Convoluted Poetry Politics

I've been waiting for a book contract with the press (which I won't name here) which, a year ago, requested a copy of my manuscript. Last December, I received notice that my book publication was in the 2013 budget, the 4th of four books on their production calendar. I've made announcements of sorts about this deal, mainly to friends, but lacking the contract, I was wary to make it known in the larger world.

Saturday I found out that my project had been dropped, because of the restraining order that's on file with the City of Seattle against the man who assaulted me last summer and who also destroyed $4k of inventory at my job. See, he's on the board of the press, and is very active. I don't know any other details.

And in fact, he may very well read this blog post. And if he does, he'll know that when I read the email containing this information, it felt like a punch my gut: all the air was smacked out of me. I felt betrayed, angry and nauseous. If his intent was to do the most damage to me possible while complying with the requirements of his protection order, then he was most successful. (I don't know if I'll ever know why this friend of 20 years suddenly turned enemy. It's baffling and confounding, and tests all my resolve in my effort to remain a loving and compassionate human being.)

It's a complicated situation. The Executive Director is a friend who is also a member of my writing group. She's a good person, an ethical person, and I'm guessing that she has been backed into a corner. Irony is that this press wouldn't even exist if, in 1991, I hadn't pulled together a diverse group of people to form a writing critique group — three years later, the group gave birth to the non-profit press, which has been operating in the black ever since. I was only active in the press from 1994-2002, and my only claim to it now is as a co-founder.

The man facing felony criminal charges here has been a driving force behind the press. As a grant writer and fund-raiser, his all-volunteer efforts have paid off generously. There is a lot which he can be proud of — I'm willing to give him that.

But if an organization's board member assaults a client, I believe that his resignation should be demanded. I understand that there's a lot at stake here, and it's a very complicated scenario. It's ugly, it's uncomfortable, and I really don't desire to fan these flames any more than the writing of this blog post. And I think he knows this. So, in essence, I'm backed into the corner too.

So, for the moment, no book in the works.

Bigger and better things, perhaps?
I think yes.

Headline News: Poet Gets Paid to Write!

It has happened. I received actual cash $$ (well, in my Paypal account) for a piece of writing. Albeit, it's not poetry. It's a personal essay, and you can read it here.

Not quite enough money to go out on the town, but I might go out on the village, or hamlet. Or maybe I'll just go out in my back yard. Live it up right, I tell you.

Tuesday Poem: Thomas Hubbard

I highly recommend today's Tuesday Poem — a piece by a part-time-Seattle poet, Thomas Hubbard. Here's a teaser:

You eye my braid, my old car, my flute bag

in the rear window, and that expression comes
onto your pale, clean-shaven face.
 
You seem upset that I don't shuffle, step aside, 
show embarrassment about my dark skin, and
why must I have feathers in plain view?


I had the good fortune to hear Thomas read this at an open mic recently, and he graciously consented to let me record him reading it. Read the full text here.
 

Fungus Amungus

This morning I went out in search of the white-speckled red-capped mushrooms that I associate with fairy sightings. A friend told me where to find them, and find them I did, but they were mostly crushed and obviously kicked about. Maybe something like this happened (and I missed it!) —

"Come, Now A Roundel" by Richard Doyle

There were a few remaining, but the color had faded. Isn't this a beauty?

Apparently, a meal of 15 of these caps will drop you into the grave.

I've had this postcard in my possession since my early 20's; I think I bought it in Germany. Hadn't given it much thought over the years, and managed to resurrect it today, finally knowing the name of the wee mushroom traveler: Mr. Amanita Muscaria. And those grandfatherly morel men — sentries!

Animalia

I was walking to work yesterday and there was a dad walking his two girls to school and one of them, probably about six years old, was r-r-r-r-rufffing like one of those yippety yappety miniature dog-things. She kept doing it: r-r-r-r-ruffing for a few steps, a few steps silent  (she'd twirl, or hop, in the between times) and then do the whole thing again. I don't think she had any idea how good an imitation she was doing, and that was a lot of the charm of it. She didn't expect applause, or praise. This was done for the joy of it — twirling and hopping and barking. Of course, I was enjoying it all terr-r-r-r-uff-ically. In the fog.

And then this, played at work today:


But not to be outdone by this:


Hmm. A barking child,
a goat yelling like a man,
a kitten mewing like a goat.

Really, now, it doesn't get much better than this.

Not to kick a dead horse, but.....

Funny how a realization can come out-of-the-blue, at a most odd moment, with even odder prompting....

A conversation at work today somehow wandered from hydrangeas and how they change color depending on soil acidity, to piles of oak leaves in an Arkansas forest, to the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and its 10,350 cacti.

We were verbally wandering, and painting. Two of us at the long table, Debussy piano from the speakers, a flicker (woodpecker) on the feeder outside the window. Fog.

In my head I followed the map from Arkansas to the Southwest, and recalled an argument my ex-husband and I engaged in periodically, which ended in unresolved conflict.

The first time it came up, we were in Texas, visiting his family. I said, "I want to drive into West Texas. I want to see it."

I'd heard about West Texas, first in the eloquent prose of Larry McMurtry in his epic novel, Lonesome Dove, where it's depicted as vast and bleak, stretching out for what seems forever. And my ex- sometimes mentioned it, said that you wouldn't want to drive across it.

I told him that I wanted to go there.
He said, "No you don't."
I said, "Yes I do."
"There's nothing there."
"That's what I want to see, the nothingness."
"No you don't. Believe me, there's nothing there."

And so the conversation went.

He loved to bring this subject up when we were with anyone from his family, and always, they all burst out laughing. It was if they knew something that I didn't, couldn't know, and damned if they were going to tell me. I felt six years old and prim in a roomful of saddle-weary cowboys. (Even if they were all graduate and post graduate-school educated intellectuals, with nary a pony in sight.)Any argument from me went nowhere. And really, what did I know? I was a newcomer to their beloved Texas. West Texas was for cattle rustlers and Commanches, Texas Rangers and bandits. It was an unforgiving landscape, a place where you didn't want to run out of gas, no place for a moss-hearted poet from the Pacific Northwest who knew only persistent moisture and ever-present ferny foliage.

And I wanted to see it, precisely because of where I was from: a landscape gloriously hemmed-in with mountain ranges in the distance, with tree upon towering tree in the foreground. I desperately wanted to experience this other landscape,  to feel that expanse of desert-earth spread out beneath the wheels of the car, mile upon mile. The sun. The dearth of greenery. I imagined it as an opening of the heart, a letting-out of the spirit, a flying-loose of everything held close for comfort.

We never went to West Texas. And during the conversation at work today, it struck me that this conflict was at the core of our rift, the irreconcilable piece of our union, a way of looking at the world that we did not and would not ever share.

I envisioned what he called "nothingness" and saw infinite possibilities for sensory experience. He saw, well, nothing.

And the more time that passes, the potential for infinite possibilities grows exponentially, West Texas or no West Texas.

Maybe it seems an over-simplification to boil down the failure of a marriage to whether or not both parties want to experience whatever it is that one really experiences in West Texas. But sometimes a moment surges to the forefront among all other possible moments and announces: pay attention, this is important.

