A GROWN UP GIRL PICKS UP THE ICARUS
TALE FOLLOWING THE GROWN UP BOYS
AUDEN KOMUNYAAKA OVID & WC WILLIAMS


Equilibrium like comfort can be deadly
dull. When Icarus was young he
longed to topple it -- loose labyrintine
rocks and hurl himself a path
across the sea. His father the engineer
balanced desire with deeds and
as we know, Icarus did not heed his
warnings for his boyish greed for
sky-high play that repeats his story today.

Много спасибо для всего from http://babelfish.yahoo.com

many thanks to Naomi Shihab Nye


This latte in Seattle has a white swirl heart thanks
to the barista’s skill and attention.

At the Family Grocer in Chiloquin
the salesclerk scooped stale Folgers into the dented urn.

The house has not slid away thanks to the retaining wall
after the trees had fallen across 32nd Avenue East below.

We always loved the peppery scent of carnations
but they are odorless now so we ignore them.

Children have allergies and asthma thanks to people
Lake Chelan was more peaceful before the jetskis arrived.

What about the Ceiva frame? Thanks to its internet connection
we can see photos of Sassy taken today 300 miles away.

Thanks to Medgar Evers pool in the early morning.
Thanks to the warm sauna after an hour swim.

Bald eagles have been disappearing from Puget Sound
You are fortunate to see one as you cross the floating bridge.

Your heartbeat speeds fearsomely
that massive wingspan shadows your car.

Thanks to the gas fireplace we are still cozy.
Thanks to the buds of the Ivory Prince Lenten Rose below the sleeping dogwood.

-Laura Gamache
2/5/09

Insula Dulcamara (1938)

I insulate myself from my inner beast --

blur my vision, hear the Muzak, practice scat.

You sing me Cain and what he did to Abel

as if we never had a dealing with Jack Welch.

I remember Carolyn and her mother Cora

Dore and throw them in my brain in front of Tito

but what do I know, I hear the crowd aroar

there's more to cooking geese than ovens.

Do we remember what we must not do unto

the meek? You tell me I am ... breaking up.

Cats extend their knives, the birds flock, etc.

USA Today has no pie chart for this, no arc

that makes any, ...can you hear me now?

I sing I love technology, loud and yet again

while nonsense calls me like a loving Dada.

Ostriches and chickens offer eggs, in coop

or praire what they give are ova over arias

unt uber allas what do we know but Mt. Etna

every one Vesuvial, every Dick and hairy Tom.

Beauty was a wall flower, her petals open

bruised and underused, our disapproval tacit

a tisket a tasket, you say, ...I didn't catch that.

The lights are bright at MSN and AOL

and do not make them diamonds, mhyrr, ore,

yet all you say to me ..., I'll try redialing.

Shefer Crossword 9/8 poem draft


Oh give me a poem where the buffalo roam
and don't stand by their meat for sale sign.
I sing of this place where the buffalo pace
though Durangos are clouding our days
Home, home in the dome
the kingdome that's blown all away...


I've lost my nerve. failure of verve. oy.

Another blue blue day with deep pigment green
warning us it won't be long till November darkens
our skylights with leaves large as eviction notices.

another false start. faint heart.

From the groaning table fall more crumbs
and the bums have chosen Sarah Palin
to suck out all the oil. They think they foil
our democratic urges I'm already singing
dirges to an early seen awakening.

alak aday our hope has passed away.

Ahoy! I see the ship Euphoria
do you spy it too? are you my mate?
or do you love to hate never abate
in greed instead of seeing need
succubus spouting ugly screeds.

As sun dims and shimmers, razors
miss and blood stains trouble others too.
You grimace from cold or memory, a-okay
from behind the boat, another agony
hushed in wake. We know emergency
room, vet, Benadryl, bandaids, litany
of cures, sign of the cross. Remember
when nobody's child took meds?
We down brownies, empty wine bottles,
rue the cut that will not close, seek grace
in a badminton swing, floaties on the lake.

I'll get to the point soon enough, Tim,
so get your fingers off your Apple
Davy Crockett downed in Alamo
John Lennon offed in front of Ono
your eyes glazed like I'm a rerun
you naked but no marble David
all this as cunning as quicksand
not what we wanted when we arose
and though there's sun there's ursa,
dippers falling through star forests
you can't see through your stink eye
hair glint tribute to bleaching agents
I'm mean, you say, my tongue is acid
you one unsung hung sharpshooter
oh feet oh legs oh thighs of clay
finger flash across yon abacus
and all the world at bay. Say
what you must say, the gander
and the goose, and I will stare
my stare. We've passed our prime
and tit for tat for far too little time

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


How far we've come when we can char
our ribs on Wolf stoves' stainless with ado
outdoors with cedar wood from Taos.
But here it is again, our rain, my love,
the rhodies saved and we will nip
no kiwi vine today. Forward up an urge
we'll climb a dryer day. Silicon in tubes
we rubes aplay while out the window ivy
climbs clefted bark the cedar sighs
I dream through catalogs as if to buy
a Morris chair, pillowed bed, Sundance
dainty on a thong, oh me I play my part,
hooked wool rugs and Grecian urns
sugar plums to dance and fill the pie charts
it's damp I'm dumb I've put away the aloe
don rubber gloves, downstairs I scrub off
mold, afix new tiles, at ten I'll break for tea.

