On Monday the air in at my open window came in uninvited
and at such a pace:  not a run, not a skip, but with the sweep
of a ballroom diva gliding a fast fox-trot.  I had no choice
but to name her Joyce.

Tuesday, the gauze curtains hung limp until sunset when this air
(I’m sure it was German) blurted through in know-it-all gusts,
rocking a crockery stringer of fish to clunk like terra cotta bells,
chipping a maroon fin.  I named her Bertha.

Wednesday brought Anna who curled my bedsheets up
like the back of a slumbering cat.  And Thursday, Phyllis,
who stirred only rarely, and then like a nurse with a tongue
depressor, demanding that I say, Ahhhhh.

Today is Friday.  None have come and suddenly June
fails to fit this chunk of days with one this still, this stale.
While doldrums remain, June will be Jane.  (I had, you see,
no choice.)

Oh boy Lynn do I love this one.  You have such an amazing way of describing things that it makes me want to choose one for myself.  Would have to say I love it, but only one thing that sits funny, and its probably only me....  'the air in at',  as I am wanting to say, the air at my window came in uninvited'.... course that is probably why you didn't write it that way.....

Laura

Hey you!  Thanks.  This whole week I've enjoyed the changes in air -- and really did start off on Monday by naming that diva air "joyce' -- [I live alone and even if I didn't, no one would pay much attention to my random naming of things].  I think you may be exactly right about the structuring of that opening -- I made some modifications, sort of.  Not sure if it's a poem yet, or just my imagination at play.  What totally surprised me, as I rambled through this, was how June became Jane at the end.  I mean, I glanced at my window, the white gauzy things I have hanging up there were so still they looked like a transparent wall.  A day like today doesn't deserve such a fine name as June -- do you think?  I don't.  And the so cool thing about writing is that it's just writing. 

Glad you liked it Laura and thank you for taking a look and finding that "sits funny" spot. 

Then I start thinking about the so cool thing, about writing just being writing, and realize how I meant that just as it applies to me, writing for me, to entertain none other than me -- but of course that changes once the words written are put to others; the writing becomes something more, like communication.  Not "like" communication, but communication.  Good communication or bad communication.  Bad, in that it may be written poorly, or, "bad" in that it may be intended to sway opinions or beliefs one way or another.  Or, good, in that same way--at least, that is, with good intentions, perhaps. 

I have this huge chunk of information (research and interviews and more research) about a woman who truly lived in a time of great change.  Her name was Irene.  What's happened over the months that I've been working on Irene's story, or I should say a novel that includes Irene's story, is that all this knowledge about her has turned into something like a slab of granite, or marble.  She's in there, inside all this stuff and more stuff.  How do I bring her out?  Twice now, I feel like I've slipped with my chisel and whacked off an ear, then a finger.  Twice now, I've started all over again.  The debris on the studio floor is stacked up as high as both of our chins.  An avalance would bury the cat [if I had one]. 

Which reminds me -- I need to take down my "Beware of Crazy Woman with Cat" sign on the front gate.

Your writing Lynn, is far from just writing.  Your imagination is a blossom that never ceases....

Laura

Lynn... you see what I mean.  Even your stories have character.!!!

Laura

I look at my clock, the one with no protective clear shell to keep dust and cobwebs from knitting clever sweaters on the long and short hands, the thin, long, red second-hand--and it's 8:32 a.m.  I've been up since five and there are seven ciggarette butts in the ashtray, but I've already emptied it once, and the quit-smoking drug is refillable and waiting for me to come up with the bucks and the gumption to go that route again.  If I do, then I won't have a filthy, yuck reminder, close as my fingertips, of this vice, this weakness.  It keeps me grounded, this knowledge that I am not in control.  Not just of my addiction.  Of anything.  The smoke curls up as best it may.  An overhead fan whirls, making the curls just mentioned not curls at all but jagged little efforts to find some path to follow.

And the filthy, yuck reminder ashtray--if it were gone, out of sight, then I wouldn't recall as often, if ever, the large amber-colored glass ashtray that this smalll plastic square once sat inside.  The one I use here, so easily removed from the larger, decorative amber one--the two of them at the top of a pedestal stand that stood next to Grandpa Ivy's scrathy old armchair.  An armchair a girl in shorts never dared sit in, even when Grandpa was at work, because the harsh, nubby weave of the upholstery was the devil on girly skin.  The chair was green.  That sort of green shade that moss takes on after it's been tossed to the shore and faded by the sun for some days or weeks. 

And now the clock says 8:45.  I have warmed my fingers on words for thirteen minutes, more now, as I continue to warm them.  All the while, Irene is waiting for me, tucked in a folder inside a file where I have been writing about a whistle that her brother Alex wore on a chain and blew, as a warning, to signal Irene he was about to light the fuse and pull the lever that would expel her out of the cannon, over the audience seated in tiers at the Atlantic Steel Pier, and into the Atlantic Ocean.  Four minutes more--gone.  As is she.  And now me, from here.

"It keeps me grounded, this knowledge that I am not in control."

of course you would know why I love that so much, and the armchair . . .

 on another note -
I cannot help but think of dandelions when you mention Irene.  I walk to and from work, I see them, and think of clowns and floorboards, very strange.  I never forget pieces I read, they stick, stick, stick.  though I'm certain you've changed it by now.

in kansas- june is a month of mug honing to july where even the rocks cut sweat- I miss my mountains. enough of my prattle,  always happy to read you.

Such an interesting thread that seems in consequence of posting the poem on this board instead of "submit". I am curious how some poems trigger notes and comments of shared experience, or should I say, how the reading triggers the thought. Do we remember the poems that resonate our own experience?

The poem belongs on the editors board...

larry

I was looking for a journalese thread title.  The poem had just been finished and the title seemed a good choice for someone who writes out of season, out of calendar, out of memory, experience, mind. 

Clowns and floorboards and dandelions dancing and Nora in Jane, or is it June, honing to July where even rocks cut sweat and biscuits dot the lawn for leapfrogging.   Where it rains and the landscape swallows the sky, or tries to--the white stiff tongues of mountains teasing enterable clouds.  And mists are great fuzzy lips that want only to nuzzle the fir stands and broken stumps and rills.  Are the rhodies blooming there now? 

And there was delight in Columbia and I was always lost, never knew my bearings, where east was, or west--only that I was in the great South and safe with friends never met until met.  And sitting near the back of the room, you were there on the left.  And sitting at the back of the room, I was there on the right.  And Maggie was reading, her hips leaned into a stool, her elegant hand reaching out toward me and her fingers traversed all those chair rows and the place where they touched was like the place where little girls prick their fingers with pins and press them together, mumbling oaths of sisterhood through blood.

Jane will be gone soon -- I know it seems odd to say so, but I will be gone to Santa Barbara by Wednesday (funny, I wanted to write, "by Wanda") and when I am gone I will be in June rather than Jane.  I will probably not be writing, but learning from writers about how to, going from panel to panel at the Writers' Conference.  I am equally anxious and eager to meet Carolyn See again.  She once told me that anytime I had an ms. ready, she'd willingly give me a critique.  She's accepted an invite to dine at my daughter's on Sunday, the 24th.  My ms. is not ready.  Irene is still hugging the floorboards, clowns and dandelions swirling her watery thoughts.  At least James Cagney's father has died and Jimmy is in a chorus line at the same theater where Irene is appearing.  Pretty soon Boston will be flooded with molasses and a doughboy who made it through the Pandemic and mustard-gassed trenches will drown.  I don't know what his name is.  I better go figure that out while it's still Jane.

Not Jane anymore and no wind coming in at my window to name.  I could call July 'Julie' but I've known two women named Julie and neither of their personalities fits this blazing heat.  Although one was a redhead and the other a blond.  The blond was a co-worker who became a friend when I was 19 and worked for Pacific Bell and became somewhat less of a friend when I was a widow at forty and realized she probably had, in fact, succumbed to my late husband's charms at some point in time--maybe in the seventies, maybe again in the eighties.  Would have to be early eighties because he was outta here by the late ones.  Ah, Al, you did live enough life for three men, maybe nine.  Miss you, darlin', despite your wandering ways.  The redheaded Julie was a neighbor for a few decades and made the best peach cobbler this side of Georgia.  She used to make an extra one for our family and had the best all-out laugh of any woman I've ever known.  They moved--Julie and her blue-eyed, bald, born-again, over six-foot-three, great hulk of a husband--to Tennessee a few years back.  I do miss that redheaded Julie and her cobblers.  I even miss her husband's efforts to coax me back into the fold.  Such a look he would get in his eyes when I'd smile and tell him faith was a gift and, so far, ungiven to me.  A look that said he would miss me in heaven. 

So, although 'Julie' might be the easy answer to renaming July -- it just doesn't fit.  Maybe, like a new puppy that by its antics and actions brings on the right name, the one that says all that puppy is and will be--maybe July will do that for me before the remaining days peter out.  Or maybe July will just be July.  Will have to wait and see.

And then there was my friend Jillian, a fiery redhead with guts enough for three teenage girls. She stomped on a policeman's toe once - on purpose - and then smiled her way right out of that ticket. She drove a green Hornet with a 304. Green went with her hair.

The month of Jillian is July for me. Nothing ever happened in July after that and it's been 35 years.

The month of Jillian is is July
for me.  Nothing
happened in July after
that redhead stomped
a policeman's toe
purposefully, then
smiled her way out.
She drove a green hornet
with a 304.  Green went
with her hair.

And so shall July be the Month of Jillian for me as well.  Fourteen days into it and August out there in the stars, waiting to be renamed on journal page by a whim of weather or hair shade . . .

If August is a month for obsessions, then what of September? 
Will sated days sprawl so fat with gain and applesauce
they'll stumble to set, fumble at the shades of mountains
to rise, only to slouch across a patchwork of states loosely vined
by ripening pumpkins? melons ready to bust wide at Labor
Day picnics with the coaxing of a long knife, smiling rinds
bagged up with so many thighs and breasts and leg bones
of the Colonel's bucketed chickens? 
                                                  Or, will obsessions go
unsatisfied, hungry through August in abnormal ways--binge
on row after row of tender sweet corn plucked from stalks
grown high in tall acres, platoon after platoon? binge and
bring it all back, unrecognizable?  What a strange, strange
fate it must be to see fat where ribs protrude.

August is my month of plenty, not October. August is heat and more heat cooked and stirred and potted and canned into jar after jar on shelf after shelf. Heat for the winter jarred and warehoused against the cold.  Beans, corn, pickled this and that. Dried tomato and onion. 

Energy kept in the purgatory of my pantry to be recalled to the heaven (or hell) of my winter table.

Autumn for me is a peach.  The skin is September, the meat is October (my birith month, and the month of my conversion) and the pit is November (to be spit out as quickly as possible to get to December and Xmas.

I am glad and proud and delighted to know you, Lynn.  Thoughtful and skillful you are -- and imaginative and alive to senses.

Rick

Was that a random act of kindness? that compliment above?  I don't know how you do it--see the better side when there's not a better side to see.  But that's okay.  That's okay. 

One more week of August then we skin the peach of autumn, eh?  What a perfect notion--September as the skin.  They, september hours, often have a fuzz; a fuzz of rain to drive dove further south and confound the hunters dawn and dusk.  A fuzzy chill one night and fuzzy warmth the next.   A sense of holding in by by by a tissue skin, so easy to rip a tear, easy to bruise, easy, even, to leave ignored inside a bowl of time until flies are drawn to buzz the fuzz.  September as the skin of autumn has the colors, too.  Even dawns, often as not, have a quality of warmth tipped past prime in color.  Birth pinks tend toward more mauve as if an older dawn.  Not the same as dawns of spring.  September colors yes, more peaches in them, yes. 

And I'll give you the flesh for October.  But that haste to spit the pit of November as quickly as possible -- no.  Nope.  I say, if you take the pit to mouth it shows a bit of greed regarding autumn, a want to glean the least and stubbornest bits of flesh from what it was.  I say, don't spit at all.  What won't go down, remove and plant for another fall.  But in good time.  Take it slow.  That pit.  Take it slow.

I am delighted to know you, Rick.

Monday.  Not just any Monday but THE last Monday of THE last week of THE last August the year 2007 will ever know.  Someone asked me in an email just today if I thought much about time.  I sometimes wonder if I ever think about anything else.  Of course, THE last August of 2007 was also the FIRST August of 2007.  How strange it might be to have double months in any given year.  I know nothing of science.  By nothing, I mean to say "I know very, very little and what I do not know I understand even less."  But what would it take?  An extra moon, maybe . . . or an extra sun?  That would be tricky, an extra sun -- how could earth orbit two?  But, now that I go silly with just trying to write a few words of nonsense, I bet there are those solar systems out there in the universe somewhere that DO have two suns, that some sort of cyclical change over occurs that sling shots the planets one by one from their rotation around Sun 1 to rotate around Sun 2 and what comes of all this is not one August in a year, but two -- August One or August (a) or August I. or August Sr. and then, during the rotation about Sun 2, the month becomes August Jr.

Monday is a day for burying, for plumbers, for waiting for the homeless to come home. The lyricist knew what he was talking about when he sang the day blue. It's for waiting on other days and other months; for waiting on bills in the afternoon mail. I'm sure if the mail came in the morning there would be fewer bills aren't you? It's for spending the money you won't earn till Friday. Monday isn't the beginning, it's just the day after.

TIME - time is nothing but a booger flicked off your nose, a nuance of color, where clear fades to green with infection.   I have nothing else my friend, not even peas...and no carrots .. definitely not.

I liked it all the same, I did... I really did.. and thank you
I am alone and this - is how-  it should be . . . I am myself- without - words

I am tired.

(having spent the entire day ---- I have nothing to say ... thought I did - but don't.}

 ninety miles an hour without gas.... none... none, what-so-ever, and on, and on, and on,   

propellers green
to lips are pressed
but nary -
whistle
 sounds

Autumn obsession where I grew up was foo'bah (excuse me. . .  football).  And also hunting.  Ba-LAMM!   But then, to get back to your post, don't obsessions always go unsatisfied?  Isn't that their nature?  My hometown hasn't won a state championship since the early seventies, and they're just as obsessed as when they were winning them back to back.

So how is September turning out for you now that we're reaching the Equinox?

Rick

Just discovered the responses to an earlier post regarding Time and Mondays and dual suns with planets that slingshotted out of one orbit to cirlce like a revolving green pea, or peas, in another.  We climb on board the carrot, nora, and nibble out our chair and stare out upon or snooze the way through all that is or was or could'a would'a should'a maybe been.  If we're lucky, the plumber does come and the futon doesn't float out the sliding glass door with the la-z-y boy and somewhere, somewhere, there is a dry roll of Charmin.

Friday here and sara sidle from csi is safe and nick will be 3+ mos. by the solstice.  Equinox?  I think I blinked.

Hi Lynn:

I liked this so much that it's difficult to say anything. You've created a small universe as big as a novel - very full and rich. Thanks for sharing.

Best Always,
John 

I was sixty again when I woke up, but for some minutes or hours (you never know what time really is when you’re dreaming, do you?) I was more like forty and I was enough in love that I said Yes, I will marry you, although I can’t recall now, now that I’m awake, if we ever made it to the altar.  It was good though, the feeling of falling.  There is something I recall about that Love Fall and the safety, or the lack of Fear, that swells up to meet you and surround the place or places that you fall through so that you feel all of that like air cush-ing past and none of it, nothing, threatens.  Everything’s sweet, not so much to the taste as to the ear and the touch and maybe the sight; everything’s soft and there are no hard edges anywhere, not on tables or nouns; not on verbs either.

Do I recall the face of my dreamed fiancé?  No.  Well.  A little.  It was kind and round-ish and blue-gray eyes and features all pretty much normal.  What I mean to say is that the nose wasn’t crooked or hooked or thin at the bridge or Gallic, but just a nice nose neither too large nor too small; that the lips were average and hair brown with a little wave but not too dark a brown but a little bit darker than mouse-brown and the wave not so wavy as to be wiry but a curve to the hairs nonetheless.  The thing is: it doesn’t matter at all that I don’t remember much about the face in the dream or that the face in the dream belonged to a man at least ten years younger than the self I dreamed.  That self, like I said, was forty or so, not sixty, and that boy-man of the dream was thirty, or thereabouts, and kind.

His kindness is hard, difficult to describe.  I’m not sure I can.  I’m not sure the dream was long enough for me to “know” what sort of kind he was, or is.  I can write “is” on the off chance that in another dream he will return and isn’t really past tense for the duration.  On the other hand, how long would a dream need to be to “know” those figures I people them with?  A nano-second ought to be long enough to know all there is to know of those I make, I create. 