And today I did.

Forest in a Box

A friend of mine — a man — is in the hospital, going on day nine, after a long and complicated surgery. All week I've dithered about what to bring him. We women like to bring things to people; I'm guessing it doesn't matter so much to men. Flowers didn't seem quite right. And nothing edible, because of dietary restrictions.

And then this morning I had it: I'd bring him pieces of the woods that he loves so much.

So I ventured off this morning with a paper sack, and snipped and gathered, illegal, I'm sure, as it's city property. Law breaker! Ha.

This is what filled the box:

a big-leaf maple leaf
a vine-leaf maple leaf
sprigs or Douglas fir, cedar, hemlock
a Madrona twig
a salal leaf
an Oregon grape leaf
a mossy rock
two varieties of lichen
a fungus-robed stick

Upon opening, he immediately brought it to his face, and inhaled: forest in a box.

We were both pleased!

Out Loud, In Public....

I gave a reading of my poetry this week at a coffee shop in the city where I lived in my previous marriage, a location I've not revisited since I left over two years ago. Even though it's only 19 miles away, I've had no reason, as well as zero desire, to return. In fact, the closer I got, the more unsettled my stomach became. Oy.

To remedy that, I began my 20-minutes at the mic with this, um, shall I say, excoriation:

My Deterrent Example 

 

 "...and following the wrong god home we may miss our star." 
                                   —William Stafford 

I followed the wrong god home. 
Or was it the wrong dog? 
I panted after his wagging tail, 
dog or god — didn’t matter. 
Dumbstruck, smitten, 
led on by his trickster charms — 
All it got me was trouble 
and highbrow kibble, pricey vodka 
at the bar, vacations 
that verged on paradise, doubled 
for a time as real life. 

But it wasn’t in my nature, 
after all, to worship
either canine or divine. 
His altars and icons belonged 
to no heaven I could trust 
beyond our abbreviated marriage — 
its disillusion, its dissolution. 

O my fraudulent idol, my expired deity — 
all your coffers rattle empty now. 
Your gold is a crumpled scrap 
dumped-out at love’s dead-end — 
not home, not sweet, 
no god — you — and undeniably wrong. 

---------------

I'll say, that blew all the bad wind from my sails in a jiffy.

The rest of the reading was most uneventful.
The (small) audience was unreactive, silent, serious.

I've given many readings over the years, and when I encounter an audience like this,  I usually shorten the whole thing, skip past poems, get the damn thing done.

But Thursday night, I thought, fuck it. I'm going to ignore the silence coming from the "crowd" and just lean into my work. Pretend no one's there.

And it was actually kind of fun, leaning into the microphone, feeling the weight of my words fill the spaces in the room.

All week I've been thinking about the young woman in the video in my previous post, thinking about her confidence and self-possession — a gift to own at such a young age. And the message of her poem, the notion of women "making space" for the men in their lives, has nagged at me all week, tapped me on the back, made me pay attention and listen to the video again for its bold truth.

Somewhere, in some pile (probably in my basement) is a poem I wrote when I was in my early 30's, titled "Becoming Invisible", about this same subject. Tomorrow I might hunt for it, bring it out to the light and let it celebrate a 25th birthday.

gobsmacked

I can barely follow the path that led me to this video....

To explain: I saw this on facebook last night, posted by the daughter of a man I met in an online widows/widowers discussion group ten years ago, when I was deep in the dark ditches of grief. He was also newly widowed, and for the first six months of that journey we kept each other standing when it seemed all too easy to sink into the muck. He lived in Texas — I met him only once in person, when I was traveling with my then-boyfriend (and now ex-husband) P., in a hotel lounge in Fort Worth. Met his daughter that night too — lovely people, and we've kept in touch throughout these changing years.

The young woman in this video is the daughter of a man to whom I've been very close in the past year (but with a strong measure of turbulence), a deeply entangled friendship that has drawn me into a no-going-back full-blown love affair with quantum physics, among other things. (And none of them inconsequential.)

So: posted by daughter of Texas-friend who played a big part in keeping my head above water that first year of widowhood, and the video is of the daughter of another friend whose come-and-go presence in my life has been profoundly life-altering.

Got it? Yes?! (Not even sure if I do. Head is in a bit of a spin.)
Damn. Are you all as amazed & blown away by these times we live in as I am?

Empurpled

I zipped out the door this morning to work (on foot) looking, I fear, like one of those elderly when-I-am-an-old-woman-I-shall-wear-purple women: black shoes, purple/grey/black-striped socks, black tights, purple corduroy skirt, black t-shirt, black corduroy jacket, purple striped scarf (the best thing about the outfit, and knitted by one of my sisters) and a black beret. Black leather over-the-shoulder handbag and a red floral-patterened vinyl lunch bag. I was certain that people were pointing at me (I should be so lucky!) and guffawing.

What have I become? It was a moment of weakness, insight into a possible future to which I shall approach only if I am drugged dragged.

Tomorrow it's back to my Seattle de rigueur grey or black. With black. And perhaps a little more black, just to be sure.

A strange accounting of unordinary events, and a spell.

Eleven years ago, upon my leaping forth into a new venture (Two Tartes Bakery), a Wiccan friend gave me this completely lovely and thoughtful piece of glass art:

The caveat?
It came with a spell, and in order to ensure the good wishes put forth in the text, I was encouraged, or, actually — required — to destroy the piece.

(Let the records show that the same former-friend precipitated the following legal action:)

Well. Skeptical-me decided, instead, to hang it up in a prominent place in my home, to honor both the text and its artistic integrity.

Longtime readers will know that from that point on, my world shifted into a miasma of broken glass, death,  lawsuits, betrayal, divorce — just add etc. after that list and you'll be hitting a home run.

Many incidents of glass shattering — from the windshield in my late husband's van (a collision of skull and glass) to a pre-divorce falling-down of an entire shelf of glass into my face to the thousands of dollars of glass that were shattered at my feet this past summer.

Which brings me to a conversation last week with an old friend, and a rekindled memory of the piece pictured above, which has resided for the past two years bubble-wrapped and boxed in my basement. Unbroken. Spell intact.

The slightly-less skeptical me started thinking about things like spells and run of bad luck and thought, well, it wouldn't hurt.....

So tonight after work, I carted it up from the basement, removed the protective wrap, deposited it in my garbage can in the alley, and whacked it good with a hammer. Whacked it seven or eight times, certain it caused a moment of alarm to more than one neighbor, that siren-inciting sound of glass breaking.

And then I was done.
Spell broken.

And now, to get on with the rest of my life....

A Minor Proclamation

I don't like mussels, or oysters, or clams, all of which should be of no interest to anyone except that I've endured a lifetime of having to justify to others why I don't like them. At a party the other night, this came up yet again, and I stated that if I'd said that I was a vegan, or a vegetarian, I wouldn't have needed any further justification. My questioner agreed. And then asked if I liked scallops!

Maybe I need to make up a name for my food likes/dislikes. I'm thinking along the lines of whatever-the-fuck-I-want-to-eat-atarian, or, in a shorter form, wtfiwtetarian.

