I have a secret...

I ain't gonna shut up.
This is my mouth.

Ai, "Knockout"

Details, Details: Check out this original portrait by Harvey!

This detail is from a pen-and-ink portrait of Raleigh and me. Ain't we purdy? Seriously, click on all the listings for parkerart at Etsy (link above).You can see how great Harvey's art actually is. This is only a teeny-weeny example of what you'll get for your money if you ever need a portrait, book cover, wedding gift, etcetera. He also sells artist trading cards, drawings, one-of-a-kind whimsical dolls, prints, you name it. His strange death series and alphabet series are among my favorites.

Puritan versus Pagan: Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother"

Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming - Diana and Helen - and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.

This is among the most beautiful ends of any short story, especially how Cheever shows us that the historical/classical/pagan triumphs over the Puritan/abnegatory/christian with a lower case "c." The rebirth of the women as goddesses here is beautifully done. (Note their classical names). Despite all the classical references in "Goodbye, My Brother," this is essentially a retelling of Cain and Abel--one for the ages, and probably my favorite of Cheever's stories.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Cheever. We're still reading and admiring your work.

Choose Choos, or Why I Love TJ Maxx Beyond All Reason

Thirty dollars. Thirty dollars. Thirty dollars. Less than $8 per heel-inch.
The only reason I can discern for this staggeringly low price is that the left shoe is a 7-1/2 and the right a 7. They fit as though they were cobbled just for me. I've never even seen this brand at TJM before. I think the Druids of the Shoe Tree sometimes send these portents to true believers like me.

Maybe it's a reward for supporting USPS and Gmail: I have 50 poems out in the world right now. I sent a chapbook out today, too: Love and Other Four-Letter Words. That make 75 poems out in the world, which for me is a record. I didn't even know I had 75 poems.

Tomorrow: Chicken and Brats and spinach salad and baked sweet potatoes. Roses and peonies. Bunches of editing $$$ for next week. Trade Day at 6 a.m. Fresh tomatoes to drizzle with olive oil. Indy 4 with my husband and daughter and maybe Daniel if he deigns to go with us. Cherry cobbler with Eagle Brand. Long weekends, friends, are good.

I have lots of bargains from yard saling to tell you about, but right now I want only to admire my shoes.

Jeanette Winterson and Elegy: Do you agree?

My own feeling is that death is integral to life, but lost to language. When death approaches, when death happens, that event falls outside the scope of what can be said. To write about it is a kind of magic - an evocation, an invocation, a re-membering of what has been dis-membered. The scattered life, now returned to so many atoms, becomes what atoms are - empty space and points of light. I suppose the writers who find a way of saying what resists all saying find a way into the empty space and the points of light, allowing death to be both the wholly private and personal experience it must be, and yet a collective happening.

C.S. Lewis, whatever you think of his Christianity or his politics, achieved this beautifully in A Grief Observed. It is not simply a matter of understanding one's own situation, but a matter of finding the words to express the human situation, without platitudes or patronising. So when Lewis begins: “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear”, we are with him, and he is with us.

_______
This is from a review of literature on death, including Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which I think is a marvelous book. (Not sure about the play version...)

Lately, elegy's been on my mind. What's been on yours? I have been in the world 22 years, 2 months, and 5 days without my best friend and I miss him every day. Do you ever get over this?

James Dickey: In the Presence of Mine Enemies

James Dickey/In the Presence of Mine Enemies

The Sheep Child--James Dickey

Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pinestraw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There’s this thing that’s only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can’t live. his eyes
Are open but you can’t stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?

Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may

Be saying saying

I am here, in my father’s house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
Of sobbing of something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,

In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wood,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring. From dark grass I came straight

To my father’s house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun’s grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woods into bean fields, they go
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
They groan they wait they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.
_____________

23The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2 He maketh me to lie down in green [1] pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest [2] my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. [3]
____
I have read Dickey multiple times, this poem multiple times, and until this week I never saw this! The sheep child is re-visioning parts of Psalm 23.

I really have a new poem for the pastoral unit now...

I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wood,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring.

Nature versus nurture? Not a very peaceable kingdom at all.

Circe: Franz von Stuck

Here, take what I have for you.

I love the lion.

And Sardines?

_______
More good news on the poetry front: My poem, "Pneumonia: Shuckswitch Road," has been taken by qarrtsiluni. I am so happy! They had an editing recommendation that was a wonderful nip/tuck for the poem. Also, I have written a poem I like since finishing my degree. That's almost a first for me--to like something this fast. I immediately sent it out, to teach it a little humility.

