to be curled up on this couch, on this night, computer in lap, zima tomatoes in fridge and despite the cough that I thought I had conquered but which lingers and troubles all day and for a portion of the night. So far I have a pulled muscle in my upper back from trying to avoid the headache the comes from coughing and the burning lungs. But I have a plan to go to the gym tomorrow and to force myself to do a real run and see if I can shake this gross gathering of ickyness that has invaded the isthmus of lung reflected. And while I did watch the game, and have developed a late season fandom/fondness for Aaron Rodgers and so am happy for Green Bay's win and for Mr. R's MVP award, I can't claim enough attachment to football (now basketball...) to give this post its gratitude.
Lots of things are responsible, the first is a simple appreciation for my friends and for Spoon of NY who sent a ridiculously-generous housewarming gift and somewhere up ahead, I get to buy pails of vibrant paint and zero-in on what I think will be an apricot living room, a twilight chimes bathroom, a leaf green bedroom, and a kitchen that varies depending on how much we hate the cabinets on any given-week. But really I am thankful for friends that still care for me after so many years and so many different types of lives. Spoon in New York, Bear in Denver, my dear Liz, Kathrine and Karima regathered in my hometown. Between them, the better part of my life resides.
I am really loving Shawnee Hills, too and I logged on tonight determined to do a review of a place we just found and love, so bear with me as here goes:
Cinco de Mayo Mexican Grill is my new favorite find in Powell. It is run by this very cool family and Manny, the owner, makes a wonder of a margarita called appropriatly Manny's Margarita. It has a real high kick to it and doesn't forsake a fresh tart and salty flavor. And then the shrimp diablo dish was amazing. The best shrimp dish I have ever eaten, spicy but tangy and the shrimp were large and fresh.
The decor is comprised of these colorful, carved wooden chairs with intricate scenes that made the whole room look vibrant and happy. The staff was fun and friendly and the place was filled with regulars. I have told M that it is the only place I want to go out and eat around here although I have a real fondness for Iacono's and Shanghai Lily--all places that I would never have frequented if I had stayed in my old neighborhood. Spring means we get to investigate Delaware, Ohio, which is just a little up the road from where we are now. Adventures up ahead, good, interesting food in our little town, a hope that most of the worst storms are mostly behind us, all good things for this early February.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Marshmallow Creme Coffee & Black Gladiolas
Sunday morning and M is making my favorite Sunday breakfast: Soldiers, a dish I'd never heard of before M and one that will make me always think of soft-boiled eggs and sticks of toast as his dish alone. I use Frank's hot sauce with them and it is a breakfast that generally makes me happy.
My marshmallow creme coffee tastes neither like marshmallow nor creme, but it is acceptable, if only. The window to my right (a sliding glass door that leads out to a rooftop deck area,) makes for each season practically a part of my bedroom so I wake to what felt all winter-wonderland to me in December and by now, is going a little winter-weary. But Gladys is here and adores watching the birds that I have left food for, even the starlings are still a treat for her, while I feel a bit remorseful that they have found us and in their large numbers devour every kind of food I put out for the various customers of "Cafe Zozo."
A jay just absconded with a heel of Italian bread much larger than his head and I am content, if baffled as to how to get back to the kind of routine I had in Victorian Village with long walks to school and the gym and that supergirl feeling I had of being fit and strong. And writing, more writing has to happen. This morning's paper had an article with a woman who died and whose family could not afford a funeral. People banded together and someone made her a beautiful coffin of aged poplar and blue lining. People raised money for the expenses and while I still feel a bit stung and saddened at the Ted William's fiasco, I needed good news even if it came wrapped (like one of the mysteriously-dead rainbow trout and sunfish of Salon, Ohio) in the newsprint of abject poverty, of people so poor they cannot afford to retrieve their own dead, it illustrated good will and the days seem so lacking in it.
In other news, I am planning a trip out here for my mom soon and I need to get to Florida and see that wonderchild-nephew of mine. For some strange reason, I am loving sending random Valentine's treats out. For The Bear and his lady J, I am sending Trader Joe's dark chocolate almonds with sea salt and turbinado sugar plus a beautiful cumin/caramel/toffee scarf with gold elephants embroidered on it. (Straight from Bangkok and from my bird-boy.) The Bear still feels pretty beat-up by Alex's death and while midnight-dark-chocolate almonds are no cure, they are certainly a Sartwellian-endorsed grief response.
For Penny Rose and Maya I found these necklaces made up of pennies and coral hearts. For the lovely Ms. Lyla Wren, I have sent a red tutu and heart leggings of a valentine's outfit and for Juniper, there are journals and gel pens. I love that all of these children are a part of my world if not my own than good for the borrowing as if anything isn't.
My marshmallow creme coffee tastes neither like marshmallow nor creme, but it is acceptable, if only. The window to my right (a sliding glass door that leads out to a rooftop deck area,) makes for each season practically a part of my bedroom so I wake to what felt all winter-wonderland to me in December and by now, is going a little winter-weary. But Gladys is here and adores watching the birds that I have left food for, even the starlings are still a treat for her, while I feel a bit remorseful that they have found us and in their large numbers devour every kind of food I put out for the various customers of "Cafe Zozo."
A jay just absconded with a heel of Italian bread much larger than his head and I am content, if baffled as to how to get back to the kind of routine I had in Victorian Village with long walks to school and the gym and that supergirl feeling I had of being fit and strong. And writing, more writing has to happen. This morning's paper had an article with a woman who died and whose family could not afford a funeral. People banded together and someone made her a beautiful coffin of aged poplar and blue lining. People raised money for the expenses and while I still feel a bit stung and saddened at the Ted William's fiasco, I needed good news even if it came wrapped (like one of the mysteriously-dead rainbow trout and sunfish of Salon, Ohio) in the newsprint of abject poverty, of people so poor they cannot afford to retrieve their own dead, it illustrated good will and the days seem so lacking in it.
In other news, I am planning a trip out here for my mom soon and I need to get to Florida and see that wonderchild-nephew of mine. For some strange reason, I am loving sending random Valentine's treats out. For The Bear and his lady J, I am sending Trader Joe's dark chocolate almonds with sea salt and turbinado sugar plus a beautiful cumin/caramel/toffee scarf with gold elephants embroidered on it. (Straight from Bangkok and from my bird-boy.) The Bear still feels pretty beat-up by Alex's death and while midnight-dark-chocolate almonds are no cure, they are certainly a Sartwellian-endorsed grief response.
For Penny Rose and Maya I found these necklaces made up of pennies and coral hearts. For the lovely Ms. Lyla Wren, I have sent a red tutu and heart leggings of a valentine's outfit and for Juniper, there are journals and gel pens. I love that all of these children are a part of my world if not my own than good for the borrowing as if anything isn't.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Thursday, Chickadee, Warm Room, Nuthatch, Home Safe, Robin, Trees Spun of Glass
I am baking chicken for dinner and the house is filled with the golden smell of it. Outside the trees are strangled in glimmering glass and when the sun hits the branches there is a crystalline cursive to their cries for help. They've written to the sky and the sun lights a reply but the air is still freezing and the bath of hopeful glow is deceiving.
All the words to and from Tuscaloosa are slowing-down. I have taken the story to those who didn't know and heard enough to know that what I know is what most know. Alex was a riddle in certain ways and to love and respect him meant you let him, in some respect, remain that way. You didn't ask his age and you didn't probe about his health. There was a solitude to him and he could fill a room with friends and company and keep that solitude intact.
I am home for the week, for the weekend and planning a strategy for knocking out my story and trying to feel completely well again. To my right, sliding glass doors lead to a roof with the leftover whiteout of snow and on that winter's page, there is the sanskrit of bird feet as they visit and revisit the flat of peanuts, raisins, melamakorona that I have left for them. In one day they have made short work of the offering and thinking of them in the bitter cold, I am glad for what fat I can swaddle them in. For myself, I miss my summer arms, the tone of them and the way I was consistent in my attempts to keep strong and driven. M is so great about me, so accepting and so celebratory that it is easy to lie down and rest in all that regard. But I feel noodly, all wrong for the opening of the pool in May and dreaded swimwear it implies.
In the time that I've been writing this post, the cool breeze has danced feathers of ice over the melting roof-snow and what was liquid just moments ago is plumes of ice-panes and a reminder how deep runs this cold.
Ice Storm
For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being…
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister…
I am a guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader… The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body…
It could be for beauty—
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God;
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.
Jane Kenyon
All the words to and from Tuscaloosa are slowing-down. I have taken the story to those who didn't know and heard enough to know that what I know is what most know. Alex was a riddle in certain ways and to love and respect him meant you let him, in some respect, remain that way. You didn't ask his age and you didn't probe about his health. There was a solitude to him and he could fill a room with friends and company and keep that solitude intact.
I am home for the week, for the weekend and planning a strategy for knocking out my story and trying to feel completely well again. To my right, sliding glass doors lead to a roof with the leftover whiteout of snow and on that winter's page, there is the sanskrit of bird feet as they visit and revisit the flat of peanuts, raisins, melamakorona that I have left for them. In one day they have made short work of the offering and thinking of them in the bitter cold, I am glad for what fat I can swaddle them in. For myself, I miss my summer arms, the tone of them and the way I was consistent in my attempts to keep strong and driven. M is so great about me, so accepting and so celebratory that it is easy to lie down and rest in all that regard. But I feel noodly, all wrong for the opening of the pool in May and dreaded swimwear it implies.
In the time that I've been writing this post, the cool breeze has danced feathers of ice over the melting roof-snow and what was liquid just moments ago is plumes of ice-panes and a reminder how deep runs this cold.
Ice Storm
For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens
a beautiful and precarious state of being…
Here in the suburbs of New Haven
nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs
of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics
that is practical and sinister…
I am a guest in this house.
On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and
A Nietzsche Reader… The others are still asleep.
The most painful longing comes over me.
A longing not of the body…
It could be for beauty—
I mean what Keats was panting after,
for which I love and honor him;
it could be for the promises of God;
or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more
extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.
Jane Kenyon
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Alexander Sartwell
I hate death's guts, I really do.
There is no elegy elegant enough to address the death of Alex. Some of the happiest days of my life were spent around his table, listening to his stories of old muntGUMree and the stories and dishes of Evalina. There is a gone-South that I would never know any other way and I felt honored to be in his sunny kitchen, watching light play through the cobalt vases propped in the window. I felt lucky to be invited early, help prepare the food, to laugh with him and to drive to Birmingham, to flea markets and thrift shops and with Alex in tow, for treasures to feel more treasurey. The Bear loved him dearly and he, The Bear and I felt kind of safe and caverned up in a cave of quilts when I was with them both.
Alex could tell a mean tale, write a brilliant passage and cook such food as to make you "slap your baby brother" when you took that first sensuous bite. I heard the south in all of its conflicted dialects, understood race and class from the inside. Alex made me feel less like one touring Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, as one who got it and was in certain ways, dumb yankee no more. His backyard was alive with the gorgeous collection of plants that only a professional can whip up and when we left, hearts in hands, it was the French tarragon that dear Bear dug up and planted for Alex that made the leaving behind of such a glorious plant a bit more bearable.
There is no way to say goodbye to what knowing Alex gave me, or how he made me feel transported through time to where good manners, lovely clothes and books and recipes and stories reined supreme. To have one more day in that dining room, the crazy-good chickens that were melting off their bones and swaddled in flavor, the good china, the bright silver, the candlelight and the peals and peals of laughter. With him goes a whole era, a continent or two of knowledge, a gift of gab and memory and a, for lack of a better word, bonding-force. Alex made his table and the selected guests a work of art. He built friendships like cities that interconnected and expanded both the history and resource of both. Some people are spokes, others are hubs and Alex was a super-hub for a wheel so large, that time and space are both along for the ride. I felt, and still feel, as if I knew the living-Evalina for the way she was brought back to life through Alex's telling. She, the Sayres, my beloved Zelda, Tallulah Bankhead, whole swaths of neighborhood where I had never walked and ghosts long-dead before I ever arrived, were vivid, breathing-again and before you when Alex invoked them. I hope some of us can do the same for him. I was so lucky to have known him.
You were truly one of a kind and you cannot know just how you will be missed, Dear Friend.
There is no elegy elegant enough to address the death of Alex. Some of the happiest days of my life were spent around his table, listening to his stories of old muntGUMree and the stories and dishes of Evalina. There is a gone-South that I would never know any other way and I felt honored to be in his sunny kitchen, watching light play through the cobalt vases propped in the window. I felt lucky to be invited early, help prepare the food, to laugh with him and to drive to Birmingham, to flea markets and thrift shops and with Alex in tow, for treasures to feel more treasurey. The Bear loved him dearly and he, The Bear and I felt kind of safe and caverned up in a cave of quilts when I was with them both.
Alex could tell a mean tale, write a brilliant passage and cook such food as to make you "slap your baby brother" when you took that first sensuous bite. I heard the south in all of its conflicted dialects, understood race and class from the inside. Alex made me feel less like one touring Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana, as one who got it and was in certain ways, dumb yankee no more. His backyard was alive with the gorgeous collection of plants that only a professional can whip up and when we left, hearts in hands, it was the French tarragon that dear Bear dug up and planted for Alex that made the leaving behind of such a glorious plant a bit more bearable.
There is no way to say goodbye to what knowing Alex gave me, or how he made me feel transported through time to where good manners, lovely clothes and books and recipes and stories reined supreme. To have one more day in that dining room, the crazy-good chickens that were melting off their bones and swaddled in flavor, the good china, the bright silver, the candlelight and the peals and peals of laughter. With him goes a whole era, a continent or two of knowledge, a gift of gab and memory and a, for lack of a better word, bonding-force. Alex made his table and the selected guests a work of art. He built friendships like cities that interconnected and expanded both the history and resource of both. Some people are spokes, others are hubs and Alex was a super-hub for a wheel so large, that time and space are both along for the ride. I felt, and still feel, as if I knew the living-Evalina for the way she was brought back to life through Alex's telling. She, the Sayres, my beloved Zelda, Tallulah Bankhead, whole swaths of neighborhood where I had never walked and ghosts long-dead before I ever arrived, were vivid, breathing-again and before you when Alex invoked them. I hope some of us can do the same for him. I was so lucky to have known him.
You were truly one of a kind and you cannot know just how you will be missed, Dear Friend.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Hummingbird
by Elaine Terranova
What with foresight and dancing,
gypsies would seem to pass easily
between worlds. The hummingbird too—
only a moth with a beak—
Have I ever heard it hum?
Yet it's everywhere welcome,
coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water,
for we are devious, in our desires.
And the dead, we embody them
for our own purposes. I can't talk
to a shadow, to an abstraction.
A sun worshiper, my brother,
always raising his face to it.
One touch and the body roar quieted.
Now, though I walk the length
of the park, he is not there.
He is nowhere under the sun.
I want the dead but I am with
the living. The tulips raise up their hands.
The lunch crowd swallows me.
by Elaine Terranova
What with foresight and dancing,
gypsies would seem to pass easily
between worlds. The hummingbird too—
only a moth with a beak—
Have I ever heard it hum?
Yet it's everywhere welcome,
coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water,
for we are devious, in our desires.
And the dead, we embody them
for our own purposes. I can't talk
to a shadow, to an abstraction.
A sun worshiper, my brother,
always raising his face to it.
One touch and the body roar quieted.
Now, though I walk the length
of the park, he is not there.
He is nowhere under the sun.
I want the dead but I am with
the living. The tulips raise up their hands.
The lunch crowd swallows me.