Pronunciation may be an issue, but it's sure to shut up the nosy Nellies.

Slow Crickets, Day Two

If you haven't yet listened to the slowed-down crickets video, I encourage you to do so. To explain, it's two tracks laid one atop the other, the first of crickets in real-time, the second of the same cricket songs slowed waaaaay down. A kind of cricket collage, if you will.

When I played this at work today, E. (our opera singer) was so moved she had to leave the room. There was no shortage of tears; it's tremendously powerful. For balance, I played it for G., the seven-foot resident abstract painter, who promptly labeled it "satanic". Hrmph. He's a guy.

But not to be outdone, I quickly slapped my own label on it.
"Satantric," I said.
Put that in your own personal hell and condemn it.

All in good nature, of course.
We laugh a lot.

The musical continued to flow, with this virtual choir (suggested by E.) of 2,052 voices, conducted by Eric Whitacre:



(And yes, we were working.)

To round things out at the end of the workday, I played this with the volume at full-crank:


Isn't there a rule prohibiting Mondays from being this good?

Circket Song — Slowed Down

Further evidence of infinite possibilities for astonishment:
And then Loreen McKennit — did she know when she wrote this that she was playing cricket music?
 (Many thanks to my friend Cz. for turning me on to the crickets!)

Just now while I was listening to the McKennit piece, I opened the cricket piece at the same time (to copy the URL to email to a friend), and they played simultaneously. Curious — all day yesterday I was ruminating on the notion of "audio collages", that is, producing a single piece of music that layers  tracks from different musical eras one on top of the other, fading in and out to create an entirely new sound.  Of course I completely lack — at the most basic level — the know-how and technology to even begin to tinker with something like this. But then, there it was, a fortuitous accident, and it wasn't a pairing that I could have even conceived of yesterday.

O glorious glorious!

This morning I'm singing praise for what is, and for the windows (ha! I first typed widows) and doors that have slid open to allow these cracks of light to shine through.

And of course, Leonard Cohen had it right —
there is a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in.

Angels, Clouds & Opera

One of the new luminous employees at the glass factory is studying opera, and I went to her recital tonight (in a brightly lit Lutheran church with a plethora of bibles and hymnals in every row). There was a little bit of everything, from a twelve (or so) year old boy singing his rendition of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit (he was astonishing, and it was his very first time singing at a recital) to several very exuberant but very bad and off key young women singing angsty contemporary show tunes (I blushed privately for them) to our very own Estrella, who knocked my socks off when she sang this tune from Verdi's Rigoletto (this is not Estrella!):

At age 30, already she has acted and directed onstage, performed stand-up comedy, and is now singing opera. Which begs the question: what in the hell is she doing at our rustic little glass factory?! And although I can't answer that, she is but one of several beings who, after this summer's catastrophic glass-smashing incident, was delivered down to us from a benevolent cloud.

I don't want to believe that things happen for a reason, but the fact that she (as well as two others) landed on our doorstep with a generous measure of grace, intelligence, wit and good humor seems, by far, more intentional than coincidental. But intent doesn't exist in a vacuum, and by its nature must start out with purpose, or design.

But by whom? From whom? This non-theist hasn't an answer.

 

As I'm walking home from work, two kids

pass me on the sidewalk, siblings, I think,
because they show so little interest in each other,
walk one in front of the other, backpacks sagging
with books and I don’t know what else.

I look up to smile, to say hi, but as soon

as they see me, they turn their eyes down,
and because I’m shy too, I say nothing.
The brother chews some after-school treat,
clutches the rest in tissue in his hand.
The sister trudges silently onward.

And then they’re gone, behind me

and I see in my mind still
the gentle face of the brother, his soft eyes,
and feel a sudden surge of tenderness
towards these two children, these strangers
who are barely teenagers, and who don’t consider
for more than a passing glance
the white woman looking up at them

who says nothing, and walks on. 

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr #2

The current government brouhaha/hullabaloo exhausts me. I'm considering slipping back into NewsBlackoutLand where I stood, firmly, for two years, eyes shut, ears muffled, mouth gagged. It's much more pleasant there! And, amazingly enough, my lack of attention to The News for two years had zero impact on anything, except my blood pressure.

Negotiating the Washington Health Exchange site — where a self-insured bozo like meself goes to kneel at the altar of The Affordable Care Act to plead my case — is proving to be confounding. I was repeatedly given the message that my application could not be processed because, according to "their" records, I could not be validated as an actual person. Which begs the question: if I'm applying for the first time here, what records would they have? But then I remember: it's the internet, and the internet knows all. (Which begs this further question: if the internet knows all, then just what are these records that they claim to have in their possession that give evidence to my invalidity and lack of actualness?!)

("*&$*%&($@_# ", she screamed — she the invalidated, the unactualized.)

(According to Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs, to achieve a state of self-actualization, one must first satisfy ones basic needs, safety needs, social needs and esteem needs. Isn't access to affordable health care a basic need, a safety need? This all seems to be a circular argument designed to shuttle me off to the Bin of Loonies.

And furthermore, if I lack proper health insurance and fall victim to maiming and disfigurement, then I may very well become an invalid, thus reinforcing their claim of my non-validness.

And if, according to Maslow, achieving a state of self-actualization means "acceptance of facts", then in this case it means acceptance of my state of non-actualness, as per the Washington Health Exchange.

In other words, self-actualization = non-actualness.

Well, damn. Maybe it's all true.)

At one point I was told to contact Technical Support, but there was no way to contact anyone/thing.  I don't seem to be able to help myself from thinking that this is a conspiracy perpetrated by my current insurance company to get me to abandon the process of seeking a different insurer (and a subsidized premium) and thereby buckle down and pay their exorbitant rates.

I hereby register grrr #2 for the week of September 29th.

And while barely treading water in the sea of rejection notices (from poetry mags), I awoke yesterday to landfall in the form of an acceptance from this Irish journal:

The editors took a very short 9-line poem, from a group of five poems in a narrative theme. Interesting in that they apparently think it stands on its own. The only constant in these many years of publishing poetry is that I'm consistently surprised by the responses of editors — it's a crapshoot. Go figure.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on becoming validated and actual. Tips and suggestions heartily welcomed.

Getting My Grumble On

Alone in the studio this morning, I listened to poets Billy Collins and Howard Nemerov on YouTube while I exposed sheet after sheet of film, each for 25 seconds, then washed each one out under hot running water, after which they were strung (with manuscript clips!) to lines above my head.

Water underfoot on the concrete floor. Cold coffee. Water railing from the sky outside.

Monday.
Crabby Monday.
Dissatisfied and uninspired Monday.
What I wanted was to march into Washington to give the House of Representatives and Boehner a piece of my mind — and the back of my hand. I'm counting on The Affordable Care Act, which translates into a raise for me. I mean, I love working as an artist but, as in poetry, it ain't where the big money lurks.

Grrrr.

