Happy birthday, Sissypoo!

God, this photo brings back memories. Isn't she cute with her dandelion?

"The Last Time"

Cooler weather. The lawns flecked with sweet violets flicking side-to-side in the breeze. Too cool in the shade to be without a jacket, though I almost never wear a jacket and tend to walk in the shade whenever possible. Less glare.

Hedges of lilacs in bloom, that cloying sweetness, funereal, permeating the entire town. My dad says the smell attracts ticks. I've never looked this up. Not wanting him to be wrong about anything. Meaning: he speaks rarely. Meaning: I miss his voice, its certainty.

The pepper seeds sprouted today: first, the elbows. Tiny latch hooks arching from the soil. Next, the hands. I've filled every possible shelf in the laundry room with seed flats and jars of cuttings.

I walked past the poetry center today, first time in a long while, because I wanted to see the Virginia bluebells in flower--a mass of them among the pachysandra, the blossoms in gradations of pink and violet-blue. As I passed by, my keychain came apart and bing! bing! bounced in pieces along the flagstones. That's never happened before. It's brass, sort of horseshoe-shaped, with a threaded rod in the center that had come undone. I found both pieces.

** ** **

Here's a poem by Amy Meckler, from her book What All the Sleeping Is For, which I'm really enjoying:

THE LAST TIME

He was there, a man from the waist up hovering even after I woke up
and looked back. Light enough to distinguish gray from black, I knew

he was a ghost of someone who loved me. I felt Jason, but is Jason dead?
Cancer still breeding in his bones when I left him, but he looked healthy, still tone

in half his height, a figment I knew I hadn't invented by wishing. He seemed
to be marrying me, his half body like a groom's watching a procession, but

his face was a father's angry at his daughter caught in some forbidden room.
I froze, stared back, said Ok, Ok, meaning You can disappear now, and he did

then the phone rang to prove I was not dreaming. Lime rose
from a glass left out overnight, brought to mind the summer I drove to see him,

waited by his apartment door. I looked up from my book to check my watch and
he was standing outside the glass, looking at me in my summer dress, sunned hair.

The last time I saw him whole. He asked me, and I said no.

Random--

I'm still grading compositions, having divvied them up into manageable batches. Drove up to the office today to put in a few hours. Grades are due online by Monday. Then: gardening! Reading! Time with Randy!
** ** **

On the back of a transfer truck, the following sign caught my attention:

USE DUMMY GLADHANDS
WHEN AIR LINE IS DISCONNECTED.
** ** **

Mom pieced a quilt for my brother and asked us to quilt it. It's coming along well: I'm trying to put in at least an hour each night. Hoping to have it finished before his birthday in June. Meanwhile, I have three or four designs in my head that I want to tinker around with: another reward for finishing up the semester.
** ** **

Ran across several old issues of Evergreen Chronicles today. It wasn't a bad journal; I was sorry to see it fold. Surprised to find that I still have half a dozen issues.
** ** **

In just a matter of days, the garden has erupted into new growth. The wood violets are starting to bloom all along the walkway; it's amazing how quickly they pop open (the lily-of-the-valley hasn't even bloomed yet). The crabapple tree is loaded with pink buds, small and tightly closed. The hostas have poked up, thin green leaves curled tight, not yet unrolled. The ferns are unspringing so quickly, I could almost plop down to watch.

"Street Dance, 1959"

STREET DANCE, 1959

A girl is receiving a tiara
on the bandstand in the middle of town,
that summer night. She leans her head
forward, politely smiles.
The points jab the skin behind her ears.
Seven girls in white dresses turn
in the hot August night. They have pink baby
roses in their hands. She has a whole paper bouquet,
a tiara of glass rubies, shiny black slippers.

I am eight years old.
My parents dance together
on the other side of the knotted rope.
“Have fun,” my mother says, leaning over,
stroking my face with her fingertips.
“Don’t wander off.” My brother
pulls on my hand to dance. The children dance

like children, alone or by twos and threes,
scuffing the dust, stomping
around and around the barricade.
The girl on the bandstand smiles
for the Tribune photographer
and the lights her father aims upward.
Seven white girls in starched dresses
revolve around her stillness. A man
in a black suit speaks the names
into a black microphone; the syllables
rebound, distorting in the air, dispersed
in silent alleyways behind the buildings.