Have you ever picked up a rock, a small stone, one you can hold like a poker chip between a few fingers, a thumb, one you can let go of without feeling a loss for the letting go of, and felt, as you held this hard thing easily in hand that it wasn’t a hard thing at all but perhaps made of flannel? or sun-warmed silk? or chilled butter? 

This is what the dreamed kindness was like: a stone that was flannel and I could wrap myself inside and find warmth; a stone that was silk and somehow unwrapped me in a way that my nakedness was a beautiful thing; a stone of kindness that was malleable and fitted to me as I fit to it.

I was sixty when I woke up.  And I wasn’t in my own bed but traveling and in a strange bed in an in-between town.  The rates were less than cheap and the drape at the window was held closed against any stray neon light sifting in by a strapping together with a length of duct tape—a horizontal stitch of pliable silver in the shape of a slight frown.  I missed being forty again when I woke up in the room, but I was glad, real glad, for the dream and the sleep and the almost I Do.

"Monday isn't the beginning, it's just the day after."  So Lavonne wrote some days or weeks ago.  And now I find another Monday opened up for business, half the morning gone (more than half, but who's counting?)

I like that line, Lavonne.  In fact, it might make a neat challenge line for something longer, prose or fiction, or even just one-liners about what "Monday isn't" -- know what I mean?

Monday isn't [blank]

Monday isn't youthful, not like it used to be.

Good idea! You've started my cogs rolling!

Say:

Monday isn't half so bad, now that I know they're numbered!

Monday is the curl of snails . . .sluggishly shelled

Mondays are numbered and the curl of snails
-- which makes me believe they are chambered
as a nautilus, as a calendar, as an estate or a castle
or the Winchester Mystery House.

Monday isn't green until you water it.

Which is what makes this drought so bloody awful.

I am reading a collection of short stories.  The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best Stories of the Year, 2007.  There are twenty; I've read five: one about an affair but more about loneliness than anything else; one ghost story and an almost marriage; one history of wars at a french house; one tourist tale set in Galveston Bay 1826 and told by Cheyenne recollecting the journey; one parental worry story about violence and a daughter.  They are each good, each different.  The Indian tale is the story of the storyteller, the one who lived to tell the tale of the sojourners.  I am trying to write fiction again.  Not on the novel.  Irene is so distant from me now; I think she has freckles, even as an adult, even when she dies -- but I can't really recall.  I'm trying to write short fiction and because of the Indian travel/survivor story in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection, I am trying to write a travel/survivor story, too.  I have recently traveled, and although there have been no tornadoes to lift me whirling into the sky and set me back down, with my horse, in a river I could manage--there has been a train threatening to derail; there have been two yipping small dogs I would like to muzzle and deliver somewhere far away from my uncle's mobile home; there has been that dream with the frowning duct tape on the window drapes.  I am trying to write a story with these; I am trying to survive a train wreck; I am uncertain about the dogs except that they are no longer yiipping and the broken skin on my knuckles has heeled from one hit with their tiny sharp teeth.  Actually, only the dachshund's tiny teeth, but the chihuahua wanted so badly to bite me as well, I consider he shared in the bite with the other small four-legged devil.  Why do elderly people have small viscious lap dogs anyway?   

Pour all the dots from the canvas.
Slide Sunday Afternoon on the Island at Le Grande Jatte into a clear bowl -- make it large.
Stare at the white, vacant nubs humping gesso until shadows grow the nubs into hills on the canvas and a bullock rounds the stacked hay with a cart with a girl with no shoes.

Her feet tease the passing road.
The sun turns aside, blushing to find such unabashed beauty, and for ten thousand years the earth cools while the cart passes on down the lane and the bullock is fed by a boy who is too young to know what he will know when the seasons change.

When the sun nods its way out of night
drift all the dots in a drizzle to retake the notion of color and light and eyes pixilated by time to the trickery of calm, the translucent quiver of skirted knees.   

this is a very nice prosepoem!

hmmm.  maybe so.  glad you think it works.  it had a nice feel working it.  i keep picturing this clear bowl full of dimensional pointulism dots like a bowl full of soft little marbles, or colored raisens.  and i liked that i made the sun turn away in a blush.  i seem to need some alternate reason for the demise i see facing earth; i just hope ten thousand years is enough time for the ice sheets to refreeze and come back.  i really do not know how to write about things i don't know how to face.  thanks for the look, rick.  maybe i'll repost as prose poem.  maybe.

I renamed June to Jane back when June was Jane-like (plain) and now October's looking -- what?  Less sure of herself?  Posture's gone all sloppy in the neighborbood: apple limbs round-shouldered, slumping with the bird-pecked fruit nobody climbed a ladder up to harvest; oaks dropping acorns left and right; and it looks like she's spilled bleach to splatter yellow through mulberry's saw-edged leaves.  She's not drunk yet, October, but she's older.  "Oldsober" -- I'll call October that.  It won't stick.  By tomorrow, unless I reread this gibberish, I won't recall.

Just read an opening line on a poem in the Crab Orchard Review that went something like "I would give up anjou pears for you" -- That's not the whole line, or probably even quoted exactly right [pg. 99, ruth ellen kocher, vol. 11, no. 1 if interested] but it made me think about the "you" folks sometimes have in their lives and if I have a "you" just now--someone I would give up anjou pears for.  I would give up anjou pears for my newest grandson, for any of my three grandsons.  I would give up navel oranges for my granddaughters and apricots, I would give up apricots for my friend, Bonnie Jean.  I would give up butterflies for . . . uh oh, uh oh.  I don't think I could give up butterflies.  Not just yet.  I can't think who would ask me to give them up, at least and especially for the sole purpose of writing a line or two in a journal entry.  To write I'd give up anjou pears or fruit of whatever faith is one thing.  I mean, how much bad karma can come from such a note?  But to write I'd give up butterflies, that's another.  That's giving up a lot of wings, a lot of colors, a lot of flight, a lot of dust on those wings, a lot of legs, antennae, trips, dips, nectar exchanges, blooms, cocoons.

Back to the fruit:  I would give up green apples for a new cat I could love like my old one, Kate.  I would give up Haas avocados for a canary who could and would clean his own cage and keep the cage door open, always.  I would give up Sunday meatloaf for a year for three weeks of gentle rain, the kind that can soak in and not erode what's left of banks.  I would sacrifice my most embroidered, patched, repatched, mended, worn, and worn again blue jeans for the spotted fawn that hung itself on the hogwire fence to have another chance, another jump to make when older. 

I find "loneliness" the most curious place to occupy.  And it's not as if you can pick yourself up and step out of lonely into a yard of unlonely.  I am the most separated and distant from every other life form on the planet when among them--consciously among them and they are consciously aware of my presence in that way Jack Nicholas was obsessively aware of the sidewalk lines, patterns, cracks in As Good As It Gets and we, the lines and I, are not to be stepped on.  It's not exactly respect.  And you can't call it love.

And then there are those extraordinary, rare moments.  Unexpected.  Never expected.  Such a swarm of company [more mental, more inside than out] and I am a part of it so much so that I don't know where I end and they begin. 

When in NYC last March and descending into subway tunnels everyday and changing trains and climbing stairs to find other gates --- when I was there and this sea of people moved with me and at me and from me, I felt like a spark in great continuing arc of electricity.  Just thought of that energy while typing here in my lisping whine of a voice.  Just thought of them there, all those strangers sparking the tunnels and stops and turnstiles.  That's what I need: a metro pass.

"Sometimes you think what you're writing is a poem, or a song, when all it really is is something like perspiration."

I sort of liked what I wrote about another thing that I wrote and so I quoted myself above and I'm thinking about having it put on tee shirts, you know, silk-screened or whatever to give as gifts to all my writer friends.  Well.  No.  Not to all my writer friends because my memoirist friends would just shake their heads and my fiction writing friends would just nod their heads and hand the shirts back to me -- BUT certainly to all my poetry writing friends, they would get it, they would understand.  (maybe)

Yup.  Many a sweat-stained page.  Makes the ink run.

:)

Rick

Last night I dreamed I was made of yarn.  At first [and again later on] I was a blue skein of yarn with a paper explaining my contents – 65% wool and 50% cotton and 20% silk and there were too many components, too many.  I was sometimes loose and unmade in my wrapper of explanations; sometimes crocheted too tight.  Once I was knitted perfectly, perfectly, and watching myself in the dream I wanted the pattern for that perfection so that when I wore through and a break began to unravel I could pick up the lost stitches and make myself perfectly whole, recycle me once more.

This was a good dream, this yarn dream.  The bad dreams are the ones when my finger joints are too swollen to bend and I can’t hold the needles, can’t hold the hook, when my eyes are blue white with cataracts and I can’t see the holes in the weave, can’t see them to fix, only feel them with my fingers that no longer bend.

you spun a yarn
about you spun as yarn

I love this.
My mom is an expert knitter and she has no problem taking apart something she's knitted even if it's yards long. She is such an expert you see that she prefers perfection to completion.
                                                      Like you.

: )

Always "on"...

larry

oooo -- not lately my friend, but at least dreaming a little.  and lavonne, i don't know why i dreamed yarns when lately i've been cutting up fabrics/yardage and old clothes into strips and crocheting them into bowls to hold peanuts and chips . . . maybe my subconscious wants me to put away my scissors and go back to yarn?

Good morning,
     and a very fine morning it is, having been up since four by my own choosing without illness. . . but then, it’s been so very long since I bothered to write, I see I have two 'since' without 'sense' jumbled in pollywog.
     I, too, wish you the best of the season, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and throughout each and every year.  May every day - be the lighting of candles (scented or not, as preference should not be required) 
     So very droll I think, “required” I mean . . . it reminds me of shoes, shirts, and choking a Windsor knot serving idiots.  Wandered off I did, all those years tending bar . . . and on a personal note - it makes me shiver with detoxification as I’ve all but given it up this past year or so.  You see, when they removed the tumor, I felt they might have taken enough brain cells without any more sauce, so I deadpanned it out. lmao!
     I’ve all but closed the summer house, the fields are empty and harvest stored, so we’re back to winter in town.  Outskirts of course, you know how I am about closed-up. . . I simply can’t breathe. . .
     but I was thinking of you this morning over my “cough-fee” recalling a bit of nonsense once penned and smiled.  I’ll leave you with the following, another excerpt from a piece “you” inspired- I've had some dreaming myself lately along with crochet, but then, I only have yarn and no scissors. I've never been that creative. lol.
   
"If I but had
a thumbnail full,
a clipping of sorts
to light my path-

WELL…
that would be
you…
no matches
required."
    
 . . . . alll my love to you and yours . . always, N  

*the absolute spark - 2005
  

And a merry march of moons to you, Nora.

milner

I come to add some thoughts to my month of Jane and find such warmth and goodness from you, Nora, and wonder How in the world I failed to read them earlier or send you [as milner has] "a merry march of moons" ... Now Christmas is two arm-lengths away.  I can put my finger on the day if I stand and reach my arm out and press my prints into the center of that square with 25.  But I don't.  It's enough to see that patch of holiday; I needn't touch it. 

Same goes for the llama I bought yesterday.  And the beehive.  And the flock of chicks.  The seedlings for the trees, the suckling pig.  That pretty much wraps up my shopping for the family.  If the teen grandkids are less than excited with the card informing them a pig's been given in their name . . . I'll knit them happy socks and wrap them each a navel orange in colored foil for their mantel stockings.  I know Riggs will love the bees, even on a card; at 7 any winged thing, all crawly many-legged things will do; oh, and Pokeman.  [He'll get over the fact that the card has bees on it and no game points or hidden skills.]  Riley will, at 4, probably sound out the writing on her card--she is so bright, so smart; I hope she smiles at the chicks and understands a little.  The llama is for Nick.  And the trees are for the parents of these grandkids of mine. 

www.heifer.org/catalog is the store where i shopped this year.

I’ve been looking at photos taken at Grand Central Station, lens angled up
to try (with a tool hardly the size of a pack of Marlboro Light 100’s) to capture
the scope of just how grand Grand Central is.  What I managed doesn’t make
the place big so much as it makes passers-by small.

I wonder if I’m caught by other people, if I hold digital space in equally inconsequential ways, without dimension, near invisible, even at the moment of lens entrapment, as if in walking across those cavernous floors we made no sound and sighs did not sigh in any audible way, and all that was marble wasn’t marble, wasn’t even glossy paper, but cyber-digits—pixels, not real.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling, scrutinizing the stride of some stranger on their way to somewhere other than where they were.  Africa comes to mind and old B&W movies where the natives did not cotton to having their pictures taken.  Or was that the Old West and Cheyenne People that feared their spirits stolen via portraiture?  Or aboriginal Australians?  Does it matter what continent?  Maybe.  I can blame every photo ever taken that contains an image of me for my lack of spirit. 

I’ve been robbed.  Systematically diminished by tools I barely know how to use.

Here's a little poem for Nick.
I was crazy about A A Milne when I was a little kid.
Needs a lot of tweaking, fixing the syllables, meter, etc. as well as a few more verses but here it is anyway:

Adventure on a carpet sea

Five mice set off in a leather shoe
with a hankie for a sail.
Adventure, they said, was dead ahead
but they did take a thimble to bail.

(Shoes are notoriously leaky, you know.)

Their rudder was a butter knife
fastened with a lace.
With hat pin swords in case of war
they'd administer the coup de grace

 (They might be chased by the cat.)

They rowed all day on the nursery floor
till the littlest began to cry.
The Captain, who was the oldest,
began to harrumph and sigh.

(After all, they were hungry for their tea.)

The captain ordered the sail hauled down
from the no 2 pencil mast.
They pushed the shoe back under the bed
just as Nanny hurried past.

(Pencils and hankies do not belong on the floor.)

Over buttered scone crumbs they giggled and laughed
of their adventure on the carpet sea
Except, of course, the little one
who fell asleep at tea.

(There are NO naps on the high seas!)

Very cute
but make that clotted cream scones.

e

yum!

What a fun treat!  I'll share this one with my daughter so she can share it with nick.  I wrote some juvenile poems a few years ago, thought I'd get a bunch put together for my grandbabies then, never happened though.  This is one.

Hear the Moon Coo-Coo

Gramma!  Gramma! Where’ve you been?

To the moon and back again!

How’d you get there?  Can we go?

Climbed a ladder, don’t you know!

Can we, Gramma?  Can we, please,
climb with you and taste the cheese?

Taste the cheese?  You silly loves,
no cheese up there, just snow-white doves.
Listen . . . can you hear them now?
Coo-coo, coo-cooing to the cow?

Gramma?  Can you bring one back?

What?  And let the moon go black?
Old moon, she needs them every one
to hold her high for Brother Sun
and mirror back her feathered grace
on nights like this for our home space.

Listen, Riggs, and Riley, too . . . hear them now?

Coo-coo, coo-coo!

You silly, Gramma, that’s just you!

Lynn, This is extraordinary. I read it aloud to Sandi and she's made me print it to take to school. You need to put these together. The market for children is huge. I know that sounds commercial, but this is exceptional...

Yes, exceptional! I'd love to read more!

oh my.

What you should really do first is record them for the kids then publish them for everyone else!

I'd forgotten all about the recording thing -- audacity, wasn't it?  seems like I finally figured out how to do it, with some success, and then I left for Santa Barbara again and forgot everything I'd learned.  Will have to check into that again . . .

The one that follows is something I wrote for one of my daughter's friends -- she had three wonderful high-spirited girls under the age of six when I sent this to her a few years back.  The only thing I can say for sure is that these were written in fun and most likely need a lot of work. 

The Tumble Sisters

The Tumble sisters' most favorite thing
Is jumping jacks on Saturn's ring

Except for Mondays of mid-July
When they like to gobble-eat pies in the sky

Or January Tuesdays when they open their clinic
And fix the broken friends found there in it

Like Erica Wee-Flea's tiny broken leg
Or Claudia Canary's too-soon cracking egg

Or the itty-bitty motor for the spinning mechanisms
Charlotte needs to weave nets for dew-drop prisms

But May Wednesday's are pretty special, too
When the busy Tumbles help Bumble honey-up his stew

And Thursdays, every Thursday, through October's glow
The sisters giggle through the wiggle of leaves letting go

How they tickle them color, blush them oranges and reds
And drift them down to join others in fine-mulched beds

Two Fridays of December they keep for sewing flakes
The other two (as girls will do) are specially for their skates

They circle-eight and pirouette out on the frozen pond
To the songs of bull-frogs in ear muffs they have donned

Still, September's Saturdays, the firsts and thirds at least
Will find the Tumble Sisters wishing for a grumpy beast

A beast with mangled, tangled hair, any beast at all
Who needs a comb run through new lengths of fur for Fall

But the favorite Any-Day-Thing of these Tumble wish-ters
Is jumping jacks on Saturn's ring and simply being sisters

AWWW. My favorite cuplet:

Or the itty-bitty motor for the spinning mechanisms
Charlotte needs to weave nets for dew-drop prisms

that's just darn fun to say!

