Overcast Sunday

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

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

Shout Out to Alicia

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

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

Sad Annie

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

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

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

"That Special Place in Hell" Madeleine

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

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

For Veace--in Honor of Every Lost Lyric

Elegy for Tim Buckley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2008 Bruce Bond All rights reserved
from Colorado Review

Off to Color

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

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

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

Rocky Mountain Highs

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

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

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

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

Half of It's You, Half is Me

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

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

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

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

Clouds in My Coffee

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

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

(Cafe poems are welcome, as well.)

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

Flu Thru the Weekend

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

Birds Again by Jim Harrison

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

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

Virág
Like a name like

flower. Like a

country like the

sound of a state.

Once we drove

in a small car

through a field of

tulips so red so

red the sky had

to leave. The sky

was not itself and

all that was left

was gray so gray

that red could

seem more red

than anything. That

day so many cars

stopped, people

ran into the

field and made

intonations to the

tulips. It was

February. A good

month for tulips.

In a small country

with a view of

the ocean.

**
Amanda Nadelberg's

Just like a progressive ad

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

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

Paul Guest

O Boy

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

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

Glistening

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

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

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

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

A walk in shallow water?

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

In winter we lie
in the curious river
without matches.

Only the chain is broken,
not the pendant.

Who laughs so fluently?

The mate is a flute played in the wild.

by JEN CURRIN

Down to the Last Few Bites

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

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

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

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

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

Jen Currin
The Sleep of Four Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eavan Boland
Domestic Violence