And I started to think about poetry, about the fact that I often hate poetry, wish that I could just walk away from it, like a bad relationship. I can't read more than a single poem at a time, because for me a single poem is often the equivalent of an entire novel, distilled down to a minimum of lines. Reading ninety pages of poetry is like eating ninety pieces of cake. (And reading ninety pages of bad poetry is like eating ninety pieces of Safeway cake: shortening, sugar, food coloring.) An entire collection of poetry can take months to read. This is a problem. But I can't go without it! It's what makes sense to me, the thing that unwinds the tangled threads connecting everything.

And then there's the writing of it. I'll go months without a new piece, and every day passed in the absence of a new poem is barely tolerable. A certain deadness lingers, a procession of days minus those moments of clarity where life unfolds into an infinite number of possibilities.

It's been a month since a new poem tapped me on the shoulder and demanded WRITE ME. I need my fix, my sugar, my twenty-five lines of metaphorical caffeine. I need a simile, like an addict needs a hit. Shoot me up with imagery. Get off your assonance and alliterate me. And make it quick. (She said to the muse.)

What I don't need is a bunch of white guys in Congress with their penis-waving puffed-up self-aggrandizing self-important (is that redundant?) agendas messing with my access to affordable health care.

(The muse whispers settle down.)

It's late now.
I'm tired and poemless.

Bring on the violins — 

Rivers, and Buttercream

Storming here, early this year. I'm hunkered down in the late afternoon dark while the house gets pummeled. I've left so many grapes on the vine, I'm afraid I'll lose them to this torrent. And the tomatoes, oh.

Oh.

There's talk of flooding in the news, and something in me wants to walk the banks of a spilling river, see its aggressive surge. I've said this for years, and every fall there is something more compelling in staying-in with popcorn and some strong black tea instead of trouncing out in hip-waders (which of course I don't have) to gamble on flimsy footing and muddy water-whorls.

We can have our illusions of safety, but as inhabitants of the organism we call earth, we're all teetering on the same edge.

When I was out running errands this afternoon, I couldn't quell a nagging heart-dropping sensation, and I finally remembered that today is my late husband's birthday. For the first few years after his passing, I sent his mother flowers on this day. And now she's gone, and so is his sister, and there are sharped-edged gaping holes in a part of me, somewhere that I can't identify exactly, perhaps in the solar plexus.

Everything surges forward, river or no river.

There should be a party tonight, and buttercream.
And small sips of Calvados to mark (to Mark!) yet another year.

Crank it up!

On the Job

A., one of our new luminous employees, told me today that he came in to work on Wednesday in a crabby mood (I didn't notice), but that the laughing began quickly, and he snapped out of his funk right away. Said that he tried to tell his girlfriend what it was we were laughing about, but gave up because there was so much of it. (So much laughing.)

Well, damn.
This made my day!

2000

At the Hummingbird Saloon, at the inaugural Easy Speak, my dear friend Emily gave me a gift — a book entitled Hummingbirds of North America — Attracting, Feeding & Photographing, by Dan True. It's a beauty of a book, not only for its scientific approach to the subject but also for the book-making itself, with a handsome red hardback cover and semi-glossy pages. The hummingbird has, in the past two years, evolved into a kind of totem for me, a spirit-bird — and I was both moved and delighted by this gift.

I'm going to mention a little trick that, if you do, you can reference back to all the blog posts about my hummingbird encounters: if you look in the upper left hand corner of this blog, you'll see a small white rectangular box with a grey magnifier icon. Type in the word "hummingbird", press "enter" (or "return") on your keyboard, and you be instantly redirected to that page.

And to report: Easy Speak was an overwhelming success! Standing room only, the bar owners were delighted and enthusiastically ok'd a regular once-a-month open mic. I left there Monday night with a full heart, a happy heart.

In closing I'll include Emily's inscription in my new book:

Eagerly awaiting the start of my epic journey!

Post # 1999

Theses days it feels like everything's already been said, and often said repeatedly. So here I go again, this first day of autumn, on the eve of Post # 2000.....

Blustery rain and wind today, long awaited from me after a summer more glorious than any I can recall here, where I've lived all my years. To welcome the new season I baked gingerbread with a lemon glaze, and pork ribs are tenderizing in the oven in the heat of a low flame, awash in homemade BBQ sauce. I'm going to mash a giant sweet potato with coconut milk and ginger, and I'm awaiting a note of criticism from R., who will undoubtedly point out that BBQ and a Thai-themed potato mash commit the sin of flavor clashing. I say So What.

Feeling a sweet sadness at summer's passing, especially now that I'm on the side of the hill where I'm counting future possible summers in a set of numbers that, most likely, will be less than 50. When did this happen, this change of perspective?

If I could I'd stretch out each day so I could stay awake as long as desired, and then stretch out each night so I could stay awake under a moonlit sky even longer. I'd insert an extra day between Saturday and Sunday, call in Someday, and linger there, in dark or light — awake, alert, listening, seeing.

There is never enough time, in all of eternity, in every moment that has slipped away and in every still-possible second/minute/hour before me.

The challenge, of course, is to be present and in appreciation of all of it. Even in sleep, when my dreams each night launch me into ever more extraordinary scenarios: last night I was packing for a trip to India, opening a cafe, examining a new fabric that rippled like water, watching old episodes of Mickey Mouse on a television from the 1950's, choosing from dozens of kittens with sky-blue eyes. (I'd say that was sleep-time well spent!)

Tomorrow evening is the launch of Easy Speak, my new open mic venue at Hummingbird Saloon, not far from my home. The last time I initiated a literary function was in 1991, when I formed a poetry critique group, which still meets monthly and with a history of people coming and going, many staying, for 22 years. That decisive act, which was met with a lot of opposition from my very-controlling husband, changed my life. A non-profit poetry press grew out of it, which has operated in the black for all of its 19 years.  Deep friendships were formed, and continue to evolve.
New friendships are still being formed. Off and on for these years, it has served as a kind of backbone to my social scene.

When my husband passed away, I stepped away from it, and from poetry, for a long time. Poetry was my source of spirituality, and I felt disastrously betrayed by that which had for so long sustained me. I came back to it — in my heart — this past year, and Easy Speak is the child of that personal renaissance.

It's an open book, all of it, all of life.

And the view from the top of this hill, looking at what some may see as the downside, is lit with candlelight and lanterns, bonfires and oil lamps, illuminating a landscape that is at the same time deeply mysterious and spilling with enchantment.

While in Hawaii in early September, I engaged in a conversation with a mathematician about the arc of a human life. His philosophy was that in life one has two or three occasions to make a decision that will influence and shape the entire rest of that life. I played a bit of the devil's advocate with him — I love a lively debate — and disagreed. In a larger sense, I partially agree with him. The decision to go to college or not, to marry or not, to make a career change (or not) are certainly seminal moments in life. But taking it down to more personal level, I said that I thought that life was made up of possibilities, of all sorts, and at any point in time, one could make a decision to take Road A or Road B, or Road J, or even Road X. (I should probably mention that this conversation arose out of a discussion of the Multiverse Theory in Quantum Physics.)

Sparring ensued, all good-naturedly.

Before the conversation was cut short, I said,

"Tony, you look at life from a mathematician's perspective, and I look at it from the poet's perspective."

He half-chuckled, obviously not quite in agreement with even this proclamation.

Anyway.

