8/28/09 Daily Crossword Poem Draft


If beauty hired district reps
and all the world was stage
you'd drop crutch and soar
let's listen as we hum our tune
as good for us as daily fiber
so what the traffic's daily roar
they're out for blood? We stroll
and loll and all, we seek relief
from grief and wave our flag
a rag as clean as any and solid
as the scraggy hat we doff
to anyone who stops lenient
as all who lean and loaf at ease
and these are all the arenas
needed. Pines don't cost a cent
and we've sent back the modem

Daily Crossword Puzzle Draft 8/25/09


In the days when armpits were arid
in all the streams squacked fowls
far away where air was clean and char
was for marshmallows we made
our mothers sent our food to India
davenots and grammas all lace
doilies, arms shivery not to ogle
though we did possessed by demon
and most of my dinner was on me
we wept but kept going
and now it's we who've aged
photobooks yellowing spent
like broken teeth as we reseat
at the hat dance at the fiesta
whoever's at the altar isn't us
and all history is ours to amend
as we attend to other woes than ours
for all we preen we won't be seen
for long so grab your uke
and sing another sec
who wants to find that sketch
he made when you lay nude
and all your bits stood firm

Participated in a Five Strokes poetry happening (sorry - 60's language, but it WAS!) at SAM Thursday night. Four poets, a stack of sumi painted art critique pages, a microphone, clipboards, blank paper and pencils (no pens in the galleries, alas.) We were situated in the SAM Next room - first exhibit: photographs by Corin Hewitt that resulted from an installation he did for a week in 2007 at the Portland Art Museum. All about gesture and pasta, and I hadn't eaten any dinner.

Writing poems, gesturing towards or in the direction of poems from the words on the art critique pages and the sumi gesture paintings was not a problem, was familiar, was enjoyable. I love to write in company with other poets. We were a bit of an art installation, some on the floor, some on the gallery bench, all hunched over our writing.

Our instructions were to go to the mic and talk about the process we went through to write each poem as we completed the gesture toward a poem. This was complicated. We couldn't then read the poems aloud, but had to lay them on the floor and return to writing. I stood at the microphone, turned it on, looked out and was surrounded by other human beings - audience! - but how to connect with audience with no poem? How to talk honestly about process while trying to connect with audience with no rehearsal, no product to share? Was I supposed to pretend they weren't there? Our commentary was being broadcast in the main lobby. Was my job even to try to connect or only to report? I gave a report. I didn't look at anybody after the initial reflexive hello and smile. I felt guilty having cheated audience of an expectation that I would perform. I felt like a middle schooler. Each time I got up to present, I used larger words to explain my process, at least I felt that I did. I separated. I only marginally listened to my fellow poets present. At the end I read their poems on the floor. I was the only one to gesture at signing my name. I'd signed "lg" to my first couple of poems, then noticed nobody else was attaching attributions, so I quit. I took some of the sets home, they're beside me on this desk. Not because I wanted to save them but because I didn't want Greg to have to fuss with them, get them to recycling. Anyway, here's one of my poems. The epigraph is from the text of the page I was looking at.

"Nothing could be further
from the authentic art
of our time than the idea
of a rupture of continuity."

And I'm delighted to find
a typo on top of the second page
"an" for "and" deflating
scholarly elevation, illumination
under the watchful eye or breast,
scrumbled cloud, perhaps toupee.

***

Ciao for now.

Poetry in 5 Steps at SAM last night



celebration of the new moon

silvery white balloons

white horses with baby carriages

white owls with electric eyes

white rabbits, black tuxed people

in white face, all waltzing

Benaroya, Triple Door,

dancing downtown and

uphill - every new moon

somewhere in Seattle --

New Moon Lullaby

AT THIS FAR REMOVE





To study Norway's elusive narwhals

scatter white floats along fjords and wait.

When sea water flattens they can't hide,

tricky as they are. It helps you've studied

ballet - learned how to suffer -- so that

when, sea clear as a wild hare, pod

cruising close to shore, you shimmy

into red dry suit, grab a sensor strap,

you won't collapse in tears as they veer,

unicorn horns twisty gleam against

high dry cliffs on the opposite shore.





Daily Crossword 8/18/09 Poem Draft





If I had a new idea would you ask?
Were you the check to my payee?
Mitochondria to run my solo cell?
Who the Great Dane, who flea?
Me? Itch to scratch unstung areas
My tongue along reed, your oboe
A hundred rooms lit by dawn
your chest hairs in my grasp
my whimper and your bang
if your dog had been ring bearer
if I'd baked love charms in the rye
beaten more sponge cakes rise airy
high as shoulder pads, poof hair era
nail bit quick pickpocket on the Metro
if I were Ichiro's knee you'd be the base
or I the ball your bat would hit
I'm two percent and you the Oreo
eye of newt, frog skull, the curse --
the blooming plastic bag, the ode,
your belch my box of chocolates
angle into shore some more, ahoy
I 'm semi conscious, you aren't neat
bicycle bag, slide rule, yesterday's news
you've got tools we've taken orally
Rescued Sara Lees in the sink, age
of silverfish, beer traps, slugs
closer than two smashed bugs
in a rug. Crowbar, SOS for help
sacred narwhal horn wide as Asia
voodoo doll, droop bellied idol
Rumplestiltskin, Cinderella, mend
us like think system in our sleep
bottle or wise orca carries note
to change your life or make it start
my heart my art my clock to set
and as I always say: and yet.