My daughter used to call Snap Beans - Snappin beans.

Snappin Beans

Daddy snaps them off the vine
Mama snaps them up real fine
I snap them up from my plate
When it's beans for dinner
I'm never late!


and this one (the grandparents from Alabama served as inspiration):

Maters and Taters

Maters and taters
tickle my tongue
jump into my stomach
and make me say yum!

Maters and taters
taste so very nice
I eat every last bite
and leave none for the mice!

Little rhymes like that always seemed to tickle the kids
and made mealtime an easy thing!

Lavonne!  what a treat to find those rhymes!  what fun -- thanx.  What follows is more memoir exercising or perhaps excising, whatevah.


“Describe a place, a memory from childhood,” she writes in an email meant to encourage but . . . doesn’t.  It’s not that I don’t know what to write, that I don’t have “place” memories by the buckets—it’s that I’ve already written them.  I have picked them up out of my past, rubbed them hard and light between my fingers, bitten their edges with my real teeth (when I still had real teeth to bite down with) to see if they’d scar after all this hardening time, banged them each into the next (looking for fissures, cracks), examined the geodes when geodes there were, and sat next to the hundreds of filled buckets of words about me and mine totally flummoxed by the unbreakable codes of why one patch of dirt felt better underfoot than another.

But, because I aim to write when given a nudge to write, I will give some page to a powder-dirt road that ran between the big ranch house and the field.  The field was one of many on the River Ranch Dairy property; the big ranch house was the only big house and occupied infrequently when the owners came to visit; the road was a farm equipment road to the infrequent visitors to the big ranch house, to my father the farmer of the fields, and to persons over the age of twelve.

The fields were mostly planted with alfalfa, especially the one that ran along the dirt road topic of this piece of writing; but some were, seasonally, planted with silage corn.  That is the last you will read about corn for the moment and many moments to come because corn and the fields where the corn grew were farther away than I was allowed to venture during the specific age I’d attained when memories of this particular stretch of road take place.  The “age I had attained” is a foggy guess, at best, but I’m going for six, and I am there and I am six and I am standing in the soft powder of the road.  The powder is the color of the palest chickens in Grandpa Ivy’s chicken yard—not red exactly and not yellow exactly either, or brown, but a faded out something color like an almost absolved tea stain on one of Mama’s muslin tea towels.  Yes, the powder is that color, that almost colorless color, and when I stamp my foot on the road the looseness of it floats up to cover my brown shoe.  When I jump, creasing my knees to lift both feet as high up as I can, my heels touch the back pockets of my dungarees.  I land hard again, leather shoes planted deep in the dirt and I am enveloped in an almost colorless, faded chicken-ish cloud of dusty dust that rises almost as high as the horizontal stripes in my t-shirt.  A few jumps is all it takes and the bright stripes all but disappear, as do the dungarees and the brown leather shoes into the same colorless color of the road itself.

Rain is uncommon in southern California; the road is almost always a puff of powderiness.  When a tractor or my father’s pick-up truck go down it, the dust rises as high as the eucalyptus trees lining the side yard of the big ranch house.  (There’s a bedroom inside the big ranch house, one of two at the top of the stairs, that has charcoal gray, almost black wallpaper with tiny pink rosebuds with frail green stems floating all over the almost black, and the bed has a bright pink spread and the floor has the thickest carpet a girl could ever stand on and it is as bright a pink as the spread and the rosebuds in the walls.  I am 61 now, or will be next Friday, and I have never been in such a beautiful room ever again since then.)  But when it does rain, all the dirt is washed from the eucalyptus and from the alfalfa along the side of the road and from the tall weeds on the other side of the road (under and between the eucalyptus trees and outside the yard of the big ranch house).  And now, finally, I come to that place in memory from childhood that I started to write about when I began this.

On a day after an uncommon rain I stood in the road between the fields and the house with the tall weeds glistening green and clean and I broke them off at their stem, some of them, enough to tuck up under my brown leather belt, and I made a skirt—all the way round—that hung in leafy softness to the tops of my shoes.  I swayed there, in my weed hula skirt, arms doing the posing that the hula girl on my uncle’s dashboard did.  The sun was warm on the bright stripes of a clean t-shirt; my brown shoes were clean as they were every morning because my mama cleaned them up spiffy every night while I slept; I was exotic and girly (an extraordinary admission in and of itself) and danced a long time in my weed skirt.  It may have been for five minutes or fifty that I maintained that stage where the colorless powder was less colorless and the powder was compacted and firm and the whole earth smelled of wet clover and clean eucalyptus and no one came by tractor or pick-up truck.

Okay.  So let’s drop this one into that bucket for now.  Maybe on a another day I’ll bite these dentures into it and see which bit of artifice breaks . . .

Yesterday I turned sixty-one and hummed or sang out loud right through it.  Occasionally, in the humming, I wondered just when it was that I became a ghost, an observer, a chronicler of what my children and grandchildren do or don't do, wear or don't wear, eat, don't eat, break, don't break, play, don't play, read, don't read, etcetera and so on ad nauseum.  Ad nauseum to anyone else and those unfortunates who read my work and think , not again not again not again -- but not ad nauseum to me.  I don't tire of them and their ways and not ways.  I have, you see, someone to haunt, after all; these fragile containers of pieces of me and, admittedly, others.  If I were less ghost, more opaque, they would be less able to see through me and beyond to whatever is beyond.  They are my now.  They are solid, not opaque, in the moment, this moment.  Sometimes it's blinding how day bounces off their hides and my eyes water with first words, first outloud laughs, first stitches, first baby teeth gone missing, first speeding ticket, first blue ribbon for the 100 meter butterfly at a meet, first first first first first.  The "now" that they are is solid because of all that they have been -- to me, to others I guess, but to me.  I can't see through them to the beyond, but they, without even knowing they can and do, they see through me.  Outlines of organs inside are faint and inconsequential.  Depending upon where the sun is in its travels, I am pink translucence.  A living ghost.  Sometimes I forget I am still here at all, then, I hear the humming.  And it's all okay.

Some ghost, Lynn, some ghost.

milner

Yes -- I reckon so.  Some days I feel that transparent, though, you know?  With really nothing of value for them to read on the inside at all. 

Have been reading Flash fiction and also Flash non-fiction.  What follows is just free thought, free write, after reading:

Benjamin Rosenbaum wrote “The Orange” and the editors of Flash Fiction Forward put it on page 135 when W. W. Norton Company were clever enough to publish the 80 stories Jim and Bob (Thomas and Shapard, respectively) had brought together.  And I, after reading a review by Charles Lennox on Gather, and being less dim than on other days, I ordered a copy from Amazon!  Wonderful short-shorts.  Wonderful small reads of big stories.  Sometimes larger than life.  As in the case of “The Orange.”

Here’s the thing: right or wrong, I often imitate stories most enjoyed and/or respected.  In B. Rosenbaum’s short-short “The Orange,” the opening line reads: “An orange ruled the world.” 

My world is ruled by whim, not an orange, and the short-short I want to write will not be about oranges, regal or treeless, but about . . . about . . . birds.  Yes.  And a particular bird that . . . hmmm . . . doesn’t rule the world, doesn’t even rule his own roost, but, instead, is, is . . . is (hold on, hold on, I’m thinking here!) is THE bird with the longest beak in the world!   In fact, too long a beak to allow that this bird could or should thrive.  The sort of beak that once a morsel, for instance a seed, is tweezered between top and bottom, the energy required to bobble that seed the whole length of his beak to enter his mouth burns slightly more calories than the morsel provides.  A dim future, indeed.  To be always in decline, generation to generation, until the decline is such that even if there were male birds capable of fertilization, their female counterparts could no longer squeeze out an egg.  And it wasn’t just the one bird (well, at first perhaps, but not for long) or even confined to feathered types for more than half a season.  In the same way that particularly viral influenzas spread between species, this counter-evolutionary process spread.  Laterally, at first, until no eagle could maintain a wingspan as he soared; eagles of all varieties collapsing into fields, trees, granite mountain faces.  Hawks, of course, too.  Plain sparrows.  Yellow canaries.  Bees.  Gnats.  Mosquitoes and flies.  By the time people felt the effects, they cared next to none.  Science forgot how to make anti-depressants and those people that didn’t hang themselves (mostly because they were completely inept with nooses), ran over high cliffs like lemmings.  They could have been mammoth or buffalo herded to fall in just such a way by primitive tribes on Paleo continents.  They could’ve been, but in fact they were modern people gone retro beyond any brain capabilities at all!  The sorriest part, the very most sorriest part of all this Rise and Fall of species is that by the time the “fall” gets underway, we are all too dumb to put the skids on—and, by the time we RE-evolution ourselves into homes and gizmos again, we can’t remember we’ve wrecked it all at least once before or that a species of birds grew beaks too long to be useful just from drinking the water used to cool the gizmo factory uptown.

The orange in B. Rosenbaum’s story got bought by the narrative voice on page 136 of Flash Forward Fiction.  The n.v. paid 39 cents and after three days ate the orange, the same orange that was, until his departure, ruler of the world.  How do I compare my rare bird of long beak? Never a ruler, certainly never eaten (not by this narrative voice!), is he, was he, in the end, the sum of all of our best intentions?  Or . . . shh . . . . I’m thinking.

Thoroughly enjoyable Lynn. Your astute observations of the decline of civilization are fascinating. What I love about Flash is that the writer is forced to distill their ideas into the purest form - in that respect it is like poetry.

Well, that, for just a ramble.  But I do have fun on these short slides into Wherever Land.  Thanks girlfriend.

A funeral day, after the services, dead but not dead, I sat in our only armchair with my hands holding either arm.  The upholstery was green tweed.  Or big blue flowers on beige.  Or brick-red worn thin with batting and wood showing through.  I see my hands on the arms, his wedding band stuck on my finger and held from falling off by my wedding band stuck on after.  But I can’t see what fabric the chair was or if my legs crossed at the knee or at the ankle or if my ankles ran parallel down to the brown rug and angled side by side there and flat.  I can’t see that.  We were dead, you see, these parts of us—hands, feet, the stuff in between.  And not.  I watched people move  They moved as if falling through water.  But not, obviously not, as they paused, exchanged nods, bubbles of small talk with other participants halting from slow descents (or ascents) through currents I could not see. 

The embers cooled and went out on the fire screen and new sparks hung there and died.  The log was spitting itself free.  Flaring in size just to fade.  Strange to remember the sparks but not the covering on the armchair.  Did I nod when people came close? and if I nodded could they see that it was me? my head that bobbed up and down agreeing with something said?  Or:  was my presence a figment of communal imagination?  was I the one passed and Al the one somewhere about—shoulder leaned into a porch post and head cocked to one side—listening?  My mind is of two worlds.  I decided all those years ago to rise from my armchair and walk out among them.  I was invisible.  Truly.  Known, like an earthquake is known to animals before the ground shakes, but invisible: I was Death they could sense but not feel.   I wore double-knit, dark gray.  The skirt was very long.  The belt, very wide.  And when I moved among them, his friends, sisters, brothers on the front and back porches of our life, they parted to let me pass.  They parted as schools of minnows would part to go round a bit of wavering root.  Or flooded grass.

I wasn’t sad.  I was something different on the day of Al’s funeral: an observer of sparks caught in screens and deep pools of trapped friends, fathers, mothers, siblings.  It comes to me now . . . the armchair was brick-red, a warm rust corduroy with wide wales and too new to have worn through to the wood under the batting the way it did six years ago when the last reupholstering made it checkered.  Blue and ecru, I believe.

I lived in the loghouse above Cottonwood Creek in 1997; I was back from my CSU years in Sacramento -- home again, home again, jiggidly-jig.  But when OJ's televised media chase appeared, interupting basketball playoffs with a white SUV crawling along southern California highways and a plethora (is that the right word to use just here?) of LAPD vehicles giving chase, at an equally ridiculous pace, not to mention the helicopter pursuits with cameramen able to give television viewers (even those viewers trying to watch basketball playoffs) an eagle's eye view of OJ's progress -- I lived in the condo in Citrus Heights.  There were a number of girls there during the telecast, friends of Aimee, my youngest daughter, friends come down from Cottonwood, up from Santa Barbara, across from the Bay Area.  We were all heading off to Lake Tahoe and a Bachelorette Party for Aimee.  On that day, the basketball play-offs day, not one among us was pleased in the least to have the game reduced to a wee, small, five-inch square on the upper right corner of the TV screen, while OJ and his entourage of law enforcement and media took up not only freeways in southern California, but 95% of the television screen as well.  We were, what's the best word, peevish about it all.  It was a circus, one repleat with banners hung over freeway walls and bridges, spectators hoo-rahing their idol -- GO! O.J. GO! -- from rows of lawn chair spectators along the way.

Not the same at all on the tenth of February '97 when the Jury pronounced not guilty.  I was alone in the house, hands in a sink full of dishes.  The news came down from an upstairs television kept on for noise value (sometimes solitude is not all it's cracked up to be.)  The verdict floated down from that loft area.  I think the dishwater was cold by then.  Maybe there weren't many suds left to do a proper job.  Maybe all I could see were the greasey spots floating the dirty water.  I don't honestly remember why I stopped doing whatever I was truly doing and walked out on the back porch and walked down the stairs to the spa and sat on the final step and cried.  I mean cried until my shoulders heaved up and down even when I stopped crying.  I mean crying so that if, if there had been someone to say What's wrong?  What has upset you to this point? I would not have been able to answer -- physically unable to respond, but also at a tremendous loss as to how to put into words just what was lost in that moment, that verdict, that setting free.

2008, February 10

Excellent writing, Lynn. Note how the event is knitted to the narrator without editorializing, judging. It makes the piece so much stronger. Nice work.

larry

And note how the last three words sum the whole story and connect the reader, the writer and the world at large. Bravo.

It is mother's day and I have thought much and written much about my mother, but one way and another the writing came around to Death [somebody, just shoot me!] and I started reading some Rilke and then I put myself back in a room and hearing my husband was dead and this is what came and I think it may be not poetry but prose. 


Green Room

They had, one would guess, brought the helicopter
in on account of hope that all was not irrevocably
lost on the office kitchen floor, that resuscitation amid
coffee pot shards by strangers in paramedic yellow coats
was merely Step One to Sitting Up, altogether again

with working heart, inflatable lungs, apologetic
about all the fuss, the broken cup, shattered carafe,
assurances, once he caught a second wind,
he’d replace the wrong done.  One of them had to laugh,
and his laugh let the others smile about whose mouth
had saved his mouth and Cancel-The-Medi-Vac jocularity

might have been the way, instead of hopeless rotors
lifting him off to that hopeless place where staff
awaited their turns to emote – from Chaplain
to ER nurse, attending physician (He Who
Pronounced) – their audience was me.

White jackets, green scrubs, suffocating.
A rehearsed Gravity as if sympathetic, they began
to inform (as they should; this is in their Job
Descriptions) this mute, this  CPR Dummy who stands
on thick legs, sand-filled (Widows Wobble

But They Don’t Fall Down) chest, a bomb wired
to the aorta, ticking, ticking.  Seven thousand nights ago,
in a green staging room where no natural light finds
the dark.  And two doors away, him –
no apologies/assurances, no promises made.


.

Notes from Lake Shasta -- late July 08

In the cove there was smoke.
On the water, a Merganser.
An eagle split air with his white feathered head.

An osprey, closer, gyred down
to a carp lazing in shallows.

The far shore was gone,
particulate curtained.
Earth was flat in our hearts.

In our hearts, we sailed the Pinta.

Smoke.  Duck. 
Eagle.  Hawk.  Us.
Such a flocking herd. 
Such a school.

You may blame Lavonne for triggering thoughts about old keepsakes, old bones, the unburied at her new blogsite theunburied.wordpress.com  She is the cause I wrote a memoir bit called Shrapnel; and she is the cause I am now considering a hat and other "found" things.  You have to wonder how people forget things, leave things behind, things that get found by other people and picked up and kept or picked up and then set back down.  I am thinking about a small Pacific Gas and Electric lake here in northern California.  P.G. and E. has a lot of them around in the hills.  They generate power where the creeks and streams trickle in or out of their small dams.  The truth is, I have set down and left behind the exact name of the lake, but I think it was either Grace, or Nora, or Kilarc.  Or it may have been Whitmore.  We fished all of them, especially when the kids were young -- 6, 7, and 9, up through their adolescent years.  Fish and Game stocked browns in these lakes, these small power ponds.  And they stocked rainbows in them, too.  There must have been times when we went that some other fishermen types were there on the banks, but I don't recall that there ever were.  Just us.  No real parking lot, only a wider dirt shoulder off the road.  Tall fir trees and a winding path back in to get to the banks.  O, now I consider it all, there must have been a service road for the P.G. and E. guys and the Fish and Game folks.  But if there were such a road, it most likely had a chain gate barring the entrance of such likes as us. 

