They Say You Want a Resolution: Sitzfleisch

I usually break my resolutions before January turns his two-faced head in my direction. This year, I'm making only one:

Sit there until you get there.


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"Idiot with a Tripod" (aka, "Man in a Blizzard")

This is absolutely a tone poem: Watch. Listen. Write.




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The Last Goodbye: Ashes to Ashes

Harvey and I talked after his heart attack in October 2005. I’m so glad we did, because his service and his memorial today are full of what he loved, poetry, the earth, and God. Before we scatter his ashes, I’d like to share with you all why he wanted to be cremated. Harvey was always fascinated by the phoenix, that bird that rises from its own ashes to be reborn, stronger, more beautiful, in its fullest glory. It’s a type, he’d say, of Jesus, to be destroyed, then reborn. He looked forward to that rebirth, to that new body. Here’s the poem that spoke so resoundingly to him and to me about cremation. I hope it speaks to all of us.

“Cremation,” Robinson Jeffers

It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame—besides, I am used to it,
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had a great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.


Harvey also loved the idea of transformation—ink and paper to portrait, clay and heat to sculpture. One of the most beautiful songs he sang at Trace Creek was “Midnight Cry,” and the line “We’ll be quickly changed” was meaningful to him. Here are the verses he wanted read as we scatter his ashes.

1 Corinthians 15:50-58

50 What I am saying, dear brothers and sisters, is that our physical bodies cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. These dying bodies cannot inherit what will last forever. 51 But let me reveal to you a wonderful secret. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed! 52 It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed. 53 For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies. 54 Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.
55 O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

56 For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power. 57 But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong.

Harvey loved all of us here today--Pamela, Daniel, Raleigh, you all--parents, brothers, sister, sisters-in-law, brother-in-law, nieces, nephews. He loved the idea of family, he loved the idea of home, and he loved this farm. Harvey wanted a part of himself to be here with you all forever. Here’s a poem which suggests why.

Leaves of Grass, Section 52, Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Re-Joycing Notes: The Writer's Almanac

Reading: Gone, Martin Roper; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce; Our Gods Wear Spandex for HUM 211.

Writing: In my head, mainly, the idea of typeset, letter presses.

Thinking about: What makes James Joyce James Joyce?


Oh, Leopold! This is why I'll never be taken seriously as a Joyce scholar. I think of Bugs, not Bloom. The only Bloom for me is Molly, big with seed.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast....

It was on this day in 1916 that James Joyce published his first novel: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce had tried to write the same story in several forms before. In 1904, he wrote an autobiographical essay, but it was rejected. [He wrote a volume of poems, Chamber Music, and a play, Exiles; now he branches into memoir. There is no suggestion for me that in the single-note poems or in the taking-turns voices of dramatic dialogue we're watching the development of a master of contrapuntes, whose voices in their rounds are dizzying]. When he got the rejection letter, he sat down at his kitchen table and sketched out a plan to expand the essay into a novel, and within a year, he had written 900 pages of a book about a character named Stephen Daedalus, entitled Stephen Hero.

Then he left Ireland, started teaching English for almost no money, and was trying to support his family. [He'd gone to Paris to study medicine, but found the lectures in anatomy and physiology to hard to follow; he had only schoolboy French]. He found it harder and harder to finish his novel. So he decided to write short stories instead, and he wrote a collection called Dubliners. A publisher in London accepted it, but then the publisher asked him to clean up some of his language. He did that, but then the publisher wanted the subject matter changed, then an entire story removed, and finally Joyce refused.

So Joyce decided to return to his novel. But he didn't like it anymore. He thought it was too conventional. So he started from scratch [the "desk drawer revision"], and he re-titled it A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Joyce had spent nearly 10 years trying to get his fiction published, and then, in 1913, he received two letters — one from a publisher who wanted to reconsider publishing Dubliners, and a second from Ezra Pound, who was looking for new fiction to publish in a magazine. Dubliners was published in 1914, and Pound published a serial version of A Portrait of the Artist. The complete novel came out on this day in 1916, with its famous first line: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo." [What do you think the WWI-era reader thought of this? I think there's the liberation of rhythm in the lines here that comes to fruition in Ulysses There's also the idea of the fairy tale as mythopoesis?].

The novel ends with Stephen Dedalus as a young man, vowing to leave Ireland and to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." [Away, come away--Yeats at the end of "The Hosting of the Sidhe"? Obverse of The Answerer, Fragarach, in Irish mythology--a sea sword brought from the other world, and no one can lie with this blade at his throat? And if there's so much Irish reference in Portrait, why did Joyce go to Greece/Homer for Ulysses]?

(Aside: Maybe there's another example of TS Eliot "borrowing?" On page 251, when there's Not this. Not this at all, p. 251. CF Prufrock?).

Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel [Official Music Video]

Like the wind and the rain. Like a southbound train.

I'm a heading to Raleigh/Hope to see my baby tomorrow.

My real baby--Raleigh Elizabeth. It's very lonely here with just 2 cats.

"Courage!" Cowardly Lion to Dorothy.

Lady. Lemniscate. Leo.

Inner strength tames outer force.

Screw your courage to the sticking place (Macbeth).