The sun just came out, in a brief parting of sodden clouds. I can hear the wind in the trees in my one still-open window. Time to start thinking about scarves and gloves, ice and sleet. Time to think about the possibilities of the season ahead. Time to ready the lanterns, set out the candles.

It's all new from here on out.

Temptation

I want to live in a house with a tall wood fence that runs along a sidewalk.

Embedded in the fence would be double-hung windows. (Maybe curtains, yellow and white checked.)

Every now and again, I'd open one of the windows and place a pie on the sill to cool.

Would you take that pie, if you were walking by?

Thicket & Forest

My son and I went walking in the woods this afternoon, and the moment we stepped foot on the path the rain started — threatening all day but all day distant — and thunder hailed out across the treetops in its always unexpected bass drum boom. Nevertheless, beneath that high canopy of Bigleaf Maples where ferns grow all the way up the trunk to the topmost and windiest branches, we felt safe and insignificant, sheltered in mossy underbrush. And mostly dry.

There are a few old-growth firs in the park, and every time I see one I can't help but think that these trees somehow survived logging, decades before current logging practices which allow for a less dramatic clearcut. These trees began their lives well before the influx of white settlers, when everything I know as urban was wilderness. It's a good brain exercise, I think, to try to envision this different landscape, minus pavement and parking lots and the drone of lawn mowers and I could go on for paragraphs but won't.

I kept stopping to look at the ferns. In spite of the very dry summer we've had, they appeared lush and hale, growing laterally on nearly every tree. R. point some out in a high notch of a maple.

And then just as quickly as the rain began, the sun appeared, sending long rays like outstretched arms down onto the damp forest floor. It seemed as if everything respired — treestumps and loam and thimbleberries and alders, woodpecker-gutted snags, wild outcroppings of orange and pink fungus. This was no place of inactivity. Despite the relative post-thunder calm, the forest was very much at work doing what it has always done: the work of decomposition, of regeneration, all at once and always. In all ways.

A hundred years ago a person could make a home from the stump of a logged fir, live out his or her years cozy and snug in the hollowed trunk, with the addition of a modest roof.  There's a small clearing on my woods-path where for years I've wanted to camp, for just one night, but of course that would be against the City of Seattle Municipal Code.

Maybe tonight I'll hear an owl from my treetop-level attic bedroom, a half mile from the park, where I'll sleep legally. Small consolation, when what I really want is an entire forest for my bedroom, decorated with sword ferns, floor to ceiling.

"Noli timere — don't be afraid."

Seamus Heaney's last words — in a text to his wife — " Noli timere", latin for
don't be afraid.

I'm still mourning the death of this great man, this poet of stunning integrity, keen understanding of the human condition, compassion and outright talent. 

He did a book signing at Open Books in Seattle some fifteen years or so ago, and I stood in the long line that snaked out the door and down the sidewalk, the morning cold and bright. I had two books, one whose cover had been attached upside down. When it came to my turn, he opened the upside-down book, smiled up at me quizzically, and said, "Will you look at that!" I was more than delighted.

A few evenings later he gave a reading as the Roethke Memorial Poet at the University of Washington, and told this story, as I remember it:

It was the christening of my niece, and we arrived late, without a gift. I was worried about this, and my wife told me to go upstairs and write her one of my poems. So I did.

He read the poem —  I wish I remembered more about it, and whether it was ever published. But the memory alone I have of hearing him tell that story suffices. I was, again, delighted.

The following link contains more footage of the funeral — I couldn't find the direct video link, but the URL should lead anyone who is interested directly to it. There is a lovely segment where Paul Muldoon talks about coming back to Dublin from America for the funeral, and the dialogue he had with the Irish customs official upon his entry. Very much worth listening to!

http://bcove.me/chgw1p96


Listening, I was reminded of just how much I love and miss my times spent in Ireland, and how deeply connected I am to that country of my heritage. I know I'll go back, when times and circumstances allow.

On the Job, Part ____.

I was painting a small sandblasted glass vessel, blending an opaque color (in oils) with a translucent color. Our very present 6'10" painter-man, who has been christened Little G., said that he was fascinated by how we blended the colors.

"It's crazy-brain-making," I told him.

"How's that?" he said, "because it's hard to do?"

I had to think about this. No, it wasn't hard to do, once I got the technique down. But there's an element of blending opaque/translucent color into a seamless gradated tonal flow— generally from dark to light — that messes with my brain.

This wasn't easy to explain, and I hadn't, until then, given it much thought. Just one of those things that elicited an internal grumble from me each time I had to face it. A succession of questions began to spring to mind, prompting a very introspective discussion:

When/where does blindness transform to vision?
Where does the invisible become seen?
Light become dark?
Yes become no?
At what point on the horizon does cloudy become clear?
Is there a line where yin becomes yang, and vice versa?

The task of explaining why this was crazy-making was exponentially more difficult than the painting itself!

The vessel — vase, actually — was finished, finally, a deep gold blending to a sun-yellow blending to zinc white. Translucent at the base, opaque along the top rim. And somewhere along the body of that small piece of glass, somewhere undefinable, unmappable — the lights inside those colors transmuted.

I stopped my grumbling, glad for the ponderings in that I was forced to reckon with the source of my discontent, and in the process discovered that, once I stripped away the mechanics of the task, what remained was actually a more poetic/philosophical curiosity about the nature of seeing.

More than anything, this exploration into the why & how of color blending proved a dramatic contrast to the Stygian mood of yesterday's courtroom drama. And though I tried, in my consciousness, to blend the two together into merely a progression from a dark day to one that was light-filled, I failed.

No matter how hard I try to extend the metaphor, sometimes a courtroom is just a courtroom, and an afternoon spent painting is just that: painting.

In the end, I had to reconcile myself to the fact that this previously-dreaded painting task was, really, not so unpleasant after all. That it was, in fact, rather delightful, all things considered.

Court

There was a woman who said,
"I don't know if she's been served with papers yet. She's homeless. I don't know where she is. She's threatening to kill my children."
She stood at a table before the judge, leaned far forward, nervous, tripping over her words.

A man who said,
"Well, it's like, he and I were lovers. A friend said he saw him hit my car with a crowbar. I live on Social Security and my rent is $800 a month."

Another woman, who said,
"He just got out of jail today."
She was holding a scrap of paper, and she twisted and twisted it in her hands.

A young man, elegantly dressed in grey slacks, dress shoes, a green pullover sweater. I couldn't see his face, but he spoke quietly, with nervous deliberation, obviously struggling to choose the right words: Continuance? Extension?

A man who said,
" I'm disabled. I have two young children. My landlord intentionally hit me with his car."
The judge said,
"What does being disabled have to do with this?"
The man said,
"I can't defend myself!"

The tension in the room sizzled like sparklers nearly spent but that, oddly, still burned.

When it was my turn to go to the front of the room, I turned and looked directly at the respondent in my case — seated four feet away — but he stared forward, his presence as steely as the color of his suit.

I wanted him to look at me, to acknowledge my humanness; and I wanted to see his humanness, wanted to see his eyes.