Like I said right at the get-go of this little foray into the broad wilderness of so many things forgotten: Blame Lavonne.  You see, I wrote about Shrapnel, and she wrote about a hat that had belonged to her brother, and I thought about a hat we found left behind at the edge of a small power pond in the middle of a tall wood where we cast our lines and waited for big browms to nibble our hooks.  Her fault.  And now I've run out of doodle time before I even get into the hat story, except I will say it was black.  And Stetson.  I will say I have it still.

www.americanlifeinpoetry.org

Today is September 11, 2008, and I've just read a poem by a man who lost a brother to the twin towers devastation.  The poem came to me via american life in poetry, as one poem a week always does.  And I didn't know where on this site the link to ALP might be best placed so decided to put the link here in my journalese thread.

Writing in the month of Jane is writing in any month of the named time and the named time is any time spent writing when the writing is not necessary to anything other than the imagination and hands set to keys.

Tomorrow, September 12, I leave home in little red, my little red button of a car, and will be gone for one to two months.  Places I will be for varying amounts of time include Santa Barbara CA, San Diego, Temecula, Rosarita Beach BJ, Phoenix and Cottonwood AZ, Las Cruces NM, Amarillo TX, Joplin MO, Paducah KY, Columbus OH, Pittsburgh, Williamsport, Reading, Philadelphia PA, Mystic CT.  At least those are my stops going.  Haven't planned out my return as yet.  But I hope it includes Shirley MA.

I've joined a site called Roadfood.com and I'm actively in pursuit of "the best" home cooking along the way -- best chicken-fried steak, best burger, best bbQ pork, best coconut cream pie, best meatloaf, best hot dog, best greasy spoon between the left and right coasts.  So if any of you know of a place in Paducah KY that I should not miss . . . or any other place along these long highways -- give me a heads up, here, or by PM ... thanks.

p.s. OR, if you know of good coffee houses or bars where poetry is read ... I'd stop at those places too.

Have a great trip Lynn.
Don't forget to write!

B.

EDIT: Just read that Kestenbaum poem. Beautiful, thanks for that link.

We have packed our pencils, pens and genres into a briefcase with October’s shirts underneath September’s sleeveless gowns.  We have sat on top of this fat case of years and forced the zipper closed over break-ups and buttons.  We have tied a green cord on the handle of forgetfulness and made confetti of maps we will season the trails with.  We are cross country bound.  But, for the moment, in Santa Barbara with two daughters and three grandkids and love. 

Thanks for asking, B.

me

I'm envious! Can I toss it all to the wind and ride along?  It could make for great writing material and I could make your lunch. 

Love you and please be safe,
Sherry

Gone, or going, with the wind, Lynn. Marvellous. 'Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar'. Go with a bag full of fair winds. Hope you'll be in touch along the way.

milner

"We have tied a green cord on the handle of forgetfulness and made confetti of maps we will season the trails with. "

I was taken back to the day I received your book in the mail - tied with a green picot ribbon.

Dear Lynn

If you do find yourself in New England......tuesday nights at the Reflections Café
usually begins around 7:30//8pm

468 Wickenden St
Providence, RI 02903
(401) 273-7278

is poetry night.... sometimes with a guest poet and always with an open mic
and sometimes a guitarist who will improvise a background as you read.

It is hosted by the poet Tony Brown & Ryk McIntyre.

You probably already know Tony from Buddah's poetry voice anthology
which you are also on.

http://www.myspace.com/poetrybytonybrown

http://www.gotpoetry.com/News/article/sid=2477.html

I am there in Providence myself from time to time......let me know if you might make it.

I would be a pleasure for my wife and i to take you out to some of Providences
wonderful eating holes.

miles of smiles
silent lotus

email: insight  @ silentlotus.net

You know how you get working at the back of the house and somebody knocks on the door and you don’t hear it and one of the kids answers it or somebody else answers it if you live with other somebody elses.  Or maybe it’s a neighbor and they just let themselves in because they know how you are and that you are home and probably working at the back of the house.  Anyway, you turn around and there they are, the whoever company, perhaps your sister, or your brother, and you’re embarrassed because you haven’t cleaned house all day.  You’ve been making apple butter, peeling apples, doing that kind of thing if it’s the fall and the apples are ready.  You are embarrassed to see them, whoever they may be, because they come unexpected, and you go all warm and flushed with them just suddenly there … Well, that’s how hot flashes come upon me.  Unexpected, while I am busy at something else, working out some minor moment at the back of my brain and then without so much as a By your leave, there all that warmth comes to rosy up my cheeks and prickle me into discomfort.

 

Last night I recorded the moment.  Today I write out what I recorded, thinking all the while about what approaches on tender paths I can’t locate, even when I consciously search them out.  From what direction and in what guise will it arrive, that end of as is and beginning of ever after?  Through what door will it come to leave me powerless to rise from a final sleep.

 

It is my heroine, of course, my Irene of the True Life Adventures who gnaws at imagination, asks me to hold a buttonhook in one hand and thousand-buttoned leather shoe in the other before I decide what road to take a hundred years after choices were made on her behalf.  Silly girl of the human cannonball act.

 Yesterday Alice picked me up from Carolyn’s white hacienda with blue trim and uneven stone steps and brought me down to Rosarito.  Her home is alive with color, saturated reds and blues and this room where I sleep is celery green with sky-blue shelves.  There is a tall geisha on the far wall in a pink gown and she seems worked in pastels and there is a red backgrounded poster from the the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, dated 1966 gracing the wall on my right.  There are, everywhere, pieces of time placed for comfort and pleasure and it is all pleasing to me.

[continued on blog at www.lynndoiron.wordpress.com]

I want to know the latest in the adventures of Lynn D.

larry

Me, too.

PS: If I have this straight. You started a road trip, got to the first stop and signed a one year lease. Must be gorgeous.

This is the odd bit, it's not gorgeous.  Litter blows about everywhere.  Nothing is immaculate or even planned out very well.  Sidewalks are chunky and broken, too narrow here, nonexistent there.  Street dogs run wild.  Children sing.  Driving is like a game of "chicken" with each car daring the next but also backing off -- strange, strange driving.  Parks have no grass.  Tacos are to die for.  Or chicken from the chicken man joint.  Nothing is bad.  The smiles are big.  And genuine.  And I'm not just talking about food.  "It" is not gorgeous here.  Some aspects are heartbreaking.  But the people met so far are beautiful.  Am hoping a bit of that will rub off!

P.S. You got the part right about making the first stop and signing a one year lease; keys now in hand and today is bed shopping day!

http://lynndoiron.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/saturday-the-brown-plates-with-undecided-designs/   Is my latest.  I promise to read more and make comments again soon [okay, yooz guys! stop booing!] -- I have no phone and no cable connections as yet and all of my on line time is at my friend Alice's house and I can't over-do my welcome. 

Sounds like you have lots of Lynn time - which will, I am sure, end up in your writing. I am anticipating great things. :)

There is no perceptible wind today yet I have swept my small patio twice and each time made small hills of fine black dirt.  Skies are as intesely blue as they are every day here in Rosarito.  Federales (a slang Spanish term for Mexican federal police) stopped Alice’s Explorer last evening on Blvd. Benito Juarez, glanced inside, saw that we were gray-haired and blue-eyed, and wished us buenos noches with a nod and Gracias.  The bulk of their bulletproof vests showed under their outer wear; their guns were not slung at ease, but held as if ready to react, if need be.  I find myself living in a smiling, polite, armed communtiy at present.  We, those of us in Alice’s Ford, were on our way to The Last Saturday of the Month Rosarito Poetry Reading at Cha-Cha’s.

This question deserves its own line: Are poets really that dumb?

Or is that we are just of an age that we tire of caution?  In the back seat of Alice’s car, Jim (88) and Marsh (not that much younger); in the front seat, the birthday girl, Alice (70 years young as of yesterday), and me (61 and counting).

We are not very good poets, any of us.  But at Cha-Cha’s, with a glass of wine included in the cover charge of $5, we listened and shared our lines and our rants with several other writers gathered, we laughed and we clapped, talked, poked holes in each other’s work, and a few hours later climbed back in the Ford and came home without a single machine gun in sight . . .

My. I've never been attracted to poetry readings--seemed oxymoronic--till now. Again I'm jealous.

larry

I guess, like life, it's what you see on the way there, what you taste in the moment, what you find on the way back, and how, at the end, peaceful the sleep.  Thanks, Larry.  I always smile when I see you've stopped to leave a note on my door.  Gracias.  lynn

Three P.M., Popotla

Why do seagulls have an orange dot on their lower beak,
like a persimmon beauty mark, or boil,
like a bright orange dime on their lip,

then a whiter white coat of feathers (beyond decent),
and an eye, rings of yellow and black,
for tacos camarones I eat?

This chair is the best ___
facing breakers rolling for miles,
two legs on one level of decking
and two legs on another, a foundation shift?

one nobody noticed and after one Pacifico,
and another, who cares___
those breakers breaking, like Popotla is

a great conch I sit inside,
the roar pulling like a heart tide, the gull on the rail,
mariachis at the next marisco stand

and, too young, but a busboy___
twenty, twenty-five, maybe sixteen
a table away,
brown skin, white teeth (beyond decent)
and the ocean teaming with birds striking waves
in the sun long after midday.

The Baja pig is wanted
Posters up on utility poles
Mi Piggy! they say
with a portrait & reward.

Fingernails half-mooned now with loam
Bougainvillea planted in Popotla pot
Frondy palms are planted too
Geraniums are not

Spasmed little pain when I moved the chimenea
Bublous heavy thing with a flower on the front
Hollow hole without a fire, without a rock
Promises of lemon wood to warm my evening chair

95 made me laugh, 96 made me sigh

nice.

Still Life No. 1

Consider the pear on this counter near midnight,
bulbous shadow of lavender-brown sharp against
stark white under a 100 watt overhead.  Stem bent
as a raised eyebrow crafted from heavy gauge wire
too long in the weather, mottled brown hiding all
but mere glimpses of has-been gold, and the miniature
old rugged cross where a blossom has been dimples
where it all started. 

See how the wire eyebrow touches the shadow of stem,
makes an umber rainbow as if the whole dirty world
recycled itself through one Asian pear and a stretch
of glossy Formica.

Cool in the palm – while the air is still warm
it occurs to me that I am blood-driven and warmer
than a room-temperature pear.  Consider these wrinkles,
two deep lines where my brows try to meet
when I’m massaging deep thoughts, uneven
bangs from a last bad haircut of uneven shades of gray,
glint of the overhead off the label on the pear,
off these trifocal lenses through which I stare ___

Consider the whole of the still:  Woman
With Pear at Midnight.

      I thought to stop and only say - happy new year to you too, my friend.  but also,  I found the above.  very nicely done, I think.  I love the thought of a pear at midnight, a bad haircut, and wrinkles . . . yes, I said wrinkles.
     this year, this year when the girl was home - I caught her looking at me.  I said "why are you doing that all the time?"  (staring at me, I mean.)  and she said, "I never noticed how much silver you have running through your hair, or how you frown when sewing, or when doing anything else.  it's very strange, how you've aged finally"
now I ask you, - what kind of thing is that for a girl to say?  I guess she missed the thirty years I spent raising kids, or maybe, just maybe, I am- a bit older. lmao.
     she graduates this june and soon I'll be off to washington again to see her do just that - the last of my brood - and part of me is doing a tippy-toe like you wouldn't believe!  I'm finished you see, finally finished - the last one gone.  (well, she has her master's but that's not really me anymore, I've done the best I can)
     I say that because- I found her very different this year . . . yes, yes, there are still remnants of the child, but she's changed somehow.  she made dinner, off and on, the whole time home, vacuumed, did dishes, and even back-talked the man when she thought he was out of line.  she never once weaseled her way round money either - she simply asked for what she needed and then outlined why.  gone, gone was the girl . . .
    except for clothes - lmao - she's still got that "how do I look? unsure pixie elf" going on without a clue she's gorgeous.  worries about her boobs, she does. . . her butt, and everything in-between.  "how does this look?  too slutty?  too plain?  god! I'm too short aren't I?"  and - "momma make me something to wear, I know you can, please, please, please, I need a business suit that fits"  (so of course I did - every night, clear past midnight after working all day untill I felt I had pins in my head from altering and she wore it home, wore it home she said, because when she stepped off that plane she wanted her friend to ask her where she got it)
     Erin, her friend, is coming this summer - she was here last summer also, but this year she's coming for two weeks . . ."I love your mother" she says , and "your house is an easy place to come to" - I haven't a clue about that, I mean, I don't treat anyone as being special, it just is what it is, nothing more. . .
     You take the other day, (a day last week)  AnYwAyS - we'd spent the day going through boxes.  I was looking for my paints, the canvasses were found before she ever got here, they're kinda hard to miss - but I couldn't find my paints.  so, we found them and then did some other arranging here and there, knick-knacks, some poetry framed, some scrapbooking, and just this and that, kind of. . .next thing I know . . . she's (the girl) is pulling a bottle of chablis from the fridge . . .(one that came from france in ninety-nine) "paint me" she says. . .
     "I don't do portraits" came the reply . . ."no, but you do- do color." "paint"- "me"
it's to be her graduation present - as only you can imagine,  I'm not finished. . . I spent all of new year's eve working on it, took her to the airport in grunge, (paint and paint and paint, blue jeans ten years old, torn, tattered, an old grub-fest shirt, u-2, the summer my oldest was fifteen and I took him in an effort to blend music with sexuality but also to make him see sensual was a state of mind and not just physical) and then a spent all of new year's day after, and still . . . still . . .there's no end to it . . . it's hard to explain, but I told her all of it, the shirt, the music, the time, the place. before she left I tried to explain . . . the why of me . . .the way I am.  "she knows," she said.  "I've always known, and nothing, nothing, means more to me"
    I sculpted her once. she was, but three.  I put everything I had into it.  she was so perfect to me, that child I never wanted ... the illness I had when carrying, the threat of abnormality, the cancer that grew and grew and threatened to take her life from me . . .and ultimately - cost me - two other children in the way of finance, but worth it, definitely worth, every piece ripped out . . . I - "chose" - for the very first time in my "entire" life. "I chose" -unfortunately, her grandmother on her father's side holds the doll.  she'd have to make amends with her father to aquire it, and this - she will not - do... we - her and I, can't even talk about him - not ever . . . "you'll never love anyone else that way, will you momma? not ever. . not ever . . ."
 
     her, not me. . . makes me sad, I loved him, still do, in a way- unknown to even me . . .he's a bassist's who never plays anymore,  one, who hasn't played - since I left him, and he was good, very, very, good. . . made a ton when he worked. . . a ton, one night shows, but still ... a ton - for what, he did. . .I left him right before signing, I'd had enough and I've always blamed myself years later . . . still do . . . such a waste, such a waste . . . I can't even talk to him, all these years later, because I would just be so sucked right down in his talent ... so sucked right down. . .not to be . . . not to be . . . I was born to be equal, and not, behind. . . she hates him, for that. . .she hates him for that. . . so silly, not to see the man behind . . . he gave to me - myself . . .made me see it ultimately, no matter what.
     sure.  sure, it took years to find it. . . but never - was it not - there.

    I'll send you a picture, my friend, if ever, I'm done. nanny says it's the best I've ever done so far . . . but what does he know? ? ?  abstract as usual - but how does one paint the colors another brings?  the fullness I've felt with her, the place beyond fathomable, the bells of astibles in spring, snow glossed white tinged yellow, buttercups, valleys, and chasms meant to be breached . . .against every ocean - she's the sea I've sailed. for better or for worse, the atlantic meets the pacific and continents fall between. meaningless -except - for "surge. . "
     that girl's got a lot of surge, my friend, in all the  "right"  ways. . .  happy new year, my friend, it's been a good one for me and I pray it's the same for you... love, N

Chocolate is a chance
I take with cabernet sauvignon
(Charles Shaw bought at Trader Joe’s
and also known as Two-Buck Chuck)
while a friend on the line-end ponders
rewrites of Chaucer’s four thousand lines because
because those lines have not been done
since nineteen fifty-seven.

I was ten then.  So was my friend,
who today told herself You’re not forty, Girlie,
who told me, I found my tender buttons
piece – seven pages of one more decision
what to keep and what to give – and
it struck her, her world was shrinking. 
One by one they come,

the things you can live without
in Mexico.  Or not.  Justine’s award
for acing The National Latin Exam . . .
Can you live without this?  Not.

We take our baskets to our sisters;
except for one.  In the kitchen, we take all out
to think about: this, and this and this,
and this goes
in that pile for thinking
over over there. 

