This is the longest hiatus from P.E. I’ve ever taken. I haven’t felt inspired, been feeling more inward and, honestly, kind of tired of hearing what I have to say. That happens. I have been writing poetry. They occasionally float quietly in through the window. Other times they stomp up on the porch and bang on the door. Most of the time they just sit down with me for a little chat, to let me know there’s something they want to say, something I need to get busy writing about or I’ll wither away. The desire to write poetry is something I treasure, something that means that no matter how bad the world out there gets, that poetry still wants to live, wants to give voice to the depth of human sorrow and the beauty of the human soul.

I’m back in L.A. for the time being. The summer was spent bouncing up to Oregon several times, over to New Mexico, up to Napa and back to L.A. in between all of those trips. There were times when I found it difficult to ground myself, to connect with where home was for me. Instead of seeing the divine order of my life, I felt split in two, caught between, not only my two places of residence, but between who I was and who I am becoming. I wasn’t sure where I belonged.

It was on the drive down from Oregon after my last trip that a peace settled over me. I drove the 900 miles with only my two dogs as companions. It takes fifteen hours and I split it up into a day and a half-day. It’s always tough on the body, these road trips, but there’s something so liberating, something that gets freed up inside when you move through the countryside, stop at little towns and wayside stations along the way. By the time I pulled up in front of our house in L.A. I was joyfully exhausted. There was a certain amount of triumph in having gone the distance, but more than that was that somewhere along Hwy 97 or I-5, a peace had arrived, an understanding about where my true home is, where I will always belong—a place that will never have a mailing address or a weather forecast. I can’t really explain it. Like a good poem, peace is a mysterious force, some of which can be told, but most of which reaches down inside you and opens you to an inner truth, to grace.

Here are some photos taken in Oregon and on my way driving south.

 The "old bridge" over Crooked River Gorge between Redmond & Madras, Oregon

The train bridge over the gorge. When I was in high school my friends and I would come out and play chicken. Scared me then. Scares me now.

Closer look at the train bridge. It’s an amazing piece of engineering and beautiful to behold. Same goes for that husband of mine!

 
Here’s me being artistic with the photography.

Gotta interject a "bridge" poem that I fell in love with by a Polish Poet, Leopold Staff.

THE BRIDGE

I didn’t believe,
Standing on the bank of a river
Which was wide and swift,
That I would cross that bridge
Plaited from thin, fragile reeds
Fastened with bast.
I walked delicately as a butterfly
And heavily as an elephant,
I walked surely as a dancer
And wavered like a blind man.
I didn’t believe that I would cross that bridge,
And now that I am standing on the other side,
I don’t believe I crossed it.

Leopold Staff
Post-War Polish Poetry

Grass Lake just south of Mount Shasta. One of the most stunning and peaceful places. 

The story of Grass Lake. Maybe if you get a magnifying glass out you can read what it says.

No, I haven’t been to Maine or Alaska, but I did just get back from a fantastic week of poetry in Napa Valley, where Show me a moose and Get wet were the two clarion calls that arose out of poems from our workshop led by David St. John. There are four groups of twelve that meet every morning, each guided by a Master Poet (Elizabeth Alexander, Jane Hirshfield, Stephen Dunn or David St. John). There is no set curriculum, with each Poet having the latitude to assign exercises and processes for the participants to produce a new poem every day and bring to the group for critique. I can’t speak for the other groups, but I was more than thrilled with quality of the participant poets in the group I was in and found the exercises David challenged us with, to be both fun and expansive. (See below for a sample.)

The conference hosts both fiction and poetry writers with craft talks and readings by each of the workshop leaders. It’s a long day, with lectures and workshops during the day and readings every evening. I had to find some time to recoup and to write my poem for the next day, so never did get to any of the fiction writer’s craft talks. The poets each gave great craft talks and I’ve included a couple of quotes from each below.