To infinity and beyond. Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story

The Young Widow, Edward K. Johnson

This is perhaps the cover for chapbook #3. The narrative arc (if there is such a thing) is widowhood. I wrote the final poem for it today. The poem is in the comments/footnotes; the "lines" are merely the frame. There are 13 poems and 30 pages of poems. The shortest poem is three lines; the longest, 6 pages. I feel very calm about this collection. It's atypical of how I usually feel when I've finished a draft. I'll send it out in January. The full-length MS is going out after I meet with Nickole in January to discuss our plans. I think this chapbook will be ready to go out in time for the Snowbound series from Tupelo. (Might as well aim high). Five of the poems have already found homes--all but two were written this year, specifically for this project. I'm excited.

Teasers but no spoilers: Here are a few titles from the collection--Widow's Mite: Long Division; A Time is Once Upon Us: The Grimm Haikus; Little Lesson in Ornithology, In Ictu Oculi, Housewifery: An Annotation, Widow's Apologia: Against Revision, and Comings and Goings, Or Doris Holbrook Heads Again for Home. (That's the 6 pager in which I write back to James Dickey's wonderful "Cherrylog Road." Our Doris is a survivor. I miss hearing her voice in my head. She talked to me throughout the fall, and I fell a little in love with her wiseacre).

I think Harvey would be proud. I haven't given up, at least not this week.

5000 Words' Worth (or is it Wordsworth)?

Amy and Daniel.

Dimples!

Startling star.

Raleigh as Reindeer.

Pair-a-dice Pajamas, 15-year-old Rafiki, and Unidentified Woman with No Makeup

"Meditation on the Divine Will," A. Lincoln

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true — that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

_____
Scribbled on a scrap of paper, this was found by one of Lincoln's secretaries at the White House. Not meant for publication, or even for private reading, "Meditation" reveals Lincoln trying to work out his understanding of God, to find surcease and strength in faith.

During this most troublesome of years, I've been working out my own understanding of salvation--in the midst of, in the throes of, grief--with fear and trembling.* I have a responsibility to love--the divine and the human--who are the same, for me, as the Word in the World. I cannot believe that Harvey could be taken from me for no reason, so there must be a reason. If there is a reason, then it is my responsibility and my privilege to ponder it, and while I ponder, to live in love, as though Harvey were still with me. He is inside me, if not beside me. He gave me his love and the ability to love. Isn't this the work of God? To send someone to us to show us love? If there is a Harvey in my life, then isn't there a God who sent him? I have to believe that.

Help me. Thank you.

Faith is an act of will and also a non-act--satori. It's Franny's prayer in Franny and Zooey. It's Seymour's Fat Lady. It's the idea of beauty and God and not-knowing that pervades Salinger. It's the divine grounded in the human. It's the acceptance of paradox. (As poets, don't we strive to be comfortable with not-just-one-answer? Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility; Keats, in negative capability. I should also strive to think outside the box--and the canon. Lincoln writes that a house divided against itself cannot stand. I assert that a house that accepts its division can be an elegant duplex).

Help me. Thank you.


* A note on word origin--to decipher: One of my favorite words is katergazomai--to work out, to render, to result in. I have worked out mathematical equations with my son and tangles in my daughter's waist-length curls. I have wrought children into this world, a happy marriage, a few poems. I result in this: Age 53, alone, with pretty good hair, pretty good skin, and, after some crises, pretty good physical and mental balance. Didn't everything that I endured as a child and teenager--physical, emotional, sexual--result in the person I am now? Didn't it all work out for love? Didn't the black-outs of stroke and the darkness of widow's weeds act as chiaroscuro for who I am now--darkness enhancing light (art), lightness enhancing depth (music)? Don't I work through them, and doesn't something bigger than me work through them, as well? What has God wrought through me? And what should I render through writing?

Poetics: The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy

This is a seminal memory from my childhood. I have never forgotten it: They looked and they looked, and they began to see.

As we say here in Mayfield, Merry Christmas, y'all, and to all a good night and a better morning.

In Memoriam, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

L.

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

_______

Making Christmas...not bright, not in a Nightmare Before Christmas way, but making it a time of presents for those present and reflection on those passed from me (my best friend, my Mammaw, my sister, my sweetheart), and owning up to a future of loneliness.

Next week is fast approaching, when I scatter Harvey's ashes. As I travel to his family farm, the place we met, the places we lived and loved, and a special garden, I remember Harvey's wish to not be underground but of the ground. He wanted to be in many places at once, so I'm doing my best to honor that wish. He wanted me to move forward without him after the New Year, which I cannot promise to honor. I may not talk about him as much, which in a way would be a relief.

There are poems that I'm going to recite for him: "Cremation," by Jeffers and the last section of Leaves of Grass at the ceremony with family; "A Birthday" by Merwin and one of my own poems privately at the places I visit alone. Send good thoughts my way next week.

I disagree with the cliche: It should read What doesn't kill us does kill something in us.

The Darkest Evening of the Year

Brought me to and brought to me a solstice service, in memory of the ones we lost this year. For me, my beloved, my lover and my friend. For Raleigh and Daniel, their father and best playmate. For the art world, a consummate portraitist and sculptor extraordinaire. For over 300 G/T students in Kentucky, their coconspirator and best teacher. Sweetheart, we miss you. We honor your memory. Your candle burned the brightest on this, the darkest day of the year.

Remember these readings: John 1 (word) , Genesis 1 (light) , Exodus 13 (pillar of cloud, pillar of fire--theophany!), Isaiah 60 (radiance), Luke 1 (magnification).

