Night thoughts

Last night, R and I were out back, watching the sky for shooting stars. I don't see all that well at night, partly because my eyes are tired and partly from these bothersome bifocals, but I did see one quick lightscratch streak northward. We saw a tiny dot moving really fast, really high, that we thought might be a satellite. Then we both saw something odd, crescent-shaped with no running lights, flying about the height of a large incoming passenger plane. Its underside was faintly illuminated the slightest amber, as if picking up the reflected light of the town. It moved very fast, in a straight line, and was quickly gone.

* * *

Friday is the postmark deadline for the Keystone Chapbook contest. Manuscripts have come in steadily, online and by mail. I'm hoping for one more small bundle because I had a goal number in mind and we're very close to it. Things will be fine if we don't hit this number, but for some reason the thought of actually making the mark (or exceeding it) has me buzzing. Just a little. Okay, a lot.

* * *

I meet with my new Foundlings* on Saturday. Tweaking their syllabus tomorrow.

* * *

Here's a poem by Gayle Elen Harvey, from her 1992 chapbook, Flower-of-Turning-Away:

Absence

like the songs
of endangered birds. The stars
tonight are fuming
in darkness, caught in the throat
of the sky.
Someone’s filling room after room
with white roses, tells me
he’s sorry.
Love makes its own statement, a network
of warnings.

*- collective noun referring to first-year Foundation Seminar students, coined by a BU faculty member.

[photo: Night Alley, 1/12/07]

Perspective

The headache has cleared--imagine burly movers dragging loaded file cabinets across screeching wooden floors, and the wounded silence after in which thought itself is afraid to twitch--and I'm trying to drop back into the workflow. I slept a lot over the past couple of days (was it two? or three?). Walking home in a minute, but first, here's a poem by Pamela Stewart, from her 1997 book The Red Window:

Who Tells You How to Live

To journey like an ant from that crushed garter snake
in the road to intricate tunnels of saliva and grit—

would that please you? Keeping to the pattern of travel
with a precise burden of food on your back—is that enough?

Early morning in this forest is a racket of birds
and squirrels. Swamp rabbits chew the damp grasses.

Those kittens someone dumped from a car smash wildly
in the underbrush. Soon it will be too hot to feed.

One or two airplanes cross—invisible
cosmic insects below a blue swim of galaxies.

Isn’t it enough that the body keeps working its parts,
that words spill bright as birds above this seeded earth?

Who tells you how to live in this blessing of dust?
See, the ants come and go. They look like they are singing.

Headache

No adjectives available.

The long view

I was photographing a teddy bear this afternoon, when it hit me: I am no longer a teddy-bearish kind of guy. Even when I was into them, I was a bit of a snob about it. None of those Hallmark mass-produced cookie-cutter bears for me. I liked interesting bears, unique bears. I still have two miniature bears (somewhere) that were made for me, and because they are so small (so small that I've no idea where they are?) I imagine I will hang onto them. The bear I was photographing (to sell) is one-of-a-kind, also hand made, also a gift (from around 15 years ago), but I look at it--him (what was his name? he had a name card) and mehh, I don't need this in my house.

Though I'm surrounded by books I'll never read again, there are hundreds I'm unwilling to let go. One of my goals as a young adult was to one day acquire/amass a decent reading library; since then I've focused on having a decent poetry library and--even though I've given hundreds of poetry books away (to the Stadler Center library and to the Gary Library at Vermont College), the books I've kept (many of them) feel like an extension of my adult identity: it's almost as if they emit a sub-frequency or collectively give off an energy of place.

I've always admired photographs of Pablo Neruda's house: every wall, every level surface covered with an endless array of objects--art, masks, bottles, shells, driftwood, stones--so encompassing was his love for the physical world, an attentiveness I share (though now I tend to photograph stones and leaves and insects, not take them home). I always thought I'd love to live in a house like that.

But now, suddenly: ehh, not so much.

[photo: birdnest fern, 8/5/07]

Hands

Last night I dreamed I was sitting at the table in my parents' kitchen, listening as my brother talked, haltingly but urgently (can't remember what about), gesturing with his hands. As his right hand made a wide sweep, I suddenly caught it, mid-flight, and held tightly to his index and middle finger. He stopped talking. Our hands slowly sank to the table: his right, my left. With his ring finger, he gently stroked my fist. I opened my hand. He slipped his fingers out and then laid his hand fully on mine. And we sat there together, holding hands.

Two notes on this dream:

1) My brother is left-handed; I'm right-handed. We do not touch with our dominant hands.

2) I can't remember ever touching him as an adult.

[photo: Radiator, 1/11/06]

Human kinks

One of my favorite books to browse, when I have a few moments, is a sweet old 1887 edition of Whitman's Specimen Days in America. Here's his February 1877 entry titled "One of the human kinks":

How is it that in all the serenity and lonesomeness of solitude, away off here amid the hush of the forest, alone, or as I have found in prairie wilds, or mountain stillness, one is never entirely without the instinct of looking around, (I never am, and others tell me the same of themselves, confidentially,) for someone to appear, or start up out of the earth, or from behind some tree or rock? Is it a lingering, inherited remains of man's primitive wariness, from the wild animal? or from his savage ancestry far back? It is not at all nervousness or fear. Seems as if something unknown were possibly lurking in those bushes, or solitary places. Nay, it is quite certain there is--some vital unseen presence.

[photo: pokeweed, 8/9/07]

What hump?

Yesterday, someone quoted a line (or three) from Young Frankenstein, reminding me of how much I love that zany movie. Need to see it again. Sheer delight.