My brother comes and stands near me,
shy and insistent. We hold hands and stare upward.
Over the hot pavement, music scratches,
aimed from big steel speakers above our heads.
I can’t tell what they are singing; we
can’t make it out, though we push our heads out,
poking up our chins to listen, and are held there.

Now the streets are empty.
They glare sheer black in orbits surrounding
the lighted square. It spins and spins;
faster, one step, and I am lost.
I have wandered off, and in the secret of time
this happiness lies safe, still untouched,
and in it we remain
those children. The pale lights, the press
of bodies in a crowd, the night-sultry air,
reach me, beyond coercion, in the sweetness
of absolute privilege. I look up
at girls like flowers, carnations
with twiggy stems and poufy skirts, all turning
around the one who stands there still.

To see her is to enter the future
obliquely, to be taller, smooth and glowing,
to know the quietness of standing on a stage with
flowers. The speaker’s rasp, the gesturing
black-coated man pushing her forward carefully,
mastering, steering narrow shoulders, the lights
above the wooden stage, all these push back
time, pressing this into focus, clean and hard.

My brother stands happy beside me,
singing to himself. He is five. The sweetness
is being pressed out of him by steady
care and correction; his sweet joy
is being broken so he may harden,
and set into a shape. He is all green and open
with no secret place to hide his hope,
his baby joy; it shows all over him
and is being wrung and rubbed
like a stain gotten out. He will not wander
but stand there under the lights not seeing
what shimmers all around him.
He will stand under the lights, ready to clap
his hands and be pleased, to dance around
in a circle, not knowing he shines
like a military objective in the night.

: Cynthia Huntington, We Have Gone to the Beach (1996)

Passing

This afternoon I received news that Eric Van Cleve, one of our June Poets from 2003, died last week at home in Ohio. Eric took his B.A. at Ohio State and would have completed his M.F.A. at Washington University next month. I remember him well, but am sorry to say that I had not kept in touch. I do know that several of "our Junies" ended up in the program at Washington (and several others at UT-Austin), and it sounds like Eric had many friends in his grad program.

His obituary can be found here.

Below are the only two poems of Eric's that I could put my hands on. These are the poems he selected for inclusion in the 2003 program anthology:

POEM

The man who sells mirrors is in denial.

With every purchase,

he loses a twin

but cannot bring himself

to take a chair

away from the table.

When he has finished eating,

he stares into his plate

and watches the one

who will never leave,

the one holding a fork

scratching his clean, white cheek.

** **

It depends.

It depends on the wind

for the man who sells perfume

on a street corner,

beside a hotdog vendor.

Which way does it blow?

Do the hotdogs smell

like prostitution?

Does a cloud of mustard or relish

spread around his tiny glass bottles?

Only the birds

are more confused.

A hungry pigeon,

a poor man, close enough

to peck the other's eyes out.

*** ***

RECYCLING

There will come a point in history,

because everyone agrees

that history seems to be a line,

when, for wood, we will chop down

the last of the telephone poles

and pry apart our log cabins.

There will be no more room

for cemeteries, the dead dug up

to accommodate new bodies, the old bodies

kept in school, being that students

will no longer be with us.

On the way to the bathroom, one night

a man will peek through his curtains

and see a ghost:

a tree, a headstone or child.

Just watch it.

Earl Pickens, our next-door neighbor, is at it again. I can't get this tune out of my head.

April days

R & I worked a bit in the garden this morning, carefully raking leaves and litter (fallen twigs and such, not trash) from one end of the semishaded garden. The moonbeam coreopsis has sent up purply-red shoots, an inch or more high already, and it's managed to spread quite beyond the rock edging. Next weekend, I'll try digging up the runaways and planting a clump or two beneath the butterfly bush.

Speaking of the butterfly bush, I'm happy to see new growth at the top. Now all I need to do is prune it lightly (instead of to the ground, as before) and we should get quite a tall specimen this year. The flowers are butter-yellow, and the plant is ganglier than our smaller purple and pale lavender ones, but the butterflies, bees and hummingbirds flock to it all summer and well into fall.

