I learned
to dance you taught me with your body
and not words your movement answered
mine and mine yours you gave me back
to my own body we passed between us
all the speechless gestures of admiration
of those early in love who aren't yet
careful to say so much and no further

But each time we kissed you kept your lips
closed however much I pleaded
Open the petals of your mouth for me
you never let them part I thought your heart
too was closed I was afraid to see
how happily you would have offered
everything had I done the same

Love forgive me all I've given
has been a form of taking
talking over a table of scarred wood
talking always about the table
I've held out my hand and drawn it back
in case you took it always afraid
to take away the table altogether

You laid a coal on my lips you made me
bend my chromatic into blue
You taught me how to spin my line
back and forth in a broken prayer
and give it to the all-assuming air
Now here it is my gift to you
if you will take it oh my Ariadne
my muse my lady jane my valentine

She takes your hand her thumb circles
lightly over the backs of your fingers
How have you never noticed
the sweetest galaxy of freckles
scattered across the fine skin of her wrist

Outside the ragged trickle of the rain
the dark snarl of branches the blades of grass
bend and flutter caught in the wind
that sweeps over the wake you leave behind
As if it all were bowing briefly
toward your passage nodding as if to say
Yes you're going to get away
with everything
As if the dancers
happy or disappointed loving or leaving
their voices the red velvet curtain
swaying from side to side the broken glass
the girl you loved and you and the whole train
were nothing but a line of thread
licked twisted drawn through
the eye of a needle and slowly pulled
another stitch in the cloth of the world
that is all stitches a piece of string
lost in the weave never to be untangled

Look did you see it
The eye blinks
and the bud of the moment blows open
shakes off its sleepy petals
and you are sitting there
listening to a girl in a pink sweater
gossip into a phone
and she gets off
at the next stop (there is no keeping her)
leaving a dimpled seat a hole
shaped like her in the air a long blonde hair

and the smell of rain in wet wool



Craig Arnold


Made Flesh

Bonnie Prince Billy!!!

June 13 says a pink flyer with a black skeleton and that's my boy and L-Bo, Filo??

So, the worst part of my job is grading...

and my grades suffered some internet difficulties today so I had to come to an internet cafe and repost. I am sitting at the door of this great place that is all about scooters and coffee and just outside a group of people are playing kick ball in the faint drizzle of spring rain and High Street is crazy with light and bodies all doubled against the shiny streets and I am a decaf cappucino and sitting as near outside as a girl and her laptop can go and it's amazing. Sometimes I nearly simply love my life.

Update and a Request on Behalf of "Find Craig Arnold"

Rebecca Lindenberg sent a message to the members of Find Craig Arnold.

--------------------
Subject: Craig Needs Our Help

Thanks to the money raised through The Fund to Find Craig Arnold, we have been able to engage the help of an independent search and rescue team (1SRG) who arrived at Kuchino-erabu yesterday afternoon. The local authorities brought the team up to speed, and they immediately began searching; they believe they have picked up Craig's trail. They will be on the island until the 9th, looking, though obviously we all hope Craig will be found before then. However, the official search for Craig has been called off by the Japanese authorities. We need everyone's help contacting their local Congressional delegation and asking their assistance in pressuring the Fukuoka consulate to engage local US military/DOD assets on the ground in Japan. They have been thinking about it and we need them to move forward with that as quickly as possible. We would be enormously grateful if Craig's friends and supporters would help us in this effort, and we thank you all for the amazing outpouring of help, generosity, and sympathy that everyone continues to show for Craig.

-Rebecca

Whatever Can be Done

Black Tulip Reminiscence

We went out our in best black tulip suits
washed our black tulip diner-ware, painted
all the red tulips black, the pink tulips—white.
The black tulips grew rampant and right
as the night they contained. We mouthed
words into the wrong mouths for too long
and then again always. We were ironing our
collective shirts, sighing into our collective
soup, we were collected for a time, then donated.
For one season, beyond belief, we were all the rage..


10 Friday

Good Friday We Drive Around the Synagogue Geese

the deer not yet bounding across the lot, into a stand of trees
the light suggestive of spring, the air recalling winter and it’s good,
Friday, us, the strange new year we’ve opened like a suspicious package
bore a new facet to our friendship that were it a day would be Friday
a day sipping at the rainwater puddles at the edge of the weekend pool.
A day caught like a kite in the hope-tree of the possible, where Saturday
is a breakfast served in the mind’s little cafe, the stack of pancakes
rivuleted in real maple syrup, the pats of butter--pillow-plush, your face,
Friend, Brother, Dear-Heart, Weird One, better for our ever-Fridays
when I drive the hundred miles back to where for four years we shared
a lifetime and if once one of us wished a forever tucked inside
those times, the other trafficked in Black Tulip Time, an infinite
minute if imaginary.

19 Anger

Angry Black Cloud Pretends to Tulip

He rainbowed me, abhorred me, man-o-warred me,
Then bestowed me, (then just stowed me,) What was owed me?
Who can say? Yesterdayed him then unprayed him,
If betrayed then, let it lay.
Misconnected, no one objected.
We undressed and then redressed it
Left ourselves out on display.
Sacrificed it, sliced and diced it,
Then we left it, so-bereft it skulked
towards home then lost its way.

30 Goodbye too, Love: Elegy for Karen Carpenter

Only yesterday when you were sad and you were lonely,
Your alto-range lovesongs put the pop in popsong.
That smile in your voice, like a good receptionist,
kept the better part of the seventies
pleasant. Karen, forgive us, we hadn’t yet seen that strained
look on the faces of all the women to starve themselves
after you. Didn’t know that a body could be both dandelion spore
and scarecrow-headed in bellbottom jeans with a t-shirt, embroidered
with many colored flowers and glinting with a rhinestone at each
of its floral-cores. Yesterday when you were sad and you were lonely,
to leave the past and all its tears behind you, you emptied yourself,
like a pill bottle found irony on labels that instructed you not take them
on an empty stomach. Wondered how to otherwise when you were emptiness
embodied, singing your even your own dirges in a voice careful and sweet
as a greeting card. Jagged-Girl we saw you, the gothic self, running behind
the trees in the forest—recolorized by Disney in shades that were synthetic
imitations of color—that was your soul, your slip-self creeping between pines
And watching that other-you in her bright pastels pull another smile from her
handbag and swallow it whole. Superstar, you’ll go too far, not far enough,
you’ll shoot and fall, and for a split-glitter-torn second the heavens will recall.

The B.T. Encyclopedic Entry on Longing

It isn’t what it used to be. The throngs of shadows from the tetradactylic sky made us uneasy, reminded us of the shapes of Things-Before: four score and so many years ago, we longed richly, longed like the longers of old. Consider Longfellow, thus named for his rhymed-yearnings. Longfellow knew a good longer when he tried one, the bouquet of it just-so, and the good legs it hung down the sides of a goblet. Alexandre Dumas, a longer like no longer. And Proust, and so on. These days, no longer is a good longer. Better no impact, be able, as my friend says, to insert some platypus lasagna anywhere and lose nothing and when I speak, Friends, of monkey juggling, let me say that it matters not whether I refer to that unkind sport of primate-as-bowling-pin or if I mean to say that a monkey steps on a stage and spins four chainsaws in the air, three torches of fire and we all applaud. The juggler, the juggled, nevermind. We’re in the midst of defining (and by defining, I mean dismissing,) longing as the plaything of mortals, of the tender-hearted, the bleeding hearts, the hearts-on-sleeved who hurt when they want a thing, love a thing, lose a thing. I mean to say: longing is for losers, anyway.

Tulipe Noir: As the Cosmic Hand Reaches for the Light

Like a tarantula at a square dance, I felt unwelcome.
Like a memory hanging off a bridge, precarious.
This week has the breath of a six-day’s dead wino
This town isn’t big enough for this brand of make-believer.
I felt as gold and as rusty as the sweat-corroded trinkets
on bellydancer’s waist. I drank from the flask
You’re no sunset, Dollface. You’re Sunset after hours.
a dark Merlot. I said harmony and you heard harming me
and there we had the way to go, Pigeon. This city’s seen
the last of you, gumshoe. The stars were like dewdrops
on the side of a windshield of a car left for dead
on the shoulder. The body in the trunk was as folded tidy
as a suitcase packed by a new bride. We wore blue velvet
and shiny loafers. We wore carnations in our buttonholes
like bulletholes blooming from the sides of our chests.
We were not big enough for this town, for both of us.
We’re as gone as vaudeville, as late as ever, as unwieldy
as a fish half-caught, as lost as us.