* * *

They've torn down a footbridge on campus (presumably to replace it): today, on my walk home, I saw that the emptied area was wrapped with that screaming orange plastic mesh. (Does that stuff come in any other color? Can you make a hammock out of it?) The bridge had annoyingly recalcitrant planks (two-by-fours I think) that would would loose and buckle upward, causing many stumbles. In mid-June, from that bridge, I watched a snake (pictured above) slip noiselessly close to a medium-sized bullfrog, then suddenly lunge at it: Very Animal Planet, with wild thrashing in the shallow creek water. Froggy escaped. I've seen the snake a few times since, and photographed it last week sunning on the rocks.

Oh, and I started two poems on that bridge: one in 1994, during my June Seminar, as I watched the muddy roiling runoff from a thunderstorm and remembered going on a bus to watch a baptism; the second over ten years later as I bent down to pick a fallen catalpa blossom off one of the planks.

* * *

It's hot. I'm not complaining. But I'm especially savoring the Jello pops I make in my freezer. Yummy!

* * *

This morning my brother's dog was mangled to death by an unknown creature. He lives on my grandmother's farmhouse in Loveland. Mom phoned tonight to tell me about it, and to say that her latest test results were okay.

When our phone rang at about 4:30 this morning--a wrong number--I was suddenly immobilized by dread about my parents; I don't know when I slipped into Dread Mode with regard to late-night calls, but it took me a good hour to fall asleep again.

* * *

While browsing this evening through Juliana Gray Vice's chapbook, History in Bones, one particular poem drew my attention--probably because of the confluence of two of my abiding interests, housesitting/inhabiting another's space and the Wiccan/pagan calendar (to state it briefly). This is part two of her long poem "Bird, Smoke, Crystal, Bone":

This book I’ve pulled from a stranger’s shelf,
an old, no doubt expensive leather-bound
on witchcraft, fails to mention New Year’s Eve,
which seems an oversight. It’s understood—
if only in the dour modern sense—
that this night is something magical.
Anticipation charges the air, the news,
and even the owners of this house have flown
to someplace elsewhere, better, to celebrate
in style. Their dog and I have gone through our
routines—just one more icy walk before
we call it a night. And in the meantime, this:
a few portentous hours to fill, to kill,
with pages falling open on their own,
the weight of print and plates and fissured spine
selecting for me passages to read,
a scattered history in bones and ash.

[photo: unidentified hisser, July 31]

Ant lions and sperm

I have been dreaming about ant lions. I don't think I've ever seen one, but I've wondered about them a lot.

* * *

Here's a poem by Ann Townsend, from her chapbook The Braille Woods, published in 1997 when the Stanley Hanks Poetry Center still did their amazing chapbook series:

Night Watch in the Laboratory

The whipping fishtails beneath the microscope
were what you called me to see. A little package

of protein, you said, to describe the pure energy
unscrolling across the slide. One smear holds

a thousand beginning s spending themselves--
but see, you said, the ones who might always fail,

the double-headed, the lax, the crooked tails,
the inelastic ones, swimming in circles, their inner

compass gone wrong. They're like the goldfish
I bought once with the missing fin that swam

sideways, then not at all. But wait, you said.
Watch them all slow down. My eye pressed

to the rubbery gasket, the history of a generation
passed, like the dull ache I get in airports

of distant cities: so many bodies flinging themselves
onto the escalators and motorized walkways,

so many downing a last drink before the jetway,
the precarious wings lifting skyward.

In all their faces, a public blankness lets each
hustle through a crowd. Your sperm swam

and slowed, and, as the moments ticked by
on your watch, as you held me lightly,

I saw them grow less hungry, less helpless, turn to chalk.
And I lost my breath to watch your little death

as your fingers tightened around me,
and remembered the alkaline taste

on my tongue, sour, metallic, alive,
full of the fishy taste of you.


[photo: foggy quad, 9/18/06]

The page turns itself

Seems that way. Nothing I'm really doing, except adding years like tree rings: always me to the core, never really feeling as old as I (suddenly) am. Goodbye, 46. Hope to see you on the flip side.
* * *

Last night I finished quilting the border of Claudia's quilt. In the box that Mom sent this week was a very dark brown print, with tiny rust-red and mustard flecks, that picked up two of the main tones in the quilt. Just to be safe, I tried three different fabrics against the border; R agreed that the first one was exactly right. I cut two long strips, 1.5 inches wide, hand-stitched them together on a 45-degree angle, pressed the whole long strip in half on the ironing board, then pressed each half toward the middle. Very hot work on a hot August evening. Wrapped the whole thing tightly around an old Shaker herb tin and clipped it in place. Making quilt binding is not hard but it does need to be precise.

Tonight I trimmed the quilt square ("blocked" it, trimming the sides so they are completely even and square) and stitched on half the binding. I hope to have it done by Sunday afternoon so I can wash it and hang it up to dry between two bath towels out on the line. I promised Mom I'd mail it to her so she could see it first. Then I'll send it on to Claudia, and then I'll post photos. She knows I'm making it but I want the actual quilt (its appearance) to be a surprise.

* * *
While packing (and unpacking) books, I ran across my copy of Edison Dupree's Prosthesis, winner of the 1994 Bluestem Prize. I think I remember buying this book. To my embarrassment, I've never read it. In my defense, it's a slender volume, only 56 pages, quite nicely designed but ghost-pale and easy to lose among the hundreds stacked double-deep on my shelves. (On the publisher's website linked above, the book has a black cover--which is nice--and the same title design, so maybe it's in a second printing; I do hope so.) Here's the first poem I, in good fortune, opened to this afternoon:

Song of the Man Who Has Hit Bottom

Nothing much happens here, inside
this broken hold. Strings of kelp
plait me a green mustache, so fish
don’t know me. They just prowl by,
like-minded in their schools,
working those vulgar gills, and I wonder:
where’s the recovery team?
Everything tight up there? Bad year?
These cycles will reduce us all
to bare bones soon.