The sweet woodruff has spread wonderfully, practically doubling the area it covered last summer. I planted one small clump, grown in a 6-inch pot, beneath the dwarf pine three years ago. The first year, it languished. Last year, it had established nicely and covered a few square feet. Now, it's definitely on the move. I hope it extends all the way to the fence; nothing else will grow under the evergreens and giant euonymus hedge.
* * *
R gave me a haircut a little while ago. I truly needed it; I'd developed a full-blown crop of "academic hair" (think Einstein's hair). Don't know why I let it go so long--a fresh, close-cropped haircut always feels so good.
* * *
All right, I must get back to my grading, or I'll end up out in the garden again (soon, soon).

"Amen"

I first read Norman Dubie's Groom Falconer in 1992, three years after its publication (though I was reading then at a voracious rate, I'd not yet found Dubie's poems; it was Susan Prospere, I think, who recommended that I seek him out). In these recent days of various uncertainties, I find myself craving poems that ring with striking clarity, a resonant sense of place, and the sudden shock of slippage--the leap of the mind into a striking and seemingly-unbidden image--that makes this book such a welcome place for my own mind to return to. Here, for example, is the final poem in the book. Tell me if that last line doesn't prickle the hair on the back of your neck! And yet its sudden, jolting arrival feels completely organic to the space created by the poem. Dubie is a marvel. I'll never read enough of his work.

AMEN

[for Patrick & Robert]

Someone calls Duchess, our fawn Great Dane, back
Across the dusty road: she’s nearly to the lawn
When the Buick hits her, she rolls
And then gaining her legs
Runs into the field of goldenrod where my father
Finds her; when he presses
The large folded handkerchief against the wound, it vanishes
Along with his forearm. She was months dying.

One night returning from my aunt’s house, we stopped
At a light and watched a procession of cars
Coming down out of the first snow, down
Out of the mountains, returning to Connecticut. Everywhere
Roped to the hoods and bumpers were dead deer.
The man behind us honked
His horn. My father waved him on. He hit
The horn again. My father got out and spoke
With him in a voice that was frightening
Even for a man with a horn. We left the door open
And the four of us sat there in the dome light
In silence. Wanting to be fair,
I thought of squatting cavemen, sparks flying
From flints into dry yellow lichen and white smoke
Rising from Ethel Rosenberg’s hair.

"Things to Be Afraid Of"

Poems retrieved: Thanks to the patient advice of Randy, Sebastian and Eric (the latter one of my former students), I was able to retrieve my files from the laptop, where they were indeed backed up (and hidden) just before the flash drive strangled itself. Phew. What a scare: such a visceral loss of identity--I realize now the degree to which I believe I am what I do.
* * *

I owe Eduardo a phone call.
* * *

Here's a poem by Patrick Lawler, from his wonderful 1990 book A Drowning Man Is Never Tall Enough:

THINGS TO BE AFRAID OF

Light. The cities’ aortas of light.
Things to be afraid of: nowhere
And platitudes. White places.
And places to dance. Apocalyptic
Ceremonies when we find the language
For them. Nothing. To be afraid. There is
Silence and words. The breaking leaves.
The effortless. Schools of white
Butterflies, like schooners, like bits
Of torn paper. There is nothing. Our names.
Pictures of a beautiful woman
Touching the eyes of a yellow ding
Man. Things to be afraid of.
Plagiary. The planes of air. Anything
Permanent. The breakable. Winter,
Charts, spare rooms, matches, songs
Nailed to the chest. Anecdotes.
Manganese and mythology. Extra
Innings. Enumerations. Always
Nothing which is nothing to be afraid of.

Reeling

The sick, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach is the dawning realization that I've experienced a massive loss of data this evening on my computer: my 4G flash drive has somehow malfunctioned and I can't retrieve anything from it. Among the missing: all my 7KP data, including the PDF files of Harry's book; tons of journals and correspondence; nearly all my poems--many of which might be retrieved, in part, from my pocket journals, but I had a whole folder of drafts, and both manuscripts--oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap.