Wet T-Shirt Contest at the Black Tulip

Never have we given so much
thought to the body before,

then I joined that gritty, hardcore
gym and we worked out amongst

the pumped and perhaps-pumped
full of steroids and just today

the “naturals” weighed in, urinated
in the presence of a judge to assure

us that her taut frame was self-taught
not a synthetic synthesis from muscle

to tone. Our tone today is mellow,
our tone today is slack, not low

but leaning like a flower thirsting
for something to shake the eros

back into it. We spy the flyer
and the promise of water

to thin fabric, telling the secrets
of the form underneath. Midnight

rolls around, we return to see what
the transparency of water can teach

us about what we ask be revealed
just to keep concealed what we need.

Black Tulip Brogue

Once there was a way to get back homeward; once there was a way to get back to the ranch,
Meanwhile, the tulips are curling into themselves against the chill. Meanwhile, I am not going
to Scotland anytimesoon. I am not going to Anytimesoon for the swanky beachfront bacon boys,
nor the souvenirs that appear along the esplanade glued hastily, their tartans showing a swath
of plastic thigh that appears quite nearly obscene in this light: neither Scottish nor tropical.
I am not working on my Gaelic, and not priming my bikini bod for the view. I'm missing my planes.
Maps upset me, as do globes, spin them, scan them and what you'll find are the million places
where I won't be tonight. I sang a solo to the radiator and it sputtered a sick reply.
Someone asked about my whereabouts then so did I. So did I.

Black Eye, Fat Lip, Gas-Station Doghouse Roses

Randomly you occur to me;
during rain against the skylight
or seepage in the crawlspace,
During February, May or days bright
Your fingers swift to the dimmer switch.
Maybe you see me in the grocery line:
drowning in debt or gourmet coffee-beans,
my tears, or the vague drownings that fill
my lungs daily like slot machines
and find me heavy with coinage
anchored by fortune

Otherwise they Go Unsung
Black Tulip in Love

Sometimes a simile
Finds her vehicle before tenor
(An opera singer in a corvette)
And she’s off and running like
A race horse on amphetamines
Like amphetamines on a race horse
Like this is speed with hooves
And spark, his leaving and her insides
Race around the small plastic track
like a matchbox car with a rocket-engine
like it’s a marvelous night for a moondance
and your ringtone should be emerald-cut.
She is just now inside herself, wondering,
Wandering like a child lost in a mall
Or a grown-she lost in the parking terrace
At the airport, walking level four for miles
Certain, so certain, that was where she left
The car, then recalling no, his favorite number
And the car, parking neatly on three
Waited under her preferred digit.
Because he’s leaving, the city’s gold light
Seems jaundiced, a tarnished star
Where sunlight coated the newly-planted
Tomatoes, the basil and mint arching
Towards his reach. His, a gardner’s patience,
Her’s a love for the gardener and so, for the plants,
She will tend them like preemies,
And today, someone’s birthday shivers
in the parking space of the calenders
everywhere, stretched out on walls,
sprawled on desks, tucked into
cell phones and wallets, the days
splayed out like soft porn.
In the black tulip of her heart,
he reigns and he is wanted,
she cries out and he returns.
They free the small yellow
Airplane from the décor,
Fly it out--straight out
The westerly windows of the airport
And into the sunset of the best
Of their lives. For a water landing
An inflateable slide down into
Clean, folded laundry,
excellent coffee, for drowning
One calls out throw me a lifetime
and the other never fails to comply.

Since True Black Tulips Never Die
& the Sabotage is a Perennial

So we decided today wasn’t my day to find you.
Then we decided to abandon our children,
the ones with abandonment issues, the ones
that felt cocky and overloved, the ones
we never liked too much and the ones
we loved better than our limbs (our each
precious hand held tenderly in each others’
caged fingers) became the bird whose neck
we snapped and left in the alley frequented
by the most stray cats. It follows that
we decided to wear our hearts on our sleeves
then donate all our shirts to charity.
If our methods were suspect, our reasons were sound.
We decided to find in favor of light travel and wanderlust,
against all keeping, against further loss.

City Like a Sukkoth Empty and Forlorn

but clean, like the words dew and refresh.
Or the cantor's voice this morning, clear
as winter-air, the crispness to twilight
shaken off Miriam's tambourine, a circle-moon
skirted in metallic leaves clang a music--steel,
and that word--steel too, clean, clean,
clean as a wiped-down kitchen.

Like the spaces between us yield
to the black tulip hour when we remember us
pure as the day before we met, unmoved.
Our fingers yet to leave their eternal vortex
of prints swirling off that rock thrown
on the puddle of us that first time we spoke.
Disinfected, we're no longer
a crime scene, dust anything and find
that no skin cell, no hair or spit
contaminates our caesura of no longer here
nor there, so sanitized, antiseptic, it’s nearly disgusting.

But I’m meditating on cleanliness
and we’re in the midst of Passover,
the metaphor inherent too easy,
too done, and there is nothing
more immaculate than the perfect
blonde haystack of coconut macaroons,
the scent of them too, like summer
and beaches. Someone from Israel
sings in a pitch that defines the clean
but nothing so much as a very old man resting
his head against the Torah’s scroll,
eyes closed, looking like a small boy
again fallen asleep during the service,
muffled as the first day of heavy snow,
rests safe against the certain purity of the word.


Dingy as the Black Tulip Hour Dims in

How little we’ve considered
pirates these last few years
until now. Then we radio
them in and they are both
contemporary and the pirates
we imagine, eye-patched, with parrots,
and so on. We’re packing up
around the aquarium, the fish
slide back and forth in the peripheral,
where their small treasure chest
breathes in and out, the plastic gold
of doubloons, spilled strand of pearls,
the tiny skeleton lounging as if bubble-bathing,
his plastic bones cleansed on the rubies, emeralds,
and rhinestones and I consider the pillage
and remember you, Sister, your shampooed hair, unrinsed
and-crackling-dry as we talked and talked ourselves
away from that bad night, each word a brick between us
and the sandpaperdoll we’d ground ourselves against
the bitter truth, against the planetary-grime
shaped like a man (who was no man) and whose dark garden
bloomed cruel blossoms but we picked them, dried
them and from those seeds found that what is buried
breathing dirt, scooting the ground out of the way
in search of a window of sky, and far from subway rats
and city mice, a year of hard-rain grew
this good harvest, this hard-won crop.

for V, again

Black Tulips Grown in Missing Gardens

Places lost to us or places we go to do our losing,
mourn our lost. Statues there, and on good days
they’re not us. I say it but I don’t mean it—not today.

I’ve hurt myself at least three different ways
and I’m missing nine-hundred things or more.
I lost my rent check, my willpower, my way.

I’m missing the sycamore, the ill-love
at the root of it, the someone who told
me if you rub the bark, it releases

the scent of vanilla. Then a someone to magicize trees,
to see features: each crease on that old man’s face
risen true from the oak. The someone to see the dice

of expressions on faces framed in windows
from a faraway train. (His voice the only voice
that makes me cry.) I’ve hurt myself three times

today and counting, but nothing like memory:
the bamboo fence, our saint-rabbit’s grave
robbed, the dainty-bones gone and what gave

anyone the right to take them away? The painted stone
we placed there to mark the place--gone
too--and who knew how cruel any one

season might be? I miss it. Most of all on days
like today, where the snow follows sun follows snow
again and I don’t know if what I’m missing

is what I miss or the other way or if I’ve just braced myself
as the tulips have closed their mouths before they can say:
You invited us. Why treat us this way?

Black Tulip Hour at Our Cottage

If a time were a place then this
would be utopia. We might be
married, our cottage with its grass
roof keeps the weathers audible
but in their place. Our place
is daily and each other,
where flowers can be soot-dark
as the throw-pillows of charcoal
briquet on which we Sunday-grill
our garden’s skewered harvest:
the sexy tomatoes in their sheaths
of olive oil, their oregano trinkets,
the cavernous peppers, hollow
and hopeful, and the yellow squash
like suns within suns and blooming.