When I presented my facts, my voice wavered, lost in some vocal range I couldn't identify as mine. Despite my shaky speech, I believe I told my story clearly and calmly, and the judge listened thoughtfully, for which I was grateful. But my voice!

My heart felt as if it were pulsating outward on every square inch of my skin, as if I were all beating heart, eardrum-splitting beating heart.

I was granted that for which I asked, which was small consolation. A legal bow loosely tied onto something wrapped tissue-thin. But it's what I have; it's how the system works.


Upon exiting the courthouse, I inhaled deeply the warm September air, felt my throat loosen, amazed that outside everything still hummed seamlessly, impossibly on — buses, pedestrians, traffic lights, seagulls, people sitting at a coffee shop on a corner, the usual shady dealings in City Hall Park. Briefcases, high-heels, striped ties, bluejeans, sport coats, shorts, backpacks....

Tropical Textures

An Apron of Apples

Hana, and Beyond

I was a passenger in a 5-car caravan today to Hana and beyond, a mostly invisible person in a group of youthful passengers, none of whom I know well. The rule was that at every stop, you had to switch up which car you'd been in, so I ended up having delightful conversations with people that, in any other situation, would never happen.

But I miss my close friends.

That said, we visited Red Beach (a treacherous lava-field trail first had to be traversed and I thought of sending photos to everyone I'm close to letting them know that this might very well be my last communication with them). I experienced the very odd sensation of looking up at the ocean while swimming, as the ocean was partly barricaded by black lava rock formations. The sea would rise up against the lava rocks, then a wave would break and it would flow between the gaps, then begin the cycle again.

The next stop, at a beach whose name escapes me but contains these letters: H, I, A, M, O, in varying sequences. The young men body surfed — I'm such a water wimp that I'd never ever attempt something like that, but they were beautiful to watch with their exuberant enthusiasm and youthful strengths.

On the road again, twisty-turny-treacherous, a stop at a freshwater pool was cancelled when it was surmised that the pool was most likely in an evaporative state.

On and on, through bamboo forests and garlands of vines suspended from massive trees and ferns so thick on the ground and up into the tops of the forest canopies — so thankful I wasn't driving so I could drape myself out the car window, hair in full insane flight & tangle — the road so narrow in places and so rutted and bumpy it was like an amusement park entertainment. And the scent! From blossoms whose names I didn't know, from the dark dank humus of the forest floor, salt from the sea, a mesmerizing swirl of sensation.

Heaven. Of sorts.

Further on, as the road wound eastward, the landscape performed a dramatic change from tropical to dry and windswept, and for long moments, my head flung out the window to catch the wind — I could imagine I was on the western coast of Ireland, the similarities were so striking. I felt myself letting out a contented sigh. After this rather turned-upside-down week of tentative securities and feeling shifted off my grounding, here was a landscape, a geography that rooted me deeply on a deeply soulful level. And so unexpected! My heart did its song, its quiet dance of This Is My Land. No shouting necessary, it was an internal peace-settling stretch of time, of road, with every window of the car rolled tightly shut except for mine. And the wind that stripped my face of tension — a cool wind with a salty edge — was one that welcomed me to a home that for this short time existed on this other side of a planet whose limitations have become oh-so-obvious.

Tomorrow: a long flight across the Pacific to my chosen home.

Tonight: deep contemplation. An attempt to sort the instances of this past week, to file them into some kind of order, knowing that this supposed order will prove to be most difficult. And ultimately, accepting them for their own uncategorizable selves.

Such is the molecular structure of this life, atoms aswirl, neutrinos even more undefinable, doing the dance of the infinite universe.

Heat

Everything is dripping this morning, warm and sloshy with a wide rainbow on the western horizon. A few have bundled their youthful limbs in long pants and sweatshirt, and I can't remember the last time I was cold — most likely sometime last winter. The heat of a middle-aged woman is an untapped energy resource that could not only power, with little doubt, entire nations, but would for all time place women in their proper place: at the top.

Aloha

The adjustment, to a new space, for me can take a long time, longer than the length of a vacation, for instance. It wasn't until last night that I had the presence of mind to look up at the sky and notice the multitude of stars, the Milky Way — and the gift of a meteor.

And then this afternoon, I opted out of a group beach outing and instead took to the roads on my own, doing the odd things that I like to do when in a new landscape: mostly a lot of nothing, looking in windows, wandering through grocery stores, assessing the trinkets (mostly made in China) at the street markets. All at my pace, according to my whims. A necessary time-out, a breather, a respite from the non-stop pace of the house where I'm a guest.

It's been a most unusual week here in Maui. The scene has been very much like what I'd imagine a commune would be, lots of people, a single bathroom. Shared kitchen. Tents scattered here and there on the grounds. Few doors. Even less privacy. But nonetheless, the youthful majority here has been polite, kind, high-spirited, prone to spontaneous laughter.

The 30-or-so years separating me and most of them has proved to be dramatic. After 50, we prefer more sleep, more quiet, more privacy. I'm loathe to admit to the petty, fussy preferences of an older generation, but the fact of them is too obvious to ignore. I'm older, and I've become fussy.

Ouch. Can't believe I just wrote that.

But I've been here long enough to begin to look outside of my needs for comfort, and walked the grounds this afternoon with an eye for textures / patterns. I found them in the turtle's back, in the bark of the banana tree, in the intricate leaf patterns of palms, in the stripes of a variegated bamboo — until the battery on my camera died, and I was forced to give it a break.

So much for careful attention!

And tonight I'm armed with earplugs, desperate for a decent night's sleep.

Tomorrow: Hana.

Down the Cliff

I found a red gate on the edge of a steep ravine, and a man who'd just pulled up in a beat-up truck said it was to his property, and when I asked if it was okay to go beyond the gate, he offered to walk me down the 150 steps to his property where he farmed and lived.

He moved quickly and I stepped slowly, lagging behind,  careful not to slip. He said he'd lived down in this valley for 25 years, and other than a neighbor's road, which is usually pad-locked shut, his only access is this switch-back stairway. Said that when he built the two houses and outbuildings, he slid all the building materials down the "hillside" — which verges on being a cliffside. Everything: lumber, roofing, refrigerators, bags of concrete. I tried to imagine this, and faltered. Slid? I was unquestionably astonished.

Tropical flowers whose names I don't know lined the path, lush and vibrant. A dry streambed ran through the valley floor, and he showed me where they'd built a small rock damn, to make a pool for swimming, but it was all exposed rock this time of year.

I thanked him for the generous entry he allowed me — a stranger — into his private paradise, and he excused himself and disappeared across the plank footbridge.

Into the Jungle

I received a text this afternoon — friend of a friend of a friend — saying yes she'd be delighted to give me a massage and gave me directions to her house which was at the end of twisting roads where palms brushed down to the sides of the car and bougainvillea snaked up and over embankments in shouting bursts of pink and orange — up and up from the beach, closer all the time to Haleakala (the crater) but not quite that far, down into a deeply shadowed gully and up the other side, guava trees, mango groves....