Perhaps I can add a stick figure image of my grand daughter (granddaughter?) to this blog. I try to download images from my computer and the command line shows a whirring do hickey while the blogspot drafting board shows a couple of little chicklets lining up along a line with spaces for many little chicklets - I go off down the hall, return to the same scene and conclude that the stick figure or imagination are my choices as far as image goes, at least as long as I'm here along Lake Chelan, far from Comcast's fat fast cable.

In other news, it is cooler today at Lake Chelan, cool and quiet as even when there are folks in the houses along the cove they stay indoors on days like these or go off to wineries or town. Chelan now has its own appellation from the AVA - it is its own region, not a subset of the Yakima Valley appellation as before. Chelan growers specialize in white wine grapes - your Rieslings, Gewurztraminers, Viogners, and Pinots. They import the reds from the Yakima Valley and blend them to make many red wines, some good, all more expensive than the $10 a bottle I keep as my spending limit. I prefer to buy $15 wines for $10 - always look at those bright colored tags meant for those like me and perhaps factual.

I like words for commotion and disorder: hubbub, brouhaha, hurly-burly, hullabaloo, rumpus.

The satellite has no interest in my altering my blog title photograph. Perhaps the photo of one day old Quinn is gone, perhaps a blank space greets you as you enter my blog. In any case, I blog. I change my photo another day, a day when I am not living in Chelan with the satellite that feels reluctance to interact with blogger.com. It has delicate feelings this satellite dish. I don't actually have a satellite in my yard. I do not live on a tiny world sprouting trees the size of the Little Prince.

My daughter's mother in law who left yesterday speaks French, is in fact a high school French teacher. They spoke, my daughter and she, in French. My fellow grandma, memere to my ama, also spoke to the baby in French. And sang.

I should look at the poems I have on paper and type them onto this computer. I am afraid to look at them. This morning I thought of sending out some poems, putting cart well in front of oxen or mini horse. I did the laundry and the dishes. I rode my bicycle along the road for 48 minutes. Nine miles. My husband installed a device that includes odometer (not motor), trip meter, maximum speed, time, and trip timer. My maximum speed this morning was 28 mph. Graciously, it does not record minimum speed, which was 5.9 mph, so now you know.

Feet pad upstairs in a pattern that says someone is making a bed. Ahhhh. There's a bed I won't have to practice my hospital corners on, bending low, scowling, sweaty-browed. It is easy to describe any activity as difficult and joyless though I enjoy doing useful work, especially if it is repetitious and mindless. I like fugue states.

Yesterday six of us played "Scattergories" on the deck looking out at the lake. Seven were involved and five played any given round as Quinn requires a handler, soother, walker, cooer-to, ambulator, personal assistant who is undistracted by, for example, writing down a word beginning with S that is a household device or a word beginning with G that is a Halloween costume. Such is life on the lake on a Saturday.

Poem Draft From Scattergories words to follow.
Woodrow Wilson, Tipper and Al,
typhoid fever to the waffle iron,
wanker or tycoon we judge them.

Someday I'll tell you about my computer inexplicably crashing.
Nothing this time was recoverable from my hard drive.
Before I have been lucky. My husband who is a techie super hero
has been able to go behind a curtain and whirl dials and return
with all my poems and all my emails and all my spreadsheets
but not this time. I woke in a sweat missing the New Yorker cartoon
I used as wallpaper. I am deeply denying the years of poems
I won't be seeing again. Maybe this is for the best. My folders
were cluttered with drafts upon drafts and maybe these were
poems that needed to get written on the way to better poems.
Maybe this silicacious cataclysm is clean slate, tabula rasa,
do over and get it right this time with no evidence I ever flubbed.
Yes and you know what Mike Meyers said when he was not
Bill and Ted but that other duo with that blonde SNL guy - Dana
Carvey. You know what he said even though the fog won't lift
here in Pullman where I'm cobbled onto somebody else's
wireless. Not cobbled. Glommed. It is hot here and I don't
have any folders to browse through and feel smarty smart smart
for making so many folders full of poems that might some
of them have been poems. This will give me a chance to look
at the poems I printed out and decide if they warrant another
look. Today is the first day etc. as the golfer girl said in high
school, the one who collected those sayings in a thick binder
eager to share the sappy wisdom that embarrassed me even
to hear it near me. My legs are sweaty from my daughter's
tan leather couch that is her boyfriend's tan leather couch.
My husband is working on another computer. I am typing
on the tiniest computer I've ever owned, with the idea of
getting to a place where I'll know if I want to keep it within
the fourteen days that would let me get my money back.
I'm charmed by this box the size of a clutch purse (not a car
clutch, even that of a Morris Minor, such as mine.) My
Morris Minor by the way is for sale. Three years ago I said
$14,000, at last month's All-British Fieldmeet at the former
Bellevue Community College, now Bellevue College, I said
$12,000. Right now, I say anything over $9,000 and you
walk away with my car. I'll put in the fuel pump. I mean my
husband will. If he names the tool and maybe draws an outline
of the more obscure ones, I'll fetch them/it for him as he
works, but no I will not do car repair myelf much as I thought
I might when I was a radical woman in the early 70's doorbelling
for the ERA in Olympia where more than one woman told me she would not vote for the ERA because it meant unisex bathrooms. We don't have the ERA honey and we still make 78 cents to every dollar the men make for the exact same job, but hey! we got unisex potties when they're one-seaters.

On my old computer were photographs from the last five years, many of which have no backup as in this digital age who prints? My India photos for example are no more. No pictures from Greece either.

This is what death is. Unique memory gone. And life goes on. Which is cruelty.