Waiting for the Ice Storm
and the aftermath of that, and my drive in to work tomorrow should be an Olympic event. Ever since the one terrible tornado and black ice incident in Alabama of all places, I live in fear of freezing rain, sleet, and automobiles. Odd that this Utah girl should be a chicken after her Alabama winter and not all of the years of blinding blizzards and snowfalls so heavy that they routinely brought down the trees that wore the enormous white parkas of them. Beautiful enshroudings, if deadly.
So I am homed-away and happy to be less sickly than the virus that made me feel all Victorian with its fevers and the coughing-up of blood. I meant to fan my hair out against the pillows and go out in a way of wretched rose petals.
I opted out of the AWP conference this year and today's weather forecast is the only thing to console me about not attending. The conference is one of those things like family that one loves and hates at various times, but that in the end, one feels more at home connected to than not. Tonight finds me listening to World Cafe and my beloved Old 97s on the radio and getting to anticipate seeing them in Cincy AND here in April. Also, Woody Pines maybe this Friday and I am hoping to talk M into the Josh Ritter show.
I am wishing I had finished my Cold, Cold... story in time for the deadline I imposed for it. I did get comments back from Kathrine for my novel pages and her comments were good and sound and make me want to get in and write. If I can get all of my classes planned out thoroughly and this little lit mag up and running, then I can justify such selfish indulgences as some writing and re-writing.
I have been assembling a kind of loose elegiac collection, very lyric and white-spaced. I think I am going to call it Pink Lady Apple, for now and see how it fits over time.
I post a bit of winter tonight to coordinate with the freezing rain that begins soon.
Deer, December
One of thirty nights I can't sleep
I awaken to motion in the last dark
out the window, tight against the hillside.
I put on my glasses to stop
the glass in the old house from wavering.
Three of them, maybe twenty feet away,
they nuzzle new snow,
leaves and twigs not yet frozen hard,
a poor diet, winter just begun.
Foraging, chewing, staring lines into space.
Their necks bolt upright only to the slight
shift in what I imagine is wind,
to things I can't hear, couldn't,
were I with them outside and not still
warm on the edge of the bed
Then a cardinal is winter
red against the even gray of 6 a.m.
—cloudy, this time of year. I'll stay watching
until I'm late for another morning meeting,
my alarm clock not gone off—that must be it.
I can't know how little I'll be missed.
Richard Terrill
So I am homed-away and happy to be less sickly than the virus that made me feel all Victorian with its fevers and the coughing-up of blood. I meant to fan my hair out against the pillows and go out in a way of wretched rose petals.
I opted out of the AWP conference this year and today's weather forecast is the only thing to console me about not attending. The conference is one of those things like family that one loves and hates at various times, but that in the end, one feels more at home connected to than not. Tonight finds me listening to World Cafe and my beloved Old 97s on the radio and getting to anticipate seeing them in Cincy AND here in April. Also, Woody Pines maybe this Friday and I am hoping to talk M into the Josh Ritter show.
I am wishing I had finished my Cold, Cold... story in time for the deadline I imposed for it. I did get comments back from Kathrine for my novel pages and her comments were good and sound and make me want to get in and write. If I can get all of my classes planned out thoroughly and this little lit mag up and running, then I can justify such selfish indulgences as some writing and re-writing.
I have been assembling a kind of loose elegiac collection, very lyric and white-spaced. I think I am going to call it Pink Lady Apple, for now and see how it fits over time.
I post a bit of winter tonight to coordinate with the freezing rain that begins soon.
Deer, December
One of thirty nights I can't sleep
I awaken to motion in the last dark
out the window, tight against the hillside.
I put on my glasses to stop
the glass in the old house from wavering.
Three of them, maybe twenty feet away,
they nuzzle new snow,
leaves and twigs not yet frozen hard,
a poor diet, winter just begun.
Foraging, chewing, staring lines into space.
Their necks bolt upright only to the slight
shift in what I imagine is wind,
to things I can't hear, couldn't,
were I with them outside and not still
warm on the edge of the bed
Then a cardinal is winter
red against the even gray of 6 a.m.
—cloudy, this time of year. I'll stay watching
until I'm late for another morning meeting,
my alarm clock not gone off—that must be it.
I can't know how little I'll be missed.
Richard Terrill
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Saturdaisy
Yesterday was a bouquet of a day, the kind that seems incongruous in its individual blossoms but gathered up, makes for a pleasing visual harmony.
Strangely, I went to my first VFW ever. There was something cozy-cavernous to it and it was lovely to be there with an older vet who was so proud to be showing a place new to me and dear to him. On the way out, a really young man helped M's mother to the car and his innocence and sense of respect meant a lot to her and reminded me of some of my students and their true sense of decency. It was a lovely way to end the Dayton portion of the day.
The night could not have been any different from the day. A dive bar out in Gahanna called Mug and Jug and a cover band that played everything from Counting Crows to ACDC. It was as you might imagine such a thing, but it was also fun in a way. Back home M played cd after cd for me and we danced in the kitchen and stayed up until three. Needless to say Sunday morning was a sleep-in and by afternoon I felt the full weight of a week spent sick followed by a day so long and so rich.
Tonight I am trying to write but the words seem difficult and I am here to try and warm-up somehow or give up and turn in.
Strangely, I went to my first VFW ever. There was something cozy-cavernous to it and it was lovely to be there with an older vet who was so proud to be showing a place new to me and dear to him. On the way out, a really young man helped M's mother to the car and his innocence and sense of respect meant a lot to her and reminded me of some of my students and their true sense of decency. It was a lovely way to end the Dayton portion of the day.
The night could not have been any different from the day. A dive bar out in Gahanna called Mug and Jug and a cover band that played everything from Counting Crows to ACDC. It was as you might imagine such a thing, but it was also fun in a way. Back home M played cd after cd for me and we danced in the kitchen and stayed up until three. Needless to say Sunday morning was a sleep-in and by afternoon I felt the full weight of a week spent sick followed by a day so long and so rich.
Tonight I am trying to write but the words seem difficult and I am here to try and warm-up somehow or give up and turn in.
Friday, January 28, 2011
One Dark Ballet
Date night tonight and after a quick stop at Crate and Barrel (for what is date night without the domestic, capitalist foray into overpriced home goods?) we went out to our favorite new New Year's Eve find of a movie theatre to see a movie (my pick). Because I have a lifelong fascination with the ballet and the bizarre lives of ballerinas, I chose, of course, Black Swan.
Portman's performance was spot-on, if relentlessly earnest, but the movie overall lacked control over its tone, with inadvertant humor and high melodrama. It might be that the years have bred an impatience in me for art and the sufferers of art or it might be that I was just put-off by the countless bloody nail scenes, but I felt like this was the type of movie I have kind of outgrown.
In any case, after a long week of what felt like walking pneumonia, I had to get out. And I do have a new cube-shaped plum colored mimic end table, all in preparation for my mommy's visit.
Where have I been remiss? Well, considering the sick week, I am still text-ahead. I have been staying away from my telephone and spending time reconnecting with writer-friends and writing goals. I am deep into a new story that is dark and exciting and I have been thinking as my novel's narrator and imagining more of her story into place well enough to have written the ending a few days ago (though only the first fifty pages and the ending are really in place, there's a whole lot of middle to write yet.) But my priorities are falling back into place, at long last and hurrah!
For Keith's birthday, I usually wax nostalgic over some undergraduate memory, usually a driving-related one. I recalled finding a slide of a meteor or some starry-thing on a gas pump late at night during one of our crazy drives and there was something mysterious and hopeful about that find. Something promising and wherever Keith is I hope that window of starlight was foreshadowing.
Tonight me and mine are awake way too late. He: trying to unravel the Botticelli website for me and me, posting I-know-not-what to I-know-less-who and it's the middle of the middle of those nights that remind me of driving closer and closer to dawn or memories so sleep-deprived that I can't exactly recall if I saw a play called Sea Marks in some venue I can only remember by impression and I am happy for the life I have.
If I Ever Mistake You For a Poem
No body was ever composed
from words, not the hipsway
of verse, the iambic beat of a heart.
Yet inside you, a sestina
of arteries, the villanelle of villi,
sonnets between your shoulder blades.
If I were more obsessive I'd follow
the alliteration of age spots across
your arms. But I have exchanged
my microscope for a stethoscope
as I want to listen inside you, past
your repetition, your free verse of skin.
How easy it is to fall for your internal
organs. Your arrhythmia is charming
hidden in the ballad of body,
your gurgling stanzas, your lyric sigh.
Kelli Russell Agodon
Portman's performance was spot-on, if relentlessly earnest, but the movie overall lacked control over its tone, with inadvertant humor and high melodrama. It might be that the years have bred an impatience in me for art and the sufferers of art or it might be that I was just put-off by the countless bloody nail scenes, but I felt like this was the type of movie I have kind of outgrown.
In any case, after a long week of what felt like walking pneumonia, I had to get out. And I do have a new cube-shaped plum colored mimic end table, all in preparation for my mommy's visit.
Where have I been remiss? Well, considering the sick week, I am still text-ahead. I have been staying away from my telephone and spending time reconnecting with writer-friends and writing goals. I am deep into a new story that is dark and exciting and I have been thinking as my novel's narrator and imagining more of her story into place well enough to have written the ending a few days ago (though only the first fifty pages and the ending are really in place, there's a whole lot of middle to write yet.) But my priorities are falling back into place, at long last and hurrah!
For Keith's birthday, I usually wax nostalgic over some undergraduate memory, usually a driving-related one. I recalled finding a slide of a meteor or some starry-thing on a gas pump late at night during one of our crazy drives and there was something mysterious and hopeful about that find. Something promising and wherever Keith is I hope that window of starlight was foreshadowing.
Tonight me and mine are awake way too late. He: trying to unravel the Botticelli website for me and me, posting I-know-not-what to I-know-less-who and it's the middle of the middle of those nights that remind me of driving closer and closer to dawn or memories so sleep-deprived that I can't exactly recall if I saw a play called Sea Marks in some venue I can only remember by impression and I am happy for the life I have.
If I Ever Mistake You For a Poem
No body was ever composed
from words, not the hipsway
of verse, the iambic beat of a heart.
Yet inside you, a sestina
of arteries, the villanelle of villi,
sonnets between your shoulder blades.
If I were more obsessive I'd follow
the alliteration of age spots across
your arms. But I have exchanged
my microscope for a stethoscope
as I want to listen inside you, past
your repetition, your free verse of skin.
How easy it is to fall for your internal
organs. Your arrhythmia is charming
hidden in the ballad of body,
your gurgling stanzas, your lyric sigh.
Kelli Russell Agodon
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
TEN THINGS I KNOW
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts.
It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs.
The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble
song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true,
the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died
because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off.
Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already.
Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own
continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years.
There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was
so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk.
Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of
the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left
are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were
a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling.
When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling.
It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other
with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten
things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty.
How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny
wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future.
The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is
why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic
here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words.
I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath
away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates
a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered
a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins.
In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow
I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid
symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose
ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole
I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed
inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river.
The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out
each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our
hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when
thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year.
How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved.
Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where
his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it.
The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to
go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is
what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with
the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body
travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That
doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are
cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always
between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance,
I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if
our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river.
Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face,
or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all,
the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower,
with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any
breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.
Richard Jackson (but, of course)
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts.
It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs.
The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble
song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true,
the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died
because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off.
Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already.
Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own
continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years.
There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was
so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk.
Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of
the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left
are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were
a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling.
When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling.
It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other
with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten
things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty.
How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny
wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future.
The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is
why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic
here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words.
I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath
away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates
a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered
a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins.
In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow
I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid
symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose
ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole
I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed
inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river.
The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out
each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our
hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when
thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year.
How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved.
Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where
his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it.
The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to
go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is
what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with
the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body
travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That
doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are
cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always
between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance,
I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if
our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river.
Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face,
or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all,
the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower,
with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any
breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.
Richard Jackson (but, of course)
Friday, January 07, 2011
Happy Hour
A rabbi, priest, and belly dancer walk into a bar.
Everyone turns their way, recognizing a joke
when they're in one. The belly dancer, for all the swivel
in her hips, is modest, and asks the rabbi and priest
to go to another bar, but the rabbi and priest agree
that whatever bar they enter, they'll face the expectation
of a punch line. By the time they order beers,
people have gathered as they would around a burning house.
The priest wants to explain to the crowd that he
and the rabbi take belly-dancing lessons for their health.
The rabbi only knows one joke, a knock-knock joke
about a bris that isn't funny: snip who? snip you.
The belly dancer's also a black belt. This skill
combines with her agoraphobia in a sudden burst
of wounding. Someone calls the cops. An Irish cop,
a crooked cop, and a blind cop walk into a bar.
The blind cop says to the crooked cop, ''I'm into the theory
but not the practice of roosters." Everyone laughs
except the woman in back, who writes on her napkin,
"Why do people and animals in jokes always enter bars
in threes?" Just then, a hurricane, tornado, mud slide,
and stapler walk into a bar. She strikes a line
through her question and estimates how many nights
she's spent in this bar or bars just like it.
The stick figure she draws on the napkin
has hung itself with an extension chord from a cloud.
"She has a beautiful smile," the waitress says.
When the woman looks up from gracing the stick figure
with a skirt, she sees the waitress has a halo
and says, "You have a halo." "Yes," the waitress says,
"I have a halo." "I would like a halo," the woman says.
"I know you would," the waitress says, pursing her lips
the way angels do when too tired to shrug.
Bob Hicok
The Gettysburg Review
Winter 2010
A rabbi, priest, and belly dancer walk into a bar.
Everyone turns their way, recognizing a joke
when they're in one. The belly dancer, for all the swivel
in her hips, is modest, and asks the rabbi and priest
to go to another bar, but the rabbi and priest agree
that whatever bar they enter, they'll face the expectation
of a punch line. By the time they order beers,
people have gathered as they would around a burning house.
The priest wants to explain to the crowd that he
and the rabbi take belly-dancing lessons for their health.
The rabbi only knows one joke, a knock-knock joke
about a bris that isn't funny: snip who? snip you.
The belly dancer's also a black belt. This skill
combines with her agoraphobia in a sudden burst
of wounding. Someone calls the cops. An Irish cop,
a crooked cop, and a blind cop walk into a bar.
The blind cop says to the crooked cop, ''I'm into the theory
but not the practice of roosters." Everyone laughs
except the woman in back, who writes on her napkin,
"Why do people and animals in jokes always enter bars
in threes?" Just then, a hurricane, tornado, mud slide,
and stapler walk into a bar. She strikes a line
through her question and estimates how many nights
she's spent in this bar or bars just like it.
The stick figure she draws on the napkin
has hung itself with an extension chord from a cloud.
"She has a beautiful smile," the waitress says.
When the woman looks up from gracing the stick figure
with a skirt, she sees the waitress has a halo
and says, "You have a halo." "Yes," the waitress says,
"I have a halo." "I would like a halo," the woman says.
"I know you would," the waitress says, pursing her lips
the way angels do when too tired to shrug.