My friends Donnie and Monte played magnificently. The music was such a soul solace, the darkness of the chapel and darkness outside made my own darkness less lonely, and the stained glass bleeding in the candlelight was another form of tears. Everything helped. It was such a relief to sit in the shadows, in silence, where tears weren't something that shameful but something that cauterizes and heals.

I watched the moon turn blood-red this morning, and I remember that among the bloodstone's properties is the ability to open locked doors. I look for doors to open, and I ask for courage.

(PS I know that I am not a good person when I review these verses and wonder why they never read this verse from Isaiah 60: A multitude of camels shall cover you. That doesn't sound like a blessing to me. It's kind of like the mournful, beautiful Rivers-of-Zion psalm that ends with dashing your enemies' skulls against rocks).
___________
Another light in the darkness: I was also nudged to find my chapbook, A Walk Through the Memory Palace on a Year's Best list! (The link is above).

"A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker, Phoenicia Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-0978174965.

Artful and precise in their construction, these poems won Johnson Parker the Chapbook Prize from qaartsiluni, a small press doing some of the most innovative issues on the web (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a publisher of some of my own work.) I include the Memory Palace here because I believe it will please those who favor poems that catalogue, parse, and sliver the human experience in ways that reflect like shards of glass. While I prefer poetry that is more accessible and wholistically illuminative, I couldn’t help but admire this poet’s skill. I know why it was chosen, and I think it’s important to all writers to examine carefully that which challenges as well as pleases."

What a lovely review! I like that my poems sliver the human experience. (Maybe Angelina can play me in the action movie).

If you'd like to read and/or listen to some of these parsing poems (Parseltongue?), go here:

Memorypalace.walk.com



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Lunar Eclipse

This is a little flash fiction piece of mine, which I particularly like.
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Not Your Average Christmas Song

Corrs & Bono "When the Stars Go Blue"

Perfection.

On this day, in 1843....and in 2010

_____

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.

______

Can you tell I'm fasting for Friday, when THIS is the passage from Dickens that calls to me? (It is what Mammi called looverly writin', though).

My one longing (besides the impossible, to have my love back), is to write a poem of apoplectic opulence. This is my 2011 resolution. I looked through my notes, and I've written 15 poems this year. Of them, 3 are keepers. That gives me a dozen drafts to plunder. Revise, revise!

I would also like a side of wanton slyness with that apoplectic opulence.

______




The Widow’s Apologia: Against Revision

This is my story,
And this is my song of songs.
There is no third person.

There’s scene and then there’s
Seen. Present tense? To be
Present is tense enough.

Nat King Cole - "There Will Never Be Another You"

From the December 14 Writer's Almanac: Amy Hempel

December 14's the birthday of short-story writer Amy Hempel, born in Chicago (1951). She graduated from high school when she was 15 and drove out to San Francisco. She said, "Such terrible things were happening in this beautiful place" — she was in San Francisco during the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, a bomb in the Iranian consulate, Jim Jones' cult, and serial murders. And then her mother committed suicide, she got in two bad accidents (one on a motorcycle and one in a car), and her best friend died of leukemia. She decided to get hold of her life and settle down somewhere. She was a good writer, and she had studied journalism, so she went to New York. She took a fiction-writing course with Gordon Lish, and on the first day of class he made them all write down their very worst secret, the secret they would never get over. Hempel wrote about failing her best friend while she was dying. And that exercise turned into her first short story, "In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried."

Gordon Lish thought Hempel was a great writer, and he helped her publish her first collection, Reasons to Live (1985). She has published three more books of stories since then, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), Tumble Home (1997), and The Dog of the Marriage (2005). She starts each story with the last line, and writes until she gets there.

She said: "It turned out that one of the most helpful things I did without knowing it would be helpful later was hang out with stand-up comics in San Francisco. I went to their shows night after night after night. I watched them performing, working through the same material. I saw some nights it killed and other nights it bombed. All that time I was observing nuance, inflection, timing, how the slightest difference mattered. How the littlest leaning on a word — or leaning away from it — would get the laugh, and this lesson was so valuable. And the improv work — they called it 'being human on purpose,' this falling back on the language in your mouth — was hugely important. Just listening to what you're saying. I learned this when my late friend Morgan Upton, an actor and member of the Committee, took me to a Steve Martin show at the Boarding House in San Francisco. Back in the green room, Steve Martin was sick, but preparing to do his show anyway. I told him I admired that, I said I couldn't go out there and make people laugh if I were sick. And he said, Don't be silly — you couldn't do it if you were well. A brilliant reply on any number of levels."

And she said: "It comes back to the question, whom are you writing for? Who are the readers you want? Who are the people you want to engage with the things that matter most to you? And for me, it's people who don't need it all spelled out because they know it, they understand it. That's why there's so much I can't read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit."
____________
Here are things that I will take with me to the writing of fiction, which I have never done seriously and resolve to start in 2011:

(1) What's my worst secret? Can I make art of it? Since the PostSecret founder is coming to Murray, this seems particularly germane.

(2) "In my end is my beginning." I have the end for my fictional piece already. How do I write toward that end?

(3) Why are gesture and nuance so intertwined with dialogue? How does this show up in my work? Do I listen to what I say mindfully and mindlessly--Am I "falling into the human"?