Kenny the Cat, I Mean,
Explained Over the Cheap
Bottle of Gato Negri
As Poured for Us Repeatedly
At the Black Tulip Hour

He cries like he cried
when I was reading Henry James.
Professional weepers
by now, and the library
fears us like southerners
fear a powder-sugar-French-toast
-dusting-of-snow.
I am not saying the librarians
buy up all the milk and eggs
and leave the grocery
looking robbed. I am saying
that they bring in sand bags
and move the rarest books
to higher ground. That first
edition Dumas signed, for example.
We’re allowed nowhere near that section,
and yet, shouldn’t the entire library
be ashrug with sobs? The tragedy,
the gorgeousness, all gathering in a folding wave
of the unbearable ache of the glorious
uses of language to bring us: flowers, countries, back
to life. A thank you for being
this species to sing this string
of words taught to us so young
we could barely guess what we meant
by promises that contained four witches upright,
or prayers that suggested death before waking
and someone told me just yesterday
that what Sylvia Plath was missing was God
and dear fellow follower of the words
I thought of us: full of Christmas cookies
and writing about a year lousy with meteors.
How we escape however we can in the black tulip
hour, his needles, her pills, our sugar highs and lows,
the dresses we put in our virtual shopping carts
only to have them pillaged in the night.
Cindy, I almost knew your father:
years-gone before I even met you,
and on his birthday, when we dined
at our favorite Chinese cafe in his honor,
I felt he saw you somehow, sees you:
wonder, toy-hearted, a mind sharp
as his warnings about a world
he could barely trust with his girl.
We had helped each other farewell
so much, by then: your father goodbye,
your love goodbye, and me, newly-wrenched
from what I thought was certain love.
The story was the same when we left
for new distant towns months ago, only the lovers
were swapped out for new ones to leave or leave us
and we wrote back and forth, to remind us
how to move, how to do anything
not to hurt him, anything not to hurt.

Incidentally, I don’t know where the rest
of my life went, but this morning,
it’s Sunday, early spring, and outside
my window, I spy a man
teaching his daughter
how to ride a sky-blue bicycle
with a basket, plastic-flowered,
with streamers, and there is only
that first bike, father’s hand: solid-lightly
on the small of the back, believing
us into feeling it there still
when, holding his breath,
and her balance with just
the muscular-wish of his gaze,
a ghost-hand lingers, steadying
and she rides away still with him
with every push on the pedal,
every sparkling-spit of silver
off the spokes, the planet,
the daylight-saved clock
everything that spins,
spin-certain, spin.

for Chicky

Boston Review

Me and Chicky!

Happy Hour at The Black Tulip

The problem with drinking
revolves around honesty.
Around a devoted lush
we hear our faults itemized
later, incanted, the repetition
pared-down to a word
(usually compound) forehead,
bad-kiss, monobrow, mushmouth,
disbeliever, deadboylover, pigeon
but not always. But then
the booze/truth runs out
and there’s no way of knowing
what’s wrong with us.
The liquor inside us lies
Tells us we’re profound
When really we’re just drunk,
Not deep, but deepening
To the shade of dark
Indecisive as that flower.

At the black tulip hour
the minds dribbles the ball
Up and down the court
of possibility and there’s
no fairer place to play
save for yesterday
which is an etch-a-sketch
we shake out at whim
and re-begin. The clouds
not portabella, not straw,
not wood, nor shitake,
not wild. Just clouds
stuck bulbous against
a one-dimensional sky.
At the black tulip hour
We’ve said enough
about the sky. The problem
with dreamers is evident.

Outside The Black Tulip

Three a.m. and you’re smoking, Dear,
(and so am I). One shared-cigar
and music--something extravagant
romantic, pours from a bag lady's
mouth as her handcart jumps fish-silver
at the sidewalk's buckled vertebrae
where the Chinese New Year tunneling
underground marches the dragon's collaborative
concrete spine to the end of the block.
Outside The Black Tulip we collect
our affections like rainwater
and then hold the canteen
of each other for the certain thirst.
We treat our love like our houseplants,
making them wait so long,
they slouch toward the sink
before we finally give in
and hand them a drink.

Inside the black tulip:
night-lit, visceral, every color of hurt,
of scabs, the dried injury’s memory
of what it meant to tear open,
a space like that within praying hands.
Inside the black tulip, a small room
where a tiny family might gather
around the dollhouse television
as if it were a fire. The president
might present the queen with an i-pod
and we’d think it surreal only here,
where the black tulip chimes
the hour of Plato’s worst fears,
to name a thing is to make it possible,
to make it possible invites the lie.
Outside The Black Tulip, our breath
braids tequila and rum, and someone
tells someone of how today the queen
was given an i-pod by the president
and for a minute, in another realm, Plato
and Einstein raise their glass across
the mushroom clouds of paradise
as an imaginary family inside an imaginary
flower, grown in an imaginary (impossible)
shade of night, points their imaginary
remote control at their tiny screen
and shuts our whole world down.

Black Tulip Hour

When time and thyme--equally concrete
or abstract might flavor or exact
the same rhyme from life to recipe
The nun’s warning :the sin thought
the deed wrought and you,
you were such a beautiful poem
before I wrote you,such a gorgeous dress
hanging in the closet where some nights
I dream fantastic fabric, bicycling birds,
seahorse florals even that tulip: midnight
satin, not the maroon lanterning
off the queen of the night varietal
but Dumas-dark and holding

Tomorrow Marks the First Day of National Poetry Month

And L-Bo and I are writing a poem a day, in honor. No matter how failed, how broken, how stinky, how sad, I will post here. I warn you now so that you can look away, look away or like miner's canaries fly through and see how toxic the fumes get. On the best days, we might all emerge singing. Or, you'll get good-jealous and join us?
To yellow feathers and flights of verse.

Dance Me to the End of Love, MD

Slow Dance
More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about
how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained

Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like

children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
slinks toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

Matthew Dickman (From All American Poem)

I was in tears after reading it. Thank you Lovely Beary-Boy for drawing my attention to it.

The Girl from Ipanema

's got nothing on the boy from Medina. (on "favoriting" onehundredtwentynine days ago and being unable to find the unfavorite button)

Standing on the corner of Sixth & How to Forget

Italy, October

To be here is to be where fruit you have never seen before grows on equally strange trees. The fruit is not, as you first thought, oranges, though it is orange in color. Nor is it a tangerine or some strangely colored apple. Then you see it in the market, each soft fruit cradled in its own nest of woven plastic. Cachi, the sign reads, 200 lire. You hold out a palm of silver, and let the cashier pick warm coins from your waiting hand. Then she wraps your cachi in white paper like a present, which you carry to your hotel, hoping cachi can be safely eaten raw.

In your room, you slice it open, lift the cachi to your lips and find it sweeter than any fruit you've ever tasted, half watermelon, half pressed roses. Only when you've finished, do you think to look up cachi in your pocket Italian dictionary which says it means persimmon. And you remember as a child picking a persimmon at a friend's house, then leaving it all afternoon in your mother's stand-up freezer. Still, when you bit the unripe fruit, your mouth drew up in a pucker from which you—silent person that you are—never did recover. Until today in Sacile when you took a bite of strange fruit.


Now, who knows? You may speak in tongues.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Depleted Evening

I am almost counting hours until morning and until I can make something of Saturday since Friday I have so-failed. I tried. I did. I went through some clothes. I went thrifting--not great finds save for one fabulous bathrobe from China--that red (L-Bo!) and embroidered on the back. A phonecall that sort of saddened me and then a coffee meeting where I didn't even try to make it fun. I had won tickets to a concert in Nelsonville and should have gone. But I had plans and didn't want to go solo (though I really like that most of the time) but for some reason today, didn't. And this Ashleigh Flynn sounded so great on the radio. And I was Caller Number Four.