Bob Hicok
The Gettysburg Review
Winter 2010
The Public Private, The Private Public
Both facebook and the blog give me pause. They presume an importance to my daily whims and fancies that I don't actually have. I would be less than truthful if I didn't suggest that in growing up and reading the diaries of writers, I did not wish to make a certain colloquial art in my writings of the quotidian. I felt that way too about the epistolary form, the gracious hand-written letter that took pains to consider the reader instead of only the wishes for the writer to be heard and noticed. I admire great storytellers and those who can remember and deliver-well a joke. I lack some of these skills, but I aspire, on the writing front, anyway, to keep a kind of writer's diary here. The benefits are many: I can craft things well-enough for a more polished first draft if there is the hidden excitement that anyone at all might drop in for a read. I can make connections that are not strong enough to be an academic paper or even a solid essay but that, in fun, allow me to dip into music, random poems, quotes from movies and daily, tiny events. If something is to ignite from laying all these things down in proximity, it will ignite here and I can scoop it up into a word file and keep working. I can ventillate the smokey, musty, stale rooms of my psyche. I can overlap six issues into a post, and rant to my heart's content. I can wash it all down with a shot of likewise poetry. I can not verbalize every thing that frustrates me, but can instead do what I do to make sense of my world: word it out, here, and mostly alone.
In that mostly lies a world of troubles. The composite is a funny thing. You can write about one event, another person, a mixture of observations and then just a bunch of your own storytelling thrown in to keep things, well, somewhat anonymous. But there's that qualifying again. It is hard to keep a shared intimate space wholly private. The very sharing that makes me feel just enough accountability for an audience, and the fact that after graduate school, finding friends and readers has been tough, married now too with the much prayed-for and finally-found wonderful partner, all leads to a lack of writing community and community in general. At my loneliest points, dear blog, just to call out to an epistolic "you" made me feel less isolated. Certainly hitting "publish this post" brought a world of typographical error and inelegant prose into light in a way that the private recesses of my handwritten writings or my good-intentioned psyche never could.
I have major goals to get this work of mine completed, get it into the light and like most writers, I am my own worst enemy in that regard. So there is this space and from time to time, I try to fill it. And this space, as I mentioned is mostly private. But recently, upon being treated pretty shabbily by someone who has been a great deal of effort and someone who no matter how much I poured into the advice-giving and attempt to comfort, found himself always back to the same behavior and when told frankly, what I (or other alienated friends and family) thought, grew angry and lashed out at them. It is an alcoholism of the heart and it was exhausting. Years of self-analysis made me question not his behavior but my own. During that same period, the holidays occured as did a frustrating few days inside them. I decided to write about a live event and deal with the anger and sense of deep ingratitude of the now estranged friend and his addictions. I wrote in a very veiled way about it and left genders ambiguous. Someone read it and of course, was not happy. It mattered not that the character was not the character I intended, but that the frustration and some of the similar issues were at the heart of things. The year was ending and I wanted as I want now, to focus on positive things and to do the work that makes me feel good about myself. The amount of time and drama unfolding began to make me question why I do any of these things if they are to come under the wrong scrutiny and when they do, to be demanded of me more time and energy explaining. But under all that was the sneaky sense that I had been passive-aggressive and that due to a number of factors, I could not say openly and directly what I needed to say. So after the blog post, I wrote to the party in question and told him all I had to say about the way his patterns (two and a half years of patterns and two before I even knew him) were exhausting, that he wasn't living honestly and I was tired of trying to address it all. The friendship is no more and I am not at all sorry for that. Then a week or so later, I received the second call-out and in that letter I was not asked what I meant or to whom I was referring, or if I wasn't working on both the novel and essays that I work on here. I was accused outright. I pulled the blog into an invitation-only place. M (the partner) wondered at this and asked why I would do that. I said I wanted to be able to use it without self-consciousness and that I felt now, that I could not. I went to bed certain I had done the right thing. But as I lay there and thought of M's discussion with me about post-it notes and the permanent temporary and the way that all kinds of things were rattling around inside me and begging to be written and how I love how when April rolls around all of the poets with blogs who had linked to me and many of whom I only know through the blog would find me MIA, I felt bad. Because I like that other writers link to my blog and that when I post someone's poem, a google search may send that someone my way and that that might make a writer feel not so invisible on a day when that reminder is needed. I like that a couple of students, some old friends, and a few mystery folk wander in every so often and occasionally make a comment that something I wrote resonated with them and that for a moment, I feel completely connected, concatenated really, like those dolls that stretch out in a ribbon of forms and what connects them hand to hand is paper, that desparate necessary friend and foe of any writer.
So in the interest of all of that, I am resposting this. I hope that whatever I write is read in the spirit of understanding that, cliche as it is, "I write to find out what I'm thinking." It's the only way I know, the only way I care to.
In that mostly lies a world of troubles. The composite is a funny thing. You can write about one event, another person, a mixture of observations and then just a bunch of your own storytelling thrown in to keep things, well, somewhat anonymous. But there's that qualifying again. It is hard to keep a shared intimate space wholly private. The very sharing that makes me feel just enough accountability for an audience, and the fact that after graduate school, finding friends and readers has been tough, married now too with the much prayed-for and finally-found wonderful partner, all leads to a lack of writing community and community in general. At my loneliest points, dear blog, just to call out to an epistolic "you" made me feel less isolated. Certainly hitting "publish this post" brought a world of typographical error and inelegant prose into light in a way that the private recesses of my handwritten writings or my good-intentioned psyche never could.
I have major goals to get this work of mine completed, get it into the light and like most writers, I am my own worst enemy in that regard. So there is this space and from time to time, I try to fill it. And this space, as I mentioned is mostly private. But recently, upon being treated pretty shabbily by someone who has been a great deal of effort and someone who no matter how much I poured into the advice-giving and attempt to comfort, found himself always back to the same behavior and when told frankly, what I (or other alienated friends and family) thought, grew angry and lashed out at them. It is an alcoholism of the heart and it was exhausting. Years of self-analysis made me question not his behavior but my own. During that same period, the holidays occured as did a frustrating few days inside them. I decided to write about a live event and deal with the anger and sense of deep ingratitude of the now estranged friend and his addictions. I wrote in a very veiled way about it and left genders ambiguous. Someone read it and of course, was not happy. It mattered not that the character was not the character I intended, but that the frustration and some of the similar issues were at the heart of things. The year was ending and I wanted as I want now, to focus on positive things and to do the work that makes me feel good about myself. The amount of time and drama unfolding began to make me question why I do any of these things if they are to come under the wrong scrutiny and when they do, to be demanded of me more time and energy explaining. But under all that was the sneaky sense that I had been passive-aggressive and that due to a number of factors, I could not say openly and directly what I needed to say. So after the blog post, I wrote to the party in question and told him all I had to say about the way his patterns (two and a half years of patterns and two before I even knew him) were exhausting, that he wasn't living honestly and I was tired of trying to address it all. The friendship is no more and I am not at all sorry for that. Then a week or so later, I received the second call-out and in that letter I was not asked what I meant or to whom I was referring, or if I wasn't working on both the novel and essays that I work on here. I was accused outright. I pulled the blog into an invitation-only place. M (the partner) wondered at this and asked why I would do that. I said I wanted to be able to use it without self-consciousness and that I felt now, that I could not. I went to bed certain I had done the right thing. But as I lay there and thought of M's discussion with me about post-it notes and the permanent temporary and the way that all kinds of things were rattling around inside me and begging to be written and how I love how when April rolls around all of the poets with blogs who had linked to me and many of whom I only know through the blog would find me MIA, I felt bad. Because I like that other writers link to my blog and that when I post someone's poem, a google search may send that someone my way and that that might make a writer feel not so invisible on a day when that reminder is needed. I like that a couple of students, some old friends, and a few mystery folk wander in every so often and occasionally make a comment that something I wrote resonated with them and that for a moment, I feel completely connected, concatenated really, like those dolls that stretch out in a ribbon of forms and what connects them hand to hand is paper, that desparate necessary friend and foe of any writer.
So in the interest of all of that, I am resposting this. I hope that whatever I write is read in the spirit of understanding that, cliche as it is, "I write to find out what I'm thinking." It's the only way I know, the only way I care to.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Second-Hand Risings
Found the ingredients to begin to shape my plum cake recipe. I am still deciding whether a chocolate cream cheese icing would be too much or just what the damsel plum ordered. Anyway, I completed my china pattern, a simple pattern I chose when I was only fifteen and attended a Greek wedding where the bride had registered for the reasonably-priced and kind of innocent pattern (a white rose on white background with the hint of blue shadow to its folds). It's a little fifteen year old me still, but I love that this late date from then I still like it and that it isn't the dumb 24 carat rimmed Lenox show-off china that so many other of the brides chose that year, primarily for the fact that it was the most expensive (and least interesting) of the patterns.
Thanksgiving is shaping up nicely, thanks to etsy, some thrifty runnings-around but little actual thrifting. That's the thing: I am taking a kind of mostly-haitus from thrifting, that delightful verb that makes a Friday afternoon into a treasure hunt. Because I am good at few things, and because I was trained by the best (Thanks Bear!) a professional antiques picker and my co-seller on an old ebay shop that made grad. school bearable and even at times, deeply elegant, I rarely go into a thrift store and don't score or as my friends Kyle & Russel used to say: "swoop!"
It's an urban treasure hunt says my friend, and he's right. That's why I'm not playing right now, it's back to that quiet (and the novel-writing I've been sneaking in b/w unpacking and holiday-planning). I am trying not to feel the rush of the find, trying not to feel "better" because a thing plugged up the lacunas-various that make me feel like I need to feel. And there is something to be said for leaving someone else space to have things that he likes and space to be filled-in with our shared-finds. There are only so many cutesie things or gorgeous scarves or dresses so pretty that I never wear them for fear I will ruin them, or dresses so numerous, I forget I have them until some wrong season or other, I move and find the summer dresses in the late fall or with my many summer moves: winter clothes that make me prespire just to look upon. I love the stories inside them, the fabrics that lay colors alongside one another in ways that seem fresh because they're not, new because they are so old.
Tulips
That
tulip set
by the window
in its vase
of dusk is like
aflame. You
cannot help
but say — no.
Because a
tulip caught in
that glass is
a flame —
and once you
have said it how
to return to
bloomed stem
or soft spike
of anther
where now
is fire? Words
burn — bridge
colours away
from colour — so
while one
tulip flares
we lay waste
to night and
glimpse
our reddened
names — the way
Anne
cannot bear to
end — or as you
take your leave
of Mario that
ah
so missed and
strange. And you
sputter so
fierce with it
that you say it
again —
that this gift of
tulip is un-
like any
other — which
fires my lips
with a glow
already half
subsiding as you
turn to gaze — to
look with a mind
on the very point
of opening.
2010 Mario Petrucci
Thanksgiving is shaping up nicely, thanks to etsy, some thrifty runnings-around but little actual thrifting. That's the thing: I am taking a kind of mostly-haitus from thrifting, that delightful verb that makes a Friday afternoon into a treasure hunt. Because I am good at few things, and because I was trained by the best (Thanks Bear!) a professional antiques picker and my co-seller on an old ebay shop that made grad. school bearable and even at times, deeply elegant, I rarely go into a thrift store and don't score or as my friends Kyle & Russel used to say: "swoop!"
It's an urban treasure hunt says my friend, and he's right. That's why I'm not playing right now, it's back to that quiet (and the novel-writing I've been sneaking in b/w unpacking and holiday-planning). I am trying not to feel the rush of the find, trying not to feel "better" because a thing plugged up the lacunas-various that make me feel like I need to feel. And there is something to be said for leaving someone else space to have things that he likes and space to be filled-in with our shared-finds. There are only so many cutesie things or gorgeous scarves or dresses so pretty that I never wear them for fear I will ruin them, or dresses so numerous, I forget I have them until some wrong season or other, I move and find the summer dresses in the late fall or with my many summer moves: winter clothes that make me prespire just to look upon. I love the stories inside them, the fabrics that lay colors alongside one another in ways that seem fresh because they're not, new because they are so old.
Tulips
That
tulip set
by the window
in its vase
of dusk is like
aflame. You
cannot help
but say — no.
Because a
tulip caught in
that glass is
a flame —
and once you
have said it how
to return to
bloomed stem
or soft spike
of anther
where now
is fire? Words
burn — bridge
colours away
from colour — so
while one
tulip flares
we lay waste
to night and
glimpse
our reddened
names — the way
Anne
cannot bear to
end — or as you
take your leave
of Mario that
ah
so missed and
strange. And you
sputter so
fierce with it
that you say it
again —
that this gift of
tulip is un-
like any
other — which
fires my lips
with a glow
already half
subsiding as you
turn to gaze — to
look with a mind
on the very point
of opening.
2010 Mario Petrucci
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
After Praising Silence, Two in One Day
Because I meant to talk a little about assembling a home. About an umbrella I saw today with one of my most stylish students that caused me to think "what is yellow like that?"
I have my first grown-up kitchen, after scouring most of High Street, and ending up purchasing from Grand View Mercantile a sideboard and a china cabinet, both wonderfully 40s with little deco-like green designs and a wonderful oak with yes, chrome legs. Then Clintonville to find a table, that quite nearly (and to the detail)matched the atomic, rustic thing that my kitchen begs to be. Really, it's a kind of vintage country at the end of the day. I have favorite High St. shops and my collection of thrift stores that I stalked, inclusive of Flower Child and my beloved Mary Catherine's, one shop that I found great finds at but no longer visit as the owner and I find one another's presence less than pleasant, and a great little bank of North high shops where I found a stoneware bowl that I still dream of owning and a blue-mirrored table to match my coffee table. We looked and looked for a couch that met the criteria for somewhat divergent aesthetics, and the salmon-velvet couch I loved lost out to a big, new couch but with my upholstery picks and my mid-century accent chairs:one coral clam-shell back herculan beauty with day-sky of silver-threaded stars to its sun-setting sky and one torn to bits chair that had crossing legs on the side and made the upholsterer declare that for all the antiques he'd seen, he had never before seen a chair like this. It will come home all olive-velveted up with a throw pillow of fuchsia carved velvet and little chartreuse leaves.
What's interesting about any of this? To me, it's home, the first one I've ever really made, and the first time that if I paint a wall, it's my wall. If I find something major to buy for it, it comes from some place I love to support and it is a gift to the home and to time itself, not forever but long enough to warrant the look-ahead. How long has it been since I could say as much?
Teaching lately has been really wonderful. My lit. class is full of some very special and especially bright students who are full of life and make me feel as if they are getting as much a kick out of the class as I am. My fiction workshop was so savvy and on in their assessments of one another's stories today that I felt like I was sitting in a grad. workshop.
Body of the Hour
To say, the soul
is like saying, the clock
lost its body and went on ticking.
Shadow-body, this one
who lived behind the bat-faced
bone of the pelvis
raised in the slicked-back hackle of blood . . .
To say, comfort me now in the hour
of my loss is
to be the hour, always.
To be Lord Almost.
Mother So-Close.
To be this time each time
you stop—put down the fork
or turn the page and look up:
The meadow in a lather of white
four-o-clocks, the birthmarked
butterfly moving
as if written—erased—written . . .
I remember once in this world
I was an absence,
like you. Like you.
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
I have my first grown-up kitchen, after scouring most of High Street, and ending up purchasing from Grand View Mercantile a sideboard and a china cabinet, both wonderfully 40s with little deco-like green designs and a wonderful oak with yes, chrome legs. Then Clintonville to find a table, that quite nearly (and to the detail)matched the atomic, rustic thing that my kitchen begs to be. Really, it's a kind of vintage country at the end of the day. I have favorite High St. shops and my collection of thrift stores that I stalked, inclusive of Flower Child and my beloved Mary Catherine's, one shop that I found great finds at but no longer visit as the owner and I find one another's presence less than pleasant, and a great little bank of North high shops where I found a stoneware bowl that I still dream of owning and a blue-mirrored table to match my coffee table. We looked and looked for a couch that met the criteria for somewhat divergent aesthetics, and the salmon-velvet couch I loved lost out to a big, new couch but with my upholstery picks and my mid-century accent chairs:one coral clam-shell back herculan beauty with day-sky of silver-threaded stars to its sun-setting sky and one torn to bits chair that had crossing legs on the side and made the upholsterer declare that for all the antiques he'd seen, he had never before seen a chair like this. It will come home all olive-velveted up with a throw pillow of fuchsia carved velvet and little chartreuse leaves.
