The Glass Frogs Begin

It's here! National Poetry Month  where  I feel not only justified in saturating us in poem and talk of poem, but compelled!  I am participating here on Intagliod and over at Sweetly Disturbed: there I will post in a single post/single day manner. As tradition dictates here at Intagliod, I will keep extending the poem in a single post so that I might see how it is running its rivery way down the page. Likely, by month's end, at some point, I'll hide the post, should the poem seem strong enough to try to find a home in print.

I have visited Robert Brewer's blog, Poetic Asides in order to receive my first day's prompt which deals with new arrivals and have written a little prosaic start to my:

Thirty Days of Looking at the Glass Frog

Coming into the light, a body

to grow no larger than an almond,

with nothing to hide. Clear-

bellied, the miraculous factory 

that runs them always visible, 

Their translucence against

a green leaf's a vanishing act.

Today: April, no fool's gold

to this sunshine, we're all 

about arrival.  The scientist 

who fell in love the species:

Hyalinobatrachium valerioi 

named his daughter Valerie

in their honor. 

2.

What It must be to filter light,

feel the trail it follows inside,

like intuition only warmer,

the knowing a glowing

such a little form

but standing, window

to the side, a lantern

and a teaspoon of starlight

how nightfall must fall

soft as cinder, the day

coating as slowly as dust

gathered on a piano. 

3.

Slowly, slowly the body

opens, a thorn’s puncture

here, the water glass tumbles

and a clear tooth opens

a scarlet throat in the sole

of the foot, or a possum

halfway across a highway

scripted now in elaborate entrails.

We are drawn and repelled

by what spells us out in organed-

particulars, taking the view in

a little at a time. The glass frog

belies such patience, giving us

what we want, never want

from what we love: to see

the musicbox-machinery

that runs those wistful singings.

To End the Day in Elegy

My mom's closest friend's son died yesterday. He was only two years older than I am and I grew up with him. That was a long time ago, but not long enough to be telling him goodbye, or his mother how wrong it is and how very sorry that I am or to feel that sinking feeling again when someone who was living so well and trying so hard to be good to his body is gone. It's never a fair thing, but sometimes it's more stupid than other times. Goodbye George Klonizos and to you Rita, godmother, second Mom, I can only send love and prayers from Ohio to too-too far Utah.   And these borrowed words:

The Comet

I re-named the comet but nothing stuck. What do I know of bone-
deep lonely, of the beautiful freeze, of running a circuit through the
stars until all landmarks are my own staring eyes: of families
in general, what do I know? Say I'm young. Say I am the aftertaste
of all my parents' grief, a childhood spent in the downwind
of chicken blood, recurring dreams of being left behind—my mother
kneeling by the VCR to watch a video of her lost daughter—
and this is Hell: believing you can be a lens and meet your
loved ones' eyes beyond the screen, smacking your pain against glass
like a doomed swallow The half-life of loss is forever.There is hope
we don't get over. When my son began to die, I did not record
his voice, but let him simmer, speechless, in my memory, while I tried
to gain the faith to think we'd meet again. I held his fist against my lips,
I closed my teeth around the juncture of his throat and chest, I said
you'll be the fire of the sun, and I will circle you until you draw me close,
until our nearness breaks me into pieces and you burn me whole.
I would have ripped his heart out and consumed it if I'd thought
that it would choke me: I would have been the eternal mouth.
Say I'm young. Say the speeding rock of my body is as bright
as any resurrection, and I have time to shake before I hit the earth.

Copyright © 2012 Emma Törzs All rights reserved
from Indiana Review 

If not before April, then April

to write about Glass Tree Frogs, to finish the poem for Gladys and the one for the raccoon and for Malinda Markham :-(  This will be my April shower of poeming, I like the way I did the National Poetry Month daily poetry last time and I think that this glass frogs thing has those kind of legs to it. (No web-toed pun intended.)  So here I am, checking in with you, my quieter blog, my somewhere-self and promising this kind of writing here and soon.

Tonight in Ohio, the night is being whipped about like a ragdoll and the baritone windchimes that came with our home give the wind a low-sexy voice. The bed is piled with quilt and cat. I am tired and cold enough to look forward to pulling the covers over my arms and turning into and away from that dervishing winter night.

For now, I await a midnight and send it along, time-zone by time-zone, to each of you.