(4) This is not a bee--it's a short story; stop spelling everything out.
_____________


Strange fact: Amy Hempel is one of the favorite writers of--wait for it--Chuck Palahniuk, of Fight Club and Choke fame. Here's a quote from his web site, where she was interviewed by Rob Hart. Hempel discusses lyricism in prose:

RH: In a recent interview with The Believer, you spoke about the lyrical, poetic quality of your work. Can you tell us what importance poetry has played in your writing career, and what can be taken from it? I get the sense a lot of younger writers don't spend a lot of time with poetry. Is that to their detriment?

AH: Poetry is the biggest help in writing stories that I know. You learn so much about rhythm and acoustics and compression and selectivity. No wasted words, no "furniture moving." I read and re-read certain contemporary poets all the time. Look at John Rybicki out in Michigan, someone I quote often. The passion is palpable, the heartbreak--you have to read his new book, WE BED DOWN INTO WATER, to see what a strong man does with soul-shattering grief. I find I bring more poetry into my writing classes than fiction.

(http://chuckpalahniuk.net/interviews/authors/amy-hempel-interview)
________
Aha! Point number 5! I made this same argument in the 12:30 class of English 214 when I read the end of "Goodbye, My Brother" and excoriated the class for their comments that poetry won't help them be better fiction writers. Sound, rhythm, compression--exactly the points I tried to make--don't come without understanding poetry. Take this back to 214! Since this will probably be my last semester to teach creative writing, I should pull out all the stops.

Kapell: Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 i. (1950)

I remember Miss Travelstead's piano lessons. 7 a.m., and I'd be yawning, not awake from the 3-block walk (sometimes in the dark through frost-bent grasses, crystals of ice snapping beneath my boots), how I'd fumble in the music bag she'd stitched me for my Schaum, my sheet-music waltzes. She'd serve me coffee or hot chocolate in glass cups with silver holders; I'd clench the cup till my fingers were warmed from the bite of the walk to her house. She'd give me sugar cubes to hold between my teeth. I loved the bakery smell of her house and the rice paper look of her skin.

At home I had a paper piano, only a cardboard flat of keys, so I never knew how anything was supposed to sound, just how the fingers worked. It was always a revelation to hear what I'd silently practiced. It sounded brilliant, even if it was the simplest "Ode to Joy." (Bells are ringing, hearts are singing...) When I sight-read something correctly or did all my scale work, as a reward Miss Travelstead would bring out the 45 RPMs of Kapell. We'd listen to him till it was time for me to leave for school. His playing was so clear--brilliant as icicles with sun piercing through them. (Did I mention it's 4 degrees here)?

I loved the piano until I actually got one, when we moved away from central Kentucky and into the western Kentucky ranch that would be my parents' first homestead. My dad paid $10 for an old upright that was kept in the garage, ensconced between the lawnmower and the rakes. The piano wasn't good enough for the house, but it was good enough for me. The wood was antiqued green (the color of mold on bread), and the Green Giant had once been a player piano. There was a great gape where the doors hiding the mechanism had been removed. The Giant was never in tune and sounded horrid. Keys--white and black--stuck; G sharp flew off if I struck it wrong; there was no pedal action, although I stamped like a flamenco dancer to try out una corda, sostenuto, and sustain. I sight-read and fingered on my old paper keyboard till my mother threw it out, because I "wasn't practicing." My heart was broken, but the lessons persisted. I loved the language (maestoso, pizzicato), the composers' names (Strauss, Debussey, Saint-Saens), the way my music teacher smelled (Arpege). She was a kind woman and a wonderful teacher of theory and music history, and I'm sorry I disappointed her. I just couldn't stand to practice on the Green Giant.



I am sort of ashamed that I hold a grudge about having to play in the garage--no heat in Kentucky winters, no air in humid Kentucky summers. I wasn't allowed to have the garage door up because I was "so bad." I thought for decades that the Giant and my parents took music away from me. But it didn't--not totally. I kept from these lessons a great ear. Because hearing music at age 7 was such a revelation, such a rare privilege, I learned to listen with concentration. I have extremely fast, strong, and supple fingers. For someone who's only 5 feet 4 inches, I still have an octave-plus reach. My hands came back very quickly after my stroke. I credit their strength to years of piano.

If I could afford a teacher, I'd retake those lessons. I'd listen and listen and see what would come back.

Remembering You Through James Wright: Teaching Others, Teaching Myself

from "The Journey"

.................................The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don’t worry.

_____
From The Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday of the poet James Wright, (books by this author) born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio (1927). His father worked in a glass factory, and James was drafted into the Army during World War II. He read a lot of poetry in his down time, and after he was out of the Army, he went to Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill. While he was in graduate school, W.H. Auden chose Wright's manuscript The Green Wall (1957) for the Yale Younger Poets Series. After that, Wright poured his heart and soul into his second book, Saint Judas (1959). After he finished it, he thought that he had written as well as he would ever write and he became depressed, unable to write or do anything.

Then he picked up a copy of Robert Bly's magazine, The Fifties. Bly had included a translation by one of his favorite German poets, and Wright was so excited that he wrote Bly a 16-page, single-spaced letter to tell him so. Bly responded with a one-sentence letter that said: "Come on out to the farm." So Wright made his way out to Bly's farm in western Minnesota and started working with him on translations. Robert and Carol Bly made Wright do farm chores, and he loved to hang out with the animals, sometimes sitting with his favorite horse for hours. And he did manage to write again, seven more books, including Shall We Gather at the River (1969), Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), and Collected Poems (1971), which won the Pulitzer Prize. He said, "The person whom I would like to be my master is Horace — Horace, who was able to write humorously and kindly in flawless verse. I've achieved that maybe twice in my life, but that is what I would like to be."