These dishes, these containers, these
that we love to store dry stuff inside,
we pack our clothes in those.  It is
hilarious, how we shrink our worlds:  Big
pictures on walls, No on taking them;
men on an H-beam black and white
Radio City Music Hall under contruction
with crews eating lunch; pen and ink
of New York City when the towers stood;
but mirror – round, ornate, a yard across
or better – the biggest decision, Chicky,
the one that Kenny bought. 

We don’t let go, not easily, of cedar chests
or mirrors.  Those gifts they bought
with thoughts of us . . . To store those
thoughts, or not?  Can they leak through
the wood or talk to us from mirrors.  Yes?
No? Maybe so.  Depends on what we smoke,
or don’t.  She talks.  I peel
another foil from a chocolate poker chip,
tip the two-buck Chuck to red-up my glass.
It’s all chance.  It’s all
a chocolate chance

The Characters are Coming

Irene introduces her dunderhead brother
Alex, who lights the fuse: Cannon; barker;
Small-time band; suckers in the stands.

Sharon introduces Teddy, dead, and a desert house
With fake panes and a ghost of her in the window:
Painted chairs; green-tined rake; a daughter;
Pendulum lights; a smudge like a kiss on the glass.

Ricky Towne slouches past Theo’s City Junk Store
Wishing for better days, bicycles in a row, stead of:
Ivory combs; shattered silk; empty ornate frames;
bowling pins; styrofoam cups; a red lacquered trunk.

Foster introduces Irene, little man, overstuffed;
Irene and Little Fish introduce Bucky and Bucky
Intros the pigs sliding down pig-chute ramps:
One little pig; two little pig; three little pig;
Four; a dog for Buddy; bail to get outta jail;
Pesaries and quiffs; capes and sails; slats nailed
To Sycamores in Penn.

One by one they tumble to page, one by one they expire
Like paper dolls cut and paper-clothed: Daughter;
Brother; Mother; Son; Strongman; Cousin; Friend;
Clown; Lover; Woman; Girl: The story ends.

Thanks, SL.  Just some playing around with some of pieces of my novel.  A little game inside my head when I was sure where to begin earlier.  Glad you stopped by.

lynn

My Mother and Lefty Frizzel

Our kitchen ran the width
of the house like a six-foot wide
black-patent cinch belt,
two dozen feet end to end:
a chrome dinette, six matching chairs,
cushions a chippy-yellow,
a blue radio Mama tuned
with gold sweep hands on the clock side
and honky-tonk stations on the other.
How big our universe was, how endless.
Under a bare bulb in the ceiling
sshe sang, twirling the words
same as Lefty, her fingers working shampoo
through my head at the sink.
She’d wrap a white towel up
and around in a turban so big
I would tilt, and ask me for a dance,
or I asked her, the one who knew
all the cuddle spins and holds,
holds she would crisscross me into
and unfurl me out like a top-heavy flag
or not let me go. 
She had squares of silk in every color
she wore tied like bright chokers
around her neck, little tails off a square knot
she made without wrinkles. Mama
puts me at one end of the dinette
to pull while she takes the other and
when we are done stretching the chrome
and chippy-yellow, leaving a gap
like the space left when both front teeth
have gone, she drops in two leaves
so that Daddy, Uncle Gerald, Randy, Mama and
me can all sit as one family,
pass the green beans and corn,
stab breaded pork chops and fly them
to our plates, crumbs of peppered-browned flour
spicing the dinette, pass the buns,
and say grace.  Mama
turned down the radio and Daddy turned off
the blond TV before we sat, talked
of corn silage Daddy harvested
and Uncle hauled or
if the alfalfa would offer a third cutting,
or day-olds in the sick barn now well
again—How about that!
There was room for health and a Baptist prayer
while Lefty and Hank waited inside
the blue radio for Mama to come back,
turn their whippoorwill tunes
and Always Late Kisses into Mama and me duets. 
Ours was an ongoing dance.  Life lived
with okra, tomatoes,
clover across the road
that stretched to a fenceline
we couldn’t see for the green.
I remember the music coming out of that blue,
the silk bandanas Mama wore,
how gentle she scrubbed my head,
porch evenings where Daddy and Uncle smoked
and Mama would take a hit,
cows coming in for late-shift milking,
moths clicking against the porch lamp,
how sweet fresh-cut alfalfa can smell,
ghost rings Uncle exhaled to hang
like halos around the moon.
Inside, that blue radio played
while Randy and I did handstands
in the dark grass then lay on our backs
while Mama pointed out stars she didn’t know
by name so we finally named them
Patsy, Loretta, Hank, Lefty, and
Little Brenda Lee, wishing on shooters
that sometimes appeared and grieving them
as if a calf had died, passed
out of one pasture to enter a greener one
out there. Years between there and here
and ant wars me and Randy got up
by transplanting reds to black colonies,
from junebugs on strings,
sweetpeas on hogwire,
tilted turbans, missing teeth, yet
everything still is.  Everything
chippy-yellow and stretching to fit
a world big as ours for a meal
of horizons leaked out of new-named stars
and silk ends.  There is little I know
as true—but that kitchen, that table, our
porch, the porch lamp, smoke rings
to halo the moon, grass-stained knees
on our dungarees, a gold sweep of hands
on the clock-side and Lefty Frizzel.

Crown of Thorns Starfish

The coral polyps succumb one by one. 
Forests of color snuffed, drained,
by the brilliance of venonmous spines.
Purple wildfire depleting wonder. 
Leave a limb and creatures regrow
big as car tires it’s said
but who knows? 
How can you trust
the word of a diver just because
he’s suffered some small sting?  Underwater
photography can be diddled
same as above.  Why believe
there was ever wonder  – at all?  Or astronauts
walked on the moon?  Or polar bears (you know
how often and rampant their tales of long swims
between ice to climb upon can be) drowning
between floes?  All the coral
(there must,
surely,
be
too much
as it is)
can’t be under attack.  Dying? 

Fish will figure it out.
They’ll find some other forest to
propagate, fertilize their futures, pee behind
or in front of.  The oceans won’t die.
These alarmists!
These Chicken Littles chirping
like emptied cans banging along behind
wedding cars.
You gotta figure
the fewer the fish
the fewer the sharks
because the fucking sharks will starve.
Right?
I mean, right?
I mean, have you looked at how gorgeous
those purple spines on the crown of thorns starfish
are? 

An Ear Held Close Hears

Under the worm there are worm castings,
over him are worm castings and on all sides
rich constructions, loam walls of manure.
 
He knows his castling burrows,
savors ingestions, swells and contracts
with feed and release over and over

where sun never enters and a coffer of ground
is palace, palace with endless room
except for the attic-blue room of sky.

There the rose feathers wait.
There the yellow-rimmed eye watches.
There the brown root to raise the sky roof.

All his life is satiation.
An ear held close hears him satisfied.
It was sky pouring inside his walls,

the blue threat of freedom drumming
that drove him to wrap the beak.  Sweet
beak of the robin.  Sweet satiated beak.


[After Wallace Stevens, Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself, from The Collected Works, 1954]

This is quite a break from the pack. I hear a clarity that is not mimicry of Stevens.

Glad you stopped by.  I liked Stevens' poem a lot [read it today on poets.org].  But I think the two things I worked out of his were his use of prepositions, and his repeats of particular words at particular intervals.  My preps and repeats are different, not only the words but most of the placements . . . but those were two things I noted about W.S.'s write that I tried to reformulate with my 'worms' . . . Posted this here because I'm not certain it's ready for the Big Board.  Am glad you had a word to leave with it Larry.  Thanks.

I'm impressed that this all happened just today.

Rick

Ah, but Rick, they happen over time.  I'd mentioned the crown of thorn starfish a few years back in a poem [may even be in that book o'mine] about a bad back and too much Nat'l Geo channel, etc.  This whole drug/border war and what it's doing down here to the everyday shop owners. the killing of color, etc. and so on, I suppose that got me going on destruction, how things appear to be unstoppable. 

Thanks for looking in, for comment.  And, yeah, I'm majorly stuck on my novel redraft and most writing at all and so it felt good to write "some things" today. 

Is a frowning face
a frowning heart?

Ask the green hills

Watch for the silence of the millionth hand stilled
on the milipedes wearing pink gloves

Ask the green hills in the bladed quiet
Is this another Zen poem?

poem a day during the month of april

4.1.09

Yesterday I wondered how big China is
and learned there is a place where people
refused to change the time to suit Mao.
How fine it must be to cross a few acres
and find yourself two hours into the future,
or walking back, browse through a history
already part of the past. If I sit down
on a curb between zones, fanny on the future,
elbows on knees firmly fixed to the past,
stars will grow in my belly, the moon will rise
in one eye, the sun will rise in the other.
Tomorrow I will think about people and time
and perhaps pack a bag for a place with a curb
friendly to dreamers.

poem a day during month of April

4.2.09

Testimonial for Puffs with Vicks

Head cold, running through
rounds of Cottonelle tissue
aloe-treated, Brawny paper towels,
sleeve cuff when nothing’s to hand

or linen napkin, the nose unstoppable
and stopped up, breathing issues,
eyes streaming watery residue,
and sneezes.  You’ve been blessed

by friends and strangers in stores
and homes, in cars and fixed abed
until a heaven you have little faith in
seems all but a done deal.  Then

you find the Puffs with lotion and Vicks
blue-ocean-designed box on aisle 12
and gather an armload to your chest,
remove wrappers and pull the white flag

of one up and out, freeing folds.
Suddenly, your mother’s hand moves
under pink bears dancing on flannel,
coating your congested heart

with eucalyptus salves.
In that heaven you don’t trust, she
is somehow present in the Puffs.
Hand to nose, you breathe her in,

paying the checker for reprieves,
streaming eyes you let stream.

Heartfelt wishes for luck putting your line in once a day this month.  I want to keep checking back to see what develops.

Rick

poem a day during April

4.3.09

The Winnebago Box

arrived, a legacy from an uncle or aunt --
she couldn't remember exactly who,
but nobody asked and the tires went flat
with the battery.  The box stayed in the drive.
Birds used the antenna like a tree
while she brought stray broken-
spined books from yard sales and lamps
that no longer worked into her regular house. 
Three-legged chairs meant to have four --
cast-offs of every sort.

After a while the house spat her out
and some biographies, a history or two
with worm holes, several encyclopedias
dated before Neil walked the moon;
the A volume and N had been missing
for god only knew how long –
nobody would ever miss that first step.
A coat, black-and-white hounds tooth
with buttons nearly as big as Jackie K’s
pillbox hats, crawled after her like a garden
snake.  And a pink chenille robe.
All the roses had been plucked, dust bunny
hills of chenille strings nested under seat springs
and there was a cat that died with her there
in the Winnebago box on wheels.
She always thought she’d get it running again.
She’d had plans, you see.  And atlases
of a world that used to be cut up a certain way.

Her neighbors thought the cat
might’ve been gray but nobody could say,
not for sure, what color anything was
in that box,
not even the books.

~
[made a few edits 10:46 a.m. 4-3-09; new opening]

ooh what a great dust bunny image. I haven't visited here (month of Jane) before. Don't know why. It is a feast, Lynn. (Also, used your poem again--Baja--at a writing workshop and shared some of your reflections--worked really well. :)
Jill

:) thanks!  anytime on that poem -- i'm honored.

#114 Lynn...stunning...no nits.

Sue -- thank you! Cold is much improved today but I may take to Vicks scented tissues like Linus to his blankie.

I'm digging 116.

4-4-09 poem a day challenge [written for 4-3-09 PAD prompt]

The Problem with Gertie

The problem with Gertie is not her teeth
although the bottom row shows when she’s calm

and vanishes when she growls.  And she’s
good on a leash on the boulevard of palms

(she rarely trips her walker).  The problem
with Gertie is not her eyes or how they bulge

from a spiky head of Mexican street slum
varietal dog, nor is it her off-white smudge

of fur, nor her bow-legged bounce down stairs.
The problem with Gertie is she loves too much

and she loves to be in my bed.

91 is great, kept me fascinated

Thanks, Jess.  Your note made me go back re-read, remember the day, the time.  Road blocks still in effect.

Still at the poem-a-day challenge thingie; the prompt [on facebook] for day 5 is 'landmark'

4.5.09

The Fence

Just south of TJ, the scenic route
to Rosarito/Ensenada via the Cuota. 
The two fences, one tin, one white,
running parallel to gray-blue tides
are corrugating rust and high-high-
tech white, plus black channel iron
where they march barnacle-clad into
low tide, pushing old plaid shirts
with Chicklets to sell out to meet
a hazy horizon.

~

note to self: a hippy girl; first snow; when nana walks away; by all appearances; arranging flowers; full body; a question; interruption; stones; quickening;

Alice’s Dogs

The rescue dogs came one at a time
until there were four
to cuddle her lap, so she bred
Daisy and Henry
for three pups more who came
inauguration day: Liberty, Belle, & Patriot.
Besides seven dogs not fitting her chair,
a tangle of leashes and puppy-trashed
sandals nobody could wear,
three wanting in, three wanting out
and one indifferent to either,
the market for dogs being flooded (homeless
folks leave homeless dogs),
friends gah-gah with “oh how cute”
but poor about nodding and rich
with no-no shakes of their heads,
she simply found seven too many, thus
loading her SUV up with pups,
ma and pa Henry and Daisy,
Alice stopped by here
with two bowls and some food,
the Maltese-cross, Lorenzo,
and the odd-little-barker, Gertie, who,
I am pleased to report two days into
dog-sitting, continues on, alive.

~

4.6. poem-a-day prompt 'something missing'

Something Missing

Reading John Adams yesterday
in the sun out back
at a green plastic table
from a sling chair with arms
and a cup holder on one side
for a soda where I kept a beer,
elbows relaxed on the arms
while hands supported the book,
I glanced down and to the right
(for what cause, I can’t say)
and saw, quite suddenly, this
pouch of skin dimpled as a fat quilt
thrown over a bed with a bone
of a body yet in it, the muscle
gone missing by all appearance.
The left side was the same.
The beer, just opened, was cold.
I returned to McCullough’s bio
of John.  Solid lines to observe,
not the emptying sack of skin
I seemed, quite comfortably, in.

4.7 poem a day challenge : 2 prompts : #1 Clean : #2 Dirty

Clean – prompt 1

haiku five-sev-five
“on” make for april birdsong
syllables to sing

Dirty – prompt 2

free verse is pig field
wallow of raining letters
snow pens, flake words, ink

#127  Much enjoyed Lynn, the chatty voice, the acceptance.  A bump...final line with the commas breaking it up...could you use

I seemed quite comfortable in.

I love what you are doing here and visit often.

Same bump Maggie had mentioned.  Thanks, Sue.  I've posted this in Workshop so my comments and feedback, if any, when the poem is moved, [if it's moved!] will follow to Submit.  [How's that for a convoluted sentence?] 

Will you mind if I copy and paste your suggestion over there?

I like how the eternal John is compared with the very temporal Lynn.

Rick

Very temporal.  Yes.

Day EIGHT of poem a day challenge [I am staying with it!]

4.8 poem a day challenge – prompt = routine

Chimera is the Creature

the head of lion
the body of goat
the tail of dragon

chimera is the creature
chimerical was the word
on dictionary dot com
its great shaggy head
ranging up through the pixels
cloven hooves sooty black
as if a grand savannah of time
elapsed in his/her trek
dragging this tail of scales
(iridescent as peacock feathers!)
in and out through the 0’s
of 10,000 years here,
on this digital paper of now
searching
he/she tells me
for the next 0 to slip inside.
I left him/her there
went on to the next routine:
a crossword puzzle!
What will I make of that?

4.9 poem a day challenge.  prompt = write a memory

Summer Swing

As park swings go, the set
in Borger, Texas was the best,
as tall as Emma’s home, all steel
and chains and thick-webbed seats
the color of asphalt
that took us up and back again,

so far back as we’d lean into
what we moved away from,

then forward – our bodies prone (or is it supine?),
heads rested on the dawn-side,
toes puncturing the air –
‘til circumnavigation of the sun
seemed within our reach.  Jimmy broke an arm
once going for a day-moon hung
full in all that blue. And Emma

in the pink duplex with Ralph’s bed
and tumors, sockets where his eyes
still fluttered shut and open,
saw us from their bedroom window
dare July skies drop down their tornadoes. 
Could she hear us yip as pups born
of his old blue-tick bitch?  A twister’s tail

on the horizon and Emma at the window
in an apron watching. “Ralph, you think I ought
call them children in?  Ralph?”

4.10 poem a day challenge - prompt = "Friday"

Dear Frigga,

I know how you like to sit up there
in the night sky spinning clouds
from Orion’s belt (and lovely clouds
they are!) but on this Good Day
I wondered if you might muster
a rainbow out of that carded sky –
something with tulip pinks
and lavender wands arched with daisies
and palms to blur through the prisms
and warm our hearths in honor
of your named day?
   