What's interesting about any of this? To me, it's home, the first one I've ever really made, and the first time that if I paint a wall, it's my wall. If I find something major to buy for it, it comes from some place I love to support and it is a gift to the home and to time itself, not forever but long enough to warrant the look-ahead. How long has it been since I could say as much?
Teaching lately has been really wonderful. My lit. class is full of some very special and especially bright students who are full of life and make me feel as if they are getting as much a kick out of the class as I am. My fiction workshop was so savvy and on in their assessments of one another's stories today that I felt like I was sitting in a grad. workshop.
Body of the Hour
To say, the soul
is like saying, the clock
lost its body and went on ticking.
Shadow-body, this one
who lived behind the bat-faced
bone of the pelvis
raised in the slicked-back hackle of blood . . .
To say, comfort me now in the hour
of my loss is
to be the hour, always.
To be Lord Almost.
Mother So-Close.
To be this time each time
you stop—put down the fork
or turn the page and look up:
The meadow in a lather of white
four-o-clocks, the birthmarked
butterfly moving
as if written—erased—written . . .
I remember once in this world
I was an absence,
like you. Like you.
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Where Have I Been Lately?
The obvious answer is Shawnee Hills or New Home or Revising My Life. But that last one is apt enough to move me into today's post about not posting, not engaging, listening more, talking less, and the quiet of the new place I live that makes every sound significant. This, in striking opposition to the narcissism-dial to which our American radios are too often set.
I think I wanted this quiet for my novel, my poems, for the kind of serenity that me and mine can enjoy over our shared love of great music, books and the decor and wardrobe that were stuffing the draughty holes of me up, much in the shabby way that my old apartment's ticky-tack winterizing functioned (or didn't) so that I could stand in my bathroom, put on my lipstick on a windy day and look as if I were posing for a magazine with my hair blowing back slightly in mid-December, with closed windows. The people I really admire, really want to be like when/if I grow up, have things to say that are related to something beyond themselves and the world's perceptions of them. An old boyfriend of mine once said that people often grossly overestimated their looks--believing every good, inflated thing that they heard or tried to pull from people, and too, their sense of how interesting they were. He didn't say, but I went on to consider, that this often takes place in inverse proportion to the amount of chatter of the self or rather prattle about oneself in which a person engages or indulges him/her/self. I read for a time, the journals and poems of May Sarton, and from her I learned about looking outward, keeping the internal internal and watching birds and plants to deal with some of life's more intimate griefs. It isn't that she doesn't tell, it's that she doesn't make it the point of things.
I have been trying to keep what's mine inside and leave some room for steeping things up for the page. I guess I'm saying that it keeps me from this blog where I had the sense that one or two people that I might know in some way read me and that others might swing by and read something that would help to make them or me feel better understood. I had little life in Columbus outside of school and work and this was a way to have holidays with, if not friends, then company of some sort.
Now there are birds whose names I don't know that flicker in and out of branches and a new all black cat that I think I'll call Loretta after my favorite Cher character in one of my favorite movies of all time or Marlo or Ann Marie for That Girl and how I love her or maybe Romany because I don't know where she comes from and I love that word. And there are streets I haven't wandered and neighbors I haven't met and there is the real time to consider and how fast it is flying by.
This Is Not My Story
cereal boxes in the kitchen
cupboard nibbled through
the sudden appearance of
droppings, a mouse in
the house, her lover says
it has a very tiny heart,
you need only chase
it until it tires; he knows
the hearts of small creatures
having chased down a few
chickens in his youth, accustomed
to how birds wear out
easily — the human heart is
a wholly different animal,
we must sense when to give in
before the other gives up
Shin Yu Pai
I think I wanted this quiet for my novel, my poems, for the kind of serenity that me and mine can enjoy over our shared love of great music, books and the decor and wardrobe that were stuffing the draughty holes of me up, much in the shabby way that my old apartment's ticky-tack winterizing functioned (or didn't) so that I could stand in my bathroom, put on my lipstick on a windy day and look as if I were posing for a magazine with my hair blowing back slightly in mid-December, with closed windows. The people I really admire, really want to be like when/if I grow up, have things to say that are related to something beyond themselves and the world's perceptions of them. An old boyfriend of mine once said that people often grossly overestimated their looks--believing every good, inflated thing that they heard or tried to pull from people, and too, their sense of how interesting they were. He didn't say, but I went on to consider, that this often takes place in inverse proportion to the amount of chatter of the self or rather prattle about oneself in which a person engages or indulges him/her/self. I read for a time, the journals and poems of May Sarton, and from her I learned about looking outward, keeping the internal internal and watching birds and plants to deal with some of life's more intimate griefs. It isn't that she doesn't tell, it's that she doesn't make it the point of things.
I have been trying to keep what's mine inside and leave some room for steeping things up for the page. I guess I'm saying that it keeps me from this blog where I had the sense that one or two people that I might know in some way read me and that others might swing by and read something that would help to make them or me feel better understood. I had little life in Columbus outside of school and work and this was a way to have holidays with, if not friends, then company of some sort.
Now there are birds whose names I don't know that flicker in and out of branches and a new all black cat that I think I'll call Loretta after my favorite Cher character in one of my favorite movies of all time or Marlo or Ann Marie for That Girl and how I love her or maybe Romany because I don't know where she comes from and I love that word. And there are streets I haven't wandered and neighbors I haven't met and there is the real time to consider and how fast it is flying by.
This Is Not My Story
cereal boxes in the kitchen
cupboard nibbled through
the sudden appearance of
droppings, a mouse in
the house, her lover says
it has a very tiny heart,
you need only chase
it until it tires; he knows
the hearts of small creatures
having chased down a few
chickens in his youth, accustomed
to how birds wear out
easily — the human heart is
a wholly different animal,
we must sense when to give in
before the other gives up
Shin Yu Pai
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Autumnal Rumination
It is a grey day, the yellow trees standing out against the misty landscape as if they were dressed in something loud for a sixties theme party. I'm going to wear my new grey sweater bought on major sale at the E. Bauer warehouse and my navy shirt, all care of The Boy and our shopping trip yesterday for the "outerwear" sale. He bought the softest olive parka, a(nother) black fleece vest, and a grey down parka vest that makes him look all Redford and frosty. But it's not all that shopping that got me to thinking, but the sweet phonecall from my best friend and his comment that our night sounded really nice and the plan to barbeque together after we sign on the new place and that all that I have really loved is still here and that it just keeps getting added on to. My good New York friend (and first love) off to Berlin and healing after losing his wife two Thanksgivings ago when we cried on the phone together at 6 a.m. and I was brand new to Columbus and so alone that I went to Barnes & Noble when they opened and walked around there, lost, grieving, so lonely for four straight hours. And of course, there is the Bear and the baby bear and the cherished Juniper and her mother, J that have become dear to me, too. Not to mention the great friends that have offered to help move me to the new house, have offered us all kinds of help in building and repairing and how J brought boxes and M offered to dress like cat burglars for Operation Terracotta and it goes on and it's true what my friend said about an average Monday night when me and mine tried on clothes for each other and then went to the Y and then home again for our bevy of shows before the sleep that comes from the new chill of fall, which is also warm and extraordinary.
Condolence Note: Los Angeles
The sky is desert blue,
Like the pool. Secluded.
No swimmers here. No smog—
Unless you count this twisting
Brush fire in the hills. Two kids
Sit, head-to-head, poolside,
Rehearsing a condolence note.
Someone has died, "Not an intimate,
Perhaps a family friend," prompts
The Manners Guide they consult.
You shouldn't say God never makes
Mistakes, she quotes, snapping her
Bikini top. Right, he adds—You
Could just say, He's better off—or
Heaven was always in his future.
There's always a better way to say
We're sorry that he's dead—but
they're back inside their music now,
Pages of politeness fallen between them.
O do not say that the Unsaid drifts over us
Like blown smoke: a single spark erupts
In wildfire! Cup your hands, blow out
This wish for insight. Say: Forgive me
For living when you are dead. Say pardon
My need to praise, without you, this bright
Morning sky. It belongs to no one—
But I offer it to you, heaven in your future—
Along with silent tunes from the playlist,
The end-time etiquette book dropped
From the hand of the young sleeper.
It's all we have left to share. The book
Of paid respects, the morning's hot-blue
iPod, sunlit words on a page, black border.
Carol Muske-Dukes
Condolence Note: Los Angeles
The sky is desert blue,
Like the pool. Secluded.
No swimmers here. No smog—
Unless you count this twisting
Brush fire in the hills. Two kids
Sit, head-to-head, poolside,
Rehearsing a condolence note.
Someone has died, "Not an intimate,
Perhaps a family friend," prompts
The Manners Guide they consult.
You shouldn't say God never makes
Mistakes, she quotes, snapping her
Bikini top. Right, he adds—You
Could just say, He's better off—or
Heaven was always in his future.
There's always a better way to say
We're sorry that he's dead—but
they're back inside their music now,
Pages of politeness fallen between them.
O do not say that the Unsaid drifts over us
Like blown smoke: a single spark erupts
In wildfire! Cup your hands, blow out
This wish for insight. Say: Forgive me
For living when you are dead. Say pardon
My need to praise, without you, this bright
Morning sky. It belongs to no one—
But I offer it to you, heaven in your future—
Along with silent tunes from the playlist,
The end-time etiquette book dropped
From the hand of the young sleeper.
It's all we have left to share. The book
Of paid respects, the morning's hot-blue
iPod, sunlit words on a page, black border.
Carol Muske-Dukes
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
There's something about weeping cellos and willows
that my student said today and something about red taffetta and how September is a fragile month, palming a blown-glass carousel. Or it's not. Fragile. Blown-glass. What it is clear, intricate, wonderous and so on. Last month I started another blog, a secret place for trying on ideas, essay bits, a place to explore what it means not to perform or to perform anonymously like whoever left that painting against the telephone pole last month and what in me wanted to drive back for it--floral-beauty of a thing and what in me said "leave some pretty for someone else" so I did.
M makes me think about identity, how much people hang themselves out of windows and say, in essence, "look at me" but with no real art to it. Just talk and show. Just desparation so loud that it is hard to really look at. Facebook does that. The status updates that I too, indulge. How many bits of what I might be able to call literature lost themselves to the wasted moments of gossip, trivia and time-wasting and now, here, how I linger when I was just preparing manuscripts and which I will again soon. With luck, the little fragments I am shoring up will soon be stories, poems, essays, novel and will make of my time a worthwhile sacrifice. For now, back to it. But not before I share a pretty.
(Save)
The throaty jangle of pennies against
pennies against the porcelain belly
of a dressertop pig, or a train ticket
slipped into the space between book pages.
A sweater stretched across an empty seat
in a concert hall lit with pinball chatter
before the house lights dim. Pickling jars
on a pantry shelf, gold-lidded terrariums
to preserve the seasons: crooknecked
cucumbers, drifty layers of lemon wheels,
round red beets. It's time to reset
all the clocks, create a new architecture
of daylight and dark. It's time to stand
in the sun and stain our shoes with
cemetery dirt. Now we're parceling
the contents of the house, what's left
in this shingled shell. There are colors:
the plump yellow sofa, the empty gray
coatsleeves brushing against each other
in the hall closet, the fleshy deep green leaves
of the jade plant, stout stacks of white
dinner plates. There is a full set of sterling,
a pair of Eames chairs. There are old letters
softening in shoeboxes, there is everything
suspended in ink, and everything that is not.
Copyright © 2010 Alison Doernberg All rights reserved
M makes me think about identity, how much people hang themselves out of windows and say, in essence, "look at me" but with no real art to it. Just talk and show. Just desparation so loud that it is hard to really look at. Facebook does that. The status updates that I too, indulge. How many bits of what I might be able to call literature lost themselves to the wasted moments of gossip, trivia and time-wasting and now, here, how I linger when I was just preparing manuscripts and which I will again soon. With luck, the little fragments I am shoring up will soon be stories, poems, essays, novel and will make of my time a worthwhile sacrifice. For now, back to it. But not before I share a pretty.
(Save)
The throaty jangle of pennies against
pennies against the porcelain belly
of a dressertop pig, or a train ticket
slipped into the space between book pages.
A sweater stretched across an empty seat
in a concert hall lit with pinball chatter
before the house lights dim. Pickling jars
on a pantry shelf, gold-lidded terrariums
to preserve the seasons: crooknecked
cucumbers, drifty layers of lemon wheels,
round red beets. It's time to reset
all the clocks, create a new architecture
of daylight and dark. It's time to stand
in the sun and stain our shoes with
cemetery dirt. Now we're parceling
the contents of the house, what's left
in this shingled shell. There are colors:
the plump yellow sofa, the empty gray
coatsleeves brushing against each other
in the hall closet, the fleshy deep green leaves
of the jade plant, stout stacks of white
dinner plates. There is a full set of sterling,
a pair of Eames chairs. There are old letters
softening in shoeboxes, there is everything
suspended in ink, and everything that is not.
Copyright © 2010 Alison Doernberg All rights reserved
Monday, September 20, 2010
Blessed Be & So on
which run together just reads soon. By which I mean not a moment too
I walked down to the reservoir today, by this I mean: I walked through a house at the edge of the woods overlooking a body of water that will soon find me and mine on a boat of some type looking down at ourselves to see that this is really us, this is me, everything I couldn't have even known to want and at long, precious last.
There is no month more beloved to me than September, and to have it announced like this, against a sky that called a heron and its mate off the water's edge and mirroring one another from lake-skimming flight to sky-topping soar in a wonderful parallel symmetry was almost overkill on the pretty and the right.
If this were a beaded bracelet there are beads to ward off the evil eye: breaks in the pattern, deliberate fate-tricking "mistakes." We haul our big personalities in wheelbarrows and sometimes we bumper-car them about. We need open country and unassuming horizons to remind us how good the quiet and calm, how illustrative.
Soon I find what lives in 1965 again, what shares space with a curved countertop and a wood-burning stove with its ceramic starburst tile in every shade of mod. But not before we Tampa and parent-meet and Evan-celebrate. Such good verbs this life.
I am afraid of how good it feels to be this very me this very month.
I walked down to the reservoir today, by this I mean: I walked through a house at the edge of the woods overlooking a body of water that will soon find me and mine on a boat of some type looking down at ourselves to see that this is really us, this is me, everything I couldn't have even known to want and at long, precious last.
There is no month more beloved to me than September, and to have it announced like this, against a sky that called a heron and its mate off the water's edge and mirroring one another from lake-skimming flight to sky-topping soar in a wonderful parallel symmetry was almost overkill on the pretty and the right.
If this were a beaded bracelet there are beads to ward off the evil eye: breaks in the pattern, deliberate fate-tricking "mistakes." We haul our big personalities in wheelbarrows and sometimes we bumper-car them about. We need open country and unassuming horizons to remind us how good the quiet and calm, how illustrative.
Soon I find what lives in 1965 again, what shares space with a curved countertop and a wood-burning stove with its ceramic starburst tile in every shade of mod. But not before we Tampa and parent-meet and Evan-celebrate. Such good verbs this life.