Wright taught at Hunter's College, Macalester College, and the University of Minnesota, and he loved being a teacher. He said: "I've written books of verse, but I'm a professor. And to me personally, teaching is the art that gives me the more pleasure. I'm not trying to put myself down as a poet, but I mean what I say. That is, the contact with my students, and my reading of books and trying to share my thoughts and feelings with my students, gives me more pleasure, and I honor this as a high art. Remember that the teachers include Jesus, Socrates, Siddhartha, Meister Eckhart." But he liked teaching literature, not creative writing — he said, "I tried it once and failed at it completely because all I could do was sit and talk to the class. And someone would ask me a question, how I worked on something, and all I could do was grunt."

_____
These lines from "The Journey," a poem you loved, have given me some pleasure and a little bit of hope as I approach these next weeks, as I face the scattering of your ashes on December 30. I want you with me, but as I travel to the places you loved, revisit them and release you back to the earth, where you wanted to be, and keep a little of your ashes to be with my ashes, I will remember your brilliant life and your brilliant mind and your brilliant prismatic love of the world and of me, and ashes to ashes is what you wanted and I will keep all these things burrowed inside me and ponder you in my heart, and I will let 2010 end (as you told me every solstice) and hope for the forward face of Janus in 2011, when maybe days without you will be a little less mitts-zerable (Raleigh, age 3) and a wee little bit funner (Daniel,age 2).

Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?"

Grace Paley was born in the Bronx (1922). Her parents were Jewish Socialist immigrants from Ukraine, Isaac and Manya Gutseit (which they changed to Goodside). They spoke Yiddish and Russian at home, and English in public; her father learned English by reading Dickens. Her family was affectionate and noisy — they loved to sing and to argue about politics. Young Grace absorbed different immigrant languages in the streets of the Bronx, and she loved listening to the gossip of family and friends and neighbors. She said: "The word gossip, which is considered so terrible, is really just another way of storytelling. And it's the way women tell stories, and it's kind of denigrated, 'cause its women who do it." And she said, "It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life."

After high school, she took a class on English literature from W.H. Auden, who was her hero. During a lecture, he asked if there were any poets in the class who would like to meet with him and discuss their work. Out of 250 people, only five raised their hands, including Grace. She arranged to meet with Auden, and after an initial setback because she went to the wrong café, she did meet him and he read her poems, which she had written in his style, using British phrases and formal language. She said: "You understand I was a Bronx kid. We went through a few poems, and he kept asking me, do you really talk like that? And I kept saying, Oh yeah, well, sometimes. That was the great thing I learned from Auden: that you'd better talk your own language. Then I asked him what young writers now ask me — and I always tell them this story — I said to Auden, Well, do you think I should keep writing? He laughed and then became very solemn. If you're a writer, he said, you'll keep writing no matter what. That's not a question a writer should ask."

So she kept on writing poems, but she had plenty of other things in her life — she did occasional work as a typist, she was active in community projects, and she took care of her two young children. She had moved to Greenwich Village when she got married, and she spent many afternoons in Washington Square Park, hanging out with other mothers, hearing their stories. She would write down poems on scraps of paper, but she was too busy to think of writing anything much longer. Then she got sick, and she sent her kids to daycare so that she could recover. She had several days a week all to herself, so she started to write stories, drawing on the voices of the women she spent time with in the park every afternoon, writing about the kinds of events and characters that filled their lives.

She wrote three stories, and she showed them to a couple of people, including her friend Tibby McCormick, whose kids played with her kids. Tibby had just separated from her husband Kenneth McCormick, an editor at Doubleday, and Tibby guilt-tripped him into reading Paley's stories by telling him that their kids spent a lot of time hanging out at Paley's house and it was the least he could do. So he read them, and he came to see Paley and told that if she would write seven more stories, he would publish a book. And that was The Little Disturbances of Man (1959). Her first story in the collection, "Goodbye and Good Luck," begins: "I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised — change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused." The whole story had sprung from that single phrase, "I was popular in certain circles," which one of her aunts had said many years earlier. Paley said that she often based a story around a single line or phrase or way of speaking that rattled around in her head until she created a story for it.

She published just two more collections of stories, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985). But she gained a devoted following, and when her Collected Stories was released in 1994, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She knew each story inside and out, and when someone would tell her that they loved one of her specific stories, her response was: "What's wrong with the rest?"

She never made her living as a writer alone. She taught at Sarah Lawrence and the City College of New York. And she was a passionate activist for social causes, protesting against nuclear proliferation and against wars from Vietnam to Iraq, and lobbying for women's rights. She said: "I think that any life that's interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it. It seems to me natural that I'd be pulled in those ways. [...] And you are privileged somehow to do as much as you can. I wouldn't give any of it up. And I've talked a lot about this with women's groups because I think that in whatever is gained, that everything, that the world should be gained. But that nothing should be given up. I think a good hard greed is the way to approach life."

She said: "You can't write without a lot of pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from anger, which then changes into a pressure to write. It's not so much a matter of getting distance as simply a translation. I felt a lot of pressure writing some of those stories about women. Writers are lucky because when they're angry, the anger — by habit almost — I wouldn't say transcends but becomes an acute pressure to write, to tell. Some guy, he's angry, he wants to take a poke at someone — or he kicks a can, or sets fire to the house, or hits his wife, or the wife smacks the kid. Then again, it's not always violent. Some people go out and run for three hours. Some people go shopping. The pressure from anger is an energy that can be violent or useful or useless. Also the pressure doesn't have to be anger. It could be love. One could be overcome with feelings of lifetime love or justice. Why not?"

