In New York & Strolling Along

trying to decide between Chinatown & The Poet's House. There are advantages to both, but I think I'm craving pretty, bright, plastic minutiae & food filled with textures I just barely recognize and not in this order. If paper made confetti of food, it would likely be found in Chinatown.

Yes, the Weather is a Bubble-Machine Set to Always

I feel Autumn's first chilly blow in my ear. Oh for one of those leaves all hand-shaped with five colors at once spreading from their palms.

Someone made me a mixed cd that's a bubble-machine season. Yum.

Tomorrow I ride a scooter with the best name: Stella--a mode of travel that makes me crave Italy and something I shouldn't be eating and a name that starts me wishing for Brando's chest, wife-beatered or just straight-up. Yum-again and then some.

The Day the Babies Came Down

was unextraordinary, excepting the weather, accepting the no u-turn sign
erected certain happenings just go ahead and happen. We had known storms,
Babies, we had known the way a clap of thunder shivers our very timbers
but we couldn't know, couldn't begin to fathom, what weathers
our errors began. Then the babies, Good God, the babies,
overfed, pillow-bodied, resilient, sometimes mean.
Asher Paine, from The Day the Babies Came Down

Sigh...

Thanaversary Poem

You're back again, still standing
ankle deep in red-tinged moss by the edge
of the lake, your buddy Clint, your girl Virginia
and you, sixteen, drinking beer, laughing
should we go to the fireworks show?

Trust in this, your forty-first re-telling,
trust I'll take you somewhere new.
Even if you do go, you make it home
because, instead of Clint, Virginia
sits next to you. So when you stomp
the throttle she touches your right wrist,
whisper, "We don't have to
speed. We're better when we go slow."

Which is to say, you don't scream
around that corner, your buddy doesn't
yank the wheel, you all don't hit the tree,
Virginia, sixteen, doesn't die.

You grow to actually love her, to receive
fully what she said one night after the drive-in,
"Loneliness has made us victims of desire."
Receive what's true: her wisdom, her gift
at dowsing the sweetness that runs
in all beings, even you. Way far

better yet: you don't drive anywhere,
Virginia says, louder, "Let's not go." Speaking
through her body, through her eyes,
she says, "Why so much thirst for oblivion?
Come sit with me on the moss. This is my
chance to show you what it's like to be alive."

She blows a breath my way.
I breathe it in, feel the yen
for death loosen its noose. Soon
it's evening, the sky explodes with stars,
the beginingless, the endless, so close
we can feel them on our skin as we perch
on the mossy lip of the black lake now
a night kingdom of ten thousand pyres.

--Peter Harris, reprinted from Crab Orchard Review

Windflowers

Cate Marvin's new book is out. Your world needs one.


A Windmill Makes a Statement

You think I like to stand all day, all night,
all any kind of light, to be subject only
to wind? You are right. If seasons undo
me, you are my season. And you are the light
making off with its reflection as my stainless
steel fins spin.
On lawns, on lawns we stand,
we windmills make a statement. We turn air,
churn air, turning always on waiting for your
season. "There is no lover more lover than the air.
You care, you care as you twist my arms
round, till my songs become popsicle

and I wing out radiants of light all across
suburban lawns. You are right, the churning
is for you, for you are right, no one but you
I spin for all night, all day, restless for your

sight to pass across the lawn, tease grasses,
because I so like how you lay above me,
how I hovered beneath you, and we learned
some other way to say: There you are.

You strip the cut, splice it to strips, you mill
the wind, you scissor the air into ecstasy until
all lawns shimmer with your bluest energy.

Copyright © 2007 Cate Marvin

Misanthrope

One of those weeks already, when the world seems stupid, small & mean. Last week, a complete physical and my every number perfection and the blood was all kinds of the right highs and lows. Crucial because medicine (for many reasons) terrifies. This has been a month of trying to get all the things done I meant to, so when I embarked on phase two of check-ups and clean-ups and teaching at dawn's first open-eye--there are snags, rushings around, expensive and upsetting so that aggravation ensues. The phone a distressor and sleep an old island I used to swim out to. Last night, utter insomnia. Today, a bath of spite am I. But Verse Daily....ah, Verse Daily take me away. Besides certain birds un-sad so much. Thank God for them.


Non-Sonnet For Sleeping Birds

Early morning light spills trails
of aqua in its quiet promenade.
I've been here before.

Consciousness, its brutal water wheel,
spins for hours & the morning brings
a hardy slipper I have not called for.

Nights in half-lit rooms, my peripheral vision
catches shadows of running dwarves, black cats
in masquerade, a skunk who preens his plume.

I only look when I'm ready to see.
I think the hallway is breathing.

copyright © 2007 Betsy Wheeler All rights reserved

A Site that Rocks

Every Other Day

No Birdbrain He-mu

whose three-toed football kicks clean
into every goal.

Your vampire girls couldn't be more proud of you, John Adams & colleagues

Bird Flu

More avgolemono on tap. One bird barely on the mend and another on the decline. The DeLong festivities slept right through as well as L-Bo's phonecall (miss you!) It's an achy, icky day for ailing emus.

The Syrupy Daze of Summer

Slow-trickling and unwealthy. But the BFS concert was wonderful. And that I had to miss my beloved Old 97s last night was a little more okay because my good bird generously allowed me an outing too extravagant for summer and it was a blast.
My good bird is a little bit undertheweatherbird which means gallons of avgolemono soup and tea and Drusilla as heating pad. All the good coziness.

The yard sale that I posted to craigslist but not to my blog was a bit of a bust. Next time, more fliers, more vintage, more planning and yes, bloggers, all of you.

