Inside, looking out

I'm working through a stack--a big honking stack--of student essay drafts, trying to generate supportive comments to offset the plethora of marked errors. I'm reminded of the title of Leslie Ullman's book, Slow Work Through Sand. Gimme water.

* * *

We had a scare: R was experiencing terrible pain and other symptoms which, gentle readers, I'll decline to describe. We thought it was a kidney stone. Doctor's office opened at one this afternoon and they urged him to come in as soon as he described his symptoms. Tests determined it's not a kidney stone but a significant infection. He's feeling miserable. I'm upstairs working. He's flat-out exhausted. Send love.

* * *

I don't think I've stepped outside all day. Photo: the house across the street when viewed through one of the tiny oval holes in the mini blinds through which the slats are threaded.

Interstices

Maxine Kumin uses the term "interstices" in her book Always Beginning to describe the often-unscheduled or unplanned gifts of time in which she's trained herself to write. I'm still adjusting to my new work schedule (and working out the commute by trying to find reliable ride-share neighbors), so I'm more conscious than ever of the small interstices that pop up through my day. I need more self-discipline, of course (though I think I'm managing the workload pretty well so far), but I also need to be more attentive, to consciously recognize (and utilize) these small but valuable interstices.

* * *

Keystone Chapbook Update: Here, in no particular order, are the log numbers of the ten manuscripts which the final judge is reading this month:

70802; 70804; 70720; 70601; 70712; 70818; 70602; 70702; 70722; 70806.

At least ten other manuscripts came very close!

* * *

After teaching my 8:00 yesterday, Randy & I drove to Harrisburg for the quilt show. I felt a sneaky delight in lingering near his quilt to listen as people complimented his work. Very proud of him.

[photo: Light Surface #1, 9/1/07]

A walk in the woods

R and I had to get away yesterday. Fortunately, getting away is easy: a 20-minute drive to R.B. Winter State Park and we were on (and off) the trails, encountering relatively few people (considering the holiday weekend).

We brought our cameras. I'm drawn mainly to surface texture and the play of light and shadow, so I'll take either super-close-up macro shots of leaves and lichen or, conversely, deliberately out-of-focus shots to convey (hopefully) more mood than content. The pic I'm posting today is of neither category: more like a snapshot, I guess.

It was a beautiful afternoon, nice and cool in the mountains, though the creek level was way down and the marshes were oddly devoid of the usual winged swarms--I can usually count on seeing iridescent gangs of damselflies, but found none.

We then drove south to the mall (utter contrast) in search of a decent floor lamp for my Lycoming office. There's a fairly old PC on my desk, and the screen flickers noticeably, but I think I can get used to that. I'm less accommodating toward the fluorescent lighting: I really do think that it triggers some of my headaches. I had one small table lamp left from the four-in-a-box we bought for my BU office, and someone left one of those little gooseneck desk lamps, which I set up on a shelf and adjusted to point up, but clearly a floor lamp was needed. After dragging R past every conceivable model at Lowe's, I settled on a basic brushed-chrome "3 light tree" for 25 bucks.

* * *

Keystone Chapbook update: The contest is down to ten finalists. I shipped these ten manuscripts to the final judge on Thursday. Since the manuscripts are identifiable only by log number (cover sheets, acknowledgments, and bio information were removed as each manuscript arrived), I was thinking I'd post the log numbers of the finalists here. I know that not everyone is going to check this blog, but it's a good way to show a public record of the process at this stage but maintain the privacy of the writers' identities. (Authors were e-mailed their manuscript numbers as they were logged, and I deleted those e-mails immediately upon sending them). Any advice? The judge has a month to select the winning manuscript (and two runners-up). If you submitted your manuscript, would you want to know at this stage whether it was still in the running?

* * *

The man is home from his morning jaunt. It's Sunday, and on Sundays we have migas. Yummy.

Life Forms

Life Forms is a poetry book by Daniel J. Langton; he kindly sent me a copy a few years ago. It was put out by a very small San Francisco press, Cheltenham, in 1995. I don't know if it ever saw a second edition, which is a pity, because this one has rather a lot of typos in it. Really too bad. Here are two poems that caught my eye while I was browsing through it again last night:

On Meeting Franz Kafka Halfway
Through His Book Tour

He said, Gin and tonic. Which surprised me,
I thought Perrier or some exotic crap. Not
that G&T is a real drink, really it’s for dyps.
God, he’s small, nervous, with long hands,
that mittel-Europa ferret look. I sit with him,
What do you think of America, I ask.
I wrote the fucken thing, he says. His eyes are tired,
rimmed with hotel meals. Do you know Larry King?
he says. Will you sign my Schloss? I ask,
I’m looking for a girl, he says, I want to be engaged.
He signs my book, I notice he’s now Frank.

Slow Poem

There is a building that contains the dossiers
of everyone in the world. A young man was assigned
to read them. Each day dossiers arrived and
dossiers were taken away. He read at different
speeds, sipping tea.

The young man slept there, with the windows closed.
He ate in a niche with no windows.

Written lives. Places and torments. No thought
of the future. The funny cruelty of juxtaposition.
The slim files of huge hopes taken away.

After forty years he was given a pension that
would permit him to live as he pleased. He was
watched. When he died the experiment was declared
a success. He had learned nothing.

[photo: Rose of Sharon, 8/30/07]

Two Thumbs Way Up for Keith Olbermann

Could not miss his "Dragnet"-style re-enactment of Larry Craig's police report!

"No actual senators were harmed in the making of this film."

"I'm a cop. A cop in a toilet."

"Craig exited the stall with his roller bag without flushing the toilet."