Someone posted something about vicissitudes and I thought of them in Annie-light. Every month taking in the scenery and spinning it like the wheel in the middle of the boardgame. What comes up is vicissitude month after month and how many vicissitudes do you count away, before like the twelve beastly increments of the zodiac, you're back at Pisces with its fish swimming both towards and away from themselves, one another, their bodies the hissing s of snakes, their destination always you, always me, always the same, never arriving. Therein lies the difficulty in perpetual vicissituding: how to measure, where you've come from, where you've been and degrees of change in Bettermentberg. I could go for a butter mint, just know. A belief system both creamy-rich and fresh on the tongue. A love affair thrown just in time and landing in sea of ruffles and petticoat-excess. A pinafore of old-time valentines. I'm not even sure what I'm asking for.

:-(

Found this out first thing this morning while researching Sylvia for a poem.
And then there was one. Saddest news for Frieda. It must feel as if it never stops happening somehow.

I am going out into the cold sunshine and bringing back a sweet coffee for my spring cleaning extravaganza. Today's basil to be planted in Nicholas' honor.

The Beauty in Walking Away

Thursday night, L-Bo, Filo and I went to see our beloved Koogle perform some of his own songs. It was a lovely night and the strange reverberations of seeing someone you once kind of really, really like-liked do something that makes you feel so proud of him and also so protective when now you are a standard audience member with no rights to invest was kind of sad for a minute but then kind of cool. My good fortune at finding the most wonderful, special, rare and talented people always amazes me. I was just telling my favorite bear that today--regarding Veace and her way with words. L-Bo, Filo, Locksmith: all wonders to me and such friends. And my good, pretty, kind bird, I couldn't hope that a big brother would be better to me.
So Koogle hurts a little to see, and sends the air to electric-storm-settings and disturbs, disrupts, (bewitches, bothers, bewilders) but too, through battle after battle and much awkwardness, I can call him friend and he wrote those bright, beautiful songs and he was so all-grown-up up there and it was pretty great and makes me pretty proud of him, of me.

My Sweet Old ee.c

Looking through all my exams notes and the little notebook of quotes I kept just for me and came across all of these. So much of that time was hard to digest, a million books to read, my memory a selective, random, associative thing. Exams, (as dear Abraham once described certain aesthetics)require coming at the wind with hammer and nails. Still, finding this quartered bit of paper and the quotes reminded me how much I still love these words I've married.

why-colored worlds of because


since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you.

tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us
(if they do, we'll move
away still further: into now)

you shall above all things
be glad and young
for if you're young whatever life you wear
it will become you; and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become

how much more than enough for both of us
darling, and if I sing you are my voice

beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss
or sold the reason, they undream a dream)

(formybff) I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
then teach 10,000 stars how not to dance

nobody, not even the rain,
has such small hands

Today's Creed

I spend my time and try not to just kill minutes off with a big rock and the dead-eyed, broth-eating, "beige hallways," if I can help it.
They find their way in and they, (for no other life-force to them, and flimsy-souled as they otherwise are) can be persistant and tenacious when they want to apprehend the crayon-box toting, world-reading, soulful souls who are just trying to make a day of each day. We must be as vigilant as we are vibrant. They outnumber us by millions.

For this reason I have twice-Coralined. For this reason, I am going to Jacksonville to run near the water, to the Great Gatsby ballet, to Ireland, to Florida to see that first photo of a little someone for whom I must post the following advice: Eye your time, measure it out in coffee spoons but brew it strong and hearty and serve it to the few-few who deserve it. Make it hot, fair-trade and from good beans, the finest roast. Spend here if you must, they're your days, after all, Little Daisy. And most of all, be vigilant as you are vibrant.

“The female seer will burn upon this pyre”

Sylvia Plath is setting my hair
on rollers made from orange-juice cans.
The hairdo is shaped like a pyre.


My locks are improbably long.
A pyramid of lemons somehow
balances on the rickety table


where we sit, in the rented kitchen
which smells of singed naps and bergamot.
Sylvia Plath is surprisingly adept


at rolling my unruly hair.
She knows to pull it tight.Few words.
Her flat, American belly,


her breasts in a twin sweater set,
stack of typed poems on her desk,
envelopes stamped to go by the door,


a freshly baked poppyseed cake,
kitchen safety matches, black-eyed Susans
in a cobalt jelly jar. She speaks a word,


“immolate,” then a single sentence
of prophecy. The hairdo done,
the nursery tidy, the floor swept clean


of burnt hair and bumblebee husks.


“The female seer will burn upon this pyre” Copyright �© 2001 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted from Antebellum Dream Book, with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

I have forgiven Ms. Alexander for the inauguration. It isn't her fault that my Barack likes her best. Besides, after E. Arnold's the poem on Poetry and all the Elizabeth-poetry-chicks' general sensibilities, I feel like my admiration must outweigh my envy. It wouldn't be the first time that my digressive, associative way of connecting disparate entities damned or absolved the whole lot.

All the streetlights in the city of Me

This morning your mother told me a secret over decaf and too many miles. From 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday morning, Eastern time, you are conceived anew--like a character in a long, long novel--in my story. There is word of you, Little One, all over the country.
I told her how I tried giving up caffeine for few weeks and then I returned and all of the lamps on the avenue of Me re-lit and the little citizens: fedoraed, sundressed, strolling by with stylish dogs and carriages began to move again.
--from Season of White Flies & Diary of a New Sparkle in the Night Sky of Us


The streets were so bodied last night. So sculpted and dense. The very air was shaking with hormones and be in the first weekend of something like spring, the heat of the muscular flesh moving with an awareness of the body, the human form as art and appetite, it's hard to say, but the streets were fairly shivering with desire. It was yummy. The lines to Jeni's out to the street and wrapping the sidewalk as the tongue imagined the strange songs of cherry lambic or olive oil sea salt pepita ice cream rolling tart, bitter, salty meeting sweet and finally butterfat creamy against it.

Loss Dog

My favorite typo of the week and already part of a story where such a hound was needed to wander the streets of sorrow, the aging neighborhoods where the pies baked are the pies of nostalgia and the berries are never the right vintage, too modern in their flavor, geometric on the tongue with the hum and buzz of excess where should be the sound of the screen door, the dazed days of boys on bicycles and the warm palms of his mother falling paradoxically cool on his febrile brow.

Such a neighborhood needs the loss dogs wandering its evening sidewalk, while the boys that ran with them, call for them at dusk and one night, they'll return to them, tags ringing on their collars and the thunk of their tails against the night air clearing a space for summer.

Or this student explaining her missed alarm clock and how the sound finds its way into the dream

I dream about a boat and the alarm is the bell.

I am really, strangely tired today but happy. A good phonecall as I was about to walk out the door to tell me "open the door, have you been out in it yet? it's amazing!" And it is and tonight I will not be able to get that pop song line out of my head with the warm wind blowing the stars around and I do, I really do, want to see you tonight.

Lest I Forget

Here is just the kind of poem I'd share with you were you here.

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
by Kevin C. Powers

I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.

I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.

I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,
that war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.
---
Game Night
by Conor O'Callaghan


Love not
being in the loop.


Grant the spruces’ wish,
the golf compound
graying out of use,
suvs in the it lot,
power outage,
a chorus from the quad.


Bless the elsewhere
where others are
not here or you.


And rain
after midnight . . .
Ask yourself,
is that rain or bells?
---

I began two new of my own. One for Audrey, maybe Cynthia. One for a girl named Emily. And soon, the one about Song of the Lark. With a face of rapt listening...

I am fighting the wooly-horribles today. Sleep. More motion. More poetry, Poetry, prose.

Let the moment be where Annie finds herself, not because she's lost but because she's been looking and when Aram calls because she was meeting with her boss and he remembers not one but both meetings and worries that she's weary and she is, Annie tells herself that it isn't only love that looks like this but some days when there's not a cupcake on the horizon, no good song, no time to read the body of books that she sleeps beside each night, she thinks it really is. Let the moment be Liza on the line talking about lost boys as dead horses, the kind heavy when they live, heavier when they die, their bodies the stuff of breaking the barn down around them, just to hire the back-hoe and dig a grave, larger than most of the places where she has lived. There is no quiet way for a lost boy to leave you, Liza says as she laments her own, the one who forgets to brush his teeth and won't floss for anything, the one who drinks himself to sleep most nights and dreams through the alarm because he didn't protect his ears against the years of truck-tinkerings so loud they blew out whole octaves and now it's hard to call him indoors when night is falling and dinner is still warm. They are tired, Liza and Anastasia, though Liza has made a home with her man and Annie some nights feels like a single dandelion seed pirouetting ever-away from the pod, and so portable it's as if the flight was what she was made for.

