High ratchet: the sound of cicadas in our back yard. Once, in my first creative writing class at Houston, I wrote a (bad) poem that included
oily blue-black grackles and cicadas, their
ratcheting parabola. A couple of years ago, I read a poem somewhere that also used
parabola to describe that sound, and I thought
yes!
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7KP news: we got our ISBNs from Bowker today! Weeeeehaw!
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Thanks to Brent for the chap exchange. Great poems, buddy. This has rekindled an old idea in my head. . . more details soon. . .
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Kudos to Zachary Harris, whose three poems appear in the new
West Branch. I just got a copy today. I heard him read both "Old World Monkey" and "New World Monkey" last summer--good poems! Curiously, the
WB web site lists him as "Zachary Harris Willett."
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Our tomato tower toppled last week in a rainstorm. New neighbor propped it gently against a patio chair. When I noticed the felled greenery, I went out in the rain. Neighbor joined me. We agreed that the chair was the best option for the moment. Many green marble-sized tomatoes were scattered across the patio; we picked them up and set them on the table. . . Later that afternoon, I drove a stake into the ground (doo-dah, doo-dah) and tied down one corner of the tottering tomato tower's cagey infrastructure. It stayed upright and has continued to deliver tasty tiny tomatoes, one or two per day. Today: more rain, but just before it arrived, we screwed giant cup hooks into the patio beams and tied down two more cage corners, hopefully securing our vegetal fountain.
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How does one discourage
chipmunks from nibbling the garden greenery? They've been devouring the tops of our pepper plants all summer.
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Finally, does anyone out there have any (published or unpublished) poems by the late Randy Brieger? I knew him back in our Houston days, and I know he was circulating a manuscript before his untimely death. . . I contacted Angela Ball, his undergrad mentor, a few years back but we couldn't come up with an address. (For his family, I mean. I am hoping that someone out there can put me in touch with Randy's family.)
I stayed home again today, opting not to face the sleet we were told would arrive by lunchtime. It arrived later, preceded by a few minutes of fitful snow, hard pellets leaking down like sawdust from a wood-boring bee, and now I'm not sure which category precipitates against the window. I hear a faint ticking. It's 28 degrees. I set up the laptop on the dining table (no flat surface remains empty for long around here) and have toggled between projects all afternoon: work, then browse, then work, then look at collage art online, then think about book covers (for an upcoming 7KP title), then back to lesson plans. Tunneling into the last few quiet days before the new semester erupts into activity.