I have to give it to the administrative staff and all their support staff for running a seamless conference. Ann Evans, Nan Cohen & Willa Rabinovitch, the program directors, were always upbeat, supportive and efficient in taking care of the needs of both the instructors and the participants. Maybe I am just more relaxed, but it seemed to me that this year (I attended in 2005) the whole program was even more harmonious energetically and richer in valuable information on writing. Not to mention the food, (provided by Napa Valley Cooking School) which was super, super good—a light breakfast and delicious lunch every day, with an additional dinner on the first night with a final picnic on Thursday night. It was a culinary feast each day and you know how important it is to have great food when your brain is working overtime. As a vegetarian it can often be slim pickins at workshops and conferences, but these folks got it all right and provided an equal variety of tasty entrees and side dishes for the non-meat eater. 

As for my own process—I came away with a few good poems, but what is more exciting was the ease at which the poems showed up and how much fun they were to write. I don’t always get this—no writer does. But when it happens—WHOOPEE! You get on that pony and ride. I have to give big credit to the assignments that David handed out to us Sunday night. There were about ten of them and his instructions were to pick one every day as a guideline to write the next day’s poem—didn’t matter which exercise or which day. Some of the instructions were to write in a particular form (sonnet, rondelet, triolet), some were to use a particular process (the “martini” poem, dramatic monologue) and some you were to use a particular “evocation” to bring forth the poem (something “lost,” epistolary, or landscape/memory). I have to say, the results were both surprising and impressive, and got more so as the days progressed, not only in my own work, but very much so in how the whole group fed off the inspiration of each other and kept raising the bar, not in a competitive way, but in a supportive one. The caliber of the participants really blew me away, both in the quality of their work and the quality of their critiquing.

To wrap up (and get to the good part, the photos), the week was a success on multiple levels, in that I came away having learned a lot (still digesting), met some wonderful people and connected with others I’d met before, and I feel my poetry “toolkit” has been greatly enhanced. All of these combined to bolster my own work and propel me one inch further along the path of “poet.”

Landscape/Memory Poem Exercise:
Deliver us to a place you once lived, perhaps between the ages of 9 and 12 and describe it with meticulous physical detail. That’s section 1. Now, in section 2, confront the memory of an event or person from that place and time. Let us see the event of section 2 against the backdrop of section 1.

Quick Quotes from the Craft Talks:

Elizabeth Alexander:
Is the poem cleanly achieving its possibilities?
Consider the relationship of the breath to the iambic line.

Jane Hirshfield:
As children go to storybooks, adults go to poems to be rightfully frightened.
A window in a poem is where the poem breaks open—enlarges the view.
Insight is not gained by domestication.

David St. John:
A poem is a model of consciousness—an experience.
You can seize a language that belongs to you through writing poetry—bring the fullest sense of yourself.

Stephen Dunn:
Where the poem turns is where the poet makes their most significant discovery.
Grace is what occurs when technique has been loved for a long time and then forgotten.

 
Hilda & I flew into Sacramento and drove the back roads to St. Helena. This "luggage sculpture" is in the baggage claim at Terminal 2.

The first night’s reading was outside at the Napa Valley Community College, where the course was held.

 
A few of the participant poets in the David St. John workshop preparing for the morning. The tables were sprinkled with glue, paint and who-knows-what ground into them, making for a very "artsy" surface on which to muse and write.

Hilda & I in front of the fountains at the Rubicon Estate where the third day’s reading took place.

 Roy, our host at the Spanish Villa Inn where we stayed in St. Helena. Hospitality PLUS!

Hanging out on the lawn. Ann knitting, Nan in stripes, Jane Hirshfield standing at left.

Milling about before the food arrives at the picnic.

 Mickey (from Alabama), Greg & Joel finishing up their yummy meal with good conversation.

David and Greg working on their poems (or, maybe not).

Christina and Melissa, two of my roommates from Squaw Valley last year. 

First Books Panel: Austin Grossman (fiction), Indigo Moor (poetry) and Albert Flynn DeSilver (poetry). Indigo was in my workshop with Jane Hirshfield in 2005. You can check out (and buy) his book, Taproot, at Main Street Rag Publishing. 