I am afraid of how good it feels to be this very me this very month.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Good Mail
Imagine a package with a packet of columbine seeds and bachelor buttons, a little Chinese envelope tied with delicious coral ribbon and containing a pair of cloisinne Chinese fan earrings, a drawing of the most vibrant butterflies rendered in the most magical of magic markers and flying against a yellow construction paper sky. Imagine a little handmade card that accordions out and contains the most incredible little drawings. Between that and my recent addiction to Alberta Hunter and my late-to-the-game discovery of the newly-late Abbey Lincoln, it has been a week of gifts.
Stone Seeking Warmth
Look, it's usually not a good idea
to think seriously about me.
I've been known to give others
a hard time. I've had wives and lovers—
trust that I know a little about trying
to remain whole while living
a divided life. I don't easily open up.
If you come to me, come to me
so warned. I am smooth and grayish.
It's possible my soul is made of schist.
But if you are not dissuaded by now,
well, my door is ajar. I don't care
if you're in collusion with the wind.
I wouldn't mind being diminished
one caress at a time. Come in,
there's nothing here but solitude
and me. I like to keep the house clean.
Stephen Dunn
Almanac Magic
for John Wood
Believe in the bounty of drought,
of fire and locust. Count on
jackrabbit luck to grow your seed
and the tip of a dipper for rain.
If the man in the moon is late arising,
and your wife swells with your future,
she'll be craving clay and kneeling down
to eat that dirt from the root cellar.
But know your future will grow up
to leave you, to follow the magpie
with a song of honey and foil
from city neon alive in its eyes.
You stay to plow through days of sod and rock
and pray the rusty dray outlasts the harvest.
Let the wild oat drill into your hands
crooked from handles of shovels and hayforks.
Read your future in the cracks of this land,
in the bumble of tumbleweed and the stir of the hive.
Now listen for wind to shush your wheat asleep
and the scythe as it whispers its name to the sheaves.
Copyright © 2010 Allen Braden All rights reserved
from A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood
Stone Seeking Warmth
Look, it's usually not a good idea
to think seriously about me.
I've been known to give others
a hard time. I've had wives and lovers—
trust that I know a little about trying
to remain whole while living
a divided life. I don't easily open up.
If you come to me, come to me
so warned. I am smooth and grayish.
It's possible my soul is made of schist.
But if you are not dissuaded by now,
well, my door is ajar. I don't care
if you're in collusion with the wind.
I wouldn't mind being diminished
one caress at a time. Come in,
there's nothing here but solitude
and me. I like to keep the house clean.
Stephen Dunn
Almanac Magic
for John Wood
Believe in the bounty of drought,
of fire and locust. Count on
jackrabbit luck to grow your seed
and the tip of a dipper for rain.
If the man in the moon is late arising,
and your wife swells with your future,
she'll be craving clay and kneeling down
to eat that dirt from the root cellar.
But know your future will grow up
to leave you, to follow the magpie
with a song of honey and foil
from city neon alive in its eyes.
You stay to plow through days of sod and rock
and pray the rusty dray outlasts the harvest.
Let the wild oat drill into your hands
crooked from handles of shovels and hayforks.
Read your future in the cracks of this land,
in the bumble of tumbleweed and the stir of the hive.
Now listen for wind to shush your wheat asleep
and the scythe as it whispers its name to the sheaves.
Copyright © 2010 Allen Braden All rights reserved
from A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sometimes a day rotates on its axis and where we were
becomes a shadow of where we are, the day rotates, the axis
holds the place but we are cast across the room from ourselves
former or otherwise and we are cast in bronze, out of Eden,
off like a bad wig, in a role all wrong for us
but begin to occupy it, shout its bad lines with so much
sincerity, we forget the selves across the day from us
and then days gather so fast. We are matter's playthings
we are matter's peacock pyrite, dumb, pretty stones
all color in enough light, but where do we ever find
enough light to give the stupidity of stones insight?
Sometimes we pass a costume shop on a Sunday, Cleveland
where things are often set for the nonstatement of middle America
but in this case, the window, the closed costume shop and the boa
cheap feathers but regal somehow makes us want to break glass
in what really is Cleveland, Ohio, mid-August and on the run.
The car, black, being driven by someone we imagine into the rest
of our lives, and the boa, a blue like the blue that the Blue Men
honor, a blue so thick with a cobalt-intensity, nearing violet
but holding-off so that the punch of it hits miles after
we pass the thing and know that alone we would have found
a way to bring that blue home,us it against one a.m.
when the someones all sleep us off. Elegies are wasted
on the dead and the living alike.
A.Paine
becomes a shadow of where we are, the day rotates, the axis
holds the place but we are cast across the room from ourselves
former or otherwise and we are cast in bronze, out of Eden,
off like a bad wig, in a role all wrong for us
but begin to occupy it, shout its bad lines with so much
sincerity, we forget the selves across the day from us
and then days gather so fast. We are matter's playthings
we are matter's peacock pyrite, dumb, pretty stones
all color in enough light, but where do we ever find
enough light to give the stupidity of stones insight?
Sometimes we pass a costume shop on a Sunday, Cleveland
where things are often set for the nonstatement of middle America
but in this case, the window, the closed costume shop and the boa
cheap feathers but regal somehow makes us want to break glass
in what really is Cleveland, Ohio, mid-August and on the run.
The car, black, being driven by someone we imagine into the rest
of our lives, and the boa, a blue like the blue that the Blue Men
honor, a blue so thick with a cobalt-intensity, nearing violet
but holding-off so that the punch of it hits miles after
we pass the thing and know that alone we would have found
a way to bring that blue home,us it against one a.m.
when the someones all sleep us off. Elegies are wasted
on the dead and the living alike.
A.Paine
Friday, August 06, 2010
Migration
After the rain, trees burn with monarchs,
come this winter on dust-and-paper bodies.
Some of the dead cling to trash on the road,
frames of wings like frames of broken windows.
You say you never saw anything like them
in China, though you cannot say for sure.
As a girl, you leashed crickets with ox hairs
and baited bees with sweet tomato flesh.
But nothing like this, you say, like this orange.
This monarch generation lives three times
longer than its parents, than it would without
a migration to complete. They are given
time to break their bodies over mountains
and heave themselves onto warm trees
so they all might survive. Are you wondering
how much more time you have been given
to learn a language and forget a language, to break
your body over an ocean for this pale
redwood dusk and this daughter?
I know you were not drawn here to save
yourself. I cannot tell you that I have
nothing to save, nothing that waits for me
to be drawn, nothing that says, you must,
you must break your wings for this.
Melody S. Gee
After the rain, trees burn with monarchs,
come this winter on dust-and-paper bodies.
Some of the dead cling to trash on the road,
frames of wings like frames of broken windows.
You say you never saw anything like them
in China, though you cannot say for sure.
As a girl, you leashed crickets with ox hairs
and baited bees with sweet tomato flesh.
But nothing like this, you say, like this orange.
This monarch generation lives three times
longer than its parents, than it would without
a migration to complete. They are given
time to break their bodies over mountains
and heave themselves onto warm trees
so they all might survive. Are you wondering
how much more time you have been given
to learn a language and forget a language, to break
your body over an ocean for this pale
redwood dusk and this daughter?
I know you were not drawn here to save
yourself. I cannot tell you that I have
nothing to save, nothing that waits for me
to be drawn, nothing that says, you must,
you must break your wings for this.
Melody S. Gee
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
The patio door keeps flashing silver and it seems all Hopkinsesque to me, that shining, that shook foil of night on lake and the rumble that makes all the plants on the patio smear themselves against the backdrop of gunmetal and blown-lace sky. Everything's in motion out there and sleep seems to be tearing through the night too, swinging through those trees like a little boy playing Tarzan or like something called to the window by the lost boys and asked to fly the nightsky. Three flashes of light just made the trees shake-white and inside one girl types by the rectangular light of a screen and one boy turns over to a blank patch of sheet and pillow and wonders why that girl sleeps so little. It's nice to have a sleeping someone to curl back into and nice too, to trip words out on the wide water of the night, like flat-stones meant for such gliding.
Tomorrow marks the final day of my final summer course. I am a little weary. This one was an emotional wring-out in a lot of ways. There will be too little recharging time before I'm back at the gates and someone pulls the trigger and for so much less cash and three times the teaching, I am galloping, hanging from my weak arms by the horn of the saddle. The thunder is tripping alarms all over the parking lot and I am reminded of my deaf student on the day the alarm went off at school. Everyone in the room grimacing and her laughing as I walked in and she gestured to me a sign that I understood as alarm and she was enjoying being the one to translate the chaos that she knew I could hear too loud and too well and that she was mercifully-spared.
Take that, she might have said to music and the good noise of the spheres. Which is kind of me just now in ways it's hard to explain. There is so much scattered just now. Too much matter to shuffle about but the true matter lies miraculously in the next room and the prayed-for-this is not lost on me.
I am working on a first poem for Evan. Something about the way he waves goodbye as he sees the wave, at himself. How there is not greater thing to teach him about that. His whole life he will be trying to remember that that is how goodbyes work, your own hand facing you and the fingers opening, closing in a gesture that could just as easily be come here if the intention was not farewell and that farewell never so much directed as anything as back at yourself.
He is all joy, that baby, and all gift and the ten childrens' books I send along to him soon are what this aunt can most give: words and the way that at 3:35 a.m. even if someone you love dearly sleeps through the storm and to your peripheral right, seering electricity stabs the night into midday for one jarring millisecond, and you cannot sleep in all that white-heat, words, words, can keep you company for as long as you ask.
Tomorrow marks the final day of my final summer course. I am a little weary. This one was an emotional wring-out in a lot of ways. There will be too little recharging time before I'm back at the gates and someone pulls the trigger and for so much less cash and three times the teaching, I am galloping, hanging from my weak arms by the horn of the saddle. The thunder is tripping alarms all over the parking lot and I am reminded of my deaf student on the day the alarm went off at school. Everyone in the room grimacing and her laughing as I walked in and she gestured to me a sign that I understood as alarm and she was enjoying being the one to translate the chaos that she knew I could hear too loud and too well and that she was mercifully-spared.
Take that, she might have said to music and the good noise of the spheres. Which is kind of me just now in ways it's hard to explain. There is so much scattered just now. Too much matter to shuffle about but the true matter lies miraculously in the next room and the prayed-for-this is not lost on me.
I am working on a first poem for Evan. Something about the way he waves goodbye as he sees the wave, at himself. How there is not greater thing to teach him about that. His whole life he will be trying to remember that that is how goodbyes work, your own hand facing you and the fingers opening, closing in a gesture that could just as easily be come here if the intention was not farewell and that farewell never so much directed as anything as back at yourself.
He is all joy, that baby, and all gift and the ten childrens' books I send along to him soon are what this aunt can most give: words and the way that at 3:35 a.m. even if someone you love dearly sleeps through the storm and to your peripheral right, seering electricity stabs the night into midday for one jarring millisecond, and you cannot sleep in all that white-heat, words, words, can keep you company for as long as you ask.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Before and after all of this, remember that first fall, fat with colors and the swerves in canyon road that your body took for the car, and unafraid as if your mountain-birth meant mountain rights and your body recalled each jig and jag, each rick-rack heartlining the slope with what could only be a steady pulse. Before and after it all, there is just what you lean into or slow down from fear. I could never ski for this reason: body trust and terror, the certainty that speed craved more of itself and the body accelerated is a brittle, blown-glass thing. I did my extreme sports with my soul, catapulting it here, vaulting it there, the long stretches on French heights, the soul pedalling hard and finishing barely and far behind.
When You Return
Ellen Bass
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.
Ode to The God of Atheists
Ellen Bass
The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake
or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you
bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns,
or buy gold leaf and stained-glass windows.
It won’t insist you fast or twist
the shape of your sexual hunger.
There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it.
You don’t have to veil your face for it
or bloody your knees.
You don’t have to sing.
The plums that bloom extravagantly,
the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,
each pebble and fern, pond and fish
are yours whether or not you believe.
When fog is ripped away
just as a rust red thumb slides across the moon,
the god of atheists isn’t rewarding you
for waking up in the middle of the night
and shivering barefoot in the field.
This god is not moved by the musk
of incense or bowls of oranges,
the mask brushed with cochineal,
polished rib of the lion.
Eat the macerated leaves
of the sacred plant. Dance
till the stars blur to a spangly river.
Rain, if it comes, will come.
This god loves the virus as much as the child.
Ellen Bass
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.
Ode to The God of Atheists
Ellen Bass
The god of atheists won’t burn you at the stake
or pry off your fingernails. Nor will it make you
bow or beg, rake your skin with thorns,
or buy gold leaf and stained-glass windows.
It won’t insist you fast or twist
the shape of your sexual hunger.
There are no wars fought for it, no women stoned for it.
You don’t have to veil your face for it
or bloody your knees.
You don’t have to sing.
The plums that bloom extravagantly,
the dolphins that stitch sky to sea,
each pebble and fern, pond and fish
are yours whether or not you believe.
When fog is ripped away
just as a rust red thumb slides across the moon,
the god of atheists isn’t rewarding you
for waking up in the middle of the night
and shivering barefoot in the field.
This god is not moved by the musk
of incense or bowls of oranges,
the mask brushed with cochineal,
polished rib of the lion.
Eat the macerated leaves
of the sacred plant. Dance
till the stars blur to a spangly river.
Rain, if it comes, will come.
This god loves the virus as much as the child.
Wild Strawberries
Relax
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she's a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn't plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you'll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
Ellen Bass
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she's a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn't plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you'll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
Ellen Bass
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Days on Water, Babyskin, Grilled Lobster, Mirth Kitchen
Days on water, on air and two if by landed, at last, albeit gently but arrived. Some holidays remind you why you live. Three sisters dancing with one baby boy in a kitchen full of so much warmth and not because the days touched the near hundred mark or the cooking. This what being alive was meant to be I felt as that little babyboy dancing with us and laughed and each of us, for once, had all this plus good love in our lives. It felt like the pay-off for years of work. Three sisters so happy and the husband/brother-in-law all we could wish for in chosen family and my boy: a perfect, beautiful fit and hit with everyone.
For our one beach night, we chose St. Petersburg instead of Treasure Island, and the water bathy and the sand a pristine white and in the mornings there were two ribbons of amazing seashells to be gathered. One so large and intact,rusty-striped, that it looked like I cheated and bought it from one of those seashell shops.
Days in water, the heat so heavy that there was only to submerge: a swimming pool lovely and fountained, an ocean with white sands and clean warm water and so much splashing and laughter that the days could not contain more, though they tried.
Back in Ohio, I keep dreaming Florida. How relaxing and easy it all was. How crazily right my life became all at once and without warning.
Now to teach and then to try packing some things. I don't know what my new address will be yet, but the adventure of that, plus days up in Dublin with a swimming pool and workout area on-site, plus the best garden patio, are things to be savored right now.
My sale-hydrangea is yet-blooming and if it hangs in with me, I will be planting it in the soil of a home I can call my own for a long time. Right now, it hangs on a third floor balcony over a lake loud with Canadian geese and teeming with ducklings and the background of only water and sky. Bliss.
For our one beach night, we chose St. Petersburg instead of Treasure Island, and the water bathy and the sand a pristine white and in the mornings there were two ribbons of amazing seashells to be gathered. One so large and intact,rusty-striped, that it looked like I cheated and bought it from one of those seashell shops.
Days in water, the heat so heavy that there was only to submerge: a swimming pool lovely and fountained, an ocean with white sands and clean warm water and so much splashing and laughter that the days could not contain more, though they tried.
Back in Ohio, I keep dreaming Florida. How relaxing and easy it all was. How crazily right my life became all at once and without warning.