(from The Writer's Almanac, bold added)
_____
"A Conversation with My Father" and "Faith in a Tree" are two of my favorite stories. Nothing's wrong with the rest of them, either.

_____
Snowing today--and me without cat litter. Dashing to Wal-Mart in the Bull.

The Beatles - "It's Only Love" (Anthology Version)

Is it right that you and I should fight every night?
Just the sight of you makes nighttime bright....

(triple internal rhyme!)

Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen (High Quality)

You picked up the fiddle--the first time you'd ever touched one--and 20 minutes later you bowed a plaintive "Amazing Grace." Fifteen minutes after that, you played "Believe Me If All These Endearing Young Charms." Right after that you sang for me, the first time, this song.

Your voice was magical: My thoughts, I confess, verge on dirty.

And I did have a red dress. I was wearing it, for you.

Come on. Come on. Come on back.

Emily Dickinson, Born on This Day in 1830

Found in Dickinson's Corner Bedroom

Her writing desk--her
Dresser--her Franklin stove--that
Wound-down carriage
Clock. Her decanter--
Ruby glass--her narrow bed.
Three prints on four walls--
Carlyle, Eliot,
Mrs. Barrett Browning (like
her, Elizabeth).

Sewing notions--pins,
Scissors--scraps of tulle, silk--left-
Over letters in
Copperplate script--some
1700 poems
Bound into bundles
Stitched by hand--each spine
Immaculately fused--each
Dash she's thrown herself.

(Photo by D. Vandel, linked above)

One of the Waste Land Sonnets

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

______

Rhyming disruption of the couplet is why I love this section of TWL. I remember Mark Levine in Forms of Poetry telling us to find sonnets in Eliot. This is the first one that I found. I was so excited that day. Tiresias indeed!

I want to write more and whine less. Maybe I should make a prequel to my New Year's resolutions and do exactly that.

My grades are in--"Well, now that's done and I'm glad it's over." (Same poem!)

14 to Watch: A Valentine of Actors

Click on the link above to watch 14 wonderful "silent performances." Tilda Swinton has a wonderful face, as does Leslie Manville. And James Franco captures perfectly Narcissus.


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From Seamus Heaney's "Crediting Poetry"

"But there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do with the 'temple inside our hearing' which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called 'the steadfastness of speech articulation,' from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet's ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices."

What Is Pleasure?

Getting and spending...and then cleaning up after it...we lay waste our powers.

Sorry, Willie Wordsworth, I had to interject. I'm in the process of a major cleaning, both psychic and physical, of my house. Sometimes I want to give up. I want to put down the mop and take off on the broom. Mr. Clean is looking kind of sexy to me right now...

Venice, anyone ?


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Reading the Russians

Dostoevsky is the Old Testament; Tolstoy, the New Testament.

Dostoevsky's theme is God; Tolstoy's, Love.

In Dostoevsky, everyone's punished; in Tolstoy, everyone's heartbroken.

In Dostoevsky, God wins, if He's playing; in Tolstoy, love conquers all, and all conquers love.

(Chekhov. Pushkin. Pasternak. I love them best).

Sewing Sonnet: Reading Chekhov & Carver

Embroidering

Here is the heart, you say, this
pincushion, this strawberry. Here
is the floss of it: arteries,
veins threading from it, toward it;
thin rungs of the capillaries,
raveling and unraveling
over, under, crossings
and uncrossings. Now, tie the knot

off; snip it with the silver points
of the scissors (Delilah's legs
around the head of Samson); take
up the needle; plunge it in and
out. Back-stitch, hem-stitch, love-knot...Think
less of its length, more of its depths.

Comic(s) Relief: Making HUM More Humane

I'm trying my very best to come up with a curriculum that will be fun for me to teach and fun for more students than just the liberal arts majors. I've interviewed Dan's friends who have taken HUM and asked for their favorite readings. I've thought and I've thought about themes to stress. I think I'm going with QUESTIONS OF PLACE--not just place in terms of historical timelines or geography, though those are important, but also one's place in place in social hierarchy and place in a literary/mythologic cosmos. What happens when one steps out of place, doesn't know her place?

I'm going to try to relate the literature of antiquity forward to comic books/superheroes/semiotics/video games. I have plans for Gilgamesh, Frankenstein, Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Iliad, Macbeth, Candide, and, er, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I surely hope it works. It's such fun planning this syllabus.

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything." Joseph Conrad

I'm not sure about including Heart of Darkness. Yes or No?



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I Never Tire of It: The Awakening, That Is

Edna Pontellier

Beneath the open
penumbra of umbrella
does she see the sea

furling, unfurling
its waves--Ave Maria
Ave Mer et Mere

A Journey Round My Skull: The Reaper's Bookplates

Go see them all!

Two Candles Tonight, A Match Right Now

FAVOR FIRE

Flare, lucifer for
I'm touchwood, lightwood, tinder--
how I long to burn

_________

Richard Speakes

He was the first teacher who believed in my work. He made me believe that with the tithe of talent I had and the hard work I could commit to doing, I might someday write a poem.