Last day, eating our bagged lunches and saying Good-bye (David, Christina, Bonnie & Wendy) 

Wendy (from Virginia) and her partner, Gary (who was there for moral support and is a poet and professor and all-round nice guy.) 

Hilda & I bid Adieu to the Spanish Villa and a great week of poems! 

Suffice it to say, not much blogging has gone on here in the last month. No particular reason–just fell off the blog wagon and still not quite on board yet. This week I’m in Napa Valley at the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference, in a workshop with ten other fabulous poets from all over the country and David St. John as our fearless leader. It’s been very fruitful so far (in fact I wrote a poem about fruit yesterday) and I’m feeling relaxed and in a kind of juicy flow with the work. That said, I’m still going to stay off the blog pages for a little while, but I do promise to get some pictures and commentary about the Napa experience up in the next week or two after I get home. My words of wisdom for the rest of your summer: Get sun! Get wet! Get poetry!

Some days I’d like to believe that the most important thing in all the world (well, in my world anyway) is the poem I’m working on—my current one, the one that’s fresh and full of potential, still moldable and tweakable. I’ve got a couple right now that I wrote over the last few days. I may be talking on the phone with the online bank manager or taking a shower, walking in the meadow or watching Crossing Jordan on TV, but I can feel them circling around back there in my head, arranging and rearranging themselves. I go to the computer several times a day to pull them up, read through them, read them aloud, pull a word out here or there, switch another one out, shift the line breaks. When I’ve got a new version I like I print them out on a fresh sheet of paper and set them on the desk.

 There’s been a large red-tailed hawk circling around the house and immediate area the last few days. Sometimes I only catch the enormous shadow of his wings out of the corner of my eye. Just now I watched as he (or she) took a few turns right outside the window, seemed to have something in his sights, but then let the wind carry him away with no reward for his efforts. It feels that way with poems sometimes. I’ll have an inspiration that, in the moment, lyrically sings its way into my head. I write it down and it appears beautifully on the page, so fresh and authentic. In the moments, hours and days following I never take my eyes off of it, hover over it, nursing and encouraging it along, even though at times it may lose all of its luster, seem dull and unwilling to accurately portray the illumination of my original thoughts. More often than not, I must move on to another poem, let this one go, admit that it’s either not ever going to make the grade or that it needs time to mature, come of age, before I can embrace it fully and take it all the way home.

As for the two new poems presently on the table next to my left elbow—I am encouraged. They are coming along nicely, without any major hang-ups to wrestle with at this time. They’ve still got to go through the gauntlet of the workshop and being honed to the point of submission (that’s submission for publishing, of course). Time will tell. Tomorrow the forecast is for thunderstorms. Perhaps there’ll be a new poem there; in the lightening, the rain, the movement of the clouds in the sky. It’s not mine to ordain. The poem, just like the red-tailed hawk, glides into sight on its own clock, shows itself fleetingly. If you don’t look up in that moment, if you don’t grasp it in your heart with passionate adoration, it simply moves on over the trees, out of sight.
 

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realists eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.

 
Robinson Jeffers
Selected Poems
Vintage Books, Publishers 

I wrote the piece below a few days ago when I was in New Mexico to renew body, mind and spirit at the Summer Solstice celebration in the Jemez Mountains. First my husband and I took a couple of days to ourselves, nestling down in a B&B in the Pecos Mtns. owned and run by a family who had carved a beautiful home and accommodations out of the side of a mountain. The father, aptly named "The Mountain Man" has a small tree farm and lives in his own cabin, while his daughter, Judy and her husband Steve live in the upstairs of the sturdy log and stone home they built just a few years ago. We stayed in the large suite downstairs with king bed and jacuzzi tub and breakfast served in the adjoining kitchen/dining/living room area. Our two days there were perfect for resting, doing nothing and going nowhere.

The following few days were spent on another mountain with fewer trees and many, many more people. We’ve been coming to Summer Solstice since 1972 and it has never failed to be transformative, starting every morning with the three a.m. wake-up, the call to stretch the body and mind, to awaken the soul to the field of infinite possibilities. During the day there are yoga classes, cruising the bazaar, children’s camp, karma yoga (chopping veggies, camp maintenance, serving food, the list is really endless), connecting with friends and making new ones and in the evening music at the Yogi Tea Cafe under one of the massive white canvas tents. It is always a timeless experience, a pause in the madness of every day life–an alternate paradigm where the spirit is the priority and each moment is a precious opportunity to open to what could be, how individually and collectively we have the power to live as compassionate, courageous and conscious beings.

Today, another mountain range, the Cascades, is where I reside–back in Oregon for a week–with a couple of days of family ahead, then days to dive into more revision and preparation of poems for going out there in the world. But more on that later. Here’s the piece from the PE-letter from Monday with a few photos of the journey. Peace.

*************

The breeze is beginning to stir. It’s ten a.m. in the Pecos Mountains in northern New Mexico. Yesterday we rested, my husband and I, slept on and off all day, didn’t leave the premises. The pine and fir trees, the pond with trout, the wildflowers and blue sky were enough food for the soul. He watched golf on TV. I read Norman Dubie poetry and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. We both took long baths. I found myself inspired to reorganize my poems in my computer into those that were pretty much ready for submission and those that were still in need of some serious revision if they were to make the grade. It felt good to be ruthless about the readiness of the poems. I was determined not to cater to my attachment to any poem. To make it into the “Submission Ready” folder the poem had to meet a high standard of completion: rhythm, diction, form and meaning all had to mesh to make the poem sing. I was pleased to see that my standards have risen since I did a similar culling a few months ago. It has begun to mean more and more to me what the poem is aside from my sentiment or what I think it might convey. The poem must be an entity that is complete unto itself. It must have the ability to stand on its own two poetical feet.

We’re leaving here in a couple of hours. Everything back in the bags, back in the car and taking the drive through Santa Fe to Espanola and up into the hills to the 3HO Summer Solstice site where we’ll be there for a few days of yoga, meditation and connecting with our spiritual family of almost two thousand seekers. It will be hot and dry, the dust will blow, the skin will burn, thunderstorms will roll in and chanting will be heard echoing off the peaks and mesas. Just as the poems must be cut and amended, so it is time for a soul revision— a time of reflection and appraisal of the year past and the year to come and a look into the timelessness of the journey. I wish you all a blessed summer solstice and may all your revisions be clean and strong and may you always follow your bliss. It is the path to the center of your heart.

The Mountain Man 

The Pecos River 

Wild Irises 

A bucket of firewood.

The main trail through the Summer Solstice Camp. The yellow building is the kitchen, which is always jumping day and night! 

One of the yoga tents–looking out to the Jemez Mountains and Espanola Valley below. 

A little bluegrass music to end the day at the Yogi Tea Cafe.

The following is a short essay I wrote while I was in school at Vermont College a couple of years ago. It’s on the book, Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr, which is still one of my all-time favorites on the power of poetry to transform the individual, be it the writer or the reader. I’ve also included a few quotes from the book at the end and if you click on his name it will take you to the poets.org page on Mr. Orr.  Because of the length of the piece you have to click "Read On" to get it all.

At the age of twelve Gregory Orr was responsible for a hunting accident in which his brother died. He was devastated for many years. He eventually found his way back to a fulfilling and productive life through writing lyric poetry where he could express the guilt, shame and horror of that day. Orr has written and taught the art of poetry for the past twenty-five years and says of lyric poetry: “Everything I’ve learned in that time reinforces my own experience that the personal lyric helps individual selves, both writers and readers, survive the vicissitudes of experience and the complexities and anguish of subjectivity and trauma.”           

This book, especially in the first couple of chapters, read like a love story. I found myself richly absorbed in this homage to language, to language in the form of the personal lyric, where the hurts and longings of the soul can spread out onto the page as a salve upon a festering wound. Orr speaks authentically, with a wisdom and clarity that allowed me to take in what he had to say as if he was speaking as a friend, not as a scholar expounding with unquestionable authority. It is in Orr’s willingness to simply state what he has found true for himself, through experience and investigation, that I found myself relaxed and confident that we were in this together and he had my best interests at heart.

Orr gives the poet permission to be “self-centered” in writing the personal lyric. In fact, he insists it is essential for the speaker in the poem to “absolutely believe that he or she is the central point around which all meaning constellates.” He goes on to say that, of course, this is not healthy as a principle for daily life, but without the assertion of the poet’s confidence in the writing of the personal lyric the poet, as Antonio Machado says, “wanders disoriented again among objects.” It is heartening and empowering to hear this call to the poet to stand firmly in his or her experience, to claim dominion over the expression of their poem as truth, if only for them, if only for that moment. It is at once liberating, and a responsibility, to be taken seriously in the crafting of a poem; keeping attuned at all times to the honest nature of what is emanating from the self into the language of the poem. To do otherwise is to create something lifeless, words that will suck energy from the reader, rather than imbue him/her with a kind of life-juice, an electrical current flowing from poet to poem to reader.

Orr illustrates the transformative powers of the lyric poem through the examples of a multitude of works where the poets have written of struggles, tragedies and transcendence. He speaks of the need, no matter what our level of trauma, to create order from disorder; to have a methodology in which our psyche can comprehend the incomprehensible. Often, as can be seen in the mentally and criminally ill, a distorted order has been achieved, one which has not been allowed to be expressed healthily, to be heard in a way that brings a peaceful resolution. When one does not use an outlet, such as art, to “make sense” of the paradox which is human existence, the mind is stuck, as a scratched record, repeating the trauma over and over, until there is an implosion or explosion.

(Read on …)

We have a wonderful woodstove here in our Oregon house that heats the whole upstairs, so I decided to get it going to take the chill off this morning. I opened the lid and began wadding sheets of newspaper and stuffing them inside. I was all business and just about had a heart attack when a small bird flew straight up out of the stove, whizzed past my head and landed across the room. I was immediately startled, completely awed and a little bit frightened by the sudden presence of this wild creature. I figured it must be a fledgling as it only flew in short spurts and not very high. It was covered with a dusting of ashes and although it wasn’t trembling or chirping I sensed the bird’s fragility as it sought to orient itself in this foreign environment of “inside.” Also present in this diminutive creature was the indomitable will to survive and to escape, as it headed straight for the clear glass of the windows, to the tall trees and patches of sky it saw there. Because the day before had been quite warm the stove had remained unlit, making me aware that it was very likely the bird had been in that soot-blackened stove for 24 hours or more with no means of escape.

To get some counsel on what to do with the bird I called my husband in L.A. He was a boy scout in his youth and an experienced woodsman. I rely on him heavily for his clear head and practical advice when it comes to navigating such situations. After giving him all the details together we concluded that to release the bird, instead of capture it and take it to a sanctuary, was the best course of action. It appeared healthy and, as it was capable of flying on its own, we felt it would be better served by being returned to its natural habitat. After taking a picture of the confused little guy as it crouched halfway under the sofa, I caught it and cupping it close to my chest, carried it to the window and let it go. It rocketed out of my hands and flew in a ragged pattern diagonally across the driveway, landing in the tall grass under a pine tree.

The sensation of that small, vibrating body nestled in my palms stayed with me throughout the day and into the night. The whole experience felt holy somehow, like the bird and I had acted as catalysts, each for the other, revealing both the tenuous nature of our existence and the unbridled wonder of it, in such a tender and forgiving way. I will never know if the bird survived, if its mother found it, as my husband suggested she might. I do know that the spirit of the bird and the memory of our brief encounter will live on as message and metaphor in the lore of my own mythology, to be savored and re-savored–a little bit of winged magic fallen from the sky one spring day.

Later that same day…

I finally got out for a walk in the woods across from our house, here at the foot of the mountains. It’s been ten days and for some reason or another I’ve been avoiding it. I practically had to push myself out the door, away from the couch and the TV and my desire for comfort. I followed the deer trails. I would start out on one and then wander off, only to find another going a completely different direction. I veered away from the roads and houses, the sound of people talking. There were the tiniest of wildflowers blooming in the dry soil. I fell in love with each violet, yellow, and rusty red blossom. There were twisted, old stumps laying on their sides, slowly sinking back into the earth. I skirted several red anthills, a hawk circled, a solitary deer bounded through the bitterbrush and sage. There was a heart shaped lava-rock that fit perfectly in my closed hand and two rusted cans that had been used for target practice. (These last three items I picked up and brought home for some reason I can’t explain.) As I stepped out from the woods and crossed the paved road, drawn to the meadow and the golden grasses shimmering in the fading light, I was so grateful for the wisdom of nature, how absolutely embracing she is, how she draws no line between the living and the dead, the budding and the decaying, how they mingle amongst each other as an enduring reminder to the short-sighted of what has always been true, of how we are simultaneously of this earth and not of it. I turned back to the asphalt road and back to my sweet house on the meadow, taking what I found, leaving a few footsteps in the dust.

A BIRD CAME DOWN THE WALK

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, –
The looked like frightened beads, I thought
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.

Emily Dickinson
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Barnes & Noble, Publisher

FULL MOON THAT STRIKES
THE EARTH COLD

or to be young geese again
on the night of their first
migration: two angled lines
joined only at the vertex.
A week ago the full moon

that strikes the earth cold
began a thin blue air
in the distance that parted
for the V of your leaving.

Karen McCosker
A Poem A Day
Steer Forth Press, Publisher 

I haven’t exactly gone underground, but I have been truckin’ a lot lately, thus the blog has not been attended to as regularly as I would like. On May 16^th I hopped in my ’93 Mercedes at 5:30 AM, swung by and picked up my friend Seva and off we went on a road trip—heading due north up the I-5. In no time (a little over six hours, actually) we cruised into San Francisco and being a little worn out from the early start we snacked and napped in our hotel room. I’ve always loved to visit San Francisco. The architecture and the vistas are incredible. It’s been years, probably ten or more, since I’ve been there and now that my son has taken up residence there, I imagine I’ll get there more often.

To put the rest of the trip into a mini-version here’s what happened: visited my son at the Presidio Native Plant Nursery where he is doing an internship for a year; had dinner (Thai food) with him and friends in the Haight-Ashbury district; the next morning ate breakfast at the Stanford Hotel on Nob Hill, lunch in Dunsmuir (just south of Mt. Shasta), where the sun was shining and the locals were quite colorful; decided to keep on driving to Sisters instead of stay the night in Dunsmuir; arrived at the house, after buying groceries, at about 6:30 pm; unpacked, ate some dinner and crashed in our respective beds.

f
It was a gorgeous, clear day in San Francisco. The view from our hotel window.

The next morning the notorious SF fog was doing battle with the rising sun.

The Native Plant walk at the Presidio, all in bloom.

Inside the large shed where the employees, interns and volunteers work.

Mother and son hamming for the camera.

It’s been a busy week, with the focus on fixing up my husband’s office/art studio area downstairs. It needs everything: paint, carpets, shelving, desk, art table and lighting and chairs. After a few days of cruising Bend and Sisters going to second-hand stores, hardware stores and paint stores we rented a big-ole truck for a day on Tuesday to pick up the various pieces we had decided on, with the last stop being the carpet remnant, which turned out to be six feet too long (12 feet total), thus leaving it hanging out of the truck bed. To keep it from flying out of the truck as we drove the 20 miles from Bend to Sisters, Seva sat on the end of it to weigh it down and off we went down Hwy 20. I only wish I had picture of that!

Spring is making its way slowly but surely up here in the high country. The creek in the meadow is full, the grass is already a foot high and the birds are everywhere–robins, Steller’s jays, nuthatches and woodpeckers—making nests and chattering up a storm in the early morning hours. The weather is never predictable this time of year, with temps ranging from the 30’s to the 80’s and rain, sometimes even snow, that can come out of nowhere to send you scuttling indoors for a jacket or to start up a fire in the woodstove. In our yard is great rock garden that I just love because it is so ungroomed and random. The rocks are all native (the former owners took them from the property) and there are wildflowers of all sorts that poke out of the nooks and crannies. I may just go get a couple of those wildflower seed packets at the nursery in town and throw them out there helter-skelter to see what comes up.

This second week I’m here by myself, still working on the house projects, but now having more time to devote to some writing and reading. Speaking of which, I just finished Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I totally enjoyed. I’m also reading a book I found at the local bookstore called, Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipher. This book I couldn’t pass up, for obvious reasons. I’m also a few pages into an oldie, but goodie, that I never read in my youth, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I’ve also watched four movies this week on DVD: Sweet Home Alabama (one of Seva’s favorites), The Barbarian Invasions (my second time for this touching film), Les Choristes and A Love to Hide (both of these are French movies and excellent). As for poetry, I am reading poems by Tomaz Salamun, a new poet to me, from his book, The Four Questions of Melancholy. Powerful stuff and a style that seems to be a direction my own work is heading in.

Well, I think that about does it for catching up. I leave you with a poem by Tomaz Salumun and some more photos of the wildflowers amongst the rocks (and a local woodpecker lookin’ for some morsels).

THE TREE OF LIFE

I was born in a wheat field snapping my fingers.
A white chalk ran across the green backboard.
Dew made me lie on the ground.
I played with pearls.

I leaned fields against my ear, and meadows.
The stars were crackling.
Under a bridge I carved an inscription: I don’t know how to read.
They rinsed the factories with salt water.

Cherries were my soldiers.
I was throwing gloves into the thorn bushes.
We ate fish with the golden break knife.
In the chandelier above the table not all the candles were burning.

Mother played the piano.
I climbed on father’s shoulders.
I stepped on white mushrooms, watching the clouds of dust,
Touching branches from the room’s window.

Tomaz Salamun
 

Lupine with a touch of dew. 

  Looked this little guy up (yes, it’s a male) in my bird book. He’s a White-headed Woodpecker.

It’s ten p.m. and I was just sitting on the side of the bed, in the dark, ready to crawl in and drift away and I started thinking about what it means to be a poet and that got me up off the mattress and to the keyboard. It’s been one of those month-long stretches of time when I have rarely been in the “poetry zone” and mostly on the go, taking care of business. It’s fine. There’s a big part of me that enjoys getting things done and flexing the left side of my brain as I get my new computer set up or train a new assistant in the chiropractic office or supervise workers installing new pipes in the shower and others trimming bushes in the backyard. 

I have grown a bit wiser over the last few years, at least enough to know that when there is such a spell of “doing” that seems to last forever, not to get too frustrated or upset or think that I’ll never write a line of decent (or any kind) of poetry again. It’s not how it has turned out in the past. I have always come back to write. What I know as true for me is that it is in the quiet, the silence, my creativity finds an opening to come forth. In the dark, or when I am alone, vulnerability shows up, a little fear. I walk nearer the edge of sociability and being a recluse. My senses awaken and deepen. I hear the spider move across the ceiling, feel the blood pulse in my veins and taste the chicken soup my mother fed me when I was seven, in bed with mumps.

Writing when there is noise, whether it is the television in the next room, cars and trucks on the street or my own head running down my to-do list a hundred times an hour, just doesn’t work. Sometimes I can do revisions on a poem or essay when there’s a lot going on around me and often lines or words or ideas I’d like to explore come floating along and I jot them down for future reference, but rarely, if ever, can I write anything worth its salt when I can’t lay down the stuff of the day and be prepared to weep at the unbelievable beauty and sadness of this human existence. I don’t expect to find much time in the next few days or possibly weeks to bask in quiet reverie, but I so cherish the opportunity to snatch an hour or two, like now, when the house sleeps and the only light is the glow of the computer monitor as the blank page slowly fills up with words.

As to my question about what it is to be a poet, I’m not sure if history is the best reference, if being a poet means you must withdraw from the world, to separate from it so that you can see it more clearly, or if it means that to write relevant and humanistic poetry you must participate with full vigor in all your life has to offer. My guess is that each poet has to define his or her own environment of involvement, how much to weave in and out of the inner and outer world and that they must do this based on what life has handed them and how they produce their best work. I’m still in the process of ferreting out the give and take of my own "poetry zone" and perhaps this, in the end, is what it is to be a poet—to be searching for a way to be of this world; to have a family, to love and hate, succeed and fail and through it all still be the one who speaks in tongues, the one who states emphatically that the emperor has no clothes, the one who dances on the slender edge of the night.

WANTS

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff –
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death –
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Phillip Larkin
Collected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Publisher

JET

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

Tony Hoagland
Donkey Gospel
Graywolf Press, Publisher
 

Here’s my thoughts from this week’s PE letter with accompanying poems. Sweet Dreams! 

I’ve been going through a period of enjoying good sleep. If you’ve ever been an insomniac (which I was earlier in life) or a restless/up-and-down type sleeper you know what torture it can be and how it starts to skew the daylight hours, making you grumpy and inattentive, with health issues starting to crop up in body, mind and spirit. You get the idea. Well, what a relief to have made it through the last couple of years where the hormones were jumping around like kangaroos on espresso, allowing for little or no chance for a peaceful and deep reverie at night. I would either be freezing cold and piling every blanket in the house on top of my shivering body or feeling like someone had dropped me in a vat of boiling water, like the proverbial lobster, flinging the just-moments-ago precious blankets off onto the floor, leaving not even a thin sheet to cover my steaming body.

It’s hard to say what changed the “climate” but these last couple of months I have rediscovered what it is to sleep through the night, with only an occasional trip to the bathroom or groggy awakening to check the clock and roll back over into dreamland. And, speaking of dreams, those too have been more fun and interesting, leaving less residue of angst and fear that I was going over the mental edge when I awoke, my eyes bolting open and calculating my best escape route from the creatures under the bed or rustling around out in the backyard. I’m not sure what affected the change—whether it was just the body running its course with the whole change-of-life thing or if all those vitamins, herbs, homeopathic remedies, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic and various healing modalities had finally reached their cumulative potency and kicked me through to a new zone – like restarting the computer when a program stalls and you’re not clear exactly why, but when you Ctr-Alt-Delete all is well again on your monitor screen, one of the many mysteries of this life that you just accept, unless you want to spend your lifetime researching and analyzing the why and the wherefore of such things.

I’m grateful, that’s all I can say, and honestly, take one day (or should I say night) at a time, not sure that the next time I lay my head down on the pillow I won’t wake an hour later in a cold sweat, desperately flailing about for those blankets that I so confidently stashed away in the closet down the hall.

SLEEPING ALONE

It should be easy, no one
   Else breathing beside you
And no restless turning
   Away and, look,
No hands or uneven feet
   In the wrong nightmare
And no murmuring heart
   Open or shut now, sighing
For you or yours but yours
   Alone this night, oblivion
Not yours for the asking
   Or begging, but the surprising
Glimmer of dawn, even there
   In that place somewhere
The other has gone to sleep
   Without you, not now
And then, but forever.

David Wagoner
Good Morning and Good Night
University of Illinois Press, Publishers

A BED FOR A WOMAN

I sat right up in bed and said, “Help.”
I didn’t scream it as if I were dreaming
a nightmare. I don’t know what I was dreaming.
The “Help” came from a dream core like the pulp
in the core of a tooth. I wasn’t frightened,
and that’s important since it took all my
energy and self-concern to understand why
I spoke in the darkness but wasn’t frightened.
I rose up out of bed like a person
whose fever had broken as this person
had known it would. Desperation,
hysterical shapelessness, was not in the word
as it would have been had I called, but I spoke.
“Help” was more like an answer. When I woke,
but not immediately, for I was too startled, I smiled
in this bed for a woman, far from the crib of a child.

Molly Peacock
Cornucopia
W.W. Norton & Co., Publishers