Head in hands--

Thank you, Sir, may I have another?

Another year, that is. Met with the Provost this week and the signs are pointing toward an extra year at Lyco. May have to wait a couple more weeks for a solid decision. Send luck.
* * *

I'm off to Cincinnati for a long weekend to help celebrate my dear old mum's seventieth birthday. Send love.
* * *

With six weeks to go, we've already received a dozen manuscripts for the Robin Becker Chapbook Contest. Send yours.
* * *

I'll get back to blogging next week.

New mini quilt

Here's the new quilt: the pattern is "Crossed Canoes" and the quilt measures 13.5 inches square. I didn't piece this one (I wish my piecework were that good), but bought the pieced top from an eBay quilter. This is the first time I've quilted with a matching thread color (I generally use an off-white thread). Happily, I had a piece of matching fabric to make the binding.
Here's a close-up of the quilting:

"Body Parts"

This week's featured chapbook is Miss Molly Rockin' by the incomparable Maureen Seaton. This chapbook was published by Thorngate Road in 1998--the same press that runs the Frank O'Hara Chapbook Series. In the early years of that series, Jim Elledge also published the Berdache Series, of which this is the fifth title.

Maureen's work should need no introduction. When my own first chapbook was selected for the O'Hara Prize in 1998, I was extraordinarily touched to learn that Maureen had been the judge. I'd already read her books Fear of Subways and The Sea Among the Cupboards, but had somehow missed Furious Cooking. For years, her work has surprised and delighted me. It was a delight to finally meet her at AWP in Chicago in 2004, and to see Venus Examines Her Breast win at the Publishing Triangle Awards in 2005. Maureen Seaton and Jim Elledge launched my poetry career--if I can even call it a career--and I will always be grateful to them both for that.

Here's a poem from Miss Molly Rockin':

BODY PARTS

I’d never held the ashes of a dead man but I’d always wanted to

know a famous artist, so I reached out my left hand and she

spilled him into my palm. He was flame-white, his flesh dust,

he was tiny bones you could play with—they could be doll parts—

peaceful in my hand like light. I kept my hand open in case he

needed air and I knew it was not the essence of him but

nevertheless I whispered: Don’t worry, you’re safe with me. I

whispered: I love your paintings. This happened on the Upper

West Side in ’89 as the light changed over the Hudson, and that

light was in the apartment sliding on floor and walls as we

passed a dead man’s bones between us, weeping.

Once I spent a summer in Manhattan with a woman whose

desires were so unlike mine the air in the kitchen was sweetly

skewed. She told me: Pleasure, and I bent at the refrigerator

choosing the precise onion. I told her: Juice, and she stood at the

stove removing lemon seeds from basmati. We were perfect as

thumbs, we were starved and greedy as shorebirds, dipping

down, grabbing our food, devouring it.

Now I’ve begun to write “NO!” on my body parts, small cross-

stitched reminders to throw me back and hook another. Tattoo

on my right breast, sticker on my colon, scribble of bright blue

between my ovaries, hollowed now of eggs but still handy to

balance me out. The day I decide to go I’ll erase the words from

my body then disintegrate quickly like any dying fool, you’ll see

me rising from the shore—equal time lateral time—don’t hurry

into anything but love.

The man who lives in 4D sleeps above me every night in the

same rectangle of space, one floor up, beside the door, our

double beds appearing to the gods like open face sandwiches

with two chubby figures shifting and rolling in dreams or

trooping to the bathroom. Sometimes I watch Tai Chi on cable

at 6 AM because the man upstairs has jumped so hard from his

bed, and sometimes I sleep right through till 9 or 10, his footfalls

barely piercing dawn.