Now to teach and then to try packing some things. I don't know what my new address will be yet, but the adventure of that, plus days up in Dublin with a swimming pool and workout area on-site, plus the best garden patio, are things to be savored right now.
My sale-hydrangea is yet-blooming and if it hangs in with me, I will be planting it in the soil of a home I can call my own for a long time. Right now, it hangs on a third floor balcony over a lake loud with Canadian geese and teeming with ducklings and the background of only water and sky. Bliss.
Monday, July 12, 2010
What Two Oh Seven A. M. is For
If not looking into the darkness and finding it line-broken, the caesuras and commas most of what life is: waiting rooms. The waiting takes more as the days get shorter and after reading Jackie Osherow's God's Acrostic again, and after considering all she says about how maybe God has hidden things in plain sight, down the vertical margins of our seasons and science and our eyes, dutiful drones, glide left to right while we lose the most pressing part of the message.
It's two a.m. again and I have been up twice since I went down. I sleep too little and fitfully, but there is good in this here insomnia and there are dreams. Just now I am thinking a student's after class conversation about how "whatever it is: fate or God or the universe, I feel like things are floating all around me and just when I need them, some drop down and into place." Never have I been more susceptable to such musings as this year, this everylargethingatonce year. The new babies in my life, the maybe-house-buying, and all the love, in various and unexpected forms but there and with people magical enough to know what it is and to tend to it.
The line breaks give the line another way of meaning, I told my class today. A visual moment of holding a thought and then, like breath, releasing it to the next unit of attention. The line breaks give a poem a way of being art with the strings of beads and the pattern of any given musical line of design, a way to pause for a minute and "hold that thought" while a line of prose would be lost to the paragraph, the line break allows that linger--however momentary and un-slowed in the reading--to give the eye a small trinket as it leaves the one line and serpentines down to begin the next. Only a poem does that, and sometimes, when we're lucky, a day.
In a few days, I hold Evan again and my sisters meet the boy and the beginning of the kind of unity of all that matters to me continues and there will be the sea too, some rented convertable and a stretch of stupidly-clear sky. What clouds find us, find us laughing.
For now, sleep.
Demimonde
She writes with lavender ink on cream vellum. A crow
takes roost in the monkey puzzle, is lost
in its formal bracts. It rains; the rivers rise.
Clouds drifting east swell with the monsoon
flooding Thailand; the woman weeps
as she writes. A cargo liner headed seaward
escapes the tip of a triangle. Fingers of rain
point down. A foghorn declaims the enormity
of ocean, its black fathoms. In a small town
on another coast, a man checks the sky,
puts on his raincoat, opens his mailbox — galvanized steel,
flag for rural delivery — inside, an envelope
that he slices with the knife he folds
and pockets before removing her letter.
He will know the spidery purple, the fine cream,
the strokes that slope left, slightly. See, the ink
on the letter is smudged, I just need to know
you are there, the envelope, rain spotted.
Copyright © 2010 Diane Kirsten Martin All rights reserved
from Conjugated Visits
Dream Horse Press
It's two a.m. again and I have been up twice since I went down. I sleep too little and fitfully, but there is good in this here insomnia and there are dreams. Just now I am thinking a student's after class conversation about how "whatever it is: fate or God or the universe, I feel like things are floating all around me and just when I need them, some drop down and into place." Never have I been more susceptable to such musings as this year, this everylargethingatonce year. The new babies in my life, the maybe-house-buying, and all the love, in various and unexpected forms but there and with people magical enough to know what it is and to tend to it.
The line breaks give the line another way of meaning, I told my class today. A visual moment of holding a thought and then, like breath, releasing it to the next unit of attention. The line breaks give a poem a way of being art with the strings of beads and the pattern of any given musical line of design, a way to pause for a minute and "hold that thought" while a line of prose would be lost to the paragraph, the line break allows that linger--however momentary and un-slowed in the reading--to give the eye a small trinket as it leaves the one line and serpentines down to begin the next. Only a poem does that, and sometimes, when we're lucky, a day.
In a few days, I hold Evan again and my sisters meet the boy and the beginning of the kind of unity of all that matters to me continues and there will be the sea too, some rented convertable and a stretch of stupidly-clear sky. What clouds find us, find us laughing.
For now, sleep.
Demimonde
She writes with lavender ink on cream vellum. A crow
takes roost in the monkey puzzle, is lost
in its formal bracts. It rains; the rivers rise.
Clouds drifting east swell with the monsoon
flooding Thailand; the woman weeps
as she writes. A cargo liner headed seaward
escapes the tip of a triangle. Fingers of rain
point down. A foghorn declaims the enormity
of ocean, its black fathoms. In a small town
on another coast, a man checks the sky,
puts on his raincoat, opens his mailbox — galvanized steel,
flag for rural delivery — inside, an envelope
that he slices with the knife he folds
and pockets before removing her letter.
He will know the spidery purple, the fine cream,
the strokes that slope left, slightly. See, the ink
on the letter is smudged, I just need to know
you are there, the envelope, rain spotted.
Copyright © 2010 Diane Kirsten Martin All rights reserved
from Conjugated Visits
Dream Horse Press
Thursday, July 08, 2010
How Swiftly Fly the Days These Days
Teaching all summer and gratefully-so but the days are gone before I know it and the things I meant to do gone with them. A special stolen afternoon with dear Les and the laughter from that and her good brain and heart and the wonderful "buddha bowl" of my old north star made an unexpected treat of the afternoon. Sad began it, her worries and devotion over her dearest friend, but the time itself was good I think, and I was grateful for it. Tomorrow I meant to Yellow Springs, to watch a movie in the art theater there but I may just meander here, make some time for the pool, pack some boxes, get my life into a portable mode.
Tonight I am enjoying the few minutes before I turn in and the last few weeks in this place and in my own place, too. We're off to new adventures. My adventure is the "we" of it and the address, and the house or the symbolic commitments to a place, a set of walls, a bunch of what humans do to say "permanence" while the seasons and the gods laugh. But aren't we pretty to think so? And aren't we beautiful in our attempts? In the face of so much that says no, not bloody likely, as my beloved-boy would say, we say, "if you don't mind, I'll try just the same."
I mean, I believe in the goings-ahead and I am thrilled to be up to the task for the first real time in say, nine years. I am excited to have a yard where what I plant grows and what gets buried can be decorated with my homegrown flowers. I am happy for all that has had to change and be grown and buried to make this new now possible.
Echoing Canto of Fixedness
The effort made by stars
to move for us is massive:
from our fixed point
looking up through crevice
or canyon, at the vast and intricate
patterning, appraising
from a cleared or blank space,
is frightening. `Miracle'
of tawny frogmouth,
aesthetic as torn wood
in its belying swoop, distending
mouth swallowing pinpricks
of gnat-light, is nudged
aside, or magnified if waxing
spirits move the display,
intensity of mortality,
to account for fireworks:
intertexts and skyshow.
Copyright © 2010 John Kinsella All rights reserved
Tonight I am enjoying the few minutes before I turn in and the last few weeks in this place and in my own place, too. We're off to new adventures. My adventure is the "we" of it and the address, and the house or the symbolic commitments to a place, a set of walls, a bunch of what humans do to say "permanence" while the seasons and the gods laugh. But aren't we pretty to think so? And aren't we beautiful in our attempts? In the face of so much that says no, not bloody likely, as my beloved-boy would say, we say, "if you don't mind, I'll try just the same."
I mean, I believe in the goings-ahead and I am thrilled to be up to the task for the first real time in say, nine years. I am excited to have a yard where what I plant grows and what gets buried can be decorated with my homegrown flowers. I am happy for all that has had to change and be grown and buried to make this new now possible.
Echoing Canto of Fixedness
The effort made by stars
to move for us is massive:
from our fixed point
looking up through crevice
or canyon, at the vast and intricate
patterning, appraising
from a cleared or blank space,
is frightening. `Miracle'
of tawny frogmouth,
aesthetic as torn wood
in its belying swoop, distending
mouth swallowing pinpricks
of gnat-light, is nudged
aside, or magnified if waxing
spirits move the display,
intensity of mortality,
to account for fireworks:
intertexts and skyshow.
Copyright © 2010 John Kinsella All rights reserved
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Time to Make the Doughnuts
It's 3:00 a.m. and I am awake only because there was iced coffee today and as much of it as I could down despite knowing tonight would read something like this.
Life is good at Intaglioville. Life is drastically-revised. By summer's end there will be new dwellings, a luscious new room-mate and happiness, laughter every single day or maybe I mean now on those last two.
Back from visiting the family, the roadtrip to Denver and now the big plans, including a visit to the sun and sea of some place I have never been. I will try to post something poetic soon.
Life is good at Intaglioville. Life is drastically-revised. By summer's end there will be new dwellings, a luscious new room-mate and happiness, laughter every single day or maybe I mean now on those last two.
Back from visiting the family, the roadtrip to Denver and now the big plans, including a visit to the sun and sea of some place I have never been. I will try to post something poetic soon.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Mostly Southern Appendages
Today I was offered a list of payphrases, which I declined, but not before looking them all over. I love language.
Oh Poems, how I have failed thee. Still there is one coming for Matt G. that begins with "I have these feelings about spatulas." There are others. The world is a weird kind of poetic lately. I feel settled and un in equal measure.
But I am eyeball-deep in interesting reading. And I have no need to go scrambling about in the most mundane of activities, the most soul-stealing and futile (dating). So there is space, calm and some kind of simpatico to my see-saw.
More when I come up for air. For now, I grade and class-plan and wish to finish some more writing.
Oh Poems, how I have failed thee. Still there is one coming for Matt G. that begins with "I have these feelings about spatulas." There are others. The world is a weird kind of poetic lately. I feel settled and un in equal measure.
But I am eyeball-deep in interesting reading. And I have no need to go scrambling about in the most mundane of activities, the most soul-stealing and futile (dating). So there is space, calm and some kind of simpatico to my see-saw.
More when I come up for air. For now, I grade and class-plan and wish to finish some more writing.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
A zillion poems behind
blame it on Denver, the catch-up of returning, the emotional exhaustion (for life-revolutions don't come cheap) the so-much to do and so-much that matters.
Plus, two poems that I can't post. They are not only my stories to tell. Even w/o those, I am behind.
I have begun a number, completed some little ones and kept up on much of the prose-intended. I have promised my California-ed away sweet-chimp that I will have fifty pages of consecutive text ready by the weekend.
For now, a little taste of Day 5/TMI, with apologies to GML for his cribbed-idea and stolen memory. I promise to share many memories to even the score. More than a few weeks or months can hold.
Facebook
He rakes the yard and gets angry at snapshots
blown from the trash and down the alley:
turned into a corridor
of personality and look-at-me,
wonders what happened to decorum,
or dated-though-it-sounds, modesty.
Wednesday his wife changed her status
to it’s complicated, today’s Friday
and she’s asking to separate. Four hundred
thirty-seven people knew as much two days
ago and he wonders when friend became a verb
how and when she unfriended him and a faded
shot of a Ford Taurus blows into the tam or the fitzer
he’s never sure which,a picture of a German Shepherd
posed in front of a cape cod in the middle of Ohio
appears against the chain link, somebody's swingset,
somebody's clothesline billowing with unmentionables
photographed, no doubt, for the way wind
blows up a garment, lends it form,
blows down the alley end over end.
Plus, two poems that I can't post. They are not only my stories to tell. Even w/o those, I am behind.
I have begun a number, completed some little ones and kept up on much of the prose-intended. I have promised my California-ed away sweet-chimp that I will have fifty pages of consecutive text ready by the weekend.
For now, a little taste of Day 5/TMI, with apologies to GML for his cribbed-idea and stolen memory. I promise to share many memories to even the score. More than a few weeks or months can hold.
He rakes the yard and gets angry at snapshots
blown from the trash and down the alley:
turned into a corridor
of personality and look-at-me,
wonders what happened to decorum,
or dated-though-it-sounds, modesty.
Wednesday his wife changed her status
to it’s complicated, today’s Friday
and she’s asking to separate. Four hundred
thirty-seven people knew as much two days
ago and he wonders when friend became a verb
how and when she unfriended him and a faded
shot of a Ford Taurus blows into the tam or the fitzer
he’s never sure which,a picture of a German Shepherd
posed in front of a cape cod in the middle of Ohio
appears against the chain link, somebody's swingset,
somebody's clothesline billowing with unmentionables
photographed, no doubt, for the way wind
blows up a garment, lends it form,
blows down the alley end over end.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
April Prose Posies Days Three and Four
3
Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in let’s call you memory and be done with it. But I won’t be, won’t be done waking to the thought of climbing those back stairs again, the black matte linoleum I painted to match the kitchen caught somewhere between a moment in 1930 or reawakened into the 50s, the mint green cabinets and the plastic utensils I spray painted around so that throughout the black background, it appeared that murders had taken place and the chalked-out bodies were those of forks, knives, spoons, all haloed out in shades of white, red and mint. The creaky wooden back steps and then bursting into this room, Sam there at the counter, Hey Annie, and it was all there: the things I couldn’t conjure up if asked, the blender here, coffee pot there, what ever happened to that pitcher—the one with the handle re-glued after the cat threw a bowl off the high shelf like a bomb to it. Sam there pouring the morning into our matching cups, Sam there, tall, cheerful, Sam there…and I’m stuck in that place in time again.
I am stuck in that place for a minute like something locking up a gear. What I know of love and memory are gears, how they grind things up or are only stopped by finding what to lodge in their workings.
(from Season of White Flies)
Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in let’s call you memory and be done with it. But I won’t be, won’t be done waking to the thought of climbing those back stairs again, the black matte linoleum I painted to match the kitchen caught somewhere between a moment in 1930 or reawakened into the 50s, the mint green cabinets and the plastic utensils I spray painted around so that throughout the black background, it appeared that murders had taken place and the chalked-out bodies were those of forks, knives, spoons, all haloed out in shades of white, red and mint. The creaky wooden back steps and then bursting into this room, Sam there at the counter, Hey Annie, and it was all there: the things I couldn’t conjure up if asked, the blender here, coffee pot there, what ever happened to that pitcher—the one with the handle re-glued after the cat threw a bowl off the high shelf like a bomb to it. Sam there pouring the morning into our matching cups, Sam there, tall, cheerful, Sam there…and I’m stuck in that place in time again.
I am stuck in that place for a minute like something locking up a gear. What I know of love and memory are gears, how they grind things up or are only stopped by finding what to lodge in their workings.
(from Season of White Flies)
3
Partly Due
to seven seasons since the satanic ritual
we called changing-my-life
to timing—as with automobiles, air travel,
fertility, comedy, marketing and yes, love.
yes, Love, partly due to the dew itself clinging
like a real diamond on a blade of grass;
partly due to all the cubic zirconias, bad flashy
rhinestones, paste sparkles and cloudy stones.
Partly due to death--its morning breath reeking
up the new day. Ask anyone: things die
you will and so will I, we are partly-due
for bliss in some fashion. Partly due to war
that nonstop party, partly due to the diminishing
honeybees, the vanishing gorillas, the faces so human
one can read the elegies inside their dark, wet eyes,
the requiems they compose across their own brows.
partly due to somewhere, in some language,
taking hold and letting go must be one in the same
partly due to a newfound fluency and passport
in need of renewal, a globe spun like a girl
whirling her frothy dress around just before
a dance, a thrill in wherever she’s going next.
to seven seasons since the satanic ritual
we called changing-my-life
to timing—as with automobiles, air travel,
fertility, comedy, marketing and yes, love.
yes, Love, partly due to the dew itself clinging
like a real diamond on a blade of grass;
partly due to all the cubic zirconias, bad flashy
rhinestones, paste sparkles and cloudy stones.