But sometimes in my dreams I’ve seen
my savior, in his brilliant metal
helmet. Through the faceplate
I’ve seen him, sucking, like a lamb,
on the long hose that loves him.
His face is kind and dull among
those plump dioxide grapes he labors
musically to expel.
His glove touches the hull,
attaching a crumpled bladder.
He vanishes, jerked upward
like bait reconsidered.

Mind you I’m not complaining.
One simply learns to wait. One takes
this fringed pink anemone
to wife. Her name is Friday.
She’s going to do everything else.

[photo: Atlanta Night (taken from my hotel window at AWP this spring)]

Added note: I should have switched this photo with the Aug 1 one; they would have worked better that way around. Mehh, hindsight . . .

"With favorable auguries"

So reads one possible origin of august. It's always been a good month for me (I'm a Leo & my creative energies always seem to surge around this time).

* * *

I was locked out of my office today: my key felt heavy and sluggish in the lock yesterday, and I should have phoned someone then, but today it wouldn't work at all. I called the campus switchboard from my cell and was connected to campus security, who contacted the locksmith, who showed up within ten minutes. Meanwhile, I wandered around my new digs looking for a place to sit. My office is in the lower basement, [BS] on the elevator button (as opposed to [B]), and though there are stairs, I keep getting lost on them--none of the stairwells seem to connect directly to the floor (or half-floor) directly above (or below, depending on where you start). Yesterday, on the first floor, I noticed a new set of stairs, but they went up, not down.

Anyway, there are some deep-set windows along the outside hall, like big square window boxes, and I parked in one of them, dug around in my bag, and decided to take some photos of the shadows cast through the mini blinds. I'd only snapped a few when Mister Hunky Locksmith arrived. He had to remove a cylinder (tumbler?) from my the lock, but was back within 15 minutes with a replacement, and now my key works fine.

* * *

Meanwhile, R phoned to say that his wholecloth quilt has been accepted into the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza in Harrisburg! I'm so proud of him.

* * *

On Monday we received a package from Mom: lots of quilting fabric, some really neat old quilt blocks, and a nice 1940-era vintage quilt top. The neatest thing was a tiny coverlet (possibly a doll quilt) that dates back to around 1900 (probably earlier), pieced in great red and white prints. The quilting is minimal, and I don't think it has any batting. I'm tempted to re-quilt it, though I know (for the sake of authenticity) that I should leave it as is. Will take some photos soon.

* * *

There's no accessible printer in my building. I need to walk over to the library to print out a few more Keystone manuscripts . . .

[photo: blind shadows, 8/1/07]

Found one

I found a photo we took of my night-blooming cereus back in Houston in--yikes--1989. Should have dusted off the snapshot before I scanned it. Still purty, tho.

Going back for the plants

Well I've moved the books and papers, cleaned out all the file drawers (except for the pencils and staplers and stuff that was there when I moved in) (I have my own stapler, a beautiful sleek vintage model that I really ought to photograph, just to show you what a classic stapler can look like), recycled another armload of magazines, and it's down to one final box of take-home books and a few office plants. We'll swing by with the truck on Saturday to pick them up.

I'm trying to decide about Bob's chair: a big, blocky green armchair that swallows you so completely it practically belches. It was in Bob Taylor's office for years, a space I was glad to inherit for a while; when I gave it up last spring and moved to O'Leary, I had the green chair sent over. It looks like a great reading chair. I've never had time to relax in it. Maybe one final try: I'll see if it fits next to my file cabinet. I may have to swap it out for a proper bookcase. Though now that I consider this option, I realize I'd rather have a good, comfy chair than an extra bookcase: after all, I'm only going to use this office two days a week, and only for the fall semester. I should be bringing more books home, not stacking them in a cozy but temporary office.

* * * * *

Woke with a headache and the realization that R was right: I should have filled my new headache prescription so I'd have it on hand at the earliest onset of symptoms. Still, the medication (once I went over and got it) seems to be putting up a valiant battle (the war imagery is a total bleedover from reading HP7, and don't tell me, dammit, I've less than 80 pages to go!)

* * * * *

One of the plants I did bring home from my office a few weeks ago is a night-blooming cereus. It had grown topheavy in its plastic (faux terra cotta) pot and had taken to tipping over whenever the soil got a bit dry--this was, like, last year--so I plopped a nice fist-sized river stone (granite I think, nicely egg-shaped) in there to counterbalance the tippiness. The whole thing needed repotting. I put it out on the patio table for a couple weeks, figuring it needed light but not too much sun (patio umbrella), and this evening I repotted it into a heavy white glazed planter. Looks great. Hope it blooms; it's been years (back in Houston, in fact) since I've had one that bloomed (that plant died the next winter when I forgot to put it in the garage; the one I have now has grown from a tiny leaf cutting).

I should have taken a photo of this plant to show you what I'm talking about. Long, flat, straplike leaves; kind of a messy, haphhazard groing habit; absolutely stunning flowers when it finally decides to bloom: they start out as tiny buds and grow and grow until they are nearly the size of a fist, kind of shaggy looking. The flower opens at night (back in Houston, I would go out with a flashlight to watch) and you can literally watch the needlelike white petals tremble and part as it swells open. Next morning, it's spent, collapsed: a one-night-only affair.

* * * * *

R gave me a haircut. (Thanks, hon.) Reason #99 why I'm glad I married him. (Reason #98 was the incredible chicken bulgogi he cooked the other night.)

