"It comes to this, that poetry is a part of the structure of reality."
-Wallace Stevens, from his essay
"Three Academic Pieces"

The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
-Wallace Stevens, from
"Another Weeping Woman"



Like you, I love the sound of pencils
tracking imagination across a white page

I believe words hold truths
beyond their lengths and breadths

that daily and hourly and any anxious minute
we can make language ours and claim our lives

So he says to me again,
"Poetry is your hobby."
"No," I say, "that's not right."
"You don't make any money at it,
so it's a hobby," he says.

I'm doing crossword puzzles now.
If he calls that a hobby
I won't freefall out of my life.

I wear a necklace I wrote into:
"I believe that reading & writing
can save your life."

Sometimes I live it
And sometimes I fall down.

I open my hands and offer
whatever is there:
heart, sandwich, coffin nail.

Nobody will come to the door,
box with a bow
and present me what I need.

Lighten up, there are billions of stars in the sky - Jim Page

Hubble, Hubble!

Ah kiwi canes
ah yesterday's snowfall
Today slushes towards us
like bald tired trucks.

THE BAWDS OF EUPHONY!!!

stolen from Tricia at Emperor of Ice Cream Cakes

contributed to the Wallace Stevens Birthday tribute contest held at EOICC by Harry Rutherford of Heraclitean Fire
on October 11, 2006.

I do a mean impersonation of the bawds of euphony crying out sharply, actually.



and now for a poem by Wallace Stevens, sans additional visual accompaniment, but reader, I may yet cut and paste in tribute:


A FISH-SCALE SUNRISE


Melodious skeletons, for all of last night's music
Today is today and the dancing is done.

Dew lies on the instruments of straw that you were playing,
The ruts in your empty road are red.

You Jim and you Margaret and you singer of La Paloma,
The cocks are crowing and crowing loud,

And although my mind perceives the force behind the moment,
The mind is smaller than the eye.

The sun rises green and blue in the fields and in the heavens.
The clouds foretell a swampy rain.

-Wallace Stevens

Happy Birthday Marie Lorena Moore!

Fiction writer Lorrie Moore turns 50 today - welcome!

I have kissed the cover or petted the spine of each of these books:

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Like Life
Anagrams
Self Help
Birds of America (I have genuflected following the kissing and petting)

Collage by Clare Murray Adams see more at www.claremurrayadams.com


Second day in a row no teaching due to snow/ice/cold - yesterday Seattle Schools were closed, today they're running two hours late. Having grown up here, snow means play, play, play or at least sitting in front of tv all day. Since I am constitutionally opposed to sitting in front of tv all day and have a healing sprained ankle and am on the icy side of fifty, yesterday I neither played nor tved but instead what did I do? Wrote a bit, but disconnectedly, disaffectedly, listlessly. It has become slightly boring that after all these decades I still must exert myself to make myself move. Somewhere in the contract I thought there was a clause that freed me from this. Aw, but there was no contract, and etc.

I have completed this morning's Word Scrimmage in the Seattle P.I., with a score of 180 (average game 155-165 Judd Hambrick, w.s. editor asserts) so I am ABOVE AVERAGE! Yea!
My words: millers, alien, datum, priest

In those alien days of plague and brief existence,
millers left the datum-free ether to priests.

Life is Never Meaningless, There is Always Food

Dog Kibble: A Villanelle


Life is never meaningless: there is always food.
All day I sit upon the stairs, nose between the bars,
and consider kibble – its smell, its taste, its mood –

and I am happy. We walk back to the woods
after lunch (me and the humans) and under leaves there are
so many dark crunchy things to eat that I should

not eat but I eat anyway. They are so good!
Even when they make me sick at home or in the car,
I like them. I like to eat. I brood

about the taste of kibble hours before it’s chewed.
They keep my meals in the kitchen in a plastic jar.
Don’t put me on your couch, please, Dr. Freud,

I’m sweet and simple and I’m good.
When I’m sad or sick, not up to par,
I sleep downstairs curled near the toilet. I’m not crude.

I’ve known shame, and joy, and I have viewed
delicious sights. I don’t wander. I don’t go far.
Life isn’t meaningless because there’s food.
Consider kibble: its smell, its taste, its mood.

-Charles Baxter

Full moon?
Crisis of Confidence, Number 5, 687

My babies on flickr.com - so weird this lack of privacy we've ramped up on the internet allows me to see my GROWN, let's be clear about that, grown children without their knowledge and consent pretty much accidentally. Okay, I did type "Shawna Todd" into the search box on flickr after logging in after I couldn't find the picture I took of the toy helicopter flying in front of Christmas sheet music which is what I intended to have as the photo for today, a memorialization of the end of the 06 winter solstice/Beethoven's birthday/Christmas/Kwanza season. Instead, I give you Julia and Shawna at Shawna's 27th birthday party last July. Gorgeous, glowing, interesting, smart, talented, a trifle driven, creative, funny, fledged and out there in the world doing cool things. Yowsa.