Partly due to death--its morning breath reeking
up the new day. Ask anyone: things die
you will and so will I, we are partly-due
for bliss in some fashion. Partly due to war
that nonstop party, partly due to the diminishing
honeybees, the vanishing gorillas, the faces so human
one can read the elegies inside their dark, wet eyes,
the requiems they compose across their own brows.
partly due to somewhere, in some language,
taking hold and letting go must be one in the same
partly due to a newfound fluency and passport
in need of renewal, a globe spun like a girl
whirling her frothy dress around just before
a dance, a thrill in wherever she’s going next.
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Day Two April Poem by Guest Poet G.M. Lear
You're supposed to every day drink a lot of water
I know it's very difficult, but you oughter.
I know it's very difficult, but you oughter.
Friday, April 02, 2010
April Day Two Brewer
Geese scream the pond’s surface out of smoothness
a hand re-wrinkling the bedsheets.
To skim the season off the top of the lake
and hang it in the panes for a way to look out.
To look-out from the balcony to any god’s hand-mirror
and see the sky’s jigsawed countenance on the ground.
The rainfall that fell there, falls up, regives.
What isn’t earth, isn’t air, isn’t fire is.
a hand re-wrinkling the bedsheets.
To skim the season off the top of the lake
and hang it in the panes for a way to look out.
To look-out from the balcony to any god’s hand-mirror
and see the sky’s jigsawed countenance on the ground.
The rainfall that fell there, falls up, regives.
What isn’t earth, isn’t air, isn’t fire is.
April ala Brewer Prompts Napowrimo
Not the Same as Being Alone
The wild geese collide with you
outside the window where she sleeps
and does not sleep alone
yet still you’re there, too.
Why here again, why now? If he’s there, again,
then how? So many places need you
more: country music’s lost
without you, love songs, too, a tumbleweed dress
falling hem over neckline and hem again,
an appaloosa tearing wild down a prairie. The cattle low
at twilight, where a woman does not sleep
solo, yet you: wandering as a cloud, a state of being
they believed left behind, come in now,
settle-down, lovers have always shared a bed with you.
The wild geese collide with you
outside the window where she sleeps
and does not sleep alone
yet still you’re there, too.
Why here again, why now? If he’s there, again,
then how? So many places need you
more: country music’s lost
without you, love songs, too, a tumbleweed dress
falling hem over neckline and hem again,
an appaloosa tearing wild down a prairie. The cattle low
at twilight, where a woman does not sleep
solo, yet you: wandering as a cloud, a state of being
they believed left behind, come in now,
settle-down, lovers have always shared a bed with you.
April Flowers
1
If not, winter remains, a stain where whiteness is the stain. If not, starlight intrudes on the dark, spots it, light dribbles down the nightness, bleached. If not, winter to skid Sam out of the living and into the otherwise. If not speed’s black ice or the seasons worn, not on the highway but on the blank stare of the impossibly-old woman who pulled out onto the interstate without imagining that what her peripheral vision missed and what she did not turn to see was my husband bound for groceries like any-husband but transformed now to involuntary stuntman, an Evil Kneivel who never trained for the moment when he’d swerve to save her antique bones and make of his body a kind of figure of resurrection, rising like a circus-Messiah sprung from a cannon but the funny part, the bent knee bounced down to the ground, the perky jump up to show his form and intention, that part got skipped, if not for that, what would remove him from me, I wondered. Not time, for the widowed never imagine that their love would end lamely, a cute bank-teller, a telling bank statement, a night at a hotel so extravagant, no wife imagines her body ever sliding down the luxurious length of such-bedding again.
2
The one with violets in her lap is the other, or child. The one with violets in her lap is never you again, when wooing has made way for the won-over, the once-over that finds you found. The one with violets in her lap in never wife, but widow, I think, while I take the funeral arrangements apart and throw them all over the living room floor. What I remember are the violets, delicate things we kept on a step-ladder that Sammy and I painted over in leftover colors: honeydew green, sockeye salmon, a color called puce and one eerie blue. We called it the Vomit of Key West but with the violets we tended in their various shades of purple, magenta, and plum, there was harmony to it.
1
If not, winter remains, a stain where whiteness is the stain. If not, starlight intrudes on the dark, spots it, light dribbles down the nightness, bleached. If not, winter to skid Sam out of the living and into the otherwise. If not speed’s black ice or the seasons worn, not on the highway but on the blank stare of the impossibly-old woman who pulled out onto the interstate without imagining that what her peripheral vision missed and what she did not turn to see was my husband bound for groceries like any-husband but transformed now to involuntary stuntman, an Evil Kneivel who never trained for the moment when he’d swerve to save her antique bones and make of his body a kind of figure of resurrection, rising like a circus-Messiah sprung from a cannon but the funny part, the bent knee bounced down to the ground, the perky jump up to show his form and intention, that part got skipped, if not for that, what would remove him from me, I wondered. Not time, for the widowed never imagine that their love would end lamely, a cute bank-teller, a telling bank statement, a night at a hotel so extravagant, no wife imagines her body ever sliding down the luxurious length of such-bedding again.
2
The one with violets in her lap is the other, or child. The one with violets in her lap is never you again, when wooing has made way for the won-over, the once-over that finds you found. The one with violets in her lap in never wife, but widow, I think, while I take the funeral arrangements apart and throw them all over the living room floor. What I remember are the violets, delicate things we kept on a step-ladder that Sammy and I painted over in leftover colors: honeydew green, sockeye salmon, a color called puce and one eerie blue. We called it the Vomit of Key West but with the violets we tended in their various shades of purple, magenta, and plum, there was harmony to it.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
O Bless You & Bless You & A-choo
Spoke with Evan on Skype tonight. He sneezed and his mommy and I both blessed him, which made him strangely-happy. He likes when things he does get response. He claps, I clap, I sing the little Greek song about clapping and braided Greek cookies in paper (koulourakia) brought home by the daddy. My own Daddy taught Evan the song, just as he taught Evy's mommy and her sisters which is yours truly, for one.
Yours truly is watching life steamroll in at the speed of well, something. Things she can't say here and things she can't say yet but there are life revolutions afoot, everywhere.
For now there are words and I have had some rattling around and some falling inkily-thud to the page. There will be more. There will be more. But the blog, is the blog a thing I use to keep things like wildflowers trapped between panes of glass? Is it a place I spoke to/from when loneliest? I am some things more than others but the loneliness tree does not grow tall in me. I can point to where it's planted, it will always stand but... I have lost the urge to say what I can't or shouldn't yet say.
But not to share beauty. My favorite phonecalls are the ones where Kat, Liz or Veace; The Bear, the Spoon, or even the old friend SF used to call in a poem to me. We would find something so urgently-beautiful that we rushed to share it, so pressing was the need to carry it to someone else.
How to Say I Love You
On evenings when my dogs and I circle the block,
if I am guilty of anything,
it's being distracted by the streetlamp.
I am visible in it.
If I look directly at the lamp, I can't see the stars.
I don't need the stars anymore?
I used to think
I'd cavern you, and grotto you, waterfall you,
and immense-rock you, solitude you
until rain Bristled the evening, lit
our roof to singing—
And of thinking too hard about what to say
when we're home from our walk:
my wife: welcome home high-wires
and habitual nightmares, lonely woes
and wooden shoes!
Copyright © 2010 Gary L. McDowell All rights reserved
Yours truly is watching life steamroll in at the speed of well, something. Things she can't say here and things she can't say yet but there are life revolutions afoot, everywhere.
For now there are words and I have had some rattling around and some falling inkily-thud to the page. There will be more. There will be more. But the blog, is the blog a thing I use to keep things like wildflowers trapped between panes of glass? Is it a place I spoke to/from when loneliest? I am some things more than others but the loneliness tree does not grow tall in me. I can point to where it's planted, it will always stand but... I have lost the urge to say what I can't or shouldn't yet say.
But not to share beauty. My favorite phonecalls are the ones where Kat, Liz or Veace; The Bear, the Spoon, or even the old friend SF used to call in a poem to me. We would find something so urgently-beautiful that we rushed to share it, so pressing was the need to carry it to someone else.
How to Say I Love You
On evenings when my dogs and I circle the block,
if I am guilty of anything,
it's being distracted by the streetlamp.
I am visible in it.
If I look directly at the lamp, I can't see the stars.
I don't need the stars anymore?
I used to think
I'd cavern you, and grotto you, waterfall you,
and immense-rock you, solitude you
until rain Bristled the evening, lit
our roof to singing—
And of thinking too hard about what to say
when we're home from our walk:
my wife: welcome home high-wires
and habitual nightmares, lonely woes
and wooden shoes!
Copyright © 2010 Gary L. McDowell All rights reserved
Monday, March 22, 2010
Flicks
One of those "Amelie" moments came to me today in the form of an old candy that no one recalled but me.
The scene I am referencing is the one where in a phone booth, our heroine sees to it that the older man finds the tin full of his treasures from forty years previous. My moment was not so large and moving but it was pure nostalgia. As a child I recalled Flicks for their design and the vibrant foil tubes. The chocolate was, in fact, chocolate-flavored and even years ago, it tasted kind of cheap but uniquely itself. But the tubes, like kaleidoscopes in shape, like special, exotic gifts: metallicly-red, gold, green and blue. Stacked together they were a wonderful xylophone or the satisfying cylinders of a pipe organ. In any case, they moved me, reminded me of lives and theatres gone by of Evanston, Wyoming's one Strand Theatre that held all the town's romantic secrets on any given Friday night. Of the young girl always on the outskirts of everything, waiting in line.
The scene I am referencing is the one where in a phone booth, our heroine sees to it that the older man finds the tin full of his treasures from forty years previous. My moment was not so large and moving but it was pure nostalgia. As a child I recalled Flicks for their design and the vibrant foil tubes. The chocolate was, in fact, chocolate-flavored and even years ago, it tasted kind of cheap but uniquely itself. But the tubes, like kaleidoscopes in shape, like special, exotic gifts: metallicly-red, gold, green and blue. Stacked together they were a wonderful xylophone or the satisfying cylinders of a pipe organ. In any case, they moved me, reminded me of lives and theatres gone by of Evanston, Wyoming's one Strand Theatre that held all the town's romantic secrets on any given Friday night. Of the young girl always on the outskirts of everything, waiting in line.
Stray Paragraphs, February, Year of the Rat
After Charles Wright
Why we resist coming after, coming second, coming late
but not last
I cannot say, but we seem to, though we should root to, if we
had the sense of a brush pile, or the squirrels.
There are no gifts that are not dowries; etym- and archaeologies
like the first divorce—the division of day from night,
that coin of solace and
precursor to the watershed, to the neighborhood's
downward contours—define where everything runs
and where runoffs deposit their wrack lines.
What accumulates is not a reason, not debris but tablature,
adagia, apologia, full-stops and half-lives along with twigs and trash,
notations scratched-out in unremarkable fashion.
We have commissioned a longitudinal study, so give it time,
but try to avoid that ur-emphasis poets put on being,
where what is best left unaccented they prod into becoming
something else,
a thing at all, that wants nothing anyway, more or less,
like our lost baby, our would-be who would-not-be,
who will miss the seventh moon's scheduled swell
but asks for no condolence.
February, old rite-monger, this is how you will be welcomed,
in the name of those who won't be.
Ignore my firstborn, as I cannot, as he pries up the corner
of the living room rug
to reveal the filthy tape, the wood floor's bright parts,
and nothing else
the naked eye can see, however suggestive.
Even so it ties the room together
in a way you cannot, or will not, willfully bereft
of origins, middle sister who, like us,
awaits recombination, some saving throw, mitochondrial.
Copyright © 2009 John Estes All rights reserved
After Charles Wright
Why we resist coming after, coming second, coming late
but not last
I cannot say, but we seem to, though we should root to, if we
had the sense of a brush pile, or the squirrels.
There are no gifts that are not dowries; etym- and archaeologies
like the first divorce—the division of day from night,
that coin of solace and
precursor to the watershed, to the neighborhood's
downward contours—define where everything runs
and where runoffs deposit their wrack lines.
What accumulates is not a reason, not debris but tablature,
adagia, apologia, full-stops and half-lives along with twigs and trash,
notations scratched-out in unremarkable fashion.
We have commissioned a longitudinal study, so give it time,
but try to avoid that ur-emphasis poets put on being,
where what is best left unaccented they prod into becoming
something else,
a thing at all, that wants nothing anyway, more or less,
like our lost baby, our would-be who would-not-be,
who will miss the seventh moon's scheduled swell
but asks for no condolence.
February, old rite-monger, this is how you will be welcomed,
in the name of those who won't be.
Ignore my firstborn, as I cannot, as he pries up the corner
of the living room rug
to reveal the filthy tape, the wood floor's bright parts,
and nothing else
the naked eye can see, however suggestive.
Even so it ties the room together
in a way you cannot, or will not, willfully bereft
of origins, middle sister who, like us,
awaits recombination, some saving throw, mitochondrial.
Copyright © 2009 John Estes All rights reserved
Friday, March 19, 2010
Sans Loneliness
Have I nothing to say? I would like to think not but it's been hard to keep the blog going. April, with its poetry month challenge, that should get me back. Until then, or soon, or the next pretty I find to share.
Today I househunt, enjoy the sunlight that is, the grief almost blown-over for my Bronte, and how last Saturday she lingered still and I had to let her go.
That letting go seems to be the way lately. Something so long considered and then, a phonecall, a bit of news, a ripe May and so much changes in a day.
Not Yet
Give me, if you will, a little time
To understand how meanings come and go,
Resembling ants converging at an anthill
And then dispersing, each with work to do.
Meanwhile, the anthill rises and expands.
The sun comes out. The days grow ever shorter.
Give me time to sense how meanings perish
Like plums left unattended in a bowl.
Because their lives were finite in the first place,
That spreading mold should come as no surprise.
So it is with meanings, I suppose,
Though how and why I've yet to understand.
Copyright © 2009 Ben Howard All rights reserved
from Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt
Salmon Poetry
Today I househunt, enjoy the sunlight that is, the grief almost blown-over for my Bronte, and how last Saturday she lingered still and I had to let her go.
That letting go seems to be the way lately. Something so long considered and then, a phonecall, a bit of news, a ripe May and so much changes in a day.
Not Yet
Give me, if you will, a little time
To understand how meanings come and go,
Resembling ants converging at an anthill
And then dispersing, each with work to do.
Meanwhile, the anthill rises and expands.
The sun comes out. The days grow ever shorter.
Give me time to sense how meanings perish
Like plums left unattended in a bowl.
Because their lives were finite in the first place,
That spreading mold should come as no surprise.
So it is with meanings, I suppose,
Though how and why I've yet to understand.
Copyright © 2009 Ben Howard All rights reserved
from Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt
Salmon Poetry
Sunday, March 07, 2010
"In the Middle of the Night
Sam rolled to my side of the bed and I pretended a sleep deeper than the one that I began so that I could feel his extra hold on me, the kiss into my hair that lingered a beat or two longer and said in no-words, I cherish you.
One night he pulled me so tightly against him, I thought he knew something tragic about me, was so close to me that he could see my blood's betrayals, some wild cell marking my demise.
There were whole tiny villages inside me even then, imaginary and dreamed up by imaginary characters living behind my spleen each of which held small flags in the street parades held in Sam's honor--even before his death. I am not worried now that if I should someday love again that the strangeness of the widowed will leave its obsessive fragrance clinging to me in ways that will cause anyone the slightest discomfort. The bond that I had to Sam, preposterous as it might sound, runs umbilical cords made of solid steel from each of the town's residents straight to him even now. They are that removed, those townspeople dreamed up by the dreamed-up villagers living in a burrough behind my real but unseeable spleen, that removed and that constant."