* * * * *

[photo: Worlds End Falls, July 2006--can't believe it's been a year]

New keys

Well the attic office remodel wasn't showing any signs of progress, so yesterday I received keys to a basement office in Taylor Hall, sorta halfway downstairs from the Bucknell Press offices. Nice space--big desk--filing cabinet--no windows and hmm, no bookcases. I'd been loading my books into copy paper boxes (having saved a few all semester); did you know (I didn't until yesterday) that five boxes full of poetry books will fit into three filing cabinet drawers?

We had an extra bookshelf at home, one of those nifty fold-down numbers, stored under the bed, so I took that in today. It will do until I can see about getting a proper bookcase.

Tomorrow: moving the last of my files and backing up the computer. I'll be using my laptop at the new office until the PC is relocated . . .
! ! !

I think those 5 are supposed to be spiders. I'm still reading HP7, late at night before falling asleep, which means I am staying up much too late to read in bed. I'm about 500 pages in. I'm terribly excited to see who dies next.
* * *

Just read a beautiful chapbook of prose poems, Give Up by Andrew Michael Roberts. Go to the Tarpulin Sky website and buy this book.
* * *

Three weeks left until the Keystone Chapbook competition closes. Submissions are coming in almost daily now. Thanks to everyone who's spreading the word.
* * *

Bedtime.

Oh, hindsight

[Several months ago, while R & I were browsing a flea market, I found a January 1945 copy of Reader's Digest and bought it for the following article. For all the times you might have wondered "What were they thinking?" with regard to kudzu (and other invasive species), well, here's what they were thinking.]

A Japanese ornamental vine is making exciting news in the South:

Kudzu- Another Agricultural Miracle

Condensed from Country Book Magazine

Russell Lord*

It was a hill farm in Alabama. If ever a farm were visibly dying, this one was. All of the topsoil had gone to the creeks and the sea. The field on which we stood was so gullied you had to keep jumping to get across it. The land was worn and bare, the sagging house was empty. But if you looked closely, here and there in the gullies you could see ropelike vines crawling, hugging the ground, beginning to net it down. It was the first planting of kudzu, the new cover crop, that I had ever seen.

"A man hanged himself in that house, and the bank took over the place. Now this field will heal soon and make fine pasture. It will be green next spring," my companion, R. Y. Bailey said. "Kudzu" Bailey, they called him. It was in December of 1936. Only a few shared Bailey's faith in this Japanese vine as a field crop, and not a few were afraid that it would be a more menacing pest than honeysuckle, spreading to take over the entire countryside.

Bailey and a few other believers replied that when a plant grows like honeysuckle yet feeds like clover or alfalfa, with approximately the same protein and carotene content, there was no point in being cautious. They showed that kudzu not only wove a mat of protective cover but worked as a legume to draw free nitrogen from the air and store it for plant use in the soil. So kudzu plantings kept marching on to heal slashed land and great gullies.

Last June I spent a week-end at the Georgia farm of Channing Cope, an influential kudzu grower. Cope says kudzu was brought in from Japan as an ornamental vine. He planted his first field of it in 1927, when he acquired 700 acres of run-down land near Covington, 30 miles from Atlanta. Yellow River Farm, it was called, for the river that drained it was yellow with topsoil.

Today the whole place stands out as a green oasis amid gray-brown cottoned-down country. "Cotton isn't king here any more," Channing Cope says happily. "Kudzu is king!" Livestock multiply in the meadows; the soil is held secure; the place is making money.

We stood that blazing hot Sunday at the edge of a marvelous vineland. The kudzu had made a riotous growth, hip deep, all over the hill.

"Reach down," said Channing. The ground was as damp and cool as that of a deeply shaded forest floor. "They took some temperatures over at the Experiment Station on a day like this," said Channing. "Bare ground was 140 degrees Fahrenheit at the surface. Under kudzu the ground temperature was only 89 degrees. That's something to consider. Many soil men here in the South wonder if the fierce heat on the tilled fields doesn't hurt the soil and hinder humidification.

"And just look at this kudzu duff!" He scooped up a handful. Those big, delicate leaves, shed from last year's crop, make a flaky mold that covers the ground completely and enters as organic matter to lighten topsoil fast. The cover on that field felt like a deep mattress under your feet.

Kudzu stands drought well. Some roots go 12 feet deep. Each crown puts out from one to four vines, and new crowns form in the joints and nodes. Five hundred crowns will plant an acre--about one crown to every 85 square feet. On rich soil the vines may grow 12 inches a day at the peak of the growing season, and 100 feet of growth in a year is not unknown. Even the first year's yield may be considerable, but it usually takes three years for the crop to take full possession of the acreage. Kudzu may be pastured or cut with a mower and taken as hay. "This 35 acres will make at least 3 1/2 tons of hay to the acre this year, drought or not," Cope told me.

I do not think that I ever saw a more erosible soil anywhere than on this farm. It washes like sugar. Even a cart track through new grassland will start a gully. But once Kudzu has taken hold thoroughly, the trouble ends. That solid mat holds the soil.

Hugh H. Bennett, Chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, said recently: "What, short of a miracle, can you call this plant? Kudzu has forced our Service to revise our appraisal of a lot of severely eroded land as having been ruined for further agricultural use. And it is not only a crop for gouged-out land; it is a splendid crop fro good land, too. It will cover a cornfield in one year; the next spring or early summer it can be plowed and that land planted to corn; then after the last cultivation of the corn it will again spread over the field, stop the erosion, store more nitrogen, and at the first hard frost lay down a carpet of rich leaf litter at least the equal of forest litter. All this in one year!"