I will tack a little Malinda Markham post-it note to a passing cloud:


The child on the stoop knows what wrong is because it grows
In the body and turns into birds that enter 
The outside world and flap their powdery wings
About her face until she can barely
Speak. No wonder she drops things a lot
No wonder the chloroform and slick. No wonder
The flowers learn to grow backwards into the earth 
Because it’s safer there and pounding
And fuck the colors are good

Coda:
I call it gin because I need / a metallic word and my city rings / with drowned and terrible hooves / which pound until I fear they will enter / The outside world but friend they never do / The children are playing with teeth / They have learned to speak like anyone else / At night, at night / They chatter like parrots with no beaks / I go to work and parse everything dry 

Malinda Markham

January, Dear January

It's been a while since a real update here at Intagliod: blog named after the unbelievably joyous arrival of my first book.

In that time, this has been a place to go with quiet wishes, various sadnesses, celebrations, pretty finds to share in word and image and companionship of the imaginary kind. If anyone was reading along, I'd no way of knowing, but I could imagine someone was and it was companionship to me when I moved to new cities and new selves and had no friends for a time or really, no friends close-by. Here was a place to hang my hope-hat, my poncho of longings. Here was a magical wardrobe to crawl through and build my own globe: mosaiced with the loveliest writing or prettiest thing I saw that day, a stockpot of sensory-finds and sundry emotions and friendship, if only my own, to talk me through some super-dark days.

Then I met A Someone and that Someone has made life feel even richer, but has filled it too, with a little house in the country, our crew of kitties and frogs and garden and deer, raccoons, possum, birds demanding their feeders stay filled, Christmas trees that stay alive by being planted in the yard, a yard that remembers what we give and an us that stays in one place long enough to reap what we sow. It was a busier breathing I began and I love it, but it keeps me often, from returning here.

I wanted to sum up the newnesses though. The kitties that grew old and died within a span of a few short months. The man who helped me grieve and bury them. The decision to foster a trio of orphan kittens and to fail at one of those fosters, thus bringing us our little tuxedo  cat to keep our one year old Cricket company. Then Clementine, because like me she'd waited too long for a keeping-place. The house revitalized with three kitties again, no one yet two. The stampedes that fill our days. The joy of it all. The frog rescues every spring, the little pond that grows the tadpole to pollywog and pollywog to frog and tree frog. Their perfectly articulated miniature selves. The herb garden, tire planters that I took from an abandoned house just as they were to be hauled away. A sixties trend to cut truck tires into floral planters and paint them bright colors and the way that I took that old project, labored over by other older hands and slapped on a new coat of paint, planted some mums at its core and made the house a little more our own with their colorful welcome at the driveway's end.  And beyond that driveway, south, south, south from here, my adored sister has given us a niece and a nephew that fill me with more love than  I thought possible.  Life is good just now and as I know just how tentative our "just nows" are, i want to track that here, share that you, whoever you are, if only really me again at another time when I need to remember how good it all got again after it had at times, been so bad.

The ring. At long last and my first. A Someone became The Someone and before this year ends, I will be married. There is so much celebrating to be done and I am savoring it all. And now the next books: a chapbook called Aloha Vaudeville Doll that will be published by Dancing Girl Press in summer of this year and finally, my collection of poems: The Rub, won a prize and will be out in early 2014 by Elixir Press. I can hardly believe it all.

Building of Unseen Cats
       

When I woke up, it was the middle of the night and
my building was on fire. The hallway was not filled
with smoke, and then quickly it was. I rescued a few
older men from their bathtubs, a few babies from
their cribs. Outside, the air was filled with hair.
Everyone but me was holding a plastic cage with a
cat in it. We weren't supposed to have cats in my
building, but there they all were, an invisible nation
suddenly uncurtained into a blinding and brutal
world. Everyone looked at me with a face that said
let's never speak o f this. Let's not look directly at what
is meant to be loved in secret. Let's, for example,
imagine the sea is always, constantly, and forever
spilling toward us, that our screaming building is
something worth escaping.

Zachary Schmoburg

The Next Big Thing Series

Thanks to Amanda Auchter for tagging me. Watch soon for responses from: Lesley Jenike, Cynthia Arrieu-King and Kelcey Ervick Parker.

Here is the interview:

What is the working title of the book?  The Rub
Where did the idea come from for the book?  A combination of borrowed voices, re-imagined fairytales, a couple of Ophelias, a handful of Pinocchios, some lost and founds, some finds and losses, and what is swapped for "the real."