One night he pulled me so tightly against him, I thought he knew something tragic about me, was so close to me that he could see my blood's betrayals, some wild cell marking my demise.
There were whole tiny villages inside me even then, imaginary and dreamed up by imaginary characters living behind my spleen each of which held small flags in the street parades held in Sam's honor--even before his death. I am not worried now that if I should someday love again that the strangeness of the widowed will leave its obsessive fragrance clinging to me in ways that will cause anyone the slightest discomfort. The bond that I had to Sam, preposterous as it might sound, runs umbilical cords made of solid steel from each of the town's residents straight to him even now. They are that removed, those townspeople dreamed up by the dreamed-up villagers living in a burrough behind my real but unseeable spleen, that removed and that constant."
Saturday, February 27, 2010
For Bronte Lynne W. Kartsonakis
Labored breathing in the middle of the night, but morning finds you still here, still drinking all the special-milk I can pour for you. Nineteen years in the knowing. We were both young girls then, our first apartment, Salt Lake City, you: a handful of cat, protecting your brother by puffing up to the size of a large breakfast muffin and hissing with a mouth no wider than a fingernail, but for all you were worth. Your worth: nothing I can measure with your breaths-heavy, and countable but not, and value, but never enough. From Utah to Alabama to two cities in Ohio, I raise today to you and with luck, tomorrow, too.
FARM CAT
Dawn terror of songbirds, night-visioned devil,
if there is a heaven for animals, it follows that there be a hell.
And so, at last, I’ll know where to look for you.
There, at least, you’ll appear with wings—
though they’ll be gristly and bloodied in your grinning mouth.
There the nose leather of Cerberus shall bleed into eternity.
Furred city of the meanest fleas, if there was ever some cheetah
under your tabby hide, it died long before you did.
Time had your gold eyes cotton and haze,
farmers kicked and shot at you,
and packs of leash-less dogs put you at bay,
but I will wake in the dark morning one time more,
and tell the mockingbirds, though I do not believe it true,
that Wallace, my own, wakes in the Egypt of some albacore heaven.
Eliot Khalil Wilson
Buy his new book: This Island of Dogs
at AWP 2010 or from Amazon in April.
FARM CAT
Dawn terror of songbirds, night-visioned devil,
if there is a heaven for animals, it follows that there be a hell.
And so, at last, I’ll know where to look for you.
There, at least, you’ll appear with wings—
though they’ll be gristly and bloodied in your grinning mouth.
There the nose leather of Cerberus shall bleed into eternity.
Furred city of the meanest fleas, if there was ever some cheetah
under your tabby hide, it died long before you did.
Time had your gold eyes cotton and haze,
farmers kicked and shot at you,
and packs of leash-less dogs put you at bay,
but I will wake in the dark morning one time more,
and tell the mockingbirds, though I do not believe it true,
that Wallace, my own, wakes in the Egypt of some albacore heaven.
Eliot Khalil Wilson
Buy his new book: This Island of Dogs
at AWP 2010 or from Amazon in April.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Wonderful weekend
perfection, actually.
The week has flown by. The snow-day probably helped it along. Tonight, I write, work on the apartment, anticipate my Friday night and feel happy. Rare thing it is to feel so satisfied with so much.
Whitman today in the lit. class and for fun, I had everyone read a passage of Song of Myself. I almost teared up thinking how old Walt would have loved to hear the various voices, the genders, races, accents, inflections of the multitudes.
The week has flown by. The snow-day probably helped it along. Tonight, I write, work on the apartment, anticipate my Friday night and feel happy. Rare thing it is to feel so satisfied with so much.
Whitman today in the lit. class and for fun, I had everyone read a passage of Song of Myself. I almost teared up thinking how old Walt would have loved to hear the various voices, the genders, races, accents, inflections of the multitudes.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
OLIVER DE LA PAZ
Insomnia as Transfiguration
Because the night is a scattering of sounds—blunt
branches hurtling to the ground, a nest stir, a sigh
from someone beside me. Because I am awake
and know that I am not on fire. I am fine. It’s August.
The scar on my neck, clarity—two curtains sewn.
A little door locked from the inside.
Nothing wants anything tonight. There are only stars
and the usual animals. Only the fallen apple’s wine-red crush.
Rabbits hurtle through the dark. Little missiles.
Little fur blossoms hiding from owls. Nothing wants
to be in this galaxy anymore. Everything wants the afterlife.
Dear afterlife, my body is lopped off. My hands
are in the carport. My legs, in the river. My head, of course,
in the tree awaiting sunrise. It dreams it is the owl,
a dark-winged habit. Then, a rabbit’s dash
to the apple, shining like nebulae. Then the owl
scissoring the air. The heart pumps its box of inks.
The river’s auscultations keep pace
with my lungs. Blame the ear for its attention. Blame
the body for not wanting to let go, but once a thing moves
it can’t help it. There is only instinct, that living “yes.”
Insomnia as Transfiguration
Because the night is a scattering of sounds—blunt
branches hurtling to the ground, a nest stir, a sigh
from someone beside me. Because I am awake
and know that I am not on fire. I am fine. It’s August.
The scar on my neck, clarity—two curtains sewn.
A little door locked from the inside.
Nothing wants anything tonight. There are only stars
and the usual animals. Only the fallen apple’s wine-red crush.
Rabbits hurtle through the dark. Little missiles.
Little fur blossoms hiding from owls. Nothing wants
to be in this galaxy anymore. Everything wants the afterlife.
Dear afterlife, my body is lopped off. My hands
are in the carport. My legs, in the river. My head, of course,
in the tree awaiting sunrise. It dreams it is the owl,
a dark-winged habit. Then, a rabbit’s dash
to the apple, shining like nebulae. Then the owl
scissoring the air. The heart pumps its box of inks.
The river’s auscultations keep pace
with my lungs. Blame the ear for its attention. Blame
the body for not wanting to let go, but once a thing moves
it can’t help it. There is only instinct, that living “yes.”
On Reminding SF that I Am Still Here
I also like sunlight. I am a person who has to rush out of my home every morning into the sunlight to make sure the world is still here.
Harrowing drive back from The Road Trip, but the road, the trip, the West Bank Inn overlooking the snowed-over lake, the makeshift Valentine's dinner of smoked oysters, sardines, braided mozzarella, water crackers and angel food cake mmmwaah.
The fact that it is never a good idea to put bubble-bath in a jacuzzi and always too tempting not to. Sam & Ethels with cakes that look so homemade, a girl contemplates a day when she really will indulge. And raisin pie! Good music, laughter and more laughter. A magical turn-off to a set of graves and a whole glittering sea of whiteness. What heart-shaped, snow-colored days.
Harrowing drive back from The Road Trip, but the road, the trip, the West Bank Inn overlooking the snowed-over lake, the makeshift Valentine's dinner of smoked oysters, sardines, braided mozzarella, water crackers and angel food cake mmmwaah.
The fact that it is never a good idea to put bubble-bath in a jacuzzi and always too tempting not to. Sam & Ethels with cakes that look so homemade, a girl contemplates a day when she really will indulge. And raisin pie! Good music, laughter and more laughter. A magical turn-off to a set of graves and a whole glittering sea of whiteness. What heart-shaped, snow-colored days.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Thanks Michelle for all things Michelle and this Billy Collin's poem, too
Litany
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Lovin' that Lesley Jenike
If you haven't bought her book, you should. If you have, you will go straight to heaven, classier for the reading.
Lost Eyes or The Lost Art of Transcription
— for Hart Crane’s mother
To coax out your spirit I left a fifth of Cutty Sark
on the highboy, paper lantern in the cherry tree,
map of indeterminable coast by the bed, borrowed
Tempest, tattersall-covered, in the bed, full-fathom
five, a crushed Mexican lily, born of paper from
our tax holiday you lined the sea with, a stop-gap,
while I sheltered upstairs on a cool wide spread,
waiting for you to die. Love-making was never easy,
but to transcribe it? Minus a mouth, your tear-jerkers
turn to gas and fly. I sink into your syntax one
antiquated line at a time, as if I understand. But I
never did. You are too much for me, even dead
Lost Eyes or The Lost Art of Transcription
— for Hart Crane’s mother
To coax out your spirit I left a fifth of Cutty Sark
on the highboy, paper lantern in the cherry tree,
map of indeterminable coast by the bed, borrowed
Tempest, tattersall-covered, in the bed, full-fathom
five, a crushed Mexican lily, born of paper from
our tax holiday you lined the sea with, a stop-gap,
while I sheltered upstairs on a cool wide spread,
waiting for you to die. Love-making was never easy,
but to transcribe it? Minus a mouth, your tear-jerkers
turn to gas and fly. I sink into your syntax one
antiquated line at a time, as if I understand. But I
never did. You are too much for me, even dead
Monday, February 08, 2010
Wondering if any other poetry lovers
noticed this. (Thank you wonderful Kate for drawing my attention to it. I had not seen the game and would have missed it.)
Wedding Vows
Eliot Khalil Wilson
...and I'd like to add that I will mind like a dog. I will wear whatever you like. I will go wingtip. No more white socks. A necktie stitched to my throat, turtlenecks in August. New York gray or black, only colors that dogs can see. I will know of squash, vermouth, and wedges. I will do all the grilling because I love it so. I will drive the wagon, man the bar, weed-whack compulsively. I will make money, the bed, never a to do.
I will build like an Egyptian, a two-mile pier complex, a five-story deck. I will listen like a bat, attend to the birth of sounds in the back of your throat. I will remember like and Indian elephant, recall requests made of me in a previous life. Your date of birth will be carved in the palm of my hand. I will make good. I will do right. I will sleep on the pegboard on the wall in the garage.
I'll have a tongue like a sperm whale, eyes like a harp seal, biceps like a fiddler crab. I will have gold coins, gold rings, stiff gold hair like shredded wheat. I will be golden at receptions, gold in your pocket, Paganini in your pants. Money will climb over the house like ivy. Excellent credit will be my white whale. I will always. I will everyday. I will nail the seat down. I will let you pretend I am your father.
I will be a priapic automatic teller machine, never down, never a usage fee, a stock prophet, a para-mutual seer, tractable, worshipful no matter what. I will always want to. I won't notice what you don't point out. I will entertain your friends, say how your love saved me. I will convince them. I will talk, really talk, to them. Deep meanings will be toothpicked and passed around.
I will need zero maintenance. I will be a utility or a railroad. There will be no breakdowns or disconnections. I will allow you lovers, Moroccan teenagers and Turkish men. I will adopt them. I will not cry. I will respond to grief by earning more. My sweat will smell like drug money, like white bread baking. I will be as clean as a Mormon, wholesome like Iowa. I will lead. I will be a star, a rock, like Rock Hudson.
Wedding Vows
Eliot Khalil Wilson
...and I'd like to add that I will mind like a dog. I will wear whatever you like. I will go wingtip. No more white socks. A necktie stitched to my throat, turtlenecks in August. New York gray or black, only colors that dogs can see. I will know of squash, vermouth, and wedges. I will do all the grilling because I love it so. I will drive the wagon, man the bar, weed-whack compulsively. I will make money, the bed, never a to do.
I will build like an Egyptian, a two-mile pier complex, a five-story deck. I will listen like a bat, attend to the birth of sounds in the back of your throat. I will remember like and Indian elephant, recall requests made of me in a previous life. Your date of birth will be carved in the palm of my hand. I will make good. I will do right. I will sleep on the pegboard on the wall in the garage.
I'll have a tongue like a sperm whale, eyes like a harp seal, biceps like a fiddler crab. I will have gold coins, gold rings, stiff gold hair like shredded wheat. I will be golden at receptions, gold in your pocket, Paganini in your pants. Money will climb over the house like ivy. Excellent credit will be my white whale. I will always. I will everyday. I will nail the seat down. I will let you pretend I am your father.
I will be a priapic automatic teller machine, never down, never a usage fee, a stock prophet, a para-mutual seer, tractable, worshipful no matter what. I will always want to. I won't notice what you don't point out. I will entertain your friends, say how your love saved me. I will convince them. I will talk, really talk, to them. Deep meanings will be toothpicked and passed around.
I will need zero maintenance. I will be a utility or a railroad. There will be no breakdowns or disconnections. I will allow you lovers, Moroccan teenagers and Turkish men. I will adopt them. I will not cry. I will respond to grief by earning more. My sweat will smell like drug money, like white bread baking. I will be as clean as a Mormon, wholesome like Iowa. I will lead. I will be a star, a rock, like Rock Hudson.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Snowed-Out
which meant too, snowed-in and the roadtrip something yet to look forward to for a later weekend.
What can be said here is that there was no sorrow at the plan-change. There's in fact, little sorrow, save for my uncle's death and my father's sadness at having no living brothers. For today, all that I love lives and breathes and feels close at hand. Plus, were I the girl to believe in answered prayers or that I warrant any such personal attention from something more fantastic, I would say something large about how much I had hoped for so much of what is right and right here.
It is so much harder to write about happiness without sounding like you are naive or walking a tightrope that only the crowd can see is frayed badly at one end. To the first I can say that being happy is some amount of work, in the initial laying of foundation if not in the subsequent care and feeding. To the latter charge, sure, we are all on a tightrope like that, it is called mortality. But for the first time in years, I feel like I really went after what I wanted and trusted myself that I knew what I knew. It's hard to be happy and harder to admit it. It's hard not to feel like fate would like to have a shot at that target you have now named and propped up for display. But it is harder to stay in a state of skepticism, self-sabatoge and chronic waiting for what might ensure more of happiness' opposite or indifference, at least.
Loving this song.
What can be said here is that there was no sorrow at the plan-change. There's in fact, little sorrow, save for my uncle's death and my father's sadness at having no living brothers. For today, all that I love lives and breathes and feels close at hand. Plus, were I the girl to believe in answered prayers or that I warrant any such personal attention from something more fantastic, I would say something large about how much I had hoped for so much of what is right and right here.
It is so much harder to write about happiness without sounding like you are naive or walking a tightrope that only the crowd can see is frayed badly at one end. To the first I can say that being happy is some amount of work, in the initial laying of foundation if not in the subsequent care and feeding. To the latter charge, sure, we are all on a tightrope like that, it is called mortality. But for the first time in years, I feel like I really went after what I wanted and trusted myself that I knew what I knew. It's hard to be happy and harder to admit it. It's hard not to feel like fate would like to have a shot at that target you have now named and propped up for display. But it is harder to stay in a state of skepticism, self-sabatoge and chronic waiting for what might ensure more of happiness' opposite or indifference, at least.
Loving this song.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Such a weekend
It has been some time since there has been something I have looked forward to as much as I am looking forward to Friday afternoon when I get to be picked up from school directly and head off on a road trip, carefully-planned to include such perfect picks as a cafe called Sam & Ethel's. Then as dusk approaches, lakes, motels, the perfect meandering to find our way there. There is talk of a hike and farmland, (silos!) and the kind of days I used to seek all through my time living out west. It is no wonder that my favorite kind of soul resonates to the landscapes too, of Wyoming and "gets" the kind of diners and drives that make an afternoon flat-out holidayed. My BFF said that a street in Cincinnati smelled like vacation and this weekend is steeped in holiday.
I am so excited. Tonight, I sleep and tomorrow pack then dinner with my co-road-tripper. I cannot hurry the hours off fast enough.
I am so excited. Tonight, I sleep and tomorrow pack then dinner with my co-road-tripper. I cannot hurry the hours off fast enough.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)