Northern farmers are beginning to envy the South in having this marvel. Geneticists are now working to develop hardier strains that will push the kudzu belt northward. The general range of the crop is south of the Potomac River, although in my home county of Harford, Maryland, I have seen a growth as luxuriant as any.

In a part of the country farmed almost to death under the old crop-and-chop system, kudzu is lively, hopeful, exciting. "A strange ecstasy," Cope says, "lifts southern growers' hearts and exalts their language when they get together to praise kudzu." At a meeting of the Kudzu Club of America in Atlanta last spring one man told me how he raised eggs for three cents a dozen on kudzu hen pasture; others testified that corn yields had risen from fourfold to sevenfold on fields that had been in kudzu. One man told of his progress in dehydrating kudzu for stock feed and human use. It makes fine breakfast food, he said.

The Kudzu Club has set as its goal a million acres of kudzu in Georgia by 1950 and eight million acres for the South as a whole. "That wouldn't be a bit too much to support the livestock economy we need, and help make our agriculture permanent," Channing Cope says.

*RUSSELL LORD has written about farming for more than 20 years and is a consultant to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Even as a boy of 13, he found agriculture on a Maryland farm so exciting that he began to report farmers' doings for a country weekly. At Cornell University he specialized in agriculture, and later he became a contributing editor of The Country Home, Country Life and The Progressive Farmer. He edits The Land, published by Friends of the Land, a nonprofit society formed four years ago to combat the alarming waste of our natural resources, and is author of Behold Our Land, The Agrarian Revival, and To Hold This Soil.

Saying too much: private moments in public poems

I've been thinking about this subject since I first started writing the poems that eventually were published in Survivable World: how much narrative detail is too much? After the book came out--after, in fact, I'd read one poem in particular in DC--, I realized that I'd gone too far with one line.

The poem is about the trips that I made to and from the hospital in D's last days, with and without his family. The phrase "everyone strained, polite" pushes right at the edge (I think now) of what's publicly acceptable: these are his family; they were under terrible stress, and I was only able to see them through my own lens of grief.

Which is acceptable in such circumstances, but for the fact that I wrote it down, fully intending to use it. I published it, thinking I had written an honest narrative of the experience. The thing I said next, and how I strained against the boundaries of privacy and propriety in order to accomplish the telling, is what shames me still. I want to say that I didn't mean it ("after ten years you'd think we'd know whether we liked one another"), that of course I liked them ("But you're just like any other married couple!" his mother said to D in her kitchen on one of our early visits), but they unnerved me, too.

The Pod People, I called them, that Christmas holiday our Honda's transmission failed on the long drive home to Houston. We were trying to push the car in terrible snow, and a beat-up white truck full of ominously quiet men picked us up, took us to a gas station miles down the road, where we phoned D's parents. Oh, the men were fine; it was just D's prissiness at the dirty truck--or maybe that they'd caught on that we were queers--or some undefined sense of difference that I'll never figure out which caused them to grow silent as we bumped along, but I couldn't help feeling that D was betraying a sense of disdain. I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was a palpable shift in the cab of that truck (why did I blame D for it?) and I remember thinking They could kill us, shove us down an embankment, go back for the car (absolutely loaded with gifts and camera equipment). It was days later, when D hadn't yet phoned to have the Honda towed, that I lost my patience with our extended visit, with living among his too-polite, blandly nice family, and launched into that explosive argument. I wanted to go home: I needed space to write, to read. I didn't trust their goodness and felt it had to be a facade; worse, I was sure they secretly disapproved of me.

And so the poem contains a kind of lie, though even as I write this I am back in that awkward shuttling to the hospital, the oppressibly religious funeral which I permitted because I knew it would comfort his parents. And yet, when his father, back at the house, said what a nice service it had been, didn't F murmur I thought it was awful, and didn't I realize that she, too, was somehow an outsider?

* * * * *

I made a fiction of my love,

and fell in love with that.

HP7

Randy and I walked up to the local wee bookshop a few minutes before midnight; there were maybe 25 people already lined up to buy the new Harry Potter. I waited outside, watched folks arrive (several kids in costume) and depart, gleefully clutching their copies.

I just finished Chapter 5. Let us not speak of it.

Happy reading, everyone.

Tagged

Okay, I'll play. Nels tagged me for the eight things meme, and though I'm panicked about which eight people to send this on to (flashbacks of dodgeball team selection back in high school gym class) (oh wait, *I* get to pick?), I'll try just about anything once. Here goes--

THE RULES

(We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.)
-Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
-People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
-At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.)

THE FACTS

1) I used to collect porcelain wall pockets, though I've since gotten rid of all but three. One of the three I can't part with looks like a teapot-shaped clock. It's light blue, and the hands are set at 7:20.
1A) (significance of the fact:) My late partner, David, passed at exactly 7:20 PM, about six years after we bought this wall pocket.
2) I have never broken a bone, though I do have an interesting scar on my scalp, left by a deep gash caused by a childhood fall against a case of Pepsi bottles.
2A) (I'm not going to do this for each one, but...) My mother worked in a general store when I was a child (she also worked as a waitress). Soda, back in the day, came in tall 16-oz. bottles and was delivered by the hunky Pepsi Man in painted wooden crates . . . This particular scar is so deep that it still freaks me out when I touch it with my fingertip.
3) I once shot my brother in the back of the head with a bow and arrow. Accidentally.
4) I am one of six children, but I only speak to three of my siblings. I got fed up with the crazy shit the other two kept pulling, took my toys and stomped out of that sandbox for good.
5) I was voted Most Likely to Succeed by my high school class, but I have never had the nerve to go to a reunion and tell them that I'm not tenured.
6) I was taught to read and write by a family friend (the owner of the general store referenced in 2A) long before I ever started public school. Because of this, everyone treated me as if I were a super-bright kid, and I believed them, despite later evidence to the contrary. (I'm maybe medium-bright, but I have a terrible memory for details.)
7) I have had three body piercings, not counting the ones in my ears.
8) I have no interest in getting a PhD, but I would love to go back and get an MFA in Book Arts.