What genre does your book fall under? Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 

What a question to send one to dreaming. Colin Farrell as the unruly beloved, Rachel Weisz, just because she's Rachel Weisz. Tina Fey as Ophelia.  Pee Wee Herman as Hamlet.  Daniel Craig as Pinocchio.


What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Throw the map out the window, Darling, there's more everything ahead.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? There are so many versions of this book over time. Some version is a dozen years old, another, six months. I swapped poems in and out, changed order, changed my mind, the sheets, hairdressers, and all the while, like most books, it was in a state of continual revision. There is not just one first draft of this book. Other manuscripts grew from this, stole from it and gave back or into it.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
All sorts of scenes, cities, loves and bad choices. Everything I wanted to keep or discard, the poems are always a way to try to remember and try to purge or forget. Mostly they have their own worlds and memories and I just try to listen in on those.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It's a pretty eclectic gathering of poems. I try to imagine everything from "where secret animals might graze" to "other animals" the ones that didn't make it to the ark or this version of the world, to a jive-talkin' Ophelia.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 
My book won the 13th Annual Editor's Prize at Elixir Press and will be published in 2014.
It is neither agency-represented nor self-published.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KEITH REHM!

If all day yesterday I had not been putting January 23 on my documents, then perhaps today when I went to write a check at my vet's office, I would not have had to gasp and say, "I missed a friend's birthday."

But I did and so I remedy that this morning.

HAPPY JANUARY 24th DAY OF YOUR BIRTH, FRIEND.

It's been a good year here and I hope that same can be said for yours. I hope beyond that, for joy and happiness each day of this next year.

So late it's early

and I've an urge to type with dirt-clotted fingernails.  The day was a big snake sighting. Something dark with yellowish zig-zagging, a water snake, maybe. I couldn't be sure. I was all about getting the rusted-out wheelbarrow from the woods, all about the planting of the vegetable garden and so flip-flopped out to the little forest beyond our yard. I had the wheelbarrow in hand when the coiled thing, tongue flicking, body poised for trouble, came into my vision. A foot away and with many feet of self to spring out to me. I screamed like a girl and ran straight down the road. I called the mister over as he was eager to see the snake and alas, and of course, it was gone. But I got my wheelbarrow and tomorrow I plant the tomatoes and peppers--patient things they've been, waiting for a long-time home.

We planted the Kim-gifted yuccas. They were put through a lot of waiting too, and by the time they got into the ground there was no telling if they were bound for thriving. I hope they make it. The blossoms are amazing: big white bells like lilies of the valley on super-steroids.

The froglets this year were early and adorable. The tadpoles are seeming to do well and the mystery tadpoles are still significantly larger and have yet to give me a way to tell just who they will be.

The delphinium is blooming a color of purple that seems impossible to believe in, but there it is: all spriggy and deep, deep. I warned you that the content me was likely boring, but she is happy, Gang and tomorrow morning will be here soon. Tomorrow afternoon means setting up my roof garden plant, floral sculpture thing. I can't wait. Now, I guess, as it is pushing two a.m., I should sleep.

Here's a poem by a favorite poet and one that I fortunate to hear read recently:

Poem for Jenny

Larkspur and delphinium, wild and tame
transcriptions of the same essential idiom
(as lullaby, corralled, is requiem,
a sigh, bound and gagged, a lyric poem).
Earth's trying to remake herself with stars,
her own inky domain of skyey colors.
She wants everything. It won't be hers.
Her starry flowers, heedless of safeguards,
will launch their blue and purple rockets heavenwards
and leave her to her dusty browns and reds,
her brief sky shattered, just as words —
the good ones, anyway — will quit this page
before I ever pay this garden homage
or name the pain I'm trying to assuage.
Nonetheless, these clusters are in flower
if only for an instant, as they were
a year ago, when Jenny (this poem's for her),
knowing how I love them, put them here
to make the way around my house less bitter.
My next-door neighbor, she'd watched things shatter
and so came by to plant and tend and water
and whatever else it is that gardeners do.
And I remember catching a dim glimpse, as if through
an impossible tunnel — what's all that blue? —
and thinking, as one thinks of something wholly out of view,
how lovely it would be to lay my eyes on them,
though they were there, waiting, each time I came home:
larkspur out the back, out front delphinium
(the cultivated version for the public eye,
its wild incarnation just for me . . . )
and once or twice I did suspect that beauty
and kindliness had aimed themselves my way
but each was such a difficult abstraction,
at best unverifiable, uncertain,
a meteor I wasn't sure I'd seen.
I, who'd been so lucky up to then,
was utterly astonished by what pain —
in its purest form — can make out of a person.
It was (such things exist) a brutal season
and one that's not entirely departed
though time has passed; flowers, twice, have sprouted.
The earth will be, twice over, broken-hearted,
which means, at least, according to King David,
in his most unnerving psalm, closer to God.
Me? I'd leave some distance if I could
though it would be untrue to say no good
has come from any of this. See? out my window
the earth again has sheathed herself in indigo;
this may be the time she makes it through:
her sapphire daggers, bursting their scabbards,
carve frantic constellations: elfin songbirds
vehement with blue and purple chords;
earth's reaching for her heavens, I for words
or any chink of rapture I can claim.
Delphinium. Larkspur. Larkspur. Delphinium.
Let me claim you as you climb and climb.