Spring, sprang, sprung

Our campus takes an easter holiday: no classes tomorrow. I'm grateful; I need time to catch up with my grading.
* * *
I saw one blossom on a perennial vinca growing against the sunny corner of an old home on my walk home from the bank. That and a few lavender crocuses, tightly shut and quaking in the cold breeze.
* * *
Randy's almost finished with a large quilt that he started this winter. I've helped a tiny bit on it; I need to make the binding this weekend so we can try to finish it before I go out of town next weekend.
* * *
Meanwhile, today I was happy to find a batik fabric in the cupboard that matches the mini quilt I'm just finishing for one of the women at the bank. I cut three inch-wide strips from the batik and sewed them together into one long piece; tonight after dinner I'll press it in half (and then again) to make a narrow binding for the new quilt. It's turned out well. I hope she likes it. Will post a photo as soon as it's done.
* * *
Got a friend's manuscript by e-mail yesterday. I'm looking forward to giving it a close read.
* * *
The Robin Becker Chapbook manuscripts have been steadily trickling in. Please do spread the word: the deadline is May 15th.
* * *
Ostara blessings to all y'all--

CFS: White Crane/James White Poetry Prize

I just saw this on Jameson Currier's blog. Mark Doty will judge this year's entries.

The White Crane/James White Poetry Prize is given biennially for a book-length poetry collection. The prize consists of a monetary prize of $1,000, publication of the winning manuscript by White Crane Books, and 5 author copies.

~Submit 48 to 80 pages of original poetry with a $25 entry fee by October 30.
~All submissions must be in English.
~All submissions must be the work of the applicant.
~Applicants must be Gay-identified males.
~The winner’s book will be published by White Crane Books.

Please include a cover letter with a short biographical statement and contact information. This contest will be judged blind, so we insist that manuscripts to be judged NOT include your name or any identifying information.

Submissions not following exact guidelines will be rejected. Manuscripts will not be returned. For notification of receipt, please include a self-addressed stamped postcard with the submission.

Entry fees should be in the form of check or money order made out to James White Poetry Prize. Submissions must be postmarked no later than October 30, 2008 and should be mailed to:

James White Poetry Prize
172 Fifth Avenue, Suite 69
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Winter boarder (3)

When I decided to grow impatiens from seed last winter (a year ago), I picked a variety that was supposed to be deep, dark red. The seedlings came up fine, and after a couple of months they were ready to set out in the shaded area beside the house. When they finally bloomed, I was chagrined to find that they were a bright, fiery neon red, not the more medium tone described (and pictured) on the packet. (So it goes with such advertising, as most of you gardeners know.)

This past fall, despite my lack of love for their neon hue, I couldn't let the frost get to all the impatiens. I brought one inside to grow under lights in the attic (and if it hadn't been for Randy, I'd have forgotten about it) (thanks, hon). Here's the lone survivor, still screaming vermilion, but face it: any color is welcome during this long muddy pre-spring tease. This year, instead of seeds, I'll take cuttings from this "mother plant" to start another row for the shade garden. They do brighten up the alley beside the house . . . I just may try another batch from seed. Maybe white. How could they lie about white?
* * *

It was warm enough yesterday to scrabble around in the kitchen garden just outside the back door. I cut down the old stalks of perilla (the original plants were a gift a few years ago from Glynis, and she was right--it comes back doggedly from seed every year, in both our garden and our neighbors'), the dead geraniums, the frozen mint (new green shoots coming up already from that one). A small clump of columbines that reseeded last year are looking quite green and robust. I ought to dig them up and thin them out, but I didn't get that done. Oh, and I think the tarragon is coming back: very happy about that.
* * *

We have new neighbors in the small add-on apartment in the back. Alas, they're smokers: it literally comes through the walls. My eyes are burning. And the smell, yuck. I hate that it gets into our quilts. We have a sizeable air filter upstairs but need a second one for downstairs now. Can't wait till it's warm enough to keep the windows open . . .

"The New Americans" & "Days of Forgetting"

Besides Mary Ruefle and Larry Levis, Jon Davis is a poet I must reread periodically. Scrimmage of Appetite is a book I have trouble getting my head around, but I'm convinced that it's the real thing.