Advance Requiem for a Lovely Couple

So Beauty's gone under the knife again,
For a chin lift and an alabaster brow;
And Truth, who can't stop confessing
Everything to everyone, has taken another
Name in the witness protection program.

Who would recognize them now, Anonymous
And his soulmate? Maybe, with her new look,
She'd like a new name, too, something tan enough
For a swimsuit, like Melanie, or as pale as
Blanche, all parasols and moonlit lace.

Cramped in their dim suburban home, afraid
To stroll around the neighborhood, Alias goes only
Deeper into himself, where his thoughts line up
Like retired folk at a buffet diner, as if it's
All You Need to Know Night in the brain.

It's a cold and lonely life, quiet to the end,
When the organ pipes will play low hymns
No one but churchmice and poets can hear,
As soft as two palmfuls of ash poured inside
A small urn, old and Greek and overwrought.

Elton Glaser

May the Moment Be

better than the memory" my wise new friend tells me. I like it and like that I am just now, precisely where I need to be.

The new schedule of less phone time more discipline is working well so far. Today is a lovely color and I'm about to dive into it. More soon

BRAT
I am all about heavenly cavorting
Here on silly earth.
And I misbehave around death.
And I tug on trouble's braids.
But tonight I am going to pretend
I know the people who love me.
Jeni Olen

Tonight I am going to pretend to know that the new love is respect and that what isn't mine won't be and that there is a bunch of gift wrap around things like that.
I had good Vietnamese food tonight. I walked on old streets in the new cold which is less-so than the old. I went for a drive last night and someone's presence was so present in the car with me I thought he must be thinking me too. But I'm rarely right about who pines and how much and I am again, okay with that.

A friend said yesterday that I was without strategy and that made me glad. I have made a list of goals that have little to do with anyone but me. They are good things and I need more energy. There have been many funerals in the lives of people I love lately and what they all seem to spit back from their bed-shaped holes in the dirt is something about knowing what matters, random beauty and the open eyes to get it, the infinite, unrepeating sky, spices, black cats, good music and the kind of hands that hold on and well.

Starry Starry Night

Tonight we study more Van Gogh letters and the work that he inspires. I recall seeing his paintings live and being unable to believe that they were what they were ie: real Van Goghs and not dorm posters or boxer shorts of starry night.

His colors, the shagginess of the paint, sigh... I am so tired still. I can't wait to go home and make some great veggies, eat spring mix salad and sleep. I am reading a borrowed book and oddly-distracted by far-away persons and the way they cast long shadows that are not unwelcome, unrefreshing.

Today's offering is from my new find:

Patrick Lawler

Freud with a Picture of Teiresias Finds Dora with a Picture of Cassandra

When I wake, glass is all around me.
Millefiori glass. Venetian glass. Glass
with thin vein-like cracks. Glass like
the breath of an anorexic.
Glass like the brains
of deep-sea fish. Glass like language.
Glass like belief. Glass filling the room.


Glass like echoes. Glass like the language
of aboriginal people. Glass from the mothering
caves of memory. Glass like swollen objects
that have been misplaced in dreams:
Birthmarks and terrariums.

Glass like the uterus of a saint. Glass


like the sewn language of memory. Glass ready
to break into a mosaic. Glass like a body of someone
touched. Glass like an indelible language.


Glass like the memory the body has
of places that have been touched.


Glass filled with twisted light. Glass so fragile
it breaks when I think. Glass that cuts into flesh.
Glass that grows more dangerous
with every step. Glass that sees everything
with its shattered eyes. Glass like a fantastic
plant with fruit that will make us transparent.

I was always one of those women that hung out too long at the counter with the other women in vintage clothing shops like the one in Baltimore where we gathered around Lucinda Williams as if she were a patron saint. And then Sam happened. Sam, who fit into that world and made larger it and brought his own globe over and we made a life of it all. A messy, tangle of life with plastic beads in his thirties, my late-fifties greens. His restrained deco decor and silk ties in colors that claimed the spice rack. Everything richer after Sam and that sense, that Peter Pan girl-feeling I had of being ever-single and moving in some circle of people that were, too, it evaporated so organically, so gently with Sam that I find myself stunned that there was a time I lived with...cufflinks and his big floppy clown-foot gym shoes and that there was a time after that, when I boxed his things reverently, breathed in his scent as if my lungs could keep him that way, and put our life away in storage. I didn't explicitly tell myself that he would be back and we would go to the desolate always-same rows of storage units and we would turn the key and our objects and his things wedded together behind some door with numbers on it would be waiting and we might then, right here, pull up a chair and resume. But I didn't and I know this, really tell myself that it would be impossible to store him and therefore us, for a better, later time. I lived with cufflinks, I thought, the way someone else might mutter the winning numbers of the lottery ticket that took them from destitute to beachfront property. Once upon a time, there were cufflinks on my dressing table.

Periwinkle Blue & Silver Shoes

A clean bedroom with my beautiful comforter (thank you, The Good Bird,) and my lovely duvet. A bit of blue sky and Florida up ahead, beyond that, Chicago and a big dose of people that I love. I have this real hold on things right now and I am loving that feeling.

I read a poem today that reminded me what it is about marriage that I will someday want in my life again.

Cleaning Out Zaide's Apartment
by Yehoshua November
— for my grandparents

His scent still lingered in the black heat
of his darkroom, where he spent decades
developing his meticulous world
of insects and flowers.
Boxes of slides
lay piled on top of one another.
Holding one to the lamplight,
I entered a different universe,
where moths silently cling to the stems
of roses.

In the bedroom
we found tie clips in the shape of airplanes
and then the slender, fragile model planes
he had built from scratch and hand-painted
bright blue with yellow emblems on the wings.

And in every drawer,
countless notes she had written to him.
He must have saved them all,
each one wedding the mundane to a private world
only the lovers themselves could know:
Hard-boiled eggs on the stove. I believe in you.

Enough of the Parade Already

It's snowing floats and marching bands here. Sorry Streisand, but there it is.

The weather wore on me a little. If I were a sweater, I'd have pilled some. Then I was walking back from Metro and I heard a voice call out my name. I looked up to see one of my adorable new students who is connected to one of my adorable previous students running across the street, coatless, black hair flying, to ask me to go up to the second floor and see the mural they were painting. How could I not? I went up and it was a tangle of color, styles, and yet, harmonious. A kind of wacky symphony of figures and these delicate trees and the turquoise and au lait restraint of the keen eye that drew me in my other student's writing (you recall the one, Locksmith?) I wandered over almost hypnotized, having no idea whose work it was just that it was beautiful and the student who first brought me in to see the piece said "that is J's" and I thought, "of course."

Another new and bright student was working on it, too and I felt that old continuity and good fortune that I did when I worked with generations of students in Alabama and Cincinnati. What I couldn't find in myself in either motivation or endorphins or even just plain old energy my students like strange angels flew down and injected into my day.

The ride home was absolutely terrifying. I am curled up under my comforter with a good new novel and tummy full of kale, broccoli, go-lean "ground beef" garlic and cheese pizza. I am reading an amazing novel written by a poet (big shock that it's amazing!) I am dreaming of spring in northern Ohio and all of my fun little holidays.

If Someone Takes A Spill

Who told you you're allowed to rain on my parade
I'll march my band out, I'll beat my drum
And if I'm fanned out, your turn at bat, sir


Life remains lovely. New shoes (thanks Kathy!) Momentum remains and today is the day that brought us the hilarious Keith Rehm. Happy Birthday He-Whom-I-Will-Not-Likely-See-Again but whose memory of friendship makes me smile even on this sunny day in January when I forgot the date but a U2 song came on the radio and I thought of driving through Utah, driving through my youth, of chess and jalopies, of all-night talks, of the kind of friends I have today and how lucky I am to always find the most special, good-weird people to keep me company in my travels.

Happy. Happy. Happy.

Don't Tell Me Not to Fly

I simply gotta... And I simply booked my flights up through March, anyway.

Best day, Babes. The S.O.P.T. continues gorgeously and I feel really great. My new sexy vitamins are making me feel like Zeus and the trips to Florida and Chicago are making the future look fun. I booked everything and cannot wait to see my family and hang out with my people at the conference. Chicago is one of my favorite cities and to be there on days that might otherwise be February-fraught is a good plan.

Veace has both posted and written poems today that have sent the proverbial head-top sky-wise. And on this very eve, this seems even more my year. Our new president is a thing of great pride to me. I am adance inside.

"Don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter

Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade"

I am in Streisand's debt. She kicked in just when the whole perpetual training thing looked like a bad idea and walking to Jeni's ice cream and trying all of the flavors sounded better. Then elation--that feeling and the fact that this song was a good portion of the soundtrack to my childhood. My mother loves Streisand, owns all of her movies, plays them again and again. I have been able to block The Prince of Tides and have real affection for the Funny Chick series, even The Way We Were with its so-young Redford and a political fervor in the streets that made me wish L-Bo and I had old-hatted up, little lady gloves and hit the streets to campaign for OUR NEW PRESIDENT! Three more days. I am finding some bar inaugural thing. Even as L-Bo abandons and Bostons out. Join me? Because it is one of the truly right things to happen this year and with luck and no tiny miracles, more will follow. Until the song runs out...

Fridays are for Neruda

This poem is twice-stolen. First from Pablo-himself who wouldn't mind, I know and second from the wonderful blog of a former student and brilliant poetessa. She promises us more of her writing soon and she knows her way around Spanish and Spanish poetry. And maybe she will be at AWP this year? If so, she will certainly track me down?

For now the sonnet I am reminded of and love all the more today when Friday is frozen solid.

Soneto XVII

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.



Sonnet 17

I do not love you as if you were a salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you so straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this; where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

This is My Carnival Ride for the Rest of My Life

Savoring these last few days before school kicks in and with it, the sense that I am chasing myself up the block but I'm always too fast for me.

Made a nice dinner and am about to draw a lovely bath. Life is not ungood right now. It's odd the people that maintain an interest in you and those who forget you utterly. I'm always amazed at what I move and what I made no impression upon whatsoever. Is it in inverse proportion to effort? Sometimes it seems that way. But I have a lot in my life right now. People. Possibilities. The new way of living which is holding strong as am I and that feels really certain. I keep thinking of that annoying arguement I had once with a man who was trying to scare me into dating him by saying that "soon the bus will take off without you" and how incensed I became that he couldn't see that I had held out this long for something extraordinary and had no regrets about almost anyone. One regrettable poet is as close to the regrets heap as I might get but since I burned all those, let's think of him as ash and be happy for that. The bus seems more full and full of good things than ever and my attitude is more solidly that thing people call happy and take for granted than it's ever been. Depression is like a couch you are forced to lug around through your days. It makes everything seem too hard and not worth it and worse,it's invisible so people don't understand how hard it is to just care enough to bother. But if the bus belongs to me, I keep it in working order and I post the marquees of destination and really, things have only been getting more plentiful and again, happy. And for my friends, you who endured 2004 with me, it seems nearly miraculous to say so. So much is going so right that with a little more effort and maybe some real luck on our new president's side and some patience on ours for it is nothing short of magic needed to get the country looking better, I will run on into this coming May happier and better than ever. I eschew the naysayers and those dumb, boring people that always talk about their age. One of the most gorgeous, vibrant and exciting people I met last year is nearly fifty and not only never discusses "getting older" or losing vision or any of that, but is pretty pleased as punch with himself to be his very self and I get, in every way, why.

Sledding Weather

I walked downtown, back and past the park on my way to buy groceries for a pizza that I will want to eat every single night. Broccoli, cauliflower, capers, pizza sauce, oregano, roasted garlic, sundried tomatoes, baby bella cheese, all baked on this thin wrap on pizza tin drizzled with olive oil, small minced roasted garlic, salt and pepper. So good!

Anyway, but the walk past the park meant there were families pulling babies on sleds and families sledding down the hill at the park and so much soft snow falling it was like a scene from some holiday movie. When I left the market it was twilight(because I am more the dreamy-love-to-be-in-the-store vs. the efficient shopper). It was so white before that all the white was now reflecting bluish-purple. A fantasia.

One day, I must write about the swinger-dental office of yesterday. It's bedtime now--well beyond. And tomorrow brings more snow and more walking out into it.

Tonight has been very sweet overall.

To Wellness, to Snowflakes the Size of Tutus for Hippos, to White Chocolate Peppermint Coffee

It's a test this day. So far, I've failed but I aim to rise up and try again.
If I stay here it's all decadent coffee and Suzanne Vega but I am not supposed to stay here. The new life plan says I must venture out, snowshoe if need be, a mile to and from and between. But the snowflakes were like seasoning earlier and now they are kleenex for giants, plain white t-shirts for Apollo and his crew, nightdresses for the very-pregnant flying by the window and corkscrewing around one another. A terrible, freezing squaredance of stayindoorsstayindoors...

I must muster up. No Vega, no coffee and yet....

O the Pep Talks You'll Give

to yourself just to not-do, not-go, stay-put, allow.

I did all the day's drudgery and tonight, I deny myself a treat because, the inner-mommy in me says "it's for the best tonight." Another night, another bit of Seussian/Mother advice. All dentisted-up. Room upstairs a multi-purpose indulgence of a place. Tonight's dinner, a vegetarian fantasy of stir-fry. My favorite take-off on the garbage plate with those wonderful f/st/eak strips from M.S. farms. Love them. Egg beaters, laughing cow cheese, brocolli, spinach, wonderful salsa, olive oil and some diced onion. I feel the vitamins fueling up the tired and weary me.

More later, perhaps.

Winding Down

& every day a list. Yesterday at N. Mart, I tried this whitechocolatepeppermint flavored coffee and think that it and Chocolate Velvet will be what gets me through winter. Dental appt. today, heaps of snow and a morning plan to walk to Metro and activate myself to leave what little warmth the apartment provides and head out into the chill.

Tried to update the I-tunes so as to add more Uncle T., and look around for something new to make a mix out of. Something that doesn't mope and helps me to move about in the white city with the grey sky I call home now. It will be April someday. It will be May.

Vividest early morning dreams, so strange and upon waking it is no wonder I craved some Sylvia. Her stark voice reminds me that even as the insides fight it, the seasons change and what likely won't console, re-writes. If my pen could marry a hurt like that! Her petals are half babyskin, half razor--trustworthy cries, hers. I am taking my injured self out into the poppyless landscape, with a gift-free, unasked for dreary-pants of sky. It's hard to imagine sunlight on such a day. I need good music, more coffee, and lots of work done by evening. I need to imagine my good friends reading this somewhere warm and good for them. Happy Monday, Crew.

Poppies in October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly --

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

---------

Poppies in July
Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! -------------
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

If Not for Veace, Where Would I Be?

Or really, any of us, or beyond that, the English language. Some day check out the poems we wrote for one another that take place in Cincinnati and on a subway platform in NY where V waited down the stairs as I farewelled a saxophonist (because I sound so hip if I say it that way--not really--but it's either this post or more about soup or my apartment or I resort to the cats) and I met her late, late, and we waited--had had enough to drink to sit down on that disgusting concrete and watch rats zoom in and around the tracks and Veace wrote a gorgeous telling of the night and held it like living butterfly landed on a book and minus the pins and death. (We keep those in our collective soul: me and V, some straight pins in a cloth tomato and a death-thread, plus those little tin coin threaders with the lady-profile and some of those crane old-fashioned scissors for the snipping that sentimental versey-chicks are prone to).


DOCTORS WARN AMY WINEHOUSE OF FUTURE EMPHYSEMA RISK
Each doctor performs
the same dance,
moves across my lungs
and makes me hum

the lyrics. Let me
explain. The body
heals itself, but lately
it's grown bored.