Jacqueline Osherow
The Yale Review
Volume 93, Number 2
April 2005 

A.R.

(and for Steph Rogers, too)

1.
Planted the columbines
in an Aprilful afternoon
It's been a hard year
for dying. Last week
my friend said: My my my.
She set a standard
for how we think
of ourselves, didn't she.
Women poets, that is.

2.
Didn't intend to April
planted instead the annuals.
Then she willed me out
to the perennial squaredance,
and I spun the poems around
to return.

3.
Not sorry but would,
with a gift for burning,
recall last fall, when someone
said: we've finished our various
augusts and started in
with the embers.

4.
They can't leave completely,
one hundred percent
of what some ever spoke
aloud, recorded somehow.
One hundred percent
of what she ever spoke
allowed more, megaphoned:
like a begonia flashing
scarlet so many stories up.

5.
Taking-April warmed early,
the May Pond shimmered
elsewhere, and the first vixen
of the season remains in her red
shadow, but from here on, I share
the notion of fox with her,
looking up always from the silvery
bend in the road of 1965,
and her with the photograph taken
in Alabama that echoed
a road ahead, neither then-wife
nor she, nor she-fox nor I
could have known what was mirrored here
central Ohio, where the woods hold
too, a tree hoop-skirted with deadly vine
where women meet and together pull the heavy
ivory needle through. A tree considers time
only barely--but when she died,
somewhere inside itself,
a trunk gained another ring.
A ligneous Saturn, an earthy myth.

6.
Hidden. A glossary absent our classification
we wander then, undefined nameless,
spelling ourselves out to the palms
of our own hands. Might she marvel
to find us, written in our own hand,
hidden in our own hides, thriving.
The other world muffled now, harmless
and the body of us, a sea beginning
nowhere, everywhere.
7.
An ocean's origins confound us,
the sybaritics of each day
undress our wounds, say
what we must about passing
us by, or on and among these years, imagine,
a woman's meaning to another woman,
magnifies: sisters in the distance,
the braided language spoken
in long walks, into bathroom mirrors
where we speak to the eyes
reflected off the glass, or browsing
where we speak as we file through
clothing racks and we know to pause
when the hangers pause, to stop mid
philosophical musing and suggest
how well that color harmonizes with our flesh.

8.
Sometimes she rejects sunlight,
opens to the flourishing fields
the refusal of umbrellas, caped
in rain, the frosted windows
embroidered with cold thread.
A least once the sun rejects
her and together we're unforgetful,
the train tracks of our bones
parallel, the destinations varied.

9.
Inside us, the marshaling yards
grow shady, connections we
might have made fall into night's
long fall and we tarry, separate
malingerers. We spill ahead
into a steely nowhere.
Certain words occur:
enemy, oven, sorrow, enough
to let me know
she's a woman of my time.

10.
To be a forest escaping, a tree
broken-out of the greenhouse,
a fractured satellite hooked
by a fork of branch, unrooted
we travel, half-dead and dragging
our arteries against
the blood-soaked earth aswirl. Hush,
the moon is a head full of whispers,
listen: the voices are hers.

11.
Dear season of loss,
deer season antler-stabbed
and velvety. A ghostly appetite
eats at us, the assertions
of the tentative haunters
wash through the woods
but to the untrained eye,
it looks like moss.
The fawn-colored earth,
buries us in doe-silence.