"He has a wide stance when going to the bathroom" (presumably why Craig's foot touched the cop's).

Uh-huh.

Fortune cookie fortune

"Work expands to fill the time available."

I'm eating pizza leftovers at my desk with the door closed and hoping no one comes to see me during this office hour. I need to cover the same material at 2:00 that I did at 11:30, but more efficiently. I think my 3:15 section benefits the most, because by the third go-around I've made the necessary adjustments. I'll be glad to have this first full week under my belt.

More Engman

A nice break in the weather today. Wish I'd been outside a bit more.
* * *

We're shipping Randy's quilt tomorrow to the PA quilt show. It runs Sept 6-9 in Harrisburg.
* * *

I should be in bed but LOTR: The Return of the King is on, and it's hard to walk away from it once heads get rolling.
* * *

From John Engman's Temporary Help, two more poems of dark days that foreshadow our own:

Richard Nixon

Are you the President of pink flamingos and sad plastic flowers?
I remember you as a young man waving through a blizzard of television snow.
I remember you as an old man weeping real tears that fooled nobody.
I will do my best to remember you as a wise, china owl in a city garden.
Would you rather I remember you as a wise, china owl in a city garden
or as someone’s father selling pencils in the rain under a streetlamp?
Do you believe America will fall to pink flamingos and sad plastic flowers?
I believe I could have been elected President but nobody voted for me!
The young woman sitting beside me on the bus could have been an angel
of Michelangelo but half her face had been destroyed by a grenade.


Red Wine

Something in his voice tonight
is like joy as he describes

red noise and ribbons of white fire,
the beauty of the bombing of Iraq.

We are watching a late broadcast,
a new war on CBS, and my friend,

a woman with whom I have not slept,
admires the way the anchorman uses

his voice to confuse sex and death.
Showbiz, I tell her, is great stuff.

But she says no, the human touch.
He warms our insides like red wine,

as if he rushed to the studio to say
folks are dying, the sky is falling,

just for us. We believe he is kind.
We believe he has never been kissed.

Drinking the koolade

Drove up to Lycoming this afternoon to run some last-minute errands (parking sticker, voicemaul setup, class rosters) before donning regalia to take part in my first-ever convocation. I don't know why I never did this at Bucknell. I didn't go to my own graduation at Houston (but the Vermont ceremony was great). Anyway, a nice 45 minutes outside on a slightly breezy but otherwise muggy August afternoon. The faculty, staff and administration walked double-file over to the quad, then stepped to the side to line a pathway, through which the first-year students passed while we applauded. It seemed all so delightfully pagan. In the tent after the ceremony, I bypassed the trays of appetizing morsels and dove straight for the iced barrel of bottled water.

On the way home, I saw the Goodyear blimp make a steep nosedive across the freeway and disappear behind some trees. I think it's here for the Little League World Series, though I heard on the radio that there were no games scheduled for today.

Classes start on Monday. I'm about as ready as I'll ever be.
* * *
Here's a poem from John Engman's Temporary Help:

The Window in the Cow

You are a child with much to learn,
my professor said, when I compared
windows in cows to Nazi experiments.
The worst-case scenario for cows is veal,
he said, brief lives in small, dark stalls.
And didn’t I eat steak? Someday I would be
dead, he said, of what might be diseases
cured by such cows. So I changed my thesis

and learned a first lesson in rhetoric:
try to think before you feel what you see.
From my dormitory room, I could see the cow
grazing pampered grasses, strolling her acre
of the University behind a chainlink fence,
scolding those who came to see her bowels,
and the four stomachs, with a woeful moo.
Like an Old Faithful or Mount Rushmore,

backdrops for photographs of children,
she was exotica for the family album.
And if she came close, mothers and fathers
could study her puzzling intestines through
glass held by rivets to her torso, encourage
the children, with oohs and ahhs, to step up
and rub her soft ears, the children amazed
that such a cow was willing to be touched.

Kudos

Congratulations to Katie Hays, Tyler Mills, Donika Ross, Brandon Som and Becca Wadlinger, whose poems have been selected for the 2007 Best New Poets Anthology!

I may, I might, I must

If you will tell me why the fen

appears impassable, I then

will tell you why I think that I

can get across it if I try.

[photo: Robin tracks, 4/24/07]

"THE HARP OF FLOOR LAMP"

So proclaimed a label attached to one of three lamp harps--those springy things that clip into place and support a lampshade by means of a threaded eyehole and (usually) (somewhat) decorative finial--one of three lamp harps that appeared, to my eye, to be identical. I'd become convinced that the fluorescent lights in my nice, new windowless office were exacerbating my headaches, so last night R & I bought some lamps. Cheap lamps. Four lamps in one box for about 50 bucks, some basic assembly required.

I put them together today, one every few hours, as a treat--in much the same way that I used to reward myself with chocolate--and now I can work without fluorescent glare. Much nicer.

* * *

Still raining and chilly, but nothing drastic. And we need the rain. Yesterday, or maybe it was Sunday, I took some wet photos in the garden.

* * *

I'm thinking of a new series of photos and have started experimenting with a few but I don't want to say anything more about it. There's really no time right now: classes start tomorrow at BU and Monday at LC.

* * *

eyehole is a creepy word. It looks much less so when capitalized--Eyehole.

See what I mean? The second one looks like an archaic expression of greeting, something uttered by Plains Indians: ay-yuh-HO-lay!

* * *

Home again, home again. Jiggety-jog.

[photo: rain on nasturtiums, 8/20/07]

Out

I'll be out for much of the day. We're having something done.

[photo: ice truck, 5/2/07]

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.