THE TAGGING

1) Randy
2) Amanda
3) Eduardo
4) Collin
5) Peter
6) Dustin
7) I really have to stop here. I feel like a telemarketer. I don't really even *know* some of these people (though I'd like to). Apologies for wrenching the system. . .

[photo: wall pocket]

I'm not a designer, but . . .

What do you think of this pattern? It's a piece of fabric that dates back to the mid-1870s. I want to use it in a cover design for a chapbook.

Koestenbaum

I'm packing books in earnest now, and stopped to re-read this poem, which I'd tagged with a Post-It note and read last year to my students. When Jason (Schneiderman) and Michael (Broder) had me out to read at the Ear Inn a couple years ago, I had the pleasure of reading with Wayne Koestenbaum. I thoroughly enjoy his work. This poem's a little quieter; of course in class we talk about the lovely haunting imagery as well as the formal structure:

The Ornate and Lovely Corner House

Oldsmobiles up and down the canals all night:
how they drive on water
is a mystery beautiful as it is absolute.
I ask the waiter

the origin of the automobile riding
by the fishmonger’s,
idling on the water’s surface, and he is surprised
to see me linger

over a question that to him is obvious.
When I finish my coffee
the night-prowling cars have vanished,
but from my balcony

tonight, in the ornate and lovely corner
house, with envy
I will watch the slow procession of the cars
that are too heavy

to float. And yet they float, a formation
not reflected
in tomorrow’s papers, my generation’s
tone, the tormented

air I am used to hearing in the daily speeches.
The sublime
visits me so rarely that when it approaches
there is no time

to regret my lack of preparation
for its luminous
arrival, its liquid organization.
This life is formless

and I do not understand most of it:
why no children
gather in my cool garden when the heat
grows violent.

- Wayne Koestenbaum, Ode to Anna Moffo

[photo: mini violet blooming on my desk]

Thinking of a friend

Thinking of a friend, and the difficult passages we dread but can't avoid. This poem by Jody Gladding has been on my mind all weekend, and goes out to Nels:

Footwork

When Nijinsky died, they cut open his feet
to find the secret of his dance. His bones,

it turns out, were like anyone’s.
With each step, our heels sink that much

deeper into earth. We have
nowhere else to go. Once my mother

crossed and recrossed an entire field
to find my sandal. Now she’s gone;

she left her darning.

: Jody Gladding, Stone Crop

[photo: seedhead, 6/23/07]

New blue mini

Here's the new mini quilt. I finished binding it last night, washed it in the kitchen sink, and hung it up to dry. Tried taking photos this afternoon by pinning the quilt to a towel on the clothesline, but it was pretty breezy, so it may look a bit off square.

My mother hand-pieced the triangle squares and handed it off to me; I machine-pieced the border and hand-quilted the whole thing, then applied a very narrow binding made from the same border fabric. The quilt measures 14.5 inches tall x 18 inches wide.

* * * * *

We saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this afternoon at the Campus Theatre: I loved it. That's all I'm gonna say.

* * * * *

Uhh, I don't think so

So I'm supposed to be packing up to move from my office and into a newly-renovated space on the third floor of Carnegie, where I had an office before I schlepped everything over to this building last summer. Are ya with me? On Monday, I walked over to check out the new digs. The photo pretty much says it all. Fortunately, the department manager in Geology is being super nice and has extended my stay until August 1, but I don't see how they're going to have the new space ready by then. Do you? So I'll have to move somewhere for the interim, then again when the office is finally ready. It's appalling.

* * * * *

The headache turned out to be a migraine, and eventually went away. My doc prescribed Midrin. We'll see how it fends off the next one (which hopefully won't occur anytime soon).

* * * * *

We need a nice slow rain.

* * * * *

Interest in the Keystone Chapbook Prize has been steady. (Thanks to Steve Herb at the PA Center for the Book for posting the CFS there!) The deadline is one month away (August 17), so if you're eligible, get that manuscript together!

* * * * *

Sorting through papers in my office (and at home). I've recycled pounds and pounds of paper. I must learn to be more efficient, especially given how often I've had to move offices. . .

New bars top

I have a rotten headache. This is the second day. I feel like someone has beaten me with a two-by-four.

* * * * *

Yesterday I pieced a new quilt top. This "Bars" top is made from reproductions of 19th century fabrics: the "poison green" original that the above is based on dates to 1850 and is commonly found in central PA quilts from the mid- to late 1800s. The double pink is one of my favorites, and the chrome yellow really brings out the yellow flowers in the green fabric. This top measures approximately 21 x 24 inches and is a smaller version of a wall quilt I pieced that Randy quilted last year. I've been wanting to make a smaller version, and even with my crummy headache, this was a pretty straightforward assembly (though I did sew several strips backward and had to take them apart to redo). Though I shuffled around gingerly most of the day, I'm glad I managed to accomplish something over the weekend. [The first photo looks wonky: it's not; the edges are straight and square.]

* * * * *

Yesterday afternoon as we talked out on the patio (I was quilting on the triangle mini and Randy was reclining back, looking up at the gorgeous sky), Randy spotted a bald eagle circling high over the back yard. We yelled to the neighbors to come see--someone grabbed binoculars and I tried to focus a shot with my digital cam (with no luck)--and we all craned our necks to watch this magnificent bird wheel and soar lazily toward the river, the sun flashing off its white head and tail. Quite wonderful. I have not seen a bald eagle since David and I were in Alaska in I think '93.