With my eyes closed on the massage table, the bird calls were piercing and omnipresent, not a single one I could identify, but foreign and tropical. I imagined their plumage and exotic colors, like dream-birds that exist in the rare dream and are always just out of reach, fluttering beyond the branches of a tree too high, barely glimpsed for all the bright feathers —

And in that deep-tissue haze (discovering muscles I didn't know existed but very clearly were calling out to be named), the music of a single flute, a quietly resonant drumming — I thought this is what it feels like to move on to another state of consciousness. One could name that state death, or rebirth, or merely a transcendence to something, someplace other — honestly, I don't know what to call it. All I know is that I entered a place of utter peace and contentment, with the outcome being:

this is enough.

Tropical...

...and up-country, 2641 miles from home, flung out onto an island in the Pacific.

Here for a wedding, staying in a house populated by dozens of 30-somethings, sharing the single bathroom, on three acres that could only be described as glorious. The sharing aspect is so reminiscent of my hosteling days, with beautiful lithe bodies draped across sofas and an energy I have not visited in decades. Carving out my private head-space is a bit challenging!

There's a flower-consuming Sudanese turtle in a wire pen, horses in the lot next door, and a deep ravine where wild boar roam. I've yet to venture the overgrown trail down into the ravine, but it's definitely on my agenda.

I'm also itching to visit the apiary, somewhere down in that jungled ravine.

Seamus Heaney, on the Bathroom Wall

In 1991, my husband Mark tore a Seamus Heaney poem out of the New Yorker, folded the edges back around the poem, and push-pinned it to our bathroom wall. No frame, no decorum: straight poem. We were that kind of family.

For years I read that text — Like a foul-mouthed god of hemp come down to rut — as I brushed my teeth and dried my hair, the paper becoming moisture-splotched and yellowed as the years ebbed forward. I never truly committed it to memory, one of my failings as a poet, I suppose. There are few poems I can recite by heart, and this, of all poems, should really be the one; neither for any kind of universal truth nor for beauty of language (although these are both present), but because I looked at it every day, year upon year.

In the ensuing decades, past Mark's death in 2003 and beyond, it was removed and relegated, I'm guessing, to some pile, and subsequently put in some box or another. Because who could dispose of such a bare-bones piece of evidence of the consumate Irish poet as well as my poetry-loving husband who, without hesitation and minus adornment (because it needed none!), stuck the poem to our bathroom wall?

In all honesty, I've not given it any thought since I removed it from its hallowed sheetrock. That is, until today, when I read that Seamus Heaney was dead at age 74, and suddenly, tonight, after a long work-week and in anticipation of my one-week vacation commencing Sunday, I let down all my emotional barricades, and wept for the elegant Irish poet who by all rights should have thrived until a much later age, and for my half-Irish husband who went to his death with the unrealized desire to visit Ireland.

And where is this poem, The Fair Hill? Most of my poetry collections are still boxed from my move back to B-Street in 2011. The only way to access the poem online is to purchase a digital subscription to The New Yorker. Instead I'm left with only the essence of what hung in steam and the many acts of human ministration that took place in the bathroom: the showers, the baths, the tooth-brushing, the hand-washing. And then the even-more humbling instances of being alive: the attending to a sick child, the shower set to hot-steaming to soothe a persistent cough, the rinsing of gaps left in the jaw post-extraction.  Seamus Heaney was present for every one of these, a torn page from a magazine,  a Nobel Prize-winning poet alive and present in the most private and essential habits of my family.

More than anything, I wish Mark were here right now so we could each raise a pint of Guinness to the master of verse who presided over my make-up applications for many years. If Mark were here, we'd take turns reading Heaney's poetry aloud. We might stand out on the balcony together — he died before it was completed — and shout the lines of The Fair Hill out into the August night, into the dark and past midnight, beneath this sliver of moon that could, just possibly, resemble a potato slice.

So here's to you, Seamus Heaney.
May you and Mark clink your pint glasses in heaven, or wherever it is that poets and lovers-of-poetry land after your exit from this world of torn paper pinned to bathroom walls.
 

Sláinte.

Advice, Declined

The Angel With Broken Wings is a regular fixture in the studio these days, exuberant in his exhortations and equally entertaining in his on-going commentary on life; a person who knows how to laugh as well as he knows how to cry, and he ain't scrimping on either.

Today he told me that if I was going to land myself a man I oughta dumb things down a bit. And guess what: I was outraged, albeit in a warm manner, and told him very kindly: NO. Not no-where, not no-how.

(Notice that "nowhere" can be read as either "no where" or "now here". Very curious, doncha think?
In that they have opposite meanings? I think it was stuff like this he was referring to when he suggested the dumbing-down.)

Bottom line: if a man isn't able to engage in a little pun-spiked sparring on a regular basis, he's not worth my time.

The days keep getting odder, or more odd. (Maybe more oddly?) (More oddly odder?)

Spoke on the phone today to a police detective, a public health nurse and a hospital records department. This is only slightly better than last week, when it was a detective, a judge, a bar owner and a software developer.

In the past months I have spoken to neither a clown, a taxidermist, nor a prime minister.

To whom have you recently spoken?

Owl, Midnight

Close to midnight I heard an owl.
I was lying in bed, nearly asleep
when I heard the distinct hoo-hooing low notes,
a barred owl. I dragged myself from the mattress
and went to my balcony in the dark,
waited to hear it again, and I did,
not too close, just distant enough —
maybe half a block away in a Douglas fir,
or cedar, I'm guessing. Lovely, ethereal,
almost melancholic.

Seemed to be the sound
of being alone in the dark, no stars.
The city asleep, or nearly there.
Not so much for me after that,
yet worth the interruption, because
in all the years I've lived in this house
I've not ever heard an owl
from my bed at midnight.

Tremors

There are dark rumblings in my world at the moment, a shifting of tectonic plates, a teetering on jag-edged cliffsides.

So much cannot be said.
So much wanting to say every last word of it.

And in other news, summer begins a dry crackle to its denouement, the days a yellow haze of thin cloudcover and puddingthick air. The five apples (variety: Chehalis) that my apple tree produced this year have begun to fall, pocked and shot through with mites. Useless, and yet oddly beautiful in their utter imperfection.

White flies.
Aphids.
Every morning the way out of the house crisscrossed with spiders' webs.

If I were ten years old again and wandering the yellow fields of my childhood, I'd go searching for a garter snake or an ant pile. Once, under a discarded piece of plywood in a far corner of a neighbor's one-acre yard, I found a mouse family all swirled together in a soft grass nest, the mother-mouse in full alarm when her roof was so rudely raised by the giant (me), the babies pink and helpless. I gently let the board back down — I recall that afternoon so clearly — and continued on my solitary hunt for the small trappings of wildlife my world allowed.

But not here, not now.

When all the old words became no longer useful
she went at them with knives and scissors —
her desire for  a new language
more powerful than the tidal pull
of the moon, more resonant than birdsong.

Launching a New Venture

I'm securing a venue to host a monthly 4th-Monday open mic in my Southeast Seattle neighborhood, featuring spoken word (poetry, prose, memoir, etc.) and music, modeled after a thrice-monthly event that I attend in the northend of town. Choosing the location has been tricky — it must be open late and must serve alcohol (poets like to drink!). I spoke with one of the owners of Hummingbird Saloon last week, and he sounds 97% okay with the idea. Not excited, mind you. He hosted an open mic at a bar he used to own in New Orleans, and was overrun with loud and obnoxious (and offensive) slam poets. I'm not at all interested in the loud and obnoxious! Not interested in censorship either, but if I'm the one putting the time in to set up and host this thing, I get some say. (Glad the owner and I share this perspective.)