Thanking you in advance
for attentions in re: this matter,
                     Wren

to any who happen upon these efforts, thanks to jamesthomashoward [who has a fourth name I have forgotten] who mentioned he is working on a long poem, I have begun my own long poem.  Mine is inspired by the fantastical imagination of Merwin and I am following his 13 line stanza set up as used in 'East of the Sun and West of the Moon' from Migrations. 

38 Dreams from a Pillow [working title]

Pretend sleep is near awake’s exit.
Normal sheets and feather pillow,
Perhaps fresh from clothespins and lines
Under broad skies and sun where wind,
Still learning how to maneuver, stumbled
And fell, then stood to rush headlong
In play with linen’s folds and creases –
An unstoppable, toppling, toddler wind
With stories older than planet equators,
Older than solar flares. Every tug and shift
Leaving indelible prints of anecdotes,
epics, haikus, odes and folklore
To weave through a dreamer’s hair.


A feather’s nib, sharp as a needle, draws
A thread through pillow’s casing.  The nib
Sews an April night (pressed inside the season
As if columbine pressed amid pages of books)
To the dreamer’s cheek, and thence commences
An embroidery of delicate leaves. Stems sprout,
Stitched in and out, back and in, betwixt fabric
And lobe of the ear, veining up, crossing
One brow like a low running hill of brown firs
To lay veins out to edges and points. How
Green this sleep! How calm the dreamer
In slipknots of silk, stamens like days
Countless as dust motes in sunlight struck
On the stairs.  (Yes, this sleep has stairs.) 


The steps are a patchwork of starfish linked
Like calendar months.  A Tuesday comes down
As Friday ascends and two seals bark
Greetings or warnings of rain from the landing,
And, “G’day,” Friday says to Tuesday,
“And to you,” Tuesday says back.  In unison
They ask the green sleep of dreams, “Where
Has May gotten off to?  Has she lost all
Her hours again?  Such a time she has
With weeks! Spoils them, I say,” they say
In unison, “happy sunshine and zephyrs,”
They nod together, “will spoil a whole week
Every time.” Then Tuesday and Friday are gone.


Sleep wrinkles an embroidered brow:
should she follow an early day down?
Or follow late Friday up? These siblings
In marking time are fickle figures, one
generation of boring fifth days, might,
In the next set of seven, attend fetes
until Saturday’s breaking yawn. Sleep is
No fool.  And the two landing seals barking
“Rain! Rain! You’ll get yourself wet!” she
Decides to descend after Tuesday, who is
In pursuit of May, who pursues all her hours:
Dreamer on a starfish stair; hair, a fall
of wisteria blooms; face, as if in a bower.

[first four stanzas -- 34 more to go!]

These have a very sure touch, Lynn.  Very braided layered feel to them...I'm ready for more!

[next 3 stanzas of 38 Dreams from a Pillow -- only 31 left to write!  Thanks, Sue, for stopping by; am having some fun with time -- and not to be taken too seriously!]

The dreamer’s hands slip between cheek
And pillow, a wall of fingers and palms
The feather’s impelled to address, adorn
With nooses and knots and floss constructs
In shades of green and growing. A prick
At the back of one palm pierces lifelines
To emerge through the back of the other
And chain a shawl of forget-me-nots to blanket
Sleep’s rounding shoulder. Down after Tuesday
She descends. Steps of starfish fray undone,
No longer bond as letters of words,
Nor sentences, nor paragraphs, nor chapters:
The book of the stairs vanishes.
   

Tuesday is reading The Sun in a sun-soaked parlor.
“Oh, don’t mind me” he says, and sleep answers,
“No” and says “But who shall mind me?”
He says, “The hours,” reading his magazine;
“Patience will bring them along, likely as not
With minutes skewed by hands confused
With tangles of seconds.  Are seconds as knotty
In wakefulness as they are in dreams?”
“I don’t know,” the dreamer wants to say,
But her lips, now quilted with ribbon buds
In seashell shades of pink won’t budge;
Yet all the while she smiles and Tuesday nods
And grins as if she has sung an aria of weeks.



He looks upon her and she upon him
And where his eyes had been wheat and amber
She finds the left holds a fingernail moon
Of midnight, the right an apricot dawn.
Then patience rustles in with minutes
Bunched to her checkered skirt, dredlocks
Of seconds barretted back from increments
Of each face.  Minutes finger her rose bud lips,
Wind their locks about her wrists and rise,
Pulling dreamer and patience to a chaise
Under canopied sunsets where horizons blur
Into skies bolted together by light years:
Here, a dreamer idles somnambulant night.

two poem a day challenge poems.

4.11 poem a day challenge -- prompt = object

Gutter Cup

Who dropped you, styrofoam cup?
How many yards and miles traveled
before stopping at this gutter
with a crack in your lip and brown
ring settled around your bottom?
I am not pickin you up.  I doubt
either of us will ever be handled again.


4.12 peom a day challenge -- prompt = "So I Decdied to [blank]"

So I Decided to Walk

There was this pina colada waiting
in a tall glass with feminine curves
and a color like pale butter
with a wedge of pineapple clipped
to the rim and an ocean coming
forward and edging back for a path
on a shore to follow.  And I did.

There was this white dog
with blue-white eyes
and legs long as a wolf’s
and head wide as a wolf’s
waiting in the shade
of a parked Chevrolet.
He had a loping gait, when,
head down, hackles up, teeth bared –
he mistook me for a trespasser.

There was this thick brown rope
tied off to the axle of the car
and the dog’s collar, and
there was one yard of space
between my feet and his teeth   
when the rope stopped him.
So I decided to skip the colada.
Oceans are over-rated anyway.

4.13 poem a day challenge -- prompt = hobby [cheated and used an old poem!]

Deconstructing for Constructing

For three days I deconstructed
sweaters, saved bone buttons off cardigans
and rolled used yarn into balls, wondering
where the arms went (once they were gone)
and each cuff, left and right,
and each chest, left and right,
and how blank air must find itself chillier
without all those broad rows down the back,
without all these knits and purls.

For some months, maybe years,
I stored those balled yarns (yes, it was
years, it was decades) the way
Grandmother saved odd bits of string,
rubber bands, containers from cottage cheese
(dish soap kept on the counter because
under the sink was gone over to stacks
of reusables she never
reused).

Now, I knit socks
in bright stripes of what was, wondering
if the yarns will remember my feet
half so well once I’m done.


4.14 -- poem a day challenge --  two prompts. First prompt: Write a love poem.  Second prompt: Write an anti-love poem. Simple as that.


Love Poem: A Jar of Love

A jar of love is like that box
inside the box of Christmas ornaments,

that small paper-wrapped package
with red curly ribbon

and the tag with a sentiment about love
or friendship, the weightless one

never opened because it’s the thought that counts.
And there’s no “thing” to hold or wear

like a scent or earrings or a scarf
to exchange for a suitable color, a less

busy print, all the while nodding
with pleasure – and heartfelt thanks,

knowing the coins came from that clear jar
with a slot in the lid where kindnesses

accumulated, the one kept on a shelf
with red jam and Elsie’s chow-chow relish.


Anti-Love Poem: Lot 4-Sale

Between the house on the corner
and a driveway halfway down the block,

a field of man-high wild mustard
blooms yellow flowers and white grocery bags.

The sacks fill and deflate like lungs
from the tall stems in the fickle wind,

three lungs to a plant here, one there,
heaving as if tormented by unfulfilled lust

after bodily loves
they’ve only known the labored hand of,

the foreplay of having been used,
then, emptied, thrown aside –

are caught in an unwanted field, 4-sale
for a price, ballooning white sighs.




4.15 poem a day challenge -- prompt = use title from a favorite poem and change one word

In the Afterlife

The ground rises with dismantled bones.
The millipede who has traversed ribs
and metatarsals finds respite in a tunnel
where vertebrae no longer hold.

In elm roots, a hankering to penetrate,
the sow bugs do a slow tango,
quartz breaks in a multiplication of fractures.

The saprophytic fungi feed.
The toadstool emerges: one leg wearing a hat.

I am a feast for wood and what would be.
I give away all of me freely.
I pick out a sombrero and serape,

learn to dance on one leg in the damp.
Nothing is new, not even this.


[after “In the Evening”, Billy Collins, The Trouble With Poetry]

4.13 poem a day challenge -- prompt = hobby [cheated and used an old poem!]

Deconstructing for Constructing

For three days I deconstructed
sweaters, saved bone buttons off cardigans
and rolled used yarn into balls, wondering
where the arms went (once they were gone)
and each cuff, left and right,
and each chest, left and right,
and how blank air must find itself chillier
without all those broad rows down the back,
without all these knits and purls.

For some months, maybe years,
I stored those balled yarns (yes, it was
years, it was decades) the way
Grandmother saved odd bits of string,
rubber bands, containers from cottage cheese
(dish soap kept on the counter because
under the sink was gone over to stacks
of reusables she never
reused).

Now, I knit socks
in bright stripes of what was, wondering
if the yarns will remember my feet
half so well once I’m done.

© Lynn Doiron



Dear Lynn

For me this is a very beautiful and delicate
weave of a timeless imagery that works wonders.

I read into the last word of the poem "done"
a myriad of meanings.

Would it be tooo tooo revealing to exchange "gone" for 'done' ?
For me 'gone' would flow nicely with Deconstructing and the
timelessness of the here in the hereafter.


a warm smile
silent lotus

Thanks, Silent.  I could've sworn I posted a response here yesterday.  Appreciate the suggestion.  For me, 'done' has two meanings -- done with the project at hand and done with this side of life -- and 'gone' narrows the meaning to 'done with this side of life'.  But I do appreciate your thoughtfulness with offering the idea.

4.16 poem a day --- prompt = color

[an effort at rondeau]

Green

Green grows sharp, each tender sprout
breaking ground – needles rising out,
pushed by a thimble of busted seed
to stitch a green stitch, slim as a reed
or wide as a celadon cabbage leaf

or high as sequoia’s top green bead
of elongated fibrous shine. The need
of life, this photosynthesis shout.
           Green grows

and with green, whether flower or weed,
cornucopias of apples, oats, wheat,
orange carrots, orange oranges, stout
bamboo poles rife with greening beans about
to burst green pods: sustained and pleased
           green grows.

4.17 poem a day challenge -- prompt = "All I want is [blank]

“All I Want is Working Parts”

For these hands to have bendable
fingers, unswollen joints, knees

with the proper fluid, toes
that don’t piggy out one another,

eyes able to find a speck on the horizon
and know from a functioning imagination

the speck is a pink-winged pelican
inbound from Coronado’s Olympus,

for sunsets to rise up in apricot
orchards of light and waves to ebb

into continuations of magic, sonatas
of sound in working ears at daylight

and dusk: buzz of mosquitoes, the bite
and the bead of a bloodspeck on skin.

a white smile in a brown face full of age and youth and gladness
a brown uniform worn daily at hacienda de floresta's security gate.
news flash today: he is dead, beheaded for helping someone

I've seen that many of your Mexico poems are drawn from life, so when I read one like this, my stomach turns, I cry.

I am still crying.  the kindest face you ever saw.  always helpful.  always merry.  lovely, lovely man. and I didn't even know his name.

4.18 poem a day challenge -- prompt = write about an interaction

Unattended

If I had attended the rosary
for the seguridad who tried to stop
the kidnappers from taking
the sixteen-year-old son of a wealthy neighbor,

the guard whose name I have been told
since his murder and beheading
was Juan, the guard with a sister
who looked so much like him except
perhaps older than his middle years
but the same white hair, brown eyes,
lined face from incessant smiling,

the guard with a wife
who could not wail
or speak
or see
because what beat for a heart was gone
from her chest and there, inside
that coffin, flown forever from her chest
to lay with him in his –

if I had attended
I would’ve searched out a brown cricket running
along the foot of the wall, looking for a way out.

Just Wow Lynn.  I'm loving these...rock on.

'An unstoppable, toppling, toddler wind' -- superb line.

keep pushing lynn, i think you're going to give birth to something quite wonderful.

james

Both your poems about Juan are powerful.  I echo your comment about my stuff, wish I had time for all of yours.

Rick

james!  i hoped you might look in.  how goes your long poem?  i

and sue -- thanks for stopping by . . . i have several more stanzas, but they went a bit wonky.  maggie says i should post 5 stanzas at a time in workshop.  i think they're too "iffy" -- too young to set out there yet.  but your encouragement here helps.

thanks,
lynn

4.19 poem a day challenge --- prompt = anger

The Flowers are Coming

Six white carnations fringed red on the edge,
as if embarrassed they should be so few
for this man who’s dead, splay in a paper vase
left at the gatehouse where he guarded us.

Nine stargazer lilies, like spattered bayonets
with blunted tips who tried to ward evil off
and failed; a pair of yellow roses; purple alstrumeria;
margarita daisies; cream-colored chrysanthemums; 
wild mustard in a fist-sized bunch.

One by one and two by two the cousins, friends,
and colleagues come; they build a flower arsenal
around Juan’s glass-framed portrait: blue iris; pink tulips;
baby’s-breath white lace; cuttings of camelia;
lemon wood; pussy willow; forsythia; lilac heads.

One by one, like coma victims somehow set to walk
and bend, place their tribute near his absentness:
wife, sister, son, daughter, brother, grandchildren,
neighbors like me who did not know his name.

And the boy Juan tried to save is missing yet,
thought dead; and the family of that boy prepares
a photograph and altar for the son who once kicked
soccer balls in the street below my window, laughter
ricocheting outer walls.

Anger is a quiet thing, full of hurt and sparse
carnations, scents lost on a boulevard of love
and hate.

4.20 poem a day posted in workshop 'villanelle to a villanelle' -- prompt was 'rebirth'
4.21 poem a day --- prompt is 'haiku'

Haiku

corn god on the sill
moth beyond April’s window
pink house in the sun

4.22 poem a day -- prompt = "work"

Work in Progress

The pages of your novel number 400
and second-draft paragraphs – white sails
blown full of metaphors and asides –
are off course, pushed by imagination and caffeine
into a see lane of boring doldrums.
A sloop with Irene, Third Draft gilded
on the prow of a work doc folder founders:
the turnbuckle of transitions has frayed
rigging, misplaced tenses crowd the foresail
of when what happened to whom, and timing is
that warning red sun of morning
sailors ought take notice of.  You are
color blind, especially at daylight and dusk,
knowing more in dreams and half-waking night
when the stars of your story slip silver
and phosphorescent green as surely as tides,
and the 400 wind-driven leaves of fancy
are concise, balanced, lovely as a perfect
pearl inside a hinged shell, unopened.

'the turnbuckle of transitions has frayed
rigging, misplaced tenses crowd the foresail
of when what happened to whom, and timing is
that warning red sun of morning
sailors ought take notice of.'

Excellent.

'when the stars of your story slip silver
and phosphorescent green as surely as tides'

Bit clunky.


For what it's worth,

James

4.23 poem a day challenge --- prompt = "regret"

Night

Sometimes night is night and stands around our house
like a loitering crowd in dark coats, waiting for lamps
to die and moths to seek other stars or settle ash wings
against inside screens, wanting that broader, wide sky.

Other times night is a great black horse, hard-worked
and foamed at the bit, his spittle captured by Hubble’s
stare and galloped to dreamers here on earth, nebulae
herds of the painted ponies and appaloosa comet tails

and we ride with these faces pressed into his lathered
neck, fingers of one hand holding fast to his feathery
mane, between our legs night’s power pumping, dark   
moving apace to cross another  turned dawn  horizon.

And sometimes, lifting our heads from sleep to light
we find a moth on the screen who awaits her release.

4.24.09 poem a day challenge -- prompt = "travel"

Traveling Up to Anger

The thing would not rest,
would not settle itself
down like a dog once it’s circled
and circled again, but kept on
going around, pausing to paw
a braided rug of disparate views,
then continuing counter-clockwise,
eyes on the pattern
that would not change,
would not become any more than
what it already was: a worn thing
with knots coming undone.
Exhaustion takes hold.
Patience is flown from mind and chest
like a wild canary from her cage,
and the door is open,
a great gaping hole of blue
waits out there for the thing to be exiled to,
or you.  And you walk, one
of those compressed-closure gadgets
slowly eliminating the gap
between screen and doorframe,
your ass a long way off
before the end clicks into place.

4.25 poem a day challenge -- prompt = "event"

Notification Delivered

Look, this letter
from Pulitzer folks,
unopened
and held by the sides
between fingers and thumbs

is scented with applause
and ruby-gemmed throats
and white-ties worn with tuxes

the mighty of literati
gathered and standing
are shouting Brava! Brava!
the pink tiara of stones
in my hair

blinding first chairs
in the orchestra pit
and I am smiling, nodding
my head as if the young queen

upon her coronation.
Every bank statement
is a Pen Faulkner Award,
AT&T bills are Nobel

notifications
I open slowly: the imagination
and muses all, straining
over my shoulder, greedy to read.

