New year, clean slate.

I am resolved to submit poems every Saturday of 2008.

After two members of my family told me I couldn't begin a resolution with a four syllable word, I told them my resolution was to step up. At dinner the other three members of my family asked what my resolution was and I said "to step up." The other members mentioned the longer version and my daughter asked for that version. Since the original hearers looked pained, I shortened it to "to act rather than react." Everyone noted that these were two different resolutions. I perused the dinner menu. My husband's resolution is to live more in the moment, my older daughter's is to change her default answer to questions beginning, "would you...?" from YES! ABSOLUTELY! to "let me get back to you on that." My younger daughter's resolution is to be kinder to herself. My son in law claimed not to have a resolution, though he said he has things he wants to do.

Younger daughter = the coach
Older daughter = the reporter

I got up this morning at 4:45, and drove the coach to the airport so she can go back to Miami Beach. She's going back with her Christmas snorkel, fins and mask so she can go out to the beach tomorrow to try them out. The shortie wet suit should get there in another week. Then she's going to sign up for SCUBA diving trips and find jillions of like-minded friends, some of them not tropical fish.

We went to the Palace Ballroom for New Year's Eve. There was a live swing band and dance floor. Since I've had the frozen thigh with nerve jangling I was worried I wouldn't be able to dance, but I did, to the slower songs. Jim wanted I know to swing me around in his mad unschooled style but resisted the impulse as much as he could. It would be fun to take some lessons and learn how swing dancing is done, though I don't know if Jim would find this fun. Maybe we'll find out. The couple next to us went to the Northwest Dance Exchange classes (maybe that's right) at the Swedish Club and said they were helpful and not frou frou or competitive. The classes were helpful not the Swedish Club.

One month from today I fly to India. Time to call that Indian travel agent and find out about flying from Dehli to Kochi, and about getting a car to take me from the Dehli airport to the Radisson Hotel. Yikes!

I've been having a rough time staying here on the planet, tracking my obligations and staying in touch hour by hour with not only what I'm supposed to do but what I might want to do. My mind is a bit of a mush. This reminds me of the woman in primal therapy who yelled at Mike, "How dare you accuse me of working against myself!" which was why every last one of us was in therapy, but sometimes it riles to have someone point it out. I have been working against myself of late, in the quest for "rest" or "a break" or "just a minute of freecell" that turns into vague hour after hour of carpel tunnel syndrome courting bland brain deadening activity that isn't doing anything. I think to myself if there is no god if by corporate and governmental decisions the bees are all going to die and we are all going to have to live in caves again if we live at all then what's the point of functioning? It's pretty hard to argue with that even though it's also danged vague and out there in the future or over in DC and certainly not in my laundry room where the dryer needs to be filled and turned on, in my workroom where the organizational tasks loom - for example I have no book ends so that my new glass shelves drip books at the edges, or at the post office where the stamps live. I will have to get into my biodiesel fueled beetle that is unwashed in the spirit of saving the planet and sloth and drive off in it to do my errands, return to work diligently at getting books together for 7th grade classes, and etc. The and etc. will include my new vice which is the doing of crossword puzzles from the seattle pi, not the seattle times. I do the Merle somebody yes Riegel (or Riegel, or similar) puzzle and thus emboldened embark on the new york times puzzle which I can do now Mondays and Tuesdays without fail, and Wednesdays I dependably can do more than half. Thursdays and Fridays it's Merle alone whose crosswords I can work out, though I still try the NYT. This is a guilty pleasure, a lesser literary accomplishment. I have my tiny delights, as when the answer to a question is "ode" - very frequent - or when it is, only once thus far, Pablo Neruda, written "pabloneruda." One way in which the crossword puzzle is a lower form of art.

New version of a very old sestina by me:

Chagall's Art

The big-eyed goat
rides sky beside a chicken,
brother bows violin
over Vitebsk, a man
aloft with Bella,
torah, Rabbi, angel.

They circle, all but angel
foreign to weightlessness, goat
freed from green, Bella
backfloating lilac, chicken
companionable as man,
varnished as violin,

audible as Russian. Vilin
hourglass, air-worthy as angel,
essential as the body to man.
This is so simple, the brown goat
a child's drawing, the flat chicken,
but for elegant Bella.

His brush caressed Bella,
as bow coaxes violin,
these chickens
vibrant angels.
His hand floats on her hand, man
Marc Chagall or goat

swimming scarlet sky, goat
giddy for Bella
dreaming man
towards this violin
summoning angels,
logical chickens.

In Paris's light he sketched the chicken,
etched the goat,
animals slaughtered next door, angel
rendered, la Tour Eiffel, Bella's
planetary gravity, violin
bird from a far world, this man

whose tears painted the chicken, bella,
who said in colors' threads - violin,
angel, goat -- the essential thing is art.

-Laura Gamache

ciao bella.