Even now, the throat
can't be coaxed:
each breath assumes
a voice, every

swallow a sentence
to smoke. You see,
the world expects
a circus before a cure.

Kerri French


A random product endorsement for that crazily-seductive vanilla plum lotion made in Greece. I don't trust myself with myself when I use it. It's like no lotion or oil I've ever smelled before and the little pot of lipgloss to match it is that smell plus a plum-color and if I could kiss me in it, I am afraid to say that I might. I told Teenee (the sister) that it was so beloved a present (plus the pop-up lighthouse book!) but I thought of other people who didn't maybe know what impact they had and I know that there are many as I tell the wrong people (the ones who don't care to know) again and again what they mean/have meant to me but did I ever tell Laurel from Cincy that a few those c.ds she used to review for the indie-newspaper and that she left in the grad. office for our perusal found home with me? And does a band called Olive Trees or Bryan Hurst and the Lollygaggers or Mark Erelli and his Memorial Hall Recordings know that they were packed and transported from Kentucky to Cincinnati to Columbus, Ohio and tonight, stopped dead-cold in its tracks, some woman is listening to them years after they were sent out with that tiny glimmer of hope that all art goes out with, that someone would? To the lot of you--you mattered to a stranger that didn't have to care. And to Laurel with the great voice and beautiful mouth: thank you, too.

"It was the first night she felt on-the-mend from so much of the horror house that Cincy had been up until then. Then it was the light-of-well-being on the bricks and she wouldn't even know about last year when Vincent's elbowed-grace would move her like a thing that is going to shake you to the basement of yourself, but you won't know that yet.
'You weren't that into him,' Aram said as they walked down to the coffeeshop and Annie held her tongue and then stopped.
'I watched him from the window, he was wearing this odd-forest green and it made his eyes so warm. I was trusting him--against the rules for this sort of thing--but he had gone out to my car and was checking the tires, the windshield wipers. I watched from around the corner of his front door. As he turned to walk back, I ran back towards the kitchen before he could catch me watching. But not before I caught the look on his face--something as deep as concern to it, something that made me feel too much. He made me a stack of cds for the journey home. I kept them separate from everything--didn't want them lost in the shuffle. No, it wasn't that, it was that I wanted to keep everything from him, separate, savor it when he couldn't see.'
'A, it was just fun, light. You've got to get that.'
'You don't ever know, you know? Like the night I made him dinner with all those frozen vegetables. It was my quick casserole, the one I make with fresh vegetables about once a month. Later he made fun of the frozen ones and I never told him that I chose the frozen because my time with him felt so little, so precious that I didn't want to waste it cutting vegetables. I wonder now if it Sam's death made everything feel so frightening and fragile. Or if it was all Vincent and if I was starting to...'
She looked over and Aram was fiddling with his cell phone and Annie realized she must have looked as near-tears as she felt.
'Don't bring me down.....' she sang out brightly and then simultaneously, they shouted: "BRUCE!' in that high-pitched voice that they scream-sang out in the car and A could visibly see the relief in Aram's shoulders as they sighed-down into the ease that such an emotionally-loaded moment had passed-over like a storm."

Unacceptable Sky

It's wearing on me a little. It's the color of dinginess. An unbleached sheet, overwashed or just unclean. I need some sunlight. Maybe this is what made that Texas inmate pop out his eyeball and eat it. Such weather. Yes, that was very insensitive of me but all my muscles ache and it's cold, even with the help of the pscychedelic Amish volcano holding its breath of a space heater and "fireplace" that my parent sent. It's oddly groovy but I don't think it intends its grooviness. Which begs the question of painting it into awareness. If it were say some funky green, a blue breathing purplish, maybe then it would take credit for its opium-den possibilities.

Emmylou Harris tells me that she's "drunk all I could swallow, now the moon's gotta follow me home" and this is the kind of winter's night that highfives Ms. Emmylou and feels her moonlight inebriation to the marrow of its shaking bones. Soon, I hot bubblebath with all of my lovely lavender and white tea goodies from World Market that I was given as a present. Even a candle. And some overpriced "Gypsy" tea because I have been a very productive thing today, in spite of today's attempt to trip me.

"Some nights are umbilical corded to memory and A keeps the scissors nearby for the numerous snippings, and she walks to the laundry room with her darks neatly divided out because it's January and Monday will make her reach for her funereal garb. Today was so drab that any color--her fabulous hottest pink scarf, the emerald she wears to remind her about May and all that might have been, blared against the day like television turned on too loudly. Better to give in, the grays and navies, the black sweater, the espresso-dark skirt, nothing so flashy as deep plum until the light again suggests a world where flora is possible."

To You Whoever You Are

but that isn't what began the night, it was actually Dido's White Flag that shuffled in just as I was thinking something like there will be no white flag upon my door etc. etc. and so on...

Benjamin Button was the film of the night and it was charming in ways but also self-indulgent to the degree that L-Bo likened it to Forrest Gump and I to The Notebook, consider that span with a dash of How to Make an Am. Quilt besides. I am not sure of Katrina's function in the movie except as one more thing large and hard for it to hold. But the littles of the film, its little loves--like for buttons or tattooes and hummingbirds or swimming the English channel or just love, just how in love the film was with love was a lot and pretty winning. It's just so easy with Fitzgerald to take his lyricism and make of it something nearly precious because he loved the lovely and broken so well and so often and his prose could be bent to the sentimental in a way that it's harder to do with his earnest buddy, Ernest.

Travel Safely Chicky! So good to see you!

And L-Bo and Filo. It's bittersweet recalling how easy it was to have an afternoon like this one, walking down to lunch at Betty's (YUM!) and talking about poets and jobs and just life, but we're all elsewhere from where we met and it's likely we'll never live near one another again. But that urgency, that need to keep people close and remind them that any minute could change our proximity has only ever made me frantic and them less-responsive. This loose grip is better. I am fine here and it is SO nice to have an apartment of which I am proud and don't hide away from people. I hung sheers up in the study and the light through them is clean and serene. That fresh early morning light.

I have a couple of tasks before evening and then (a wonder!) another L-Bo event. We are cinema-ing, although what we're seeing is to be decided.
Today's poem goes out to Kathy--the dearest friend I'll ever have.

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere.And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted.Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate!How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry.I could warn her.There is still a chance.
The rain is cold.The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world.But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it.As I have.
She will wake up.She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips.I will say nothing.

Eavan Boland

Cold to the Bone

but I have been out in it and I met today's goals. Go me!

I know what I want. Clear-eyed and clear-headed in a way that it's been so long since I have been. I detest the wishy-washy and even if I sound a little...cauterized I think that I am really onto something here.

You are all so far away and I miss walks and Liberty Park and writing group and my family, my sisters by blood and choice but I feel like I'm in a kind of retreat. Every day is full and also, really wide-open and filled with solitude.

Neither the Dreary Dress of Yesterday

nor the Endorphins-as-Sequins Gown of two days ago. Woke up feeling solid, motivated a little somber which I am deciding will read as patient-as-a-planner-with-a-day planner. I am working out the schedule so that I can maintain everything even as four classes dance on my head for a few months. But there is Florida, then Chicago, then Montevallo Literary Fest. then Wick's Twenty-Fifth, then Italy, Greece and who knows. My girl trip with the Trionited Girls--White Sands, NM where I might find a way to cross Angelina River at last. If it doesn't work for that trip, I will make a way for it to. That river does not go uncrossed for one more year.
Because, that Weir-passage was memorized all those years ago by a new-to-college, new-to-so-much me and it resonated and it has been my biggest challenge to drive on and away. All the running-away-girl stories I've written. The end of every story involving always-escape. My obsession with the Roms--traveling lightly in every way. All of it says Girl, let go, freefall, there's always a somewhere after this somewhere. And my current city has had real things to say to me, so I am here and for now, I'll see what's possible with work etc. But I will listen closely for when and if it is time to go. I don't move on well or with expediency and I am going to be better about that. Sorry for the journaling here. I spend (by choice) most of my hours solo and this is a way of catching L-Bo, Veace, Locksmith and that might actually be all that I know read me.