* * * * *

My gay summer reading arrived today: Andrew Holleran's Grief and Armistead Maupin's Michael Tolliver Lives. Looking forward to both.

* * * * *

Somewhere last week, I crossed the 1,000 mark: 1,022 profile views as of today. Thanks to all who've stopped by to read and enjoy my photos.

Fields of gold

As we were headed home, Randy stopped so I could snap off these two photos of the wheat field from the truck window.

Berrying (take two)

We didn't find many berries this afternoon, but as I walked along the edge of a cornfield, I ran across this beauty. This particular damselfly has always been especially significant to me, so I'm very happy to get such a great photo.

What I'm quilting now

This is the second of two hand-pieced projects that Mom handed off to me several months ago. I'm doing a basic outline stitch inside each triangle. There are 108 triangle squares, each measuring about one square inch.

Berrying (take one)

I wanted to go berrying this morning, so after a yummy breakfast of ham & eggs on biscuits, we grabbed Sadie and a few small plastic tubs (and Sadie's leash, and a bowl of water, and her grooming bag, and my camera, and Randy's camera, oh and a couple of books and our cell phones), hopped in the truck and headed up to the Overlook trail where we'd been greeted by oodles of damselflies the other day.

Today the place was swarming with gypsy moths, even at mid-day: they were everywhere, and I fear we'll have major damage next spring (I assume they are laying their eggs now on--well, on everything).

A work crew had set a new line of fence posts and was installing hurricane fencing (is there another name for that heavy mesh fencing that people so often use in their yards and dog kennels?) and almost immediately, one of the men called out and warned us that our dog needed to be on a leash. We have her-- leash, I assured him (Randy had taken Sadie off her leash once they were around the corner but not quite out of sight of the persistent nabob who, it turns out, harassed Randy not fifteen minutes later as he sat at a picnic table reading. Sadie had climbed up on the table and Jethro approached and told R to please not allow the dog up there, saying something like "people eat at these tables" (to which R responded, yes, and bugs and animals crawl on them and birds shit on them). Randy ended up taking Sadie to the truck and phoned me that it was time to leave. Jethro even followed him to the truck and started in again.

The problem is that single men are harassed in this park because it has a reputation for being a cruising area. (People with children are routinely allowed to break the "rules.") Well, fine: but arrest the lawbreakers, and leave people the fuck alone who are just trying to quietly enjoy our state parks.

So not enough berries for pie baking. Yet. Tomorrow we hit site #2.

* * * * *
An unpleasant e-mail this morning: I've been asked to turn in my key to Bucknell Hall before July 13th. Though it's understandable that departing faculty or staff should turn in their keys, I'm not really going anywhere. I've made it clear from the start of my interim editorship that I'll be around to handle West Branch biz over the summer (not the way our regular editor usually operates, but it makes no sense to me to put stuff on hold until mid-August when we're all in the frenzy of teaching preps). So okay, so fine, I'm done. I'm done, and here's my key, and if there are any fires to put out before September, well good luck with that.

* * * * *
I wasn't going to rant about that. Oh well. Screw it.

* * * * *
The Lewisburg July 4 parade is tomorrow morning, and the fireworks display is tonight. It's just grown dark as I type this out on the patio. A firefly has landed on my wrist and is making his ticklish journey up my arm--against the grain, as it were--but hasn't yet emitted its lovely greeny-yellow lantern light. I think the laptop screen is drawing them. When Randy drove to the store earlier--around six--he said that folks were already setting up their lawn chairs along the parade route. We're a small town. Those chairs will still be there in the morning.

[photo: nasturtium, 6/24/07]

New Mini

Here's the new mini. I finished the binding last night and washed the quilt in the kitchen sink, then hung it up to dry. It's ready to be mailed. The center checkerboard top was hand pieced by my Mom; I added the border, backing, and vintage 1940s binding and did the hand quilting in an overall "Baptist Fan" pattern. The quilt measures 8.75 x 12.75 inches.

* * * * *
Dad's procedure went well: one stent and several balloons, which, my sister says, is good.

Damselfly

Here's one of the damselflies we saw the other day. Really gorgeous dusty blue. I'm happy with this photo: you can see all the webbing in the wings. I must have taken 20 shots of this particular critter--it was very patient with me!

* * * * *
Hot day. I'm happy to be able to work in a nice, quiet, air-conditioned office.

* * * * *
They started cutting down several hemlock trees beside Bucknell Hall last week, to make way for a backhoe to dig a new steam line. I had not walked past the building in a few days, but this afternoon I did. Absolute carnage. A wound in the earth. I felt a piercing synesthetic moment, a visceral body shock at the sight of the ravaged space.

* * * * *
My dad's surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Please send good thoughts.

Why I am not a banker

I forgot to pay Nancy & Bill last week. I realized it the morning that Nancy flew home, and put the checks in the mail immediately (same day), but it's a huge embarrassment. Doh. Double-doh.

* * * * *

We took a short trail walk this weekend up at the Overlook, a few miles out of town near Winfield: it's a wooded state park atop a rocky bluff that overlooks the river confluence at Northumberland. Two things of note: the wild raspberries are almost ripe (any day now), and there were damselflies everywhere! Probably hundreds. More than I've ever seen. Bright electric powder-blue, pale tawny yellow, all with transparent wings. All along the trail, clinging to trees, hovering near, alighting on grasses, but almost never holding still enough for me to get a good photo. Will see what I have in the camera. There should be at least one decent shot.