Here are two poems:

THE NEW AMERICANS

They are rising from the duckweed shoals on slippery haunches,
front feet changed into grasping hands, thumbs and
forearms thickened for commerce, mouths too bony for
kissing.
They will breathe through their skins.
Their eyes will be keened for motion.
They will be maculate, stricken with appetite.
They will lunge with purpose, long tongues speaking the
language of capture, shouting the single verb of longing
in the dialect of hunger.
They will grunt and snore nightly in the tall grass.
While gods, made in their image, bellow beside the river of
heaven, they will jockey in the weedbanks.
They will turn, nothing human in their eyes, just the hard
measure—the precision, the unswerving focus.
They will be mystics wired to the gods’ wishes.
They will leap before they know they are leaping.

***

DAYS OF FORGETTING

These are the days of forgetting, of sensation and synapse.

When, in the cartoon, the video creatures leaped from the
screen and began wandering through the rooms of
the house, the artist, the writer, the machinery of the
discursive formation stumbled onto a truth.

Instructions: Shake it and it begins snowing.

“Wherever you find yourself,” someone, perhaps in the
mid-sixties, once said, “there you are.”

The world is “whatever is the case.”

Whatever is the case, where “whatever” is a loping crane,
where “the case” is a construction worker’s
inappropriate, but, to some, flattering scrutiny.

Staple your heart to a paper flower and fold once.

Hit the space bar until the corn begins rustling in the breeze.

When the tourists discovered, at Chaco Canyon, that they
had stepped over a rattlesnake on the trail up, they
returned to taunt it with a stick and a camcorder.

The tiny man, bare to the waist, kept kicking and flipping
even when his handlers left the room.

“That’s how I want to be,” said one of the boys, making
himself stiff as a machine, spinning and kicking at the
family dog.

Double Ruefle: "Cabbages" & "Trust Me"

When I am not writing, I read Mary Ruefle. I can think of no other poet who so dislodges me from my usual relationship with language and the world. She's simply incandescent, a genius:

CABBAGES

The blues and greens, the reds,
the purples, the blanched pearls.
The smocked farmer delivers two heads
at the same time, pulling them up
like a pair of balanced pails.
The children wail. The quartered brainchild
lies upon their plates. Cut, they are swirly-
full of fancy French end papers and strange
lacunas. A bumper crop is in the air:
China stinks of cabbage soaked in brine,
wet and rotten. They feed a billion
on the cannonballs. They pile them in
the streets, they build a wall, they
roll heads until the feathers shed. In
Ireland there’s a lidded pot and they’re
blindfolded. Their mouths are stuffed in
Poland. They’re doll-sized in Flanders,
to be discreet. Such a loss
of mind! It’s fodder for the imagination.
While we live & shout & die, they are
capable of escaping the least of attention
and so survive: thrown into a river
they float, crowding helplessly towards
an alien sea.



TRUST ME

What can be discussed in words
I beg to state in brief.
A man has only one death:
it may be as light as goose down
or as heavy as a fatted hog.
Gingerly, the flowers open
and are crushed in the vat.
What’s in your perfume?
The hills of Africa are in it,
and the cormorants with their mouths full of fish,
a bed of carnations, a swannery in Switzerland,
the citrine sun baking Nappa
and a rhino whining at the moon.
An after-dinner argument is in it
and the ever-stronger doses of clap-trap
we are forced to take while still alive.
A whole aeroplane, wings and all,
and the lush spaghetti siphoned into lips
poised for a kiss.
Finish it, finish it.

: Mary Ruefle, Apparition Hill

"Horologue"

Horologue

The clock inside the mantid egg under the drifted snow,
the sap clock in the February tree,
von Karajan’s internal metronome
with different signatures exact in either hand,
terns, orcas, caribou in shrunken herds,

state ministers who synch their talks
into the general’s scheme, stock brokers
taking note, and families at the border with no plan,
the unhoused axle of the planet wobbling
one half turn among the stars in thirteen thousand years,

hatched leatherbacks not making for the heavens
into the surf but pulling onto the highway
with front flippers bloody toward new lights in town, clock
stopped on the mantel, pockmarks of storm systems on the sun,
ticking from inside a flame-rapt log

: Brooks Haxton, The Sun at Night (1995)

More honking geese

Look up. They're everywhere: long, trailing pennants of geese.
We hear them before we see them.
Like a Muybridge series!