Java-ed with my dear friend Jixie yesterday and will be Arlins-bound for some All DeLong festivities on Friday. I am jonesing for NY and SLC and Tampa. Something will soon be done to remedy these tremors, but for now, I have gathered laundry money enough for a coffee after my work-out. Ah, the glamourous life.

I raise my glass to you, Bird. (G&T Double)

Bowling for Soup Anyone?

Me & mine are hitting Bogarts on Monday July 23rd for the concert. Contact Headquarters for details. We are hoping you'll want to go, too.
If you haven't heard Almost or Come Back to Texas, you're kind of missing out.
(Speaking of missing out, the emu loves certain someones like Nathan Parker, Joel Brouwer, my unflakey-filo: Joshua Butts (Dr. Friday calls him The Good J,) Phil B. Stuart Vail--people the emu hasn't even met, by the way. The emu feels very shakey about some of the rest of y'all withholders. Maybe you're too good for emu-haiku? Maybe you should just write epics & Immortal Verse. But the thing is: Joel Brouwer's no slouch. Nathan Parker? Joshua Butts? These are the kind of quality peeps that would make an emu peck hard (not in a good way) at any disparaging comments.

There's nothing wrong with Ohio. There's nothing wrong with a little not-so-clandestine but so-hot emu luv. Give it up, already!

Frustrated Bird

Emu in heat makes
the most pitiful cry. Please
please the sorry bird.

Poets, friends of poets, fiction writers, lovers, fighters, summer-bored and murderous one and all, I am begging you. We, me and Doctor Friday/Sir Emu/The Pretty Bird and Drusilla the vampire vamp cat from hell are on our eight knees.

Hotemuluv isn't getting any. I see you there, your links, your you-tubes, your networks and extended networks, your friend and family plans. Our bird eyes you too, and what it sees is some stingy-assed literati. We are asking for you for seventeen syllables. Seventeen teensy syllables of courtly love or raunchy throw a bird up against a car kind of meter.

Make it the new meme for you and yours. Go to hotemuluv.com
Click on Give Birth to Emu
Check out the haiku
Hit submit your poem.

Then, send every single person you know to see the bird. S/he'll make it so worth your while. (Or you might at least appear on a t-shirt.)

Leaving Louisville

where the leaves on the side of I-65 seem to be already thinking autumn-wise. There was a white corvette with painful red leather interior, an afternoon on W Fourth where the streets are ready for a later-fervor and just up the road, all sharply-ironic, Ryan Adams will be singing tonight. I drove away from Ryan A. b/c that's the kind of genius-knot with which I'm tied.

In other news I wrote a poem in response to Danielle's poem. Maybe I'll post it and someone can respond to my poem about Danielle's poem which mentions another poem. Or should we start a new stone in the water and the group of us (you know who you are Poets, Emus, Countrymen) can ripple out.
Any takers?

For You
I once read a poem that compared

a pomegranate to a heart. And there

sparrows darting in and out

of the lines, violets throwing off

moonlight like old coats, and

a student raising her hand to say

I don't get it. Someone loved Someone
Else, though Someone Else didn't love

Someone back, or Someone Else did

but there was an obstacle, maybe

the sparrows darted dangerously

near the pomegranate and pierced it

or the violets stole Someone's letters,

kept them folded in their small blossoms

because they believed they deserved them

more than Someone Else. This poem

is based on that one. And also on

the time we took a scenic route through

aspens and you told me how they always

spread after a fire season because

when the pines burn down they leave

enough space for new trees to grow.

The poem was entitled, "For You."

And we kept driving and driving until

winter came, smoothing the roads white

with tiny combs of ice — your fingers

ready to sculpt my shape out of snow

so that you could ease into the hollow

chest and leave a pomegranate safe

from sparrows — the violets suddenly

confessing everything to the student

whose face opens like sunrise when

she says I understand now — I understand —

--Danielle Cadena Deulen

Veace & Me

have been working on some stuff together. This makes me feel like writing here as scratch pad, to say things like:

I could wait all day for the call right back, but I won't. What I wait for is more and less tangible than the trilling to touch of telephones. What I wait for goes like this: the cat's doughnuted herself beneath the desk. She has slept against your chest. She has a thing for intermittency, cold chicken, and the kind of skin that smells like olives and a kind of pine-chill aftershave. Even the bedding remembers.

"If I Could Fold Myself Away Like a Card Table

a concertina or a Murphy Bed, I would. But I wasn't made that way."

No one tells me that Ryan A. is not a poet. And what Ryan Adams doesn't get about artists or chronic sadness or the halloween heads we sometimes battle, doesn't need to be understood anyway.

So there.

But today is pretty, Lots of walking and my neighborhood all giddy with its summeryness. People out. Families, kids, dogs, sidewalk artists, lots of Graeter's ice cream is being consumed. What summer Saturdays were made for.

Farewell thee Well, Fair Spike

Early one morning, just as the sun was rising
I heard a maid sing in the valley below
"Oh don't deceive me, Oh never leave me,
How could you use, a poor maiden so?"

Because indeed I am the last living soul to make my way through the series, which was completed last night. Between this, the end of Rome, and of course, The Sopranos...thank God we've adopted our own crazy Dru. Sigh... On to Angel.

Listening to Amy Millan's Honey from the Tombs and you should too.
"You've got lips that I could spend the day with."

June 26th is the place to be

when Ryan Adams' latest cd appears and though your funds be summered and few, you will rush to the music store and you will bring that boy on home. (The way he ought to be.)

Platinemu

Drusilla leaves a mangled fish at various key points in the apartment intended to entice one emuist or another. If I had a groovy pink & yellow shimmery stuffed fish, I'd chuck it all the way to Chicago.

And it seems that R.M.R. was thinking of Ms. Dru, Gladiola & (yes, Liz & Chicky, also Bitsy and Harriet, too).

Black Cat
A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke