POETRY THURSDAY

"Writer's Block comes from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows...."

--Joseph Campbell



And for all my NaNoWriMo buddies: "It takes a heap of loafing to write a novel."

--Gertrude Stein



OK. I'll give it a whirl: LIES IN NOVEMBER

My stone has hands
It sleeps in the cradle
Of my hands,
Drinking my fire
My stone grows hair
In wonderful curls
Down its silky back
It loves the ice
That breaks me
More than it loves me
It sings of boots
Of blackbirds dying
Of the cracking of heaven
My stone knows black and white,
Was there at the hour
Of my birth
Understands cemetaries
Is flexible
.

The Story Teller

Story Telling was a regular event in American Indian (and other) cultures. The children would gather around and listen as the old folks sang songs and told stories as they had heard them when they were young. So it was that the tribal histories and folktales, religion and customs were passed on from one generation to the next. Grey Wolf Runs With Elk and Willow Woman say the stories were, and are, life itself. Figurines like this one I bought last summer in Nebraska, a woman (usually) surrounded by children were common as early as 400 AD.

I am The Storyteller in my tribe.
.

Poetry Thursday (Snapshot)

Night risings--listen--
the freefall of an apple
a flurry of wings










Artist: Gerus Igor

Rumsfeld Is Gone!

Ouch! That's gotta hurt!

Super Sunday

SUPERHERO, that is! :)
Who are those masked men???

Echoes From the Edge

Photo from the Hubble -- September, 2006
Oh, CLICK IT!

Credit: NASA, ESA, & H. Bond, STScI

Experiencing Technical Difficulties (or Why You Little!!!!)

Computers is acting up. :(

Meanwhile...Back on the Planet Earth

Keenan and Isaac, from Minnesota, USA!

Spacey Sunday

You've probably already seen these fantastic photos, but just in case you haven't, look for the comet Swan toward the northwestern horizon in the early evening. They say you can see it without a telescope.

From NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope we get to see the shock wave from an exploded star in Cassiopeia!


(Comet Swan copyright and credit: Paolo Candy)

Family Friday: STARFISH & BOOKWORM

Meet Starfish and Bookworm. They are my two oldest grandchildren. My handsome Starfish is "five hurrahs" old. He says that his next birthday he will be "six hurrahs!" Starfish is a rough translation of his name, Japanese to English. He loves Superman, and this Halloweeen he will magically transform into the Man of Steel. He began kindergarten this fall, and he loves ham sandwitches--without the crust!

Bookworm, my most beautiful granddaughter, is ten-years-old, in the fifth grade, and she is a voracious reader! Books have become her favorite thing. The two of us used to have fabulous tea parties, and play imaginary games with mermaid dolls. Once we made our own puppet theater. Now she likes music CD'S and High School Musical. Isn't she growing into a lovely young lady? By the way, she also loves Blogging!

.

Poetry Thursday (In My Head)

No Passion Greater Than the Mind

No Passion Greater than the Mind
Devours the Body or the Soul --
And all I know of Base Desire
By Mind was Body told.

My Soul kept White as Ivory
B'ignoring where the Body's sent --
May drop a Tear and shed a Sigh
Before this Passion's spent.

* * * *

Mind Is A Tiger In A Cage

Mind is a Tiger in a Cage --
Soul is a Desert Flower
That withers for Little Space
And dies a Little Hour.

Mind is a Tiger in a Cage --
But Flesh is Recompense
When Soul so Curiously Fades
For Want of sustenance.


(Two a la Emily Dickinson, who also Lived in Her Head!)

picture credit: troelsmyrup

Death of a Mouse, 1974

Robert Burns comes to mind:

To a Mouse, On turning up her nest, with the plough, November, 1785

...

The best laid schemes o' mice and men
Gang aft agley.

.

Scribblings: Creatures Great and Small

(...an excerpt from my book, CHRYSALIS)

We have a cat. Remy found a skinny kitten shivering and soaked from the storm. He fixed her a bowl of warm milk, but she wouldn't drink. She is yellow and white -- not more than eight or ten weeks old.

I think the kitten is sick. I wrap her warmly in a small towel, but she continues to shiver. I try to feed her with an eyedropper. Not much luck. She is limp, and I can feel her heart racing under her skinny ribs. She opens her mouth to 'meow,' but rattles instead.

She is dying. Her heart still beats, rapid and feeble, and she lies quietly as I stroke her head.

Three days later the kitten is dead. Remy and Chris weep. We bury her in the back yard, wrapped in the little towel, onto which I have pinned a note:
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

The boys are not comforted. I put my arms around them and we all three weep.

Vonnegut's Tralformadorians, seeing into the fourth dimension, perceive the universe in a different way. "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralformadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It's just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever.

"When a Tralformadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition at that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralformadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes!"

So it goes. I am three years old and they have taken me to say "goodbye" to my grandpa, who is sleeping is flowers, but he doesn't wake no matter what is said to him. Then I am six years old, having another encounter with vulture Death. I hold a brown leather dog collar. Sparky was a good dog, now he is dead, run over by a truck. The truck meant no harm. The driver was sorry, and he said so. I can't help wondering what it's like to feel yourself dying. And whether there really is an afterlife, or if all the hymns and prayers and baptisms are meaningless. I think of the earnest tears I shed over uncountable cats and dogs and birds that died somewhere back in my childhood.

"I am sorry the kitty died," I say, tucking the boys into bed.

"I am sorry, too," Remy whispers. "I prayed she would get better. I thought she might."

"It hurts her to be dead?" asks Chris.

"No, it doesn't hurt her," I say. (What the hell do I know about being dead?) "The poor kitty is better off."

"Oh," he says, gazing at me with his trusting light-colored eyes.

"I wish she was still alive," says Remy.

"I wish she was, too." I hug them all goodnight. In some matters of great importance there are no right words. So it goes.



Photo: marcydugger.typepad.com
Quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

.

Poetry Thursday: Poems You May Want to Avoid

The internet offers (free) customized poems for every occasion, "a special way to send your love." There are poems for birthdays, weddings, divorces, illness, funerals, wakes, poems for jilted lovers, policemen, global warming. There is one called "Raping Me Was Fun for Him," and another called "You Did Not Merely Die, but You Were Murdered." Whatever. They will say it for you! Here's my favorite, an acrostic, no less:

Thank You For the Favor of Your Seed

Thank you for the favor of your seed,
Half my child, who will be mine alone,
A part of you dispassionately sown,
Nor have I of you any other need.
Kindness is your only motivation,
Yet in this act you're being more than kind,
Opening a window to the wind,
Unloosing to my heart half your creation.

(I thought sperm donors were supposed to be anonymous!? --unless you're Melissa Ethridge and David Crosby. Or some weird doctor...but those are material for other poems, I guess. Maybe: Your Kidney Ailment Made You Find Your Father. Not to make light of serious situations, murder, rape, etc. Just that maybe these are poems you might want to avoid....)

Farewell, sprigs

Fallen flowers rise
back to the branch -- I watch:
oh. . . butterflies!

--Moritake (1452-1540)


They say butterflies winter in the warm air of Mexico. Then they come back. Farewell, sprigs. I shall surely miss you. Come back!

My Split Self

A Letter To Cecil B. DeMille

Remember me,
Ipana Pearlywhites:
bit moviestar
from the Forties
who might've played
opposite Bogart
and George Raft,
but didn't?
Thirty-two
pillars of ivory
once graceful
now gone to dentures,
whose especially talented
agility of hips
and imaginative tongue
taught men a new language,
whose willing flesh
became a garbage dump
for every twobit producer
west of Bakersfield?
To look at me now
who'd ever guess
this chaste rhythm
of breath under breasts
that used to rise
like helium balloons
but sag tonight
like used condoms
once fired little crimson
cherry-sucker syllables of sugar?
No one.
I am become a history book
of refrigerated kisses
preserved on celluloid
between the pages.

:)

.

Unexpected Wonders

The Cassini robot orbiting Saturn, drifting in the planet's shadow, looked back and photographed this awesome sight. Far in the distance to the left, just above the bright main rings you can see the "almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth."

A spectacular photograph, people of SSI, JPL, ESA, and NASA, who get the credit for this one!

*CLICK it twice to find Earth*
.

.

Who I Am: Connect the Dots

I am from light, yes, a spark from the great Intelligent Light that set the universe afire, from Love, both spirit and matter, yes, and from the green living body of the earth, ocean and saltgrass, rain and roots. I am from amoeba, invertebrate to vertebrate, from Lucy. I am from Ephriam, from ancient Celts breathing in haze rising from peat bogs. I am from tassled cornfields in Cornwall, from the fires and peppered spices of Spain, from El Cid. I am of salt miners and salt barges of Cheshire, I am from their empty bellies and of the potatoes and buttermilk that filled them. I am from sailing ships, and steamboats. I am from children walking behind handcarts crossing the vast American prarie, I am from their frozen feet, wrapped in gunnysacks or dancing polkas or Fylde waltzes or Virginia reels. I am from fiddles and string bands and French horns. I am from sego lilies and lumpy dick and bread n'with it, from white salamanders and the three Nephites and funeral potatoes. I am from gold miners and lumberjacks, and red-haired women. I am from pony tails. I am from books. I am Plantagenet, and DeBohun. I am Shearer and Barkdull and Wolfe. I am Hatton, and Mau, the English, the German, the Scot. I am from Eva Pearl and Glen "A", the second of two, the female model. I am white beans and banana peppers, pot roast, macaroni and tomatoes. I am from both pain and pleasure. I do not ask perfection. I only ask for NOW. I am from poetry and a perfect brightness of hope. I am from wings.

(Inspired from January, at Poet Mom's list. Thanks!)

POETRY THURSDAY--Powers of Light, Powers of Darkness

Mes Chers: It begins, "Admittedly I err by undertaking/ This in its present form. The baldest prose/ Reportage was called for, that would reach/ The widest public in the shortest time."

Not exactly from a newspaper, but definitely news, this is from a Ouija board. Poet James Merrill spent more than 20 years transcribing this 560 page epic, which he said came via the spirits of several...um, dead guys, among them W.H. Auden, a bat named Mirabell, the angel Gabriel, Michael the Archangel, Gautama Buddha, Plato, Jesus, Mohammed, Gertrude Stein, Richard Strauss, Nefertiti, Maria Callas. It touches on past lives, sperm and egg, Mozart, Hitler, Adam & Eve, nuclear explosions, and a thousand other things. Whether or not this came from supernatural sources, it is truly Merrill's Magnum Opus. From THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER, Mirabell: Book 9


THIS IS GOD'S NAME
GOD IS THE ACCUMULATED INTELLIGENCE IN CELLS SINCE THE DEATH
OF THE FIRST DISTANT CELL.
WE RESIDE IN THAT INTELLIGENCE.

WE HAVE IN THIS MEETING FOUND YOU INTELLIGENT & YOUR
SERIOUS NATURES AT ONE WITH US.
TWO FULL HOURS BEFORE THE SETTING SUN, IN THE FULL DAYCYCLE
BEFORE THE FULL OF THE MOON, WE WILL MEET AGAIN.
I AM MICHAEL
I HAVE ESTABLISHED YOUR ACQUAINTANCE & ACCEPT YOU. COME
NEXT TIME IN YOUR OWN MANNER. SERVANTS WE ARE NOT.
I LEAVE NOW AS LIGHT LEAVES AND WIND MY PATH OVER ITS
TRACK ON EARTH I AM A GUARDIAN OF THE LIGHT
LEAVE THIS FIRST OF THE FIRST TWO MEETINGS IN A CYCLE OF
TWINNED MEETINGS IN A CYCLE OF TWELVE MOONS
LOOK! LOOK INTO THE RED EYE OF YOUR GOD!

.

Big Cottonwood Canyon

We took a little trip up into the canyon to see the leaves. The mountains are beautiful, there is only a little snow, and the air is clean and smells like pine. We took the boys on a hike around Silver Lake, and they were so tired they slept all the way back home (about ten miles). Wish you could all have come along!


*click once or twice to see them better!

POETRY THURSDAY--The Body

FLUOROSCOPE


"I will eat you slowly with kisses
even though the killer in you
has gotten out."--Anne Sexton


The pinkchalk dye
marks only wagging strings,
fringed needlepoint tracings
and balloons, pulsing and collapsing

in unseen hurricanes.
It does not reveal
the soft underground place
where pain drums at the bowel's door

like an oiled machine.
It shows how ribs
imprison the black heart
kicking at its bars

like a drunk
raving of the blade,
the blade,
God, the blade.

Annie knows.
She knows the body
is a damn hard thing
to kill.

.

Notre Jardin

I was listening to NPR this morning while I drove Simon and Jacob to pre-school. They were talking about Voltaire's Candide.

"Il fait que cultiver notre jardin," he said. It may be naive and overly optimistic, in viewing the world's growing litany of nasty perils, to believe that if we'd all tend to our own gardens and pull our own weeds, and let others tend their own gardens, we'd all be better off. There's no way we can fix the whole world.


Voltaire was essentially a pessimist, with a negative world view. Candide almost convinces us that if we'd each focus on our own plot of ground in our own backyard, and do it well, then the larger issues of "Kings and Queens" would simply dissolve.

I, WASCA

Vaslav Nijinski, the great Russian dancer, suffered from schizophrenia, which often manifested as synaesthesia. In the final stages of his life he was found giving money away on the street, claiming he had suffered more than Christ. Perhaps he had.

My dear friend Maryan Paxton wrote of his last dance:

Am I a tiger,
the Angel of Death,
or God's Appointed?

These questions skriek, while
I dance attack! attack! until
God says
"Stop, Wasca.
Well done. You
danced war."

The music ceases.
I cease.

.

Poetry Thursday--SYNAESTHESIA

I, WASCA


1 Dancing Across My Own Brain

Marvelously I see my splitself
walking and dancing
across my own brain. My brain,
round as a stage, floods
with color, as if someone
outside my head were drawing
swaths of richly colored silk
across the stage lights. Color
pulses inside my ears. It is blue
as music which soars, then pales
where the brightest gold
floods singing through my eye sockets

then seeps into the ruby
of my upper brain.

2 How a White Ballet Flooded Yellow

Lately I began to see a shade
of color which I had never
seen before. Yellow.

Yellow shimmers
before bursting
from the proscenium as woodwinds.

Yellow, the color proper
pools, recedes, puddles
into petals of tainted poppies.

I tend to it with these iridescent
fingers that are forming from yellow fire
flaming into hands, all flaming

into fingers smoking and twisting
into body, sprouting legs
that arabesque to yellow music
...

3 Clue Into a Schizophrenic Mind

Someone tells me
"Wasca, your insane brother
Stanislaw died yesterday
in Russia, incinerated
into grey ash
in the fire that consumed
his madhouse."
I think: Stanislaw.
And yellow blooms inwardly
as I see my brother and I
run laughing through childhood.

The dance begins, a kaleidoscope
of colors, of sounds, of smells.
We dance in our red boots
for the first time at the great fair
in Ninji Novgorod. All the sights
all the sounds, the perfumes
flood me yellow, bells ringing,
the taste of Turkish Delight on my tongue,
turn, on pointe, fade blue
as I watch Stanislaw leaving St. Petersburg
with father. Stanislaw is young,
and a squiggle of jade spirts
as if squeezed from a tube, pirouettes
until blue sees brother sitting in the madhouse
with his vacant, dark eyes and open mouth.
The color of brother flashes blue
and brother spins, flapping and squawking:
"I burn,
I burn,
God, kill the fire!"
Stanislaw burns. All colors rage
into the silver tributaries of my cortex.
Unable to concentrate on fire,
on silver, or blue, or yellow, or green,
my mouth smiles while my brother burns
and burns
inside my eyes.

--excerpts from I, WASCA by Maryan Paxton

Self-Portrait Tuesday--"With Someone"

The two of us.

Metaphor: The Tree of Utah (Or, What I Did Last Summer)

Also called the "Tree of Life," this tree is 87 feet tall, made of 225 tons of cement, 2,000 ceramic tiles, 5 tons of welding rod, and tons of native Utah rocks. This huge sculpture is found 95 miles west of Salt Lake City on the Bonneville Salt Flats, and was made by Swedish artist Karl Momen (Momen, not Mormon)in the 1980's. The inscription on the trunk of the tree is Schiller's Ode to Joy as sung in the choral climax of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you know, Mortals join the happy chorus, which the morning stars began; Father love is reigning o'er us, brother love binds man to man. Something like that. Anyway, he thought of it as "A hymn to our universe whose glory and dimension is beyond all myth and imagination." The mountain ranges in the background are sunken in mirages of the phantom Lake Bonneville. Lots of folks don't like this tree, stuck out here in the middle of nothing, and make jokes, but I think it's cool.

Of course, Bonneville Salt Flats used to be an ancient lake, created by receding glaciers some 14,500 years ago, covering 20,000 square miles in Utah, and parts of Idaho and Nevada, and because it had no outlet, it left this vast white desert -- as well as what's left of the Great Salt Lake. This is also where Burt Munro set his land speed records with his Indian motorcycle as made famous in the film "The World's Fastest Indian." A fantastic movie, by the way, if you haven't seen it, do! And, people out here do what people do everywhere, leave a graffiti of names etc written in rocks, beer bottles, whatever, all along the edges.

THe Nevada side of the desert was blooming golden with sunflowers, blond Indian rice grass, sagebrush, and wild mustard.

I am always amazed by the volcanic formations that make up so much of Idaho and Oregon. Wouldn't it have been a spectacular show when it was all hot and active, from Yellowstone all the way through Oregon to the Pacific ocean???

Some wildflowers from Oregon. And a waterfall. Oregon abounds in waterfalls! The Saturday Market was full of flowers and fruits and vegetables and music.

Earlier in the summer we spent a week in Minnesota, which you can find here. (See June, 2006, The North Woods). It's all metaphor for things whose "glory and dimension is beyond all myth and imagination."

Little Boy Blue

C'mon you guys, I know you just love baby pictures! Isn't he SOMETHING?

Quote of the Day

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."

President Bush
in an interview with Katie Couric, CBS News, Washington DC, Sept 6, 2006
(Slate.com)

2,996 -- WE REMEMBER . . .

DAVID PRUDENCIO LEMAGNE, a police officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was last seen helping form a human chain that was leading people out of the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In the final moments of his young life, he saved two fellow comrades of the PA police and a third civilian security guard. He might have saved himself, but went back to save others.

DAVID graduated as a paramedic in 1994 from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Even after becoming a police officer in 2000, he continued to work as a paramedic at the New Jersey City Medical Center, simply because he loved to help people. When the attack occurred on the Twin Towers, he was told to stay put, but moments after the second plane hit, he asked to be sent to the trade towers, because of his training as a paramedic. Having aided and saved many lives in medical crisis, David understood what it meant to be of "Service."

OFFICER LEMAGNE was a notorious prankster, with an infectious grin. He loved jokes. He loved cycling, playing softball and basketball. Those who knew him best said: "I'll never forget that smile of yours or hearing you laugh."

"From time to time I still see you with your basketball, walking to the courts on 67th Street. I see your dad often, and he still cries...."

"I always looked up to you. I knew you for the brave leader you always were and the good friend everyone wishes they had."

"I don't know many people that was like you, David, kind, giving, down to earth, humble, bright, and a real good guy!"

DAVID loved dominoes games, and Bar-B-Ques, and smoking cigars. He loved hanging out at the "Spot," and throwing parties at "Topps."

David was 27 years old. He is survived by his parents, Prudencio and Ruth, and a sister, Maggie. And an entire nation, who appreciates and honors his committment to his mission and vocation. We still cry.... To OFFICER DAVID PRUDENCIO LEMAGNE, Badge #834, we say, "Well done!"


SILVER STAR


To be a mountain you have to climb alone
and accept all that rain and snow. You have to look
far away when evening comes. If a forest
grows, you stand there leaning against
the wind, waiting for someone with faith enough
to ask you to move. Great stones will tumble
against each other and gouge your sides. A storm
will live somewhere in your canyons hoarding its lightning.

If you are lucky, people will give you a dignified
name and bring crowds to admire how sturdy you are,
how long you can hold still for the camera. And some time,
they say, if you last long enough you will hear God;
a voice will roll down from the sky and all your patience
will be rewarded. The whole world will hear it: "Well done."

--William Stafford, Even in Quiet Places


GOD BLESS YOU, DAVID. GOD BLESS US ALL.

.

Poetry Thursday (Blue)

LIE, I TELL THEM

Be courageous, bizarre; be crazy
I don't mean roll into the aisles,
but be on another planet; walk on
stilts from here to Peru.
This isn't like math; there's
never a right answer. "Does
it have to rhyme?" "Do we
we have to write it out, or just
think about it?" The room is loud
as a shore the tide's crashing up on to.
On one side of the accordion wall,
blur of a documentary on Nixon's
last days. On the other,
Woodworking 102, sawing and hammering.
For me, writing would be like trying
to sleep in a house of straw
that tidal waves pound on, sucking what
held it loose. So when I read:

Blue is Dahlia's eyes, the Monday
before Cropsy Creek gulped her
and Blue is rage, choking like a
cat's too tight collar, digging
into blood and fur; and Blue, my
father's veins bulging from wrists
and forehead when he beats us,
I'm as startled as by abalone
when the sea pulls out.

--Lyn Lifshin

.

Self Portrait Challenge -- "With Someone"

June 19, 1964

...
when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someone's married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers they slept their dream

...

sun moon stars rain

--e e cummings, of course.

.

Sunday Scribblings -- SMART-1

Well. Europe's SMART-1 spacecraft crash-landed into the Moon last night, right at its predicted time of impact. According to David Leonard, Senior Space Writer at Space.com, "a handful of reporters and astronomers using large backyard telescopes...did not see anything." My husband and I, standing in our front yard (in our bathrobes and slippers) with our binoculars, didn't see anything either. But the Moon is truly a beautiful thing seen through binoculars. You can see craters. Shadows. Rings of light. I stayed out a few minutes more and looked at stars and listened to crickets. One of my favorite Summer-Things-To-Do is watching stars and listening to crickets. Simultaneously. I do it every summer. I look forward to it, from June until November. It absolutely blows me away! The extremes of it! Like lounging in a steaming hot tub of water while it is snowing, and drinking an ice-cold glass of Coke. The purity of opposites!

How can I say it? It's looking and knowing that the stars are out there exploding immense fires and gasses thousands of light-years away--and thousands of years ago, their light just now making it to my eyes. And the crickets chirping in the grass. The immense and distant, and the tiny and near, in the same breath. Their reality.

The hotter the night, the faster the crickets chirp. As the weather cools, their chirping gets slower and slower. And finally, it stops, and they are gone. They say you can figure out the temperature by counting the number of a crickets chirps per minute. My brother, with his near-perfect pitch, can tell you, "That one is chirping in A-flat, and that one in C-sharp!"

There's something kind of sad about purposely crashing something into the Moon, leaving a mess there that we won't be back to clean up for another hundred years. Or
so.

Friday Fractal

Back to the Source


Credit: Fronds d'ecran, bergoiata.org