12.
Something told, something true,
something sorrowed, something
grew in the telling, like a fish
or a mountain. At such elevation
first the air is blue then it is bluer,
first we are something then we
are the sum of things.

13.
A summary, luckless we meander
visitors to our own states, our bodies
under siege, our mouths weary
from explanation. What seemed
like a shared-wisdom about us,
some days falling
between the suspicious
and the superstitious.

14.
Doom-e-rang.
Each doomed day passes
and makes way for another.
I drink Mayan cocoa
and watch for seams
in the calendar: a centennial,
a millenium is best, a belief
that if this doomsday doesn't end us,
the next one will. It's worse than that:
our doom is singular, a chorus
singing all day, all days unharmonious
and out of tune. Ask her, she's out there now:
all ether, all song.

15.
She thought the dress would mend
itself, slash and strap, buttonholes,
so much frayed and faded,
even the balloon print,
vaguely deflated.

16.
To brook no passage,
the mixed-up dialogue
when we crossed
the Mad River. Never
without comment,
jest, sorrow, lent
things, borrowed.

17.
The foxes live in the sky
blue house, abandoned
now for years.
The windows filled with seashells,
porcelain horses, the souvenirs
of where the living travel.
Mementos of the mortal
outdated fragments, keys
to unlock no-memory
only clutter for the kids
to take away, But year after
year, they fail.
In the sci-fi version: the vixen
shades us. the magic of an enchanted
forest ghosty, the mysterious ripples
on the reservoir only her soles
bridging the banks, arriving with mercury-silvery
footprints, staining the shores with rolling light.

18.
And what of the longer-dead?
Homes we place our ears against
and listen for the sound of the sea.
The detritus of the late
creatures, the waves they weathered.
All that they left behind, patient and wild:
even their chalky coffins are fans
and coiled-infinities.
Some hours: the delicate balance
of preparing blowfish. Each recipe,
a warning, each bite, a dare.

19.
Holiday


20.
Let's dredge the pond of your muteness
where drowned things live again.

21.
No one has imagined us, we want to live like trees
Instead, we're under the microscope, flying under
the radar, above the treeline, below the water table,
prepositions of an ailing grammar, but breathing,
breathing greeting the moon and more than stone.


22.
The judicious sky suggested both:
measure and betrayal but the severed saplings
the girdled trunks emboldened her to call the ranger.
What can't cry out, cries in any case, a whole
crop of trillium flattened under the wheels,
the whimsical hackings at small, living trees,
made her alone inside.

23
The morning was a tree fallen
on a red car driven by tourists
from Lao. Or wrapped around
a light pole, or warped against
a building. The morning moved
from one state to the next, your
head on some ever-pillow

Kate Rhoades is the Best

Where I go, you go, Sister. And I'll be back here. I am just loving my homing-blog and writing again with my friend, Kathrine.

My mother, Kathrine and you: The Kath/arines/ryns/thrines are good to me.

Blogging-Away

Lately, my blogging seems to question the act of blogging, much as my facebook-time wonders at itself: what do I get out of this? Is this a narcissist's passtime? Facebook connects me to people whom I would, in no other way, be able to access or yes, follow. It offers lots of professional and academic updates that I could never otherwise find. And it's fun, in a mindless way. Of myself I require only moderation or the eventual cutting-off from my facebook presence.

Blogging is different. One must generate content, have, as they say, a thing to say. I write. It's what I do, what I really am on the radio dial of stations, it is my favorite self. This blog has been besides sounding board, rough draft, place of conversation and imagined listener, also, a comfort, a friend when I went to new places and had not yet made any friends. A place to mark my days when they were sliding by without witness. I don't presume any sort of importance to my thoughts, but as with the bloggers I read, I hope to strike a resonant chord.

Resonance: there it is, as in what resonates now, for me and this self, a little down-dial or up-dial from the intagliod-me. My life feels more set. Nothing is set, no artist can believe otherwise, but there are levels of chaos, levels of disorder and there moments, say last, late summer, when one actually feels able to plant bulbs, those versions of next season that say more owner and less renter, those kind of promised crops that suggest not permanence but the hope of a little lingering.

I can linger a little now. One big beloved's illness, one beloved near-father-in-law's death, one dear left-behind wife's grief and relocation later, one long, long season of taking, I know better than to suggest anything stays put for long, but that anxiety, that brand of carpe diem and restlessness varies much from the way I talked here in this lovely keeping-place blog, so often and so (six whole years!) long.

This isn't a goodbye, it's a bifurcation, not from this road to another, not instead but rather, also. I won't be updating as frequently as I once was, but the house-me, the baking-me, the longtime writing and near-sister friendship of me to the great writer: Kathrine Wright, has a couple of new digs if you're interested in stopping by sometimes:

One is the cool baking blog which is blending into the great new wonderblog called Sweetly Disturbed.

For the lovely Dr. Adler, Whose Birthday I Neglected to Blog About

He of the Slouching Toward Cincinnati poem cycle,
of the black cat, zaftig in her plush pelt, beloved
beyond even the bouquet of radishes offered me
one long roadtrip to Kent, Ohio where we vowed
not to eat them until we called one another and so
we did, crunching the rubyness of them into the cell
towers of one a.m. or thereabouts. Where a big black
horse and a cherry tree were all that we'd need in Philadelphia
in the libraries of his discontent, as familiarity might breed
as much, in his hometown where everyone knows my name!
He of the jumping-on-hotel-beds, riding in Costco
shopping carts, the convertable top down to most
weathers, even in January, especially New Year's Eve
where half-frozen but exhilerated-we drove
a crisp path into the winter stars where later
we'll meet in the fruitstand of our dreams where yes,
we dare to eat a peach, and indeed they are always in season.
To which I say Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

I love my BFF! So happy the world could dream up this little prince
and he could be findable. (Though we really should
make arrangements in the event of time travel.)

Happy Birthday Keith Rehm!

Celebration

Brilliant, this day – a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green –
whether it's ferns or lichens or needles
or impatient points of buds on spindly bushes –
greener than ever before. And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along
the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.


Denise Levertov

How better to go out than in gratitude

2011 was hard on my household. My lovely-lovely was diagnosed with renal failure and his father passed away--all in a few months. I had my first set of scary medical test results and then months later, an okay. Still, things took their toll. But the house is warm with life and love and I am here, waiting on the edge of my seat for 2012. No matter what those Mayans think.


Because 2011 has been rough on us all, but as Rilke says: Love the questions. Live the questions.
To 2012! Love and best wishes,
Sophia

Six Kinds of Gratitude

1
I'm someone's small boat,
far out at sea,
sailing from what has so long sustained me
toward what I don't know.

My joy is the sound
of the water purling around me,
but is it my hull
or the great ocean moving?

2
Are those flies I hear, or a trick of the wind,
faintly human voices,
or a whistle of breath
in the nose of my sleeping dog?

3
Without me there is no confusion.
Buddhas see no difference between
themselves and others; Angels,
between the living and the dead.

4
At last I've discovered
the secret of life:
If you don't leave
you can't come back.

5
Deep in the Earth there are pockets of light
that did not come from Heaven,
and yet they are the light of Heaven
deep inside the Earth.

6
This bird is the birdness of a bird.

—Dan Gerber, A Primer on Parallel Lives

And of course, Rainer. Always Rainer.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”

R.M. Rilke is the man!

A Tinselly Farewell to December

Holy Ghost
by Brian Brodeur

Next

My mother spreads tinsel snow over the kitchen sills,
sets the cedar manger in its place, arranging

the hollow plastic magi next to a cradle
displaying the baby Jesus missing an arm.

The little enameled figure of Mary kneeling
embraces something only she can see. Pinned to the banister,

our crocheted stockings sag. All afternoon
she listens to laundry click in the pantry dryer,

packing layers of chocolate cake and home-made cream
into Tupperware for the Heath-Bar trifle we love.

Light moves across the counter, almost touching her hand,
shattering over an open drawer of knives.

From "Snapshots 1," Other Latitudes (University of Akron Press, 2008).
Used with the author’s permission.

"I should tell them
there’s a music for the lost, a song
that cannot be stifled, celebrating those who are.
It sounds like jangling, scraping,
a hacksaw through metal. But still
it’s a song, and its dissonance is lovely.
It belies the second-hand clothing
and the stubbly beards and the stumbling.
Through the jeers, the noise of machinery, the silence,
an anthem makes itself heard."

from The Refugee Camp by John Drury

Whose work I have long-loved. The latest continues to astound. Rarely have I met someone who has such a sense of the arts and their play and his own play with all of that knowledge in his work. But here's the really rare part: he writes it all as a poet would not as someone wooden who knows a lot. (You know the poems I mean, they sound smart but dead.) Drury is a scholar's poet and a poet's scholar. There is someone real inside all of that wisdom who still manages to say it all with warmth and sometimes, whimsy. I took any course that I could from him at the University of Cincinnati and left the classroom bowled-over by how much we learned and how much fun we had learning it.

Lady Alice is Her Name

The mac book. I love it. Cindy-Lou taught me how to grab images and so I have. My desktop is sea of colorful minutia. It thrills to me to look at it all: paper lanterns, New Orleans, my lighthouse, a periwinkle crayon on an old piece of fabric of flocked dark red roses, a vintage taffeta and lace heart-shaped candybox, an amphora with a silhouette on it, oil slicks, spider lilies, Sophia Loren, three icicles, a gloved hand holding three tulips, a ship in a lightbulb, sno cones, tiny, tiny sofas and one photograph snatched from a friend's wall, of pomegranates hanging in front of a stone cherub built into an arc of a crumbling red brick wall. The photograph is shot perfectly from a kind of side angle and so fills the viewer with a kind of inexplicable longing. It is just enough and yet it creates a hunger. I am going to use it when I teach the ekphrasis class to talk about that effect--how writing should do that--ache you a little, make you want more and yet, feel strangely satisfying in that unquenched need. Very sensual. Like pomegranates.

Tiny Furniture & Au Lait Lotion & a Blow-Out

Watching the first, wearing the latter (I love the way it smells) and counting my blessings that M wasn't hurt during the third. Far left lane and a total blow-out and it was night. Just finished writing a poem that does not love the halogen light but that very light helped save the day.

Not a wholly productive day but not terrible. Favorite lines so far: "I once saw him sitting on a crate of onions reading Osterling." Then, later:
"Poems are basically like dreams, something everyone likes to tell other people about but no one likes to hear if it's not their own. Which is why poetry is a failure of an intellectual community."
"It's not too poemy, which I like."

This film is making me miss my dangly earrings days. Tomorrow I will wear dangly earrings.


Earring
by Ales Steger translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry January 2009
The whole time he tells you what to do.
His voice is chocolate candy filled with hysteria.
He is a loving blackmailer. An owl blind in one eye.
It is enough that he sees half the world to command the other half.
He gladly inspects himself in the mirror, but goes crazy if you praise him
Before another. He is not your property. He is not your adornment.
Only when you dance and when you make love with him, he coos.
Then cages open. Then he is the white message bearer of the gods.
Gradually you detach him more often, hide him in a box, misplace him.
But his bite at the lobe still whispers to you.
As if Eros holds you with invisible filigree pliers
And solders words of guilt and the silence of betrayal into your ear.
A copy of a stone from Sisyphus’s mountain is set inside it.
You roll hope uphill. And you roll downhill drunk, despondent and alone.

Poem Disguised as What I Should be Reading Right Now

Which is how to plan my courses (two of which are very new and exciting, but lots of new and exciting work and prep. too). And how to paint my wall called Toasted Marshmallow or French Vanilla, I forget which paint swatch I chose and how to prep the wall that will be Malted and do you notice a little bakery lust in my selection of off-whites? For the record, the accent wall is Mourning Dove, so let it not be said that I am focused on the lyrical, the melancholy, the simple carbs. Oh, wait...

I am wishing I were more here, less facebook. Here feels like the right ruminations about writing. There feels like self-billboardizing. I don't like it, and yet, I look. It's a clever way to pretend to friend and unfriend and it lacks the sense of consequence and courage, (like reality television). In fact, like reality t.v., it actually numbs one from feeling the sense of consequence. Thoughtlessness abounds and rarely does one stop to contemplate the actual emotional ramifications of things said and done. Here, I assume it's me alone plus maybe just a few of those wandering googlebot things that move eyeless (I first wrote "love eyeless" hmmm....) and gathering but never really gathering. (The instructional designer boyfriend assures me that such things watch the blog, too.) So here is like a way to type out what I think I am thinking and thus, cleanse the palate or rough draft out the next thing I need to say on the more official pages of my life. About those.
So New Years' resolutions are silly. They don't last. But a habit takes twenty-one days to form, so my reading tells me, so why not these twenty-one. Like starting today. I want to work on things in a more balanced fashion. My schedule allows whole days where I can paint and another day where I can sort clothes, if a deadline is coming up, I write like a fiend to finish something. Good writers, writers with good habits, work a set of hours a day at a writing project, then a set schedule for class planning, housework, etc. I read an interview with Donald Hall once and he said he advanced each of the many, many, many writing and journalism assignments a little bit with time meted out so that he might make his various deadlines. They are various and many and he always does. Plus he's said to be a damn fine teacher, as well. Even after Jane died, Hall continued to write and send his work out (I worked on a literary magazine at the time and we received a strange elegy that was later picked up by, I think, TriQuarterly.) Anyway, proof, that not even grief, much less that flitty, meandering mind of one Intagliosa, could keep a good writer from getting his good writing accomplished. With that, I leave you to a wonderful poem that was sent along to me by a kind woman who found the audio of my "Lucy" poem some years back and had always wanted the text. I was sent her note and when I responded, telling her how happy it made me that my poem stayed with her the way certain other poems had stayed with me, (yes Taije Silverman I am talking to you, also Eliot Khalil Wilson, Ilya Kaminsky, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Richard Siken, Laura Kasischke, Simone Muench, and too many others to list)... she wrote me with this lovely title which I read, envied and shared.