4.26 poem a day challenge -- prompt = miscommunication

At the Municipal

New white pick-up truck
locked and left in the lot
has a plastic-wrapped body
on the back bench seat,
a plastic-wrapped head
in the front with a note
about minding one’s own
business.  They leave
no room
for misinterpretation;
they allow no help
to intervene against
mayhem.  Terror is
a communicative thing.

4.27 poem a day challenge -- prompt = "longing" for someone or something or someplace

An Umbrian Hill Town Holds My Heart

Of the sunflower fields below the Roman wall,
stalks and heads now without color in acres

of rows bordered by deep green hedgerows;
of the tile roofs wheeling slopes between wall

and flowered acres like a stilled avalanche
of serenity without havoc; of the museum

with its shards of Etruscan life, tools hard-won
from excavations, and Renaissance paintings

by Masters out of time – I long for the piazza,
wide flagstones stretching from gelato bars

to cathedral steps, iron tables in front of cafes
with yellow cloth covers and handfuls of old men

drinking coffee or compari, grappa or cocoa,
young mothers pushing prams with children too young

to play hide-and-seek down the cobbled alleys
or in and out of small stores where

the store-keepers smile and send them on,
remembering, perhaps, when they hid in this same

safe place.

4.28 poem a day --- prompt = sestina [and i decided to use the one written earlier this month; already posted in submit; something of a cheat but ... oh well.  It's a sestina and it was written during poetry month.  will have to do.]

Sestina - Brook Song

Fronds on date palms reaching for clouds 
in a further sky; fair wind, an ally 
to both and neither, laughs by way of chimes
gallowed on the porch to swing and bang 
like water bangs rocks in a brook,
without malice nor mimicking song. 

Yet the song is there, a riffled song 
stung by stones the colors of evening clouds
or hard-pan russets singing the blues a brook
brings with tinny erosion, a humming ally 
to fair wind and foul, to the crack and bang 
of fissuring age.  Ungraspable time chimes,

teases like wind, the chitter of chimes
until silence arrives.  Silence or song? 
Is a chorus of frogs worse than the bang 
of absolute stillness?  Nebulae clouds 
hidden by closer clouds, no ally 
this absolute anything --  chaos, din, brook 

of incessant babbling is not easy to brook 
either – depending.  Inside the chimes 
of the heart, a reverberating ally 
of sorrow and joy, a ticking brown song. 
The earthen heart waits, welcomes clouds,
sere days and damp, the thunderous bang 

of change.  Tick-tick, tick-tick, bang! 
I am, says the date palm to the brook. 
I am, says the brook to the wind-driven clouds,
and you will enter me and I you.  Then the chimes
ring the clock of age like song
and the fronds touch all.  The ally

of one, the purpose, reason, and honest ally 
of the rest of us noisy particles comes from a bang 
where little universi sprang like song,
whirled lit skies as if a mad brook, 
spiraled arms flung, every arm carrying chimes 
to ring pitter-patter on cobbles from clouds. 

In a far further sky other clouds ally
beginnings, chimes toll lovely small bang-
bang-bangs, and a brook runs clear with song.

4.29 poem a day challenge -- prompt = "Never [blank]" Fill in the blank and use as title

Never Refuse Cantaloupe Soup

before you’ve given it a try.
Dill pickles on a peanut-butter
and banana sammie might be better
than peanut-butter and banana sammie
without.  Liver is liver
so never eat that despite a need
for increased iron in the blood
(better to go tired
or take some supplement).
But chilled cantaloupe soup . . .
how bad could that be? And
it’s something I’ve never tried
(same with the pickle)
(why ruin a perfectly good sammie?)
(or a perfectly good melon?)
Liver was ruined once the animal
died.

4.30 poem a day challenge -- prompt = "farewell"

Coming Home

The woman climbs the broken curb,
the heaved sidewalks of Rosarito, late afternoon
of Wednesday, burdened,
totes on forearms, flat of bread and cheese
balanced out before her, feels more than sees
her way.  I take the box of bread.  Her name
is Maria.  We walk together. She lives
two doors from mi casita with four sons;
the youngest, James, is twelve.  She has
few teeth and many scars
upon her face.  Her smile is a curve. 
There are dimples
under what’s been hurt
and dim light in her eyes.  Each day
she climbs the roadway and returns,
her shoulders rounded boulders 
for the loads.  Her door is brown wood.
I give back the flat of cheese
and bread.  Buenos tardes, senora. 
Gracias, Maria says.
 
Pornada, Maria. Adios, amiga.
Two houses down, my door is bright and blue.

A touch of Drambuie to couple the clippers
big enough to trim a horses overgrown hoove;
the liquer is a necessary, the wee burn
at the lips close upon the sweet scent
from the snifter, the miracle
of rounding physics to take what is
and compound almonds, or whatever the hell
makes heaven in a brown bottle,  more.
It is necessary,  an enabler.
Now I am done; toes dusty rose enamel;
heels, like butter; soles --
god dammit!  ok.  another half glass
and there go the soles.

now that's a sole poem I can like.

LOL, pedicure with alcohol.

rick, el vee -- grins here for finding you'd stopped by.  At 12:25 on May 31, I am on the last chapter of Irene to sift through with 3rd draft edits.  It is currently 6500 words in length, this last chapter -- and the longest chap in the whole shebang -- which seems wrong, somehow, but I am trying to save something for the editors of the huge, as yet unnamed and unknown, publishing house that will certainly pay somehwere between six and eight figures for this epic family saga, replete with its serial killers and cannons .... [where was I?] ah yes, I am trying to save something for those unknown editors to offer suggestions about.

back to it.  so sorry for being so absent on site! 

I simply cannot wait for the day I can walk into a book shop and buy this book!

Cannons AND serial killers?  A winner for sure!

Rick

Rick -- one cannon and one serial killer.  Thanks for the votes of confidence, y'all.

Posted to blog http://itcouldabeen.wordpress.com/  the following.  Not sure it works, but did think there's some info buried inside there in re: agents and waiting game. 

Two weeks lasts nine years when you’re eight or twelve and waiting for summer vacation to start, waiting to break free of desks and chairs and have more than a minute-long recess wherein you barely get a win in against Jimmy on the tetherball court before the buzzer sounds.  Then, after a month or so of freedom, of walking country roads and memorizing every blade of grass, where every pirate hides in the farm equipment on the dairy — the remainder of summer lasts and lasts, stretching into an endless sort of eon before you can catch the school bus again.

Just so with sending a chapter of Irene off to be read by an agent.  The exhileration of finally accomplishing this goal, the self-satisfaction of knowing, whatever the results may be, that the novel, one chapter of the novel, is within readable reach of someone who might give it the push it needs to become an actual book — all of that lightness of spirit, that incessant humming and silly grin for no apparent reason — leaves by the end of the week.  By the third day, you’re checking the calendar to see if a week has gone by.  You know it’s only the third day, but there’s always that outside chance you’ve somehow slept through a day,  or four.  After two weeks, you ask your editing coach and Beat the Book writing friends, “How long should I wait before I send a note around, you know, to make sure the doc file arrived ok?”  You’re told, “Let’s give it a few more weeks.”  “Is one week considered a few?”  “Let’s give her two.”  “Ok.”

You think you’ve said “Ok” out loud, but you say it again, resignedly:  “ok.”

Later, during the reunion phone conferencing call with the four other writers who’ve helped you hone the work and pumped you up when you’d felt certain of failure at completing The True Life Adventures of Irene in White Tights, during talk between the others about the work in progress with one of your friends on the call, you interupt and say, “Would it be wrong to go ahead and submit a query letter and chapters to another agent now?”  One of those Time Warp things happens.  The silence is maybe a nano-second but you feel  minutes slip past.  You have over-stepped.  You’ve been thoughtless.  You have every reason to still be dancing the streets.  Your first chapter is out there, within reachable reading distance of an agent already.  You are greedy.  Someone should give you a Time Out corner to sit in and the chair should be uncomfortable.  There shouldn’t be a chair.  Just the floor.  No carpeting.

“You could submit to other agents,” you’re told.  Then you’re told about ‘exclusivity’ and that some agents like this.  Exclusivity is a feature they can pitch to a publisher.  Exclusivity has worth.  On the other hand, you’re told, by sending to more than one agent, your agent audience is broadened, more chances to be read, to be picked up.  The main thing, you’re told, is to keep the agent who currently has the mss. (within reachable reading distance) informed of any additional queries to other agents or the sending out of mss. pages.   “It’s up to you,” you’re told.

“Ok.  I’ll wait the two weeks.”  Then, the nudge will take place to find out if the first agent has read the first chapter.  If not, then, then the information to the first agent that you’re considering sending out to a second agent.  Then the wait to find out if this information will have any effect on the first agent.  Has she read it?  Will she now?

Ok.

You can wait.  You will wait.  And, at the top of your Things To Keep Your Mind Occupied While You Wait List, write a note of apology to Susan for interupting her time to talk about her project during the reunion Beat the Book conference call.  Check.

This is great news, great comment and great prose.

larry

Thank you, kind sir!  I've posted today's installement on the Irene blog at
          http://itcouldabeen.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/fictionalizing-facts-inventing-others/
and I'm posting it below as well.  May not be the best place to post in Journalese, as I'm looking for any glitches or confusion that may be in need of edits.  But the work is what I think of as 'Irene Journaling' and so I post here.  This entry has more to do with process; I have no idea if it has any "interest" value . . . ah well.

Fictionalizing Facts, Inventing Others

What began as one story meant to fill out the true life of a true person who lived recklessly, a dare-devil by all accounts, and died young – became more than one story. 

What is or was “true,” I came to realize, can be no more than fuzzy at best.  Take me, for instance: How I remember the events of yesterday or a year ago or the sequence of climbing out of bed and finding the coffee filters to brew a first pot of coffee a few hours ago are fuzzy.   Recollections get warped.  Did the sun wake me?  Or a barking dog?  Did I fill the coffeepot reservoir first, then put the filter into the basket – or vice versa?  Did I spill coffee grounds on the counter because I glanced up to see why the neighbor’s dog was barking?  Or was that when the wayward bird thumped into the window?  Does it matter?  Not really.   

What came to matter in the “one” story, Irene’s “true life” story, was the need to write the resemblance of a life lived true to itself, to herself.  And if my own moment-to-moment life experiences were difficult to pin down, how could I possibly capture and pen to paper the moments of Irene Lowe? 

Thus the invention of Irene Johns. 

And if a wayward bird was the cause of spilled coffee grounds in my kitchen this morning, what cause or causes may have brought a vigorous and headstrong girl such as Irene Lowe to such a life as she lived, such fortunes and misfortunes? 

Thus the invented lives of characters to surround my fictional heroine, Irene Parilee Johns.  Thus an invented grandniece to rediscover a secreted-away and long-dead aunt.  Thus an imagined Depression Era venue on Coney Island called Poseidon Park.  Thus any number of stories “true” to this writer’s imagination:  invented lives and invented places, invented events, rivalries and affections.   

No evidence of coffee grounds on my counter remains.  Only the memory, only the reconstruction of that recent incident in my thinking is yet with me.  And, other than these words recording that event, the mishap will be forgotten.  I believe wayward events happen everywhere and all the time.  Beyond the reach of the Hubble telescope, a speck of matter moves.  A few inches under the earth, worms are making choices about which way to circumvent a pebble lodged in their paths.  Imagination carries my beliefs, my “inventions” of what I believe to be “true.”

Thus The True Life Adventures of Irene in White Tights became.  It is what it is – inspired by a real life and true to my imaginings about the nature of we human beings – regardless of the century we are born into, or will be born into.   

Wow.  Check you out.  (I need to more often.)  This is exciting, Lynn.

cheryl

thanks, cherylanne.  appreciate the look!

Parallels made today between Annie Oakley and my Irene.  Annie was older by nearly four decades, yet I was really surprised by the number of similarities in the lives of these two women.  It's almost as if I'd gone in and read about Annie and then took some pertinent facts of life and applied them to my Irene.  Or, maybe it's like stories, like poems -- maybe lives are that way too.  Maybe they've all been lived, are being lived, parallel to one another.  I mean, it's not like I'm the only old widow whose ever found a paradise house on a hillside above Popotla.  Nor will I be the last.  Nor, more than likely, am I the only one here at the present!

  http://itcouldabeen.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/research-parallels-in-lives/ 

I subscribe to dictionary.com's word of the day and also to dictionary.com's Spanish word of the day.  Yesterday (ayer?) was Thursday (el jueves?) and the Spanish word of the day was "imagen" which means image or picture.  This example was used:

Una imagen vale más que mil palabras.
A picture is worth a thousand words.

And I wondered if that is true.  Wouldn't it depend upon the image, the picture?  Wouldn't it also depend upon what thousand words? 

hello my friend,
                    popping by to say I miss you, N

Love this thought, Lynn:

Or, maybe it's like stories, like poems -- maybe lives are that way too.  Maybe they've all been lived, are being lived, parallel to one another.

....

thanks so much for sharing things like this.
cheryl

Reasons for Change in the Appearance of Swells

1.   They mature and grow up
2.   The big ones are hired thugs called in by shores when shores are in want of massages
3.   The small ones are puny with age
4.   The small ones are on the fade or not quite made
5.   The normal swells are actors and consequently abnormal
6.   The humongous ones work out at a gym on the far side
7.   The gray-green ones drank too much Spanish Moss wine at high tide
8.   The taupe ones are pretending to be patent leather handbags and shoes
9.   The pink ones are on the rag
10.    The frothy ones are having bad hair moments
11.    The quieter are wishing for a moment of any kind
12.    The first one is only first for a splash
13.    The last one is last until it is first and last lasts for a very long time (a.k.a. #3 and #4)

I like this.  The end is a little unravelly for me, but I love your imagination.

Rick

*Reversal of words in lines of Denise Levertov’s The Closed World

Burned but wavered eye
minds glare’s indifferent dry hills,
the over-swept darkness and silver,
last drought long after when.

Shut are doors; windows
are blinds – out days, in days;
resurrection and passion
enact wind and light.

Inheritors, the young.
Have I months for this
threshold, the understill here,
dwellings in snake-houses?

~

Denise Levertov, The Closed World, from The Sorrow Dance, copyright 1963, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-14561. 

I can’t copy and paste Levertov’s poem, The Closed World, here due to copyright infringement.  But I thought I might paste her opening stanza for comparisons with my end stanza after typing each line from end to beginning, from last line to first.  Her opening S follows:

The house-snake dwells here still
under the threshold
but for months I have not seen it
nor its young, the inheritors.

The exercise is one I came across some few years ago via poets.org and poem-a-day challenges in April of that year.  It’s interesting, the play of words and meaning and how tweaks and manipulation reshape and reform into something all together different.  It’s like working with a palm full of clay or play-dough; one minute a horse, the next minute a house. 

Villanelle (found today while looking for an accidental heart)

Wings of dragons, grasshoppers, flies, gnats, bees, et al,
legs of horses, fins of fish, paws of cats, bears,
 power the twigs that tremble the leaves Spring, Summer, Fall.

Cower bad, kiss the kind, the Great White or narwhal.
Robins, cardinals, yellow finches – life of sea and air,
wings of dragons, grasshoppers, flies, gnats, bees, et al,   

rest when rest invites and dance when pan flutes call.
Heifers, Holsteins, llamas, yaks, geldings and roan mare,
power the twigs that tremble the leaves Spring, Summer, Fall.

Yoke the songs of souls from beings large and small,
from the dead and from the living: snails, ants, spider lairs,
wings of dragons, grasshoppers, flies, gnats, bees, et al.

Nectar the signs of peace: sweeten the lure of truce.
O! elephants of India, O! Guatemalan sloth so fair,
power the twigs that tremble the leaves Spring, Summer, Fall.

I will letter your music with squid ink, post pleas to forestall;
we spell our brews in the stratosphere:
wings of dragons, grasshoppers, flies, gnats, bees, et al   
power the twigs that tremble each leaf -- springs, summers, falls.

Tsunami Watch, 2-27-10

It’s terrible vast
this gray everything
cut in half
by a rubbed line of thick against thin

A raven took the highway
not eight yards from the glass
and now nine pelicans can’t
keep the straight path,
drop like hyphens between words of air
but they try
they do try to realign

Where the sheen is on the water
there’s a split in heaven I can’t find,
a blue seam too shy to make itself seen.

I watch south and west
for a swell to appear
like a rubble-dusted torso
might make itself known from the rest.

I watch the palapas below,
settle umbrella shapes to mind
lest the wave does come
and they go.