He also gave me the great gift of Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, which is a necessary read for me. Here's an excerpt, which I reread on Marylinn's blog today:

What a silly thing we do. We sweat through poem after poem to realize what dumb animals know by instinct and reveal in their behavior: my life is all I've got. We are well off to know it ourselves, even if our method of learning it is painfully convoluted."

I let "life" get in the way of an MFA, in the way of writing without a school as spinal column. A marriage, a miscarriage, a grievous loss of friends and my beloved grandmother, and my own lack of self-confidence and commitment got in the way of writing. This was totally my own psyche and choice. Harvey always encouraged me; I always discouraged myself. When I turned back to writing, the way a backslider returns to the prayer rail to confess her slipshod ways and rededicate her life to something bigger than she is, Hugo and Harvey both supported me. In a strange way, Hugo was my low/no-residency Northwest teacher.


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James Galvin: Murray State University

From another teacher--my first workshop instructor, teaching his first class--I learned little. This was totally my fault. I signed up for his class only because my best friend thought he was cute and didn't want to be in a night class by herself. I sat there and read poems by other students, wrote some jingles of my own, and thought, So what? Then I heard him read his own poems and was entranced by The Word.

Since then, I've studied his work and read his fiction and nonfiction. From him, I learned how to teach the poetic line. Here's the poem that serves as springboard:

Art Class
by James Galvin

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,

More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.

The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky!

The horizon moves as we move,
Making us feel central.
But the horizon is an empty shell—

Strange radius whose center is peripheral.
As the horizon draws us on, withdrawing,
The line draws us in,

Requiring further lines,
Engendering curves, verticals, diagonals,
Urging shades, shapes, figures…

What should we place, in all good faith,
On the horizon? A stone?
An empty chair? A submarine?

Take your time. Take it easy.
The horizon will not stop abstracting us.

Maybe I'm Amazed

I'm very excited to receive a Pushcart nomination for my poem, "Linea Nigra," which is a broadside. Click on the link above to see the complete list of nominations from Blue Fifth Review.


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Mark Jarman

I'm not grateful for much this season, but I am grateful for my teachers. Here's one of my favorite poems. Mark Jarman taught me that poetry is like anything else you love: Give it more than you think you hold, and don't worry how it reciprocates.

The Black Riviera--Mark Jarman

(for Garrett Hongo)

There they are again. It's after dark.
The rain begins its sober comedy,
Slicking down their hair as they wait
Under a pepper tree or eucalyptus,
Larry Dietz, Luis Gonzalez, the Fitzgerald brothers,
And Jarman, hidden from the cop car
Sleeking innocently past. Stoned,
They giggle a little, with money ready
To pay for more, waiting in the rain.

They buy from the black Riviera
That silently appears, as if risen,
The apotheosis of wet asphalt
And smeary-silvery glare
And plush inner untouchability.
A hand takes money and withdraws,
Another extends a plastic sack--
Short, too dramatic to be questioned.
What they buy is light rolled in a wave.

They send the money off in a long car
A god himself could steal a girl in,
Clothing its metal sheen in the spectrum
Of bars and discos and restaurants.
And they are left, dripping rain
Under their melancholy tree, and see time
Knocked akilter, sort of funny,
But slowing down strangely, too.
So, what do they dream?

They might dream that they are in love
And wake to find they are,
That outside their own pumping arteries,
Which they can cargo with happiness
As they sink in their little bathyspheres,
Somebody else's body pressures theirs
With kisses, like bursts of bloody oxygen,
Until, stunned, they're dragged up,
Drawn from drowning, saved.

In fact, some of us woke up that way.
It has to do with how desire takes shape.
Tapered, encapsulated, engineered
To navigate an illusion of deep water,
Its beauty has the dark roots
Of a girl skipping down a high-school corridor
Selling Seconal from a bag,
Or a black car gliding close to the roadtop,
So insular, so quiet, it enters the earth.

______

I love the myth the last stanza evokes.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

This is as close to how I feel as it's possible to get. John Hannah, thank you for this performance; Richard Curtis, thank you for this screenplay; W.H. Auden, thank you for the poem.

Adimpleate--to fill up. Replete--to fill again and again. Bereft--To be emptied.

From gratis, meaning without charge, free

Thanks--W.S Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster
and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Nine years ago....

Here is happiness--one and one making one.

Although the camera says October, this is Thanksgiving 2001--right after Harvey bought me the house of my dreams--our Queen Anne. Daniel was a junior in high school. Raleigh was 4 years old. We were so much in love and so excited about our new "1880s" house. And we were happily married; in nearly every photograph I have of Harvey he flaunted that wedding ring. (Part of it was that he had such beautiful hands and liked to show them off, but he also liked being married).

Now our little yellow house is no longer the house of my dreams. It needs much work, but I'm making progress. Daniel is a junior in college, living and working on his own. Raleigh is in eighth grade, making straight A's, in all-district band, and dating. Daniel and Raleigh are both growing in delight and wisdom, growing up.

This photo marks a turning point. Three months later, we moved into the house where I now sit. Right after that, I started getting sick--lupus, kidney problems, and all the depression that comes with chronic illness/not feeling normal. The steroids that were required made me gain a lot of weight. (And not just the steroids--so did Doritos and all the wonderful meals we cooked in our tiny kitchen).