Rejections today from Many Mountains Moving. Where, oh, where can I place a longass poem? Any tips, Gentle Reader?

Four Dozen

Peonies are blooming, pink roses are blooming, azaleas are blooming, rhododendron are blooming. My yard looks glorious.

Harvey and I just finished planting 10 giant clumps of tiger lilies today that we salvaged from another yard. We marked the sumac and japonica to move later. The pinnacle lilies are blooming (last ones).

Oh, Spring you have my heart in your lily-white throat.

With Apologies to Matt Groening and Six Sentences

_________
This is for Robert of 6 Sentences fame, who runs one of the best sites I've ever read.

Mooning over Money

Face the rising moon. Hold your wallet stretched open in both hands, and lift it toward the moon. Say:

"Beautiful Lady on the rise,
Grant me now a fine surprise.
Fill my pockets and my purse.
And save me from the pauper's curse."

Then shake your wallet hard, toward the moon; lower it, and walk away.

__________________
I am eight years from being able to retire. Harvey can retire next year, but if he wants a full retirement, he has 10 more to go. We'll still have to work part-time if we retire this early, but we are seriously considering less work and more play.

Precipitate Poems

MRS. SNOW--Donald Justice

Busts of the great composers glimmered in niches,
Pale stars. Poor Mrs. Snow, who could forget her,
Calling the time out in that hushed falsetto?
(How early we begin to grasp what kitsch is!)
But when she loomed above us like an alp,
We little towns below could feel her shadow.
Somehow her nods of approval seemed to matter
More than the stray flakes drifting from her scalp.
Her etchings of ruins, her mass-production Mings
Were our first culture: she put us in awe of things.
And once, with her help, I composed a waltz,
Too innocent to be completely false,
Perhaps, but full of marvelous clichés.
She beamed and softened then.
-------------------------------Ah, those were the days.


______________________________________________________________



THE SHAMPOO--Elizabeth Bishop

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
-- Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

________________________________________________________

Here are two poems that I love to teach together--comic rhyme in the sonnet and subject-sextet rhyme. Dandruff. Snow. Stars and Moon.

I find the Justice poem incredibly funny and poignant, and the Bishop poem's incredibly sexy.

I also want to think about Justice as "Romantic" and Bishop as "Pragmatic."

(I used to have an entire collection--a dozen, one for each year--of piano lessons).

Fairy Tales and Fields

This is one of my favorite images. I've always thought it would be a great fairy tale. Her crawl across the field toward home is heartbreaking, as is the torque of her torso.

In her pink dress she is inching toward you.

Tagged: Best and Worst Pickup Lines

BEST: Quoting from Green Eggs and Ham. This one worked.


Say!
In the dark?
Here in the dark!
Would you, could you, in the dark?

WORST: Girl, you are just like a bad check. Subsequent awful comment about bouncing ensued.

If you've ever been hit on, consider yourself tagged.

Adieu: Linen Handkerchief

Tomorrow, I say adieu to my MFA studies and to my students, and A bientot to my friends and colleagues in the Department of English and Philosophy. I hope that they all have a great summer break.

The hanky is for my crying-real-tears like Betsy-Wetsy--I'll never have a group of students like this last one. (Everything you could ask in a classroom, except a worthy teacher!) Nine students is a heavenly size for a workshop, and all nine of these students were stellar.

In other news:

I have a chapbook ready to go out in the mail and maybe a book ready, too (not one and the same). It's time for me to print and take stock of what I need to do to make these poems presentable. This requires alone time...something I used to celebrate, which now I rather dread...

Graduation is Friday--I am the oldest "graduate" at my church by 29 years. The official MFA celebration is July 11 for MSU. I guess I'll be ready to read by then and see other people.

Derby Dates: Who Can Pick 'Em?

Daniel: Big Brown

Harvey: Colonel John

Pamela: Pyro

Raleigh: Denis of Cork

Celebration

Today, I start my 100th volume of Pamela's Musings (what I've named my journals since I've been a little girl). Many of the journals are illegible; most ought to be. In flipping through them, I see that technology and surrealism often collide. A cell phone? I'd have to be in a cell to use one (October 23, 1997> My first day transcribing on a computer is also my wedding day. Weird... (April 29, 1987). Bliss bliss bliss--an IBM self-correcting typewriter of my very own! (June 20, 1982).

This sounds surreal now, huh? I can remember being so grateful for that IBM self-correcting typewriter. It was a della Robbia blue beauty.



This blue...