Need to track down an amp and microphone, and learn how to use the damn things. Any leads on this, Seattle friends?

It's been 22 years since I launched a poetry happening by myself, the last time in 1991. My boys were three and five years old, I was married, renting the house we eventually purchased, had different cats and a different job. How different my life was!

The writing group that launched is still meeting, with only one other original member other than myself. There have been at least a dozen other poets that no longer attend, including one who passed away. Currently we're nine-strong, just the right number!

In 1994, the group members at that time formed Floating Bridge Press, which has been operating in the black for 19 years — no small feat for an all-volunteer, non-profit poetry press. We were young and enthusiastic, and more than a teensy bit naive. But our leap into the unknown world of publishing resulted in dozens of books/chapbooks, as well as numerous issues of Pontoon: An Anthology of Washington State Poets, and now, Floating Bridge Review. Essentially, we opened a door to publishing for hundreds of Washington State Writers.

I resigned from my board position two years ago, and am proud to be a founder.

Somehow I seem to have reached an age where I can look back and take note of the ripples of effect a single thing can have on a person/life/community. When I began putting feelers out, all those years ago,  for other poets with interest in a critique group, I was desperate to connect with other writers. (Ah! Those pre-internet dinosaur days!) Little did I know the impact this would have on me and a community of writers, or that long-lasting friendships would be formed. I merely plunged forward with my plans, believing, always in infinite possibilities.

So it is with this same excitement that I'm putting together the open mic plans. I have no idea down which path it may lead, nor which intriguing characters I'll meet in the process. All I know is that it's a new beginning, a new direction, and I'm tingling already in anticipation.

Thieving Blue

I've been stealing branches of hydrangea on my walk home from work, glorious fading blossoms spilling over onto sidewalks, driveways, the street. Not sure what I'll do/say if/when I get caught, except that who could resist such an array of every shade of blue imaginable? And because the summer has been exceptionally dry (by Seattle standards), the flowers are losing their intensity earlier than is normal. But no less stunning in their waning!

I like to think that the color evaporates as the warm days persist, and that somewhere is a repository of blue droplets, perhaps in a cloudbank, or a pocket of fog.

Once, in an upscale restaurant in Ireland, I saw a woman wearing a dress of the most exquisite shade of blue possible — not royal blue or cobalt of cornflower blue or azure — but something I'd call beach-glass blue, dark yet with a shadow of green light, and a glowing brightness that defied an accurate description, a hue that changed depending on the direction of the sun. Rather, I'll call it impossible blue. And it's rare to find in an article of clothing, believe me, as I've searched for years for just this shade.

Before leaving the restaurant, I stopped at the woman's table to compliment her, and she seemed a bit uncomfortable, which was warranted because I wanted to rip the dress from her and take it with me. (But I didn't.)

And now there are hydrangeas on my kitchen sill, on my kitchen table, and all over my bedroom, some from last year with just a whisper of color, and then this year's crop — still holding on to a generous suffusion of pigment.

Moon, Blue and Not Blue

Who has seen the moon tonight?
— a sharpened sickle, a scythe to fell the long grasses in the abandoned barnyard.
— a scar on my palm, a deep gash from a fall at a young age.
— rind, orange peel, lemon wedge, and all the pulp toothed-out.
— the petal's edge, the color bled.

But before this gloaming, I sat at the bar at The Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle, and drank a toast with a stranger to poet Theodore Roethke, whose portrait hangs over the pool table.

In this exploration and discovery that I engage in while blogging, I came across the short film about Roethke and The Blue Moon:

And I'm cast into my own blueness-moonness tonight because poetry taps down into the deepest most unreachable parts of me, and is a danger for the power it wields over me, and for the raw edge of truth that surges when I'm under its spell.

Can a bird die looking up at the sky?

I got a call tonight from the friend who lives across the street from me, wanting me to come over to see something.

The minute I stepped foot in her yard, she started whispering, and led me around to the side yard, where a robin was standing completely still, eyes open and unblinking, beak raised to the sky. She said it had been that way for quite some time. (Long enough, and then some, for her to call me, and for me to walk from my back yard to hers.) She said she'd gotten her binoculars to get a closer view, and it didn't appear to be making any breathing or blinking movements!

I quietly crept closer, squatting, took my iPhone out to snap a picture. At a distance of about two feet, it suddenly jumped, fluttered a few times, and hopped off into the bushes.

All very strange.

At what was it looking?

(And it really did appear to be dead.)

Surfeit & Dearth

It's been a week+ of almost no writing, neither here nor in my serious and more focused poetry-writing, which casts me into a state of agitation and fidgets. Gotta write.

On several occasions, I've begun a blog piece, and then word by word I delete it. Bye bye bloggie.

And then I remember just how much is going on in my work-world, my home-world, my everything-world. Still reeling from the recent violence in the glass factory. We hired new help, a young woman who is beautifully blessed with grace and intelligence, but is only available two days a week. Not enough! My mortgage went up in price by more than I would prefer, eating up a significant portion of my raise. (But very grateful for the raise.) Sigh.

Love life is in the garbage dump, festering amid a pile of rotting whatever. My parking-strip vegetable garden, on the other hand, is growing crazily — I've gardened most of my life and I've never experienced anything like this. I like to think of this summer as the result of — instead of global warming—global charming. This abundance is a short-term bonus to the perils our planet seems to be surrendering-to.

Everything appears to be patched together with thin and fragile stitches, when upholstery thread would certainly do a better job of it. But at the moment, my needle is threaded with the finest of filaments, finer than spider's silk and certainly without that tensile strength.

In these past few weeks I've witnessed a man pull himself back from actively choosing death by the bottle to embracing all of life's possibilities. I've witnessed a psychotic break, a personal assault and the destruction of thousands of dollars of glass. My heart has been shattered, people close to me have spoken of profound depression and devastating regret. I successfully rebuilt a loving relationship with my brother, something that, a year ago, I would have said was not salvageable.

I've re-established order in the production line at work, and was stunned by the realization of just how profoundly negative my former co-worker's impact was on every minute of my working day.

Relief! — amid the rising panic, when I see again the look in his eyes the moment before he swept $4k of inventory to the concrete floor.

My ridiculously amusing cat who, in complete darkness, takes a crazed running leap from the edge of the roof to the deck railing: ta-da! Lands upright and, if cats laughed, she'd laugh until tears flowed.

All of this.
All of life.
Spinning, grinding, swirling, singing, erupting, corroding, shining, falling apart, and, sometimes, if we're paying attention, we notice when it all begins to come together again.

Type, backspace, delete.
Type, backspace, delete.
Type, backspace delete.

It's been one of those summers.

Meanwhile, among the cabbages —

In the hail-pocked orchard....

....Eve left her blue dress under the honey-crisp tree.

Under Blue