* * * * *

Last time I visited my folks (too long ago), Mom showed me two tiny quilt tops she had hand-pieced and asked if I thought we could make anything out of them. Sure, I said. And brought them home and set them on the bookcase in our dining room. So two weeks ago, during the June Seminar, I finished up a project and wanted something portable and remembered these really small tops (have I mentioned that they're really small? like, each square is maybe a half-inch across?), so I found a coordinating fabric to make a narrow border and used two scrap pieces of self-basting batting to put the thing together. (Self-basting batting, because you're dying to know, is slightly "sticky" and adheres when pressed between fabrics with a hot iron. It's too messy for larger quilts but really perfect for very small projects.)

So the quilt is a basic checkerboard design in two fabrics, a pale pink mini print and a sort of teal green floral. I used a medium rose-pink for the border, which will be about one inch wide when finished. The quilting pattern I decided to go with is an all-over "Baptist fan" design, which looks like tight concentric arcs that overlap in a kind of shell pattern. It has a LOT of quilting in it, and I'm nearly done. Yesterday I rummaged around and found a piece of vintage paisley dress fabric from the 1940s, which I'll use to make the binding. Will post photos by the end of the week. (Just indulge me; I'm really into this quilting thing.)

* * * * *

Quiet weekend. Quiet Monday. I did get some more poetry books listed on eBay, including Daisy Fried's second book and chapbooks by Alison Funk & Catherine Pierce. Prices are cheap and all the money goes to my press. Check 'em out.

[switching OFF shameless self-promotion mode]

[photo: blooming hosta in our garden, 6/21]

Lodestar sinks

I was sorry to hear that Lodestar Quarterly had folded: it's sad to lose another LGBTQ venue. Wishing Patrick Ryan all the best.

* * * * *

The Keystone Chapbook Prize is off to a great start! Thanks to all the folks who are spreading the word.

* * * * *

Moving out of my borrowed office this weekend is another reminder of how much paper I still manage to accumulate in a matter of a few months. Recycling isn't the problem; I just need to be more efficient at handling stuff when I first get it.

Yeah. I make piles.

[photo: shrub rose, 6/9/07]

Prose poems: a wide line?

This afternoon, a few of us walked over to Zelda's for fruit smoothies (I had a frozen chai, yumm) and a nice chat about the prose poem. Betsy passed around some books and chapbooks (I was especially drawn to Give Up by Andrew Michael Roberts) (check out all the gorgeous handbound books at Tarpaulin Sky Press) and we read a few poems. One of the interesting notions that came up is Gary Young's notion of the prose poem as one continuous line. I hope I got that right, because it makes so much sense to me: when we abandon control over the line, we have to rely on other devices to keep the poem alive and moving forward. But if we could envision a poem as one long, extended line (I think of taping a paper banner--say, six feet long--to the wall, and writing with no anxiety over the right margin), how might this alter the ways in which we imagine it and bring it into language?

I wanna try this.

Someone's poem (I should have kept notes) reminded me of the imagery in James Wright's "How My Fever Left," and it's interesting that, in that moment, I actually remembered it as a prose poem (Wright used the form well, but of course this particular poem does not). Here's Wright's poem, from The Branch Will Not Break (1963):

How My Fever Left

I can still hear her.
She hobbles downstairs to the kitchen.
She is swearing at the dishes.
She slaps her grease rags
Into a basket,
And slings it over her skinny forearm, crooked
With hatred, and stomps outside.
I can hear my father downstairs,
Standing without a coat in the open back door,
Calling to the old bat across the snow.
She’s forgotten her black shawl,
But I see her through my window, sneering,
Flapping upward
Toward some dark church on the hill.
She has to meet somebody else, and
It’s no use, she won’t listen,
She’s gone.

[photo: some black raspberries I picked for my honey on the way home today]

A few days

The June Seminar is winding down: Nancy Eimers leaves in the morning, and the Fellows depart on Thursday. We'll miss them. I'm already looking toward the rest of my summer--moving my office, completing a few final WB tasks, planning out a new course, transitioning into a new campus, working on new poems and trying to finish one of the two manuscripts I've been juggling for too long now--and the first task alone is daunting. Too much paper. So many books. Another reason to stay home, read for the sheer pleasure of it, spend some time with Randy.

And there's always the garden. The columbines are starting to release their first seeds: the pale green clawlike pods split open and out fall shiny black seeds, smaller than sesame seeds and more rounded, more oval. I want to set up lights on the basement landing (just off the kitchen) and start some more perennials. It's much too hot in the attic now.

* * * * *

Last week, Bill Olsen and I were talking about Thomas Lynch and recommending his wonderful book The Undertaking to someone (can't remember who). Bill said that Lynch was an advisor to Six Feet Under (possibly my favorite TV series ever), and that his name can be found in the credits! How did I not know this?

Here's a poem from Thomas Lynch's Still Life in Milford:

Vigil

Rose, you are the winter oak
whose spent leaves redden and remain
limp emblems of the heart’s accustomed hold
on this—the known life of seasons,
daylights, nightfalls, weathers—
the ordinary calendars, mean time.
Ordinarily we live our lives out
hopeful and afloat among the rounded metaphors:
seedtime and harvest, dark and dawn;
solstice and equinox, calm, storm.
Ignoring the linear paradigms we move
buoyantly between our pasts and futures
gamely trading prospects for remembrances,
deaf to the regular changing of tenses—
those doorways slamming down the narrowing hall.
Behind the doors, we hear the voices still:
Goodnight. Godspeed. God Bless. Get Well. Goodbye.
The deaths we seldom grieve but set our watches by.

* * * * *

[photo: beetle I released from my office yesterday]