There are no trawlers out today,
no pangas, no sails.  Just the raven.
The broken hyphens of struggling birds.

Right as I was reading this poem, I heard my mom tell someone on the phone she was watching the tsunami on tv.  Didn't even know there was one.  I'm so bad about watching the news.  I can't imagine REALLY watching one.

I love the imagery in this poem, very moving, just as a tsunami is.

cheryl

;) -- I can't quite imagine watching one either!  The effect here (according to various tsunami links I've been watching and alert information), or 'amplitude' wouldn't have been much -- I think I figured 22" or so if I calculated the cm's to inches right.  I may, in fact, have watched the tsunami wave as it came to shore, but I couldn't differentiate it from the other breakers.  And let me say, I am glad of that.  A huge tsunami would wipe out the little fishing village of Popotla on the point down below the hill where I live.  Not to mention the baja coast and so much more. 

Ah, but I ramble.  Maybe I'll post this poem in Submit.  Maybe there's something of it enough to post ...  Thanks for your note, c. 

ld

Small Birds

They sit on brick columns at intervals
in the brick wall.  Then, like our eyes
automatically blink, they fly.

Zip-zip around the plum in full leaf
that stands hardly a yard from the white-spiked iron topping the wall  with its padlocked gates.
Up-down-up-down in front of trellised grapes.

They seem happy, if undecided.  I write
zip-zip with some trouble striking the “z”,
striking the Shift more than once.  When I look up
they’re back.  I write.  They’re gone.  One east.
One south.  Everything’s moving, nodding. 
I seem happy, if undecided. 

The doves won’t arrive until late afternoon;
they’ve promised further cooing.
I pick at a scab on the back of my hand.  Dogs bark
in other yards.  The small birds must have found
another column out of view for take offs
and landings.  Good.  I need to concentrate, fly
west, into some better words.

Small birds is a little rough, but very good - a little trimming & pruning should make it a gem - I'll look forward to the day it flits over into submit - M

Documentation

A blink of the streetlamp.  The yellow
bowl of light deciding to stay or go.
Pale gray, morning’s marine layer.
Black powerlines.  One dove and two wild
canaries perched, a half-dozen pigeons
unperched, wheeling.

I’m a voyeur, casually aware of light
in a high yellow bowl now
steadily out.  If I went out,
stayed out, who would document
this?  The undecided, decided.
The unasked, asked.

thanks, michelle.  not sure when i'll get back to it -- but some thoughts there to rehash.

Home is Where

In quiet night, on covered shucks of old corn, where skins shine and slow, beyond flaps of woven doors wind shuffles through like sleepwalking ghosts, a girl marks a shuck with blood, drifting who she was from within like a whorled dust print of her after.  After, folding this evidence into a letter she will keep in a pouch of other skin.  Months, and a baby comes.  Years, more suckling young.  The shuck is dust and the well is enameled with mineral crusts where they would take water, wearing woven doors for warmth.  You’ve seen her again folding coins in shadows, wearing a star on her cheek where a bone splintered through, and turquoise boots with silver-worked toes, buying mangoes at the market, on a bench waiting for the bus, coming out of the dentist’s office.  She’s wearing a new crooked tooth.  She’s wearing a hand on her arm and you move to let them through.  And in the quiet dark, on a shelf long with neglect and casual abuse by spiders and cats, laden with clay and sculptured skulls wearing bridal veils and stovepipe hats, you find her again.   And the tooth you know by its angle; and the fracturing star mended to hang like a lantern highlight on her cheekbone is catacombed by petals, through which she watches your passage—you cannot look and cannot look away—even home, where doors are wood and water spills from the faucet, she watches your passage.

#191 - so good.  Makes me feel connected to every woman.

Scent of a Rock

This one takes two hands
to lift close enough to lick,
to sample for salt, smell
the worlds where it’s been.
Sedimentary, metamorphic,
pebbling through striate generations
of forest and ocean floors,
speaking in steam and ash
of tours taken and planned.

I imagine moss waiting
for ferns and the calcium bones
of small rabbits once furred
in the shadows of grasses,
tippets worn by ladies
tucked into trunks and forgotten,
rolled into compacted dust
at sites on the outskirts of towns
long-swallowed by earth
birthed warm again, rising,
rounding, fracturing to round
anew with erosion, to sit these
weighted hands with maps
of lost rivers, veldts, tracts,
marrows of stems and bones.

 

While you were off with the kids, I looked at this again.

This one takes two hands to lift,
to lick,  to sample for salt, smell
the worlds where it’s been.
Sedimentary, metamorphic,
pebbling through striate generations
of forest and ocean floors,
speaking in steam and ash
of tours taken and planned.

:)

Just looked at this and messed a bit more.

This one takes two hands to lift,
to lick, sample for salt, to smell
the worlds where it’s been.
Sedimentary, metamorphic,
pebbling through striate generations
of forest and ocean floors,
speaking in steam and ash
of tours taken and planned.

An inspiration taken from #195.

Seritoln reaches into the tide pool with both hands to retrieve a large whorled snail shell. A creature of pink fluff retreats instantly inside. He lifts the dripping shell to his face and takes its essence into his nostrils, redolent of the very air around him. Impulsively he touches his tongue to the salty carapace and tastes an electric connection to his own inner ocean, deep in his bowels. He places the animal on a portable scale retrieved from his pocket and notes its weight. Now he places the animal on the dry sand above the water line and begins to make notes. Its size and shape are cataloged; the direction of the whorls, the range of colors. With his enlarging glass he notes the many layers that make up the shell. He sketches from different angles and as he does so the animal slowly emerges. First its two tongue-like feelers appear. Then what is apparently its scale-covered head and foot. The head begins a rhythmic push-pull movement and the shell rights itself. The animal begins to move toward the water.

Now Seritoln begins to draw the animal itself. It is covered in feather-like scales which unfurl beneath the water to take on the look of pink, puffy blossoms of Minar trees. Seritoln remembers the orchard in the walled garden of his boyhood home, so many days travel away on the plains of the Iguarian continent. The water gently flows in and around the scales as the animal begins slowly to make its way into deeper water.

Seritoln sits on the sand, his bare feet slowly being sucked into the other world of this sea and he gazes at the animal slowly taking flight. It is the middle of the day and the sun hypnotizes him as he watches the flicks and licks of light on the gentle waves of the tide pool.  His tired body is slipping beneath the water and he is following the snail back to its familiar world. He awakes at the discordant cries of water birds and curses when a white puddle slaps against his grass hat.  He washes the dirt from the brim and replaces it dripping upon his head. The cool water brings him back and he resumes his note-taking.

Finally, he writes a name at the top of the page.  This he says to himself is to be known as Nenoama, the wonderer.  He laughs with a sound like the cry of a water bird as he strikes through the mistake. Nenoama, he writes. The wanderer.

pigeonbike image #7 – tree bark grown over wire cable image

In the north there’s a tree with a grapevine grown straight through its heart.  The vine is as thick as an ashwood bat.  The tree is a scrub oak.  I figure the seed of a grape was shat on the soil by a bird who happened to like grapes and wasn’t private about how he got rid of bodily waste, especially not in a field abandoned by ranchers and cattle, a field where fences had never kept out a single deer or coyote or bobcat or quail.  Anyway, this bird that liked grapes shat a seed while he sat on this limb of a scrawny oak; he did this while the oak was still not much more than a trunk that branched into two parts a few feet up from the soil.  The seed took hold or broke open or whatever seeds do, shot up a tendril, some furled leaves, or nubs of leaves, and so on, gradually snaking up and up and finding the tree’s skinny trunk and grabbing onto the bark and going on, like vines do.  Some seasons came and went, the vine losing its leaves and then getting them back, its own thick self getting thicker and sending off limbs the way the tree was sending off limbs and getting taller too, and so on.  The “V” where the trunk forked into two main parts  maybe got higher up off the ground from the root of the vine, or it seemed to, but about this I could be way wrong, and in any event the vine didn’t care and looped itself through that “V” and wound around the base of that tree and re-rooted in the ground and just kept on going, like back up to where it’d looped through, but by this time the “V” and its parts had sort of closed ranks around the initial layover of the vine, leaving a little growing room yet for the vine but sort of saying, Unh-uh as to any further lazing about in that area.  Anyway, they went on like this a long time.  In the summer the tree held out its branches like a woman and the grapevine with its weave of vines and draping leaves pretended to be a sort of green cotton sheet the woman was holding up to hang – the woman being, of course, the simile for the tree, and if I’d written this better that’d be clear without me having to explain, but I haven’t and well, there you go. 
   So what I’m saying is that while there are a whole lot of trees in the north with old ranch-fencing wires cutting their bark, sometimes cutting clear through and then covered over and hidden absolutely one hundred percent so that if some one person or another with a chainsaw thought they’d just maybe like to have some of that particular tree that had once been used, a long time back, as a fence post to cut up and use as firewood to heat their northern homes—that cutter of trees, the one with the chainsaw, might just find his saw bar kicking back when it hits that buried metal, kicking back like a mule you don’t expect to be hiding out under the bark, hiding out and waiting for a chance to bite back, punch a ragged wound in the face of whoever may be wielding that saw.  But you won’t find a grapevine grown through the heart of tree that’ll bite back like that.  At least not in my neck of the north.   

Me and Ron Carlson’s Disclaimer

I never met Debbie Delucca, and Debbie Delucca may not be the real name of a girl Ron Carlson memorializes in his short piece of non-fiction titled Disclaimer which I read a few years ago in a Short Takes anthology of contemporary creative non-fiction.  Debbie was Ron’s first squeeze, or so the story reads.

For a dozen years, I tore out and saved any Ron Carlson short stories found in The New Yorker.  I subscribed to The New Yorker because I knew, or expected, I would get a smile out of whatever Ron Carlson had written once I took the time to read; and along with the smile there would be a twinge of something akin to hurt, like an echo of suffering from across a continent or a room.  Sometimes the suffering was like a vacuum left by great happiness, a happiness like when the heart lifts out of the chest, buoyed with such joy it can’t remain bound inside a pumping muscle, even though that pumping muscle allows life.  (Are they plural, those muscles, those chambers of action, of filling and emptying with shush and thud?)  Of course, I tore out short stories by other writers published in The New Yorker.  Olive green Pentaflex hanging file holders hold labeled manila files bulging with ragged-edged stories by authors the editorial staff at TNY found worthy.  I never kept my Post-It rejections.  They seemed superfluous.

I was once a first squeeze.  Barry LastNameToRemainUnmentioned used to sit with me on a blanket in front of the Etiwanda house.  The grass was St. Augustine and sharp and, if we spread the blanket behind the craggy and rough-barked apricot tree, the porch light hardly found an edge of the wool plaid, much less the outlines of our legs or where our ankles crisscrossed.  He was adept at leaving strawberry marks on my body in places no one except he could or would ever see.  (We weren’t a family that barged in on one another while dressing, nor did we leave the bathroom door unlocked, nor a chenille robe’s belt dangling and untied.)  Fifty years later I can still see a flurry of moths around the front porch light.  Through the gauzy drape of diagonally-hung sheers, I can see Mama and Daddy lit frontally by the glow of Rawhide or Wagon Train airing on the TV.  

I doubt if Barry’s attentions went as far as the front porch light and the moths circling there;  I doubt if he noticed the spread of the apricot tree branches or the highest limbs on opposing sides where Bonnie Jean and I could sit and throw wet pits at each other.  The pits wore ragged, orange beards—flesh we couldn’t quite get with our teeth.  That tree loaded up every late spring with fruit.  Sometimes branches broke from the weight.  Sometimes Daddy levered the heaviest limbs up with a 2 x 6 or a fence post.  

I doubt if Barry saw much more than skin of my neck just above where his lips worked, or the white page of my thigh exposed by cut-offs rolled up above the knees.  Yes, above the knees, and barely below my backside cheeks.

I should’ve written Ron Carlson a Thank You note years ago for his Debbie Delucca remembrance; after all, his fondness for her is why I attempt to write about love in another time, on another blanket, and hickeys and moths.  Not that any of this means very much, or will.  It’s just that I’m in the midst of watching moths from different blankets these days.  And Barry was the first to take a bite out of my love, whatever my love is, or how it was shaped back then.  I’d like, I’d very much like to understand why I’m watching moths instead of zeroing in on some neck skin, why I’m word-smithing about with a page or so of paragraphed words instead of standing in the quiet afternoon light in nothing but a red silk kimono with the tie ends dangling loose.  

I’d sit down with Barry if I knew where to find him and ask him his thoughts about then.  Didn’t it ever bug him that I was distracted by the moths, how the light caught in their wing dust?  Didn’t he ever wonder, or care, why I wasn’t totally there?  Why all he had was my skin, my oh-so-bruisable skin?  It’s tricky, but when I try really hard to imagine him listening to me ask such foolish questions, I can see him not seeing any part of me.  Not skin, not thigh, and least of all where my gaze went.  I think that’s why I don’t know where he is.  I wish I could write with truth:  I don’t care.  

However, I do care.  Not enough to make any changes.  And that, I fear, is the problem.  Have I mentioned the moth we found on the exterior wall yesterday?  

The truth is, I didn’t find it—he did, the guy I’m sharing blankets with these days.  Come see this, he said, and I said, Later.

Later, I looked.  It was the size of a small diary.  It was.  And magnificent.


[after Ron Carlson, Disclaimer, from Short Takes]

Where do I start with a comment on the above? I never heard the confusion of love, both first love and last love, described more eloquently. There is a revelation here for anyone who cares to see it. It is that Love remains constant, it is a part of life and changes as we change. Blessed be the one who sees the changes.

Lovely, just lovely.

works for me, L
would be a treat to read in pulp
reveals always are in my view
well done, super




.
 

dax -- thannx!  so good to see you kickin around the site again.

lavonne -- thank you.

Mexican Bee in a Sliding Glass Door Runner

Bumping side runners in turn,
frustrated and tiring,
he seems without sight,
solitary, a drone of summer:

the gray of June and ocean gloom;
the white of broken waves;
the black of his veined wings
and body bands; the honey
of the stripes between,
and his legs, worn
with stumbles and errors.

When he flip flops,
his wings quiet.
When he rights himself,
white walls still bar
his escape.

Like other Corps tags, they came
as a set, twins, identically stamped.
Metal of one the same as the other.
Birthmarks of equal depth, data impressed
so as to leave a mark.  On one side,
raised in the way earth hides fresh deaths;
on the other, settled delineations. 
They came with the uniform, went
to Danang, found quarters
inside a leather-inlaid walnut case
crafted for tie-tacks.

A green bee the size of a fly on the flower.
The flower: orange-yellow calendula daisy.
The green: motor-oil iridescent.
Sky: a great milky eye over the blue cheek of sea.

I’d never seen a green bee before.
Her thighs: yellow and fat.
Wings: veined translucency.

How many me images did she see?
Was I the first sandpaper-cream being met?
My thighs: varicosed and dry?
Wings: too wet to fly?

For Lynn

wow!  that's the exact bee!

You see how well your poem describes the scene!

Love the poem!  Love the picture!  Love the question!

Nothing in the News, November 5, 2007

I spent some little bit of time reading old headlines today.  I subscribe to Newspaper Archives and just figured, What the heck.  I found there wasn't a whole lot going on in the news on the 5th of November in 1988:  the Soviets had stopped their withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan; Michael Dukakis and George Bush Sr. had entertained crowds with campaign speeches in Chicago; a student at Cornell had been found as the culprit behind some big and majorly bad computer virus; he'd written the code as a joke, an experiment.

I don't know what it was I was looking for in the old news.  I didn't find anything out of the ordinary:  an ongoing war with a big country invading a weaker one; politics and promises, as usual; the son of one of the deans at Cornell up to some mischief and the consequences of such mischief.

I don't know—maybe I thought I’d find reports of an earthquake somewhere, of consequent tsunami damage.  Or a devastating hurricane.  An eruption of ash and lava. 

I read articles in Syracuse NY papers and Arizona papers and Michigan, Pennsylvania, and California papers. There wasn't a clue in any of them.  Not a hint.  Nor was there any particular line or image that would lend itself to some metaphor or simile I could use here, writing today, 19 years after Al’s sudden death.  Crushingly ordinary news, this passing business.



     Four years later, 2011, the 5th of November.  I've canceled Newspaper Archives.  The ocean shows quantities of white breaking waves today.  A poet could figure what's going on with all the white for a temper tantrum, depending upon mood.  Or an ongoing celebration of what comes and what goes.  Or vast teams of horses pulling the currents to the lava flow bank fencing my backyard where they, the horses, run headlong to spend themselves on hard, dark faces.

I saw that you were searching.  That is what IT is all about- the Search. If you found what you were looking for you would forget why you were looking.

I call it the quantum mechanics of writing.  You can either know what you are writing about or why you are writing, but you cannot know both at the same time. :)