As a treat, I offer the following from Zapruder's soon to be graphic novel: The Pajamist. I can't not post a poem that mentions my favorite Joni-song:

Matthew Zapruder

CANADA

By Canada I have always been fascinated.
All that snow and acquiescing.
All that emptiness, all those butterflies
marshalled into an army of peace.
Moving north away from me
Canada has no border, away
like the state its northern border
withers into the skydome. In a world
full of mistrust and self-medication
I have always hated Canada.
It makes me feel like I’m shouting
at a child for letting a handful
of pine needles run through his fist.
Canada gets along with everyone
while I hang, a dark cloud
above the schoolyard. I know
we need war, all the skirmishes
to keep our borders where
we have placed them, all
the migration, all the difference.
Just like Canada the Dalai Lama
is now in Canada, and everyone
is fascinated. When they come
to visit me, no one ever leaves me
saying, the most touching thing
about him is he’s so human.
Or, I was really glad to hear
so many positive ideas regardless
of the consequences expressed.
Or I could drink a case of you.
No one has ever pedaled
every inch of thousands of roads
through me to raise awareness
for my struggle for autonomy.
I have pity but no respect for others,
which according to certain religious leaders
is not compassion, just ordinary
love based on attitudes towards myself.
I wonder how long I can endure.
In Canada the leaves are falling.
When they do each one rustles
maybe to the white tailed deer
of sadness, and it’s clear
that whole country does not exist
to make me feel crappy
like a candelabra hanging
above the prison world,
condemned to freely glow.

-Matthew Zapruder

My Daddy's Accordion

I researched the whereabouts of this gorgeous bit of memory breathing Never on Sunday again and again. It was so beautiful an instrument & the memory of his playing it & how much he wanted to get good at it, so vivid. Anyway, he still has it, has kept these many years and goes down the basement occasionally and tries to remember how to play it. He tinkers with the piano in the dining room in much the same way. If he would follow-through, I think lessons would be a great gift to get for him. Our family has this kind of awe for music and yet none of us play anything really, though we all dabbled and have spent tens of thousands of dollars on music and concert tix and the like. And my most embryonic attempt at a novel featured a girl (don't laugh, no wait what else would you do?) named, I-kid-you-not Lyric and her father, a gone-musician and her sorry patterns ever since. Each chapter was named after some version of the dark and the book was called All the Ways We Say Darkness and everyone was so deep and artsy and I was twenty-someting give me a break. But there are things worth re-incorporating, I think. The current novel is attempting to be so much more quiet and a girl named Lyric would not do, but I wonder at the accordion and why, even now, in New York, or New Orleans a busker with an accordion can strike such a chord of fascination and stabbing nostalgic grief in me all at the same time. So much that my father didn't do because he was doing for us. You can imagine what Hayden's poem does to me with its blue-black cold and austere and lonely offices.

What did I know, anyway? And what do I know now? That a body in motion etc. That too much thinking is too much. That whatever is up ahead is up ahead and maybe I do need a drastic new haircut. Revision is less interesting to me just now than a new notebook. Maybe Lyric will find herself in a novella someday and I will get rid of the smoky bars and scruffy men she makes out with just to swallow their shadows. There is so much to do tomorrow always. That's a bright thing.

Today is a heap of snow, so much I don't know how we'll ever dig our way out again. I hate snowed-in now. Last year, snowed-in was cozy and yummy and had I no job a hundred miles away, I would have liked to igloo in for a lifetime of that kind of winter.

Today just makes me feel trapped. I'll want a UDF quart of skim later and it will be a major undertaking and I will be Metro bound in the morning and that too, a monumental task. Better to blanket-up and let someone read me poems, sing me songs until I fall asleep. But that is last-year-thinking. Today is all sorts of snow and 2009 and soup to be made and a really lovely little stir-fry. I think the only vegetarian that reads my blog might be the genius-Veace, but I have a product endorsement nonethelss. Morningstar Farms "steak" strips mixed in with fresh spinach, grape tomatoes, basil and garlic and stirfried with some fine olive oil.

The world whitens outside my window...

In a State of Perpetual Training

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. A new friend floated briefly through my world and I wanted to explain myself, make excuses for certain parts of my life. "I moved recently, completed a degree, stopped being a student, am trying to learn how to live where I live, had to pay for things that used to be free when I was a student: buses, gym memberships, had to find a way to walk more, etc. etc."
But I realized that I have been drawn to persons of action recently and persons of action don't listen to or respect excuses, they respect action. I am so driven in so many ways and yet, in one of the more important aspects of my life I seem uncertain, not ready, out-of-shape so to speak. I want less "edgy" as Fellner would say and more "banal" if banality means sleeping well, taking care of things, not letting things lapse or languish. In short, living the way Mission furniture is built--no nails, no cheating it into holding. Only the precise fit and perfect measuring will make those dovetailed corners hold. It's new to me as I love the ephemeral ideas, the world of lovely cloudbustings in the figurative as well as the literal sense. I have how many completed manuscripts--more than three. How many are out of my apartment right now? One and a half. How many projects-in-progress? Too many. I think the idea of training towards a goal, the way one does for a race facilitates this but I think having the next thing in mind and in place after that thing gets accomplished keeps a person in motion. I have been feeling very charged-up since December 31st and not for that cheesy-New-Years-resolutiony-routine, but I know for certain what I want and it is the kind of life that only actions will acquire for me. How personal to say here, but if it resonates and if you read me, you'll know what I mean. Every day has been different for me since I figured this out. I wrote it down, wrote it here for when I need to remind myself.

128 Days.

Root Beer Barrels & Butterscotch

Is that robin's-egg blue?, or A Poet Answers Her Critics
—Some want a guiding principle, narrative pick-me-up.

I give them root beer barrels and butterscotchs, say "suck."

A tangent is a mathematical loveliness.

Perhaps you're familiar?

Sister What-Was-Her-Name drew the most elegant trapezoids.

Who wouldn't want to do some time?

On the blueprints, a door means figure it out; a window, just looking.

I always open every cupboard, admire a narrow linen closet.

In the 1930's an actress could live at a hotel with her small dog.

I'm longing for something beaded.

I'm thinking in the next life I might appear handmade.

Copyright © 2008 Mary Ann Samyn

One More for Nina

If anything sweetens the drudgery of writing syllabai, it has to be Nina's Just in Time. A favorite of always and that piano--my God.
Wedding playlist, for sure. Dress-check. Music-check...

Happy, Happy, Happy

Things are finally getting right around here.

Knowing No Better
In the course of one night
the ice on the lake is gone
and you've done to me what May
has done to the mountain. We set out
in the small boat, and later, on canvas,
I make its edges blur into ours.
Shadows, you say, can fool the eye
about how close a foothill may be
and yes, I see how less indigo
gives the water a less fearsome depth
and that white is white
and I won't need much. I accept
this won't be a week of animals
and that you'll tell me when I'm ready.
I agree the trees go last and if I opt
for leaves, they should be all about
the hour of dusk people thoughtlessly
pass through. I see of course that too
many changes of mind equal mud.
But pardon me, knowing no better,
I've painted too shallow a sky, even
as I've heightened our beloved mountain.

Copyright © 2008 Nance Van Winckel

132 days.

P.S. Yum.

Nearness of You

Ella singing along and when Louis comes in, the warmth in his voice and the fire-crackle make the darkening window and this stupidly-cold, so-anemic winter, glow and glow and glow. Louis Armstrong sweetens this third day of a year undone and ready for revision.

Back from Metro, off to syllabai. And the training has begun!

Make Every Kiss Count: the pulp cover of a book that points to Simone Muench's gorgeous new website.

But I misread it as Make Every Loss Count & I thought that those two combined were
a. the same thing
b. the bumper sticker for 2008
c. a + b= the new now, clutter-free and filled with possibility.

More and more happiness has been gathering.

Good Morning 2009!

Regrets burnt and yesterdays put in their place. Off to the gym (or a long walk/run) in its general direction and off to in the good words of Allan Weir
"...away from the people who had given me my past and into whatever life I could find in the dark distances ahead, listening for crickadees and loving so many things about to disappear."

Later today I am researching the Italy/Greece trip. Italians are on the mind, for some reason...

"Every time that I see your face
It's like cool, cool water running down my back
Cool, cool water running down my back"