Now to that new day I promised myself.


Matthew Olzmann

MOUNTAIN DEW COMMERCIAL DISGUISED AS A LOVE POEM

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—
there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,
which you paid for with your last damn dime
because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009

Touche Today

Because I couldn't stop the dead/they ambled up to me.

Or so it's been. A long year. A long, long year. But some of it still scarlet shawls, collected animal bones carved cryptically to read a thing about vintage quilts made into tipis and what it means to teach, to be taught, to have words amass loss into something meaningful.

The other day I pulled up a poem to show a student a certain tone and the lines and within it the line about the people who loved the speaker being sad since the speaker died struck me anew as a mean thing and it reminded me of a coffee meeting a few weeks back with someone who didn't like any of his wives or women or me and how I left reeling from it and thinking that literature should bring about the best of us. So today saunters in, a little stooped as a Thursday can be and with it, an elegy by a student who wrote of the universe's overcoat and another student urging him to search that coat for spare change and change and then this title little sonnet about sugar and our sweetness galloping away with us, consumed by our consumption, done in by our need for the lovely and honeyed and I am saved enough by that. But then the mail and that cranberry crimson shawl made for me by one of my first university students ever. A girl wicked-sharp, a teacher among students even then, and now, all degreed-up, married, a grown-up but still armed with the whimsy and knitting needles both unmetaphored, restored to a world where a thing can be spun into something both necessary and playful and warming a needful day into play.

I could say more about a snapshot of Glen Campbell or a poem called a canzone shared with me by a favorite poet or about lite eggnog and spiced rum or smoke kittens or tadpoles so tiny when they burst into froglets that we call them the preemy and they burst out like a dark star against the turquoise gravel. Or a sister named of all things Antonia, who is indeed My Antonia and my best friend and my light star in a world of dark gravel. Or that I live in a house now with a someone who loves me despite myself, sometimes in spite of myself but makes a night like this pitch-black from the city's distance, a little warmer, a lot brighter.

In light of that, here's a poet whose work I await in book form:


Conversion Blues
by CHRIS PEXA

– for Rachel

tell us about evening and about the bright
star tell us about the huge dark wall
where it is pinned so if no one is looking
the sky is really burning and tell me it is my eyes
that douse it all to soot, black branches
with one root in carbon and budding eternity.

explain that once a month a family of owls covers
the tree, winks at us, refuses to explain their singing.
when snow is thinly falling we see you there,
the slowest star, and I hear you thinking
of a story, that mute wetness spread across the field is you
clearing your throat, all stories being born

from silence. what story: the snowflakes
cut from the sun are large as cars in the darkness
and grow small and doily when licked
by January stars. what story: barefoot,
running in the wake of the plow,
cold black clods and white sun blessing your steps,
no Jesus yet to dream you into majesty, earth

being enough, no steeple secrets, no divine moons
to pin back your hair, no soap for your tongue, no lye,
no alabaster mothers to sew in a new tongue
and holy toast, cracked as headstones, for you to chew.
are you ready to climb to the top of the stairs?
to tell me about the star nation, the unnamed,
what some grandfather of the clean, glowing
cafes and dive bars of the moon

call morning, a newborn's grouchy hunger?
the dew its mouth and tongue sing for?
think of me in the low thorns, hunched like an umbrella,
my small ribs breaking toward the clouds like love.