Four years after this photo, Harvey had a heart attack. He made an amazing recovery and had no permanent heart damage. Four years after that, I had a series of strokes, after which Harvey took incredible care of me. He helped me walk and relearn how to balance. He helped me learn to read and remember more than a paragraph at a time. He helped me relearn to type when the fingers of my left hand didn't work. He helped me learn to hold a pencil and to articulate my thoughts again. No one else would have done that for me. I am able to walk for miles now. Except for not being able to garden (lupus requires me to limit the time I'm out in the sun), I've made a full recovery from everything. Today, I can also announce that I have officially lost all of the weight. I weigh what I did when I had Raleigh 13-1/2 years ago. For that I'm thankful. I can now wear clothing that I haven't been able to wear for nearly a decade. I'm going to wear my oldest pair of Levis today and still have room for pumpkin cheesecake.

What will happen 2 years from now (the next four year cycle)? I can't imagine...

Harvey this year died, for no discernible reason. Not even an autopsy can tell us why I lost my only love; our children, their father; his students, their beloved gifted/talented teacher; his friends, their most steadfast and ardent supporter. Parts of me died along with him. I know that. I (somewhat) accept that. Although 23 years wasn't a long time, I'm thankful that I had Harvey as long as I did. And look at that smile--he was happy. I was happy. We made each other happy. He was the making of me.

I'm trying my best not to be sad today, but it's hard. Today all words are plebeian.

Wonderful husband, amazing teacher, artist extraordinaire--I will never forget you.

This is my beloved and this is my friend.

Ecclesiastes 7:4 and Edith: Scattershot Notes

"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of the fool is in the house of mirth."

Thus sayeth the Preacher.

In The House of Mirth: Lily Bart may be understood as the Tarot Fool: In joyous search of new experiences, carelessless leads to precipice.
_______

29 years, 29 chapters. (Is this the truism of 29 and holding?) The structure of The House of Mirth is as precise as a tool-and-die fitting.

"I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else."

Lily Bart, to Selden (Literary naturalism/determinism/machinism)
_______

"How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman."

Thus sayeth Lily Bart.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own." Virginia Woolf writes, much later, in "A Room of Her Own."
_______



Ah, Lily Bart. I come to understand you, tortoiseshell hairpins arranged on the deal dresser, water glass and chloral drops on the nightstand. You're as locked into your fate as any other Darwinistic/naturalistic hero. Survival of the fairest is not the same as survival of the fittest.

All is vanity plays out till the end on that dresser top.

One of the things that I like best about literature is the notion of inverting/torquing/exploding cliche. In the works of Elizabeth Bishop (especially my beloved "Crusoe in England"), No Place like Home twists into Home is No Place. Safe as Houses takes on a different meaning in the book I'm reading now, Martin Roper's Gone. (I think Home Is No Place might be the ultimate theme of Gone--more on that later, after I finish). Certainly, a major theme of The House of Mirth is All Conquers Love.

Harvey and I planned to design a series of samplers with these inverted cliches. Maybe I'll find a way to graph them myself.

Bah, Humbug; Harumph; Crotchety Crotchety Crotchety

"And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either."

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Let’s all blame Steinbeck for this series of self-help “books.”

Note to the Universe:

Dear Book Gifter:

Do not send me another copy of Chicken Soup for the Single's Soul. I am not uncoupled.

I would, however, be interested in receiving, and stockpiling, the following:

Chicken Soup for the Vegan's Soul;
Chicken Soup for the Weasel's Soul;
Chicken Soup for the Quisling's Soul.

Thank you for prompt attention to this matter.

Yours till the pot bubbles over,

Pamela


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Symphony of Sorrowful Songs - Henryk Górecki - 1st movement

I miss you. I see you in everything. I will see you again.

Stevie Wonder - "As"

Until the day that is the day that are no more...




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Lost in Translation: Dreams, Lines, Words

I've been having weird dreams about the Hanged Man--as an image. This led me back to 1977 and French Lit class. Here's a little Villon from Ballade des Pendus:

And the rain has soaked us and has laved us clean,
And the sun has withered us and turned us black.
Ravens and crows have hollowed out our eyes
And plucked away our beards, our eyebrows too.
Never at any time are we at rest;
Swayed this way and then that, as the wind wills,
It pushes us about, just as it pleases,
More beaked by birds than any tailor's thimble.

On translation: Michael Cunningham writes in his introduction to Death in Venice that all writing is translation, that the ideal words in a writer's head and heart never transfer through her pen or keyboard into the work of art she imagined. I agree. I also agree that all translation (foreign language, erasure, cutup) is rigorous right-brain exercise, and I need something disciplined. The Song of Songs translation is too raw emotionally for me to attempt right now. So I return to the one word site for freewriting, and to translation in spots or splotches to stay with poetry. I like to think we're married (not in the sense of antique furniture, where two discrete pieces try to pass themselves off as one) but in the sense that maybe we're joined at the metrical foot.

Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and I'm not feeling particularly thankful. I need to focus more on what's here than what's not. (A line about Death sucks a rotten tooth comes to mind
I used to post five things for which I'm grateful--maybe I should do that again.

Rafiki's vocabulary, especially the chirrups when I come home;
Shadow's Grumpy=the-dwarf grumbling snores;
Spearmint flannel pajamas;
Garnet and topaz fall leaves and the girl who dives into them;
High heels, higher heels, highest heels.

These things adimpleate (see yesterday) my days; #4 and #5 surely erase my vultuous nature. ( http://www.savethewords.org/ )



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