Sheffer Crossword 7/28, a Poem Draft

Scratch a mosquito bite, endure perpetual scab
like lion bears unhappy and pacing at the zoo
or mildew toughened and renewed through suds
for all you believe cannot come through by logo
what you swallow will return as Rorschach ink
vast and intertwined as aftermaths in Asia
and you redfaced your fisted pork chop
UHaul trailer stalled in Murfreesboro, gas cap
popped and gone however scoured the area
as we sit down and bow before our porridge
kingdom for a crescent wrench a dime a diva
pitch hum annunciation your wristwatch Zulus
believe in progress accomplish three times nil
flex will and flesh your solar plexus achy
pack portmanteau deplane in Lisbon, Portugal
itch for vinho verde lamprey sausage trout
follow what you yearn for earn your paunch
cry baby cry still leap dolphins after porpoise
so you slip you lift again and try another role
ancient churches crumbled to the apse
your lapses unrepented unexumed you fumed
so what, so why not curry what you need?

Sheffer 6/23 Puzzle

Life loops forward from the womb
odd isn't it to have emerged awed
out of that dark Eden to rise and ebb
as we all do, alas, all that we erect
falls away no matter how jealously
we guard, hate, cordon off, bargain.
It is summer with the heat turned
high sky gray trees darkening their
green leaves and shaking them at
every passing car. How far we have
driven past our welcome. We say
we'll never again and then repeat.
Coyotes stare from Arboretum
azalea shade, crows litter alleyways
beside dumpsters, asphalt fills
potholes and we are filled with mad
anxiety and sad seedless watermelon.
What have we done to chickens' DNA?
We wallow at the shrink's as peaks
lose glacial weight. What we knew
about the water cycle cannot comfort
now it's wrong. So much here to rile
kiwi whips tendrils toward dogwood
all vines lasso, pull, muzzle into and
through relentless and blind as moles.

Another Tip for Writing Avoidance

Ampleforth, England, Haryana, India, Attiki, Greece,
Coram, New York, Horsham, Pennsylvania: Hello.
(people from there the last few to view this site)


Sheffer Today

Six degrees of chemically compromised bacon
drip and droop above electric element hot as ire
another morning another homage to the ohm.
Thank you ancients for arithmetic, plus signs to obeli
to Euclid for geometry's enclosing certainties
prime numbers, times tables, elegant listings
I memorized knew holy bright colored locales
in my brain neurons branched and twined for
ever amen. However shaken I could never lose
this cultivated repetition, entry to communion
with ancient Greeks. Junior High Tillitype Editor,
I printed the Pythagorean Theorum on the front
page, ninth grade, no wonder nobody kissed me.
Cream cheese whitened knife swabs bagel
a twist turns bacon mobius strip, potato almost
browned thanks be to physics and the dam.
I will not take on horrors here, the what ifs now in
view that rues all math has made we are paying for
our physics our can do since it is there. I'm
aware. To shelter frogs, I'll place the broken pot
beneath gingko where soil stays damp, pledge
allegiance to gold splashed honey bees but
I will not shun our human push into aerials
our running past the edge. We all fall down,
get up get up we cheer the cyclist. This morning.

Sheffer 6/18

My friend gyrated on the floor in front of the amp
I danced and guarded her as well as I was able
cables dangling from the ceiling not even a mat --
yoga and sushi the future, exotic food meant poi
proudly countercultural, dorm rooms never neat,
lived on wheat sprouts, undercooked lima beans,
bass pounding through my pelvis as if to gain
anything but orgasm made nonsense in that arena
(college cafeteria) and grass made me Glenda
everyone Glenda the Good, our arms gone wands
we blessed everyone everything, high as an alp
our power pulsing through the speakers, Tiny
Dancer, my friend upright and thrashing, the boy
with waistlength hair pulling me closer, it all
mattered and none of it mattered but matter
moving colliding like remnants of the Big Bang
in deep space grandiose colossal even my ear
Venus size widening ranging as if just to hear
were its tiniest ability as it licked up, sucked in
decibels as if sound was all you can eat spaghetti.

Moon's orbit widens no matter that we bay
for it like all we love to stay, this sheaf
I've written rife with fever flush like flu
you in my blood molten holy as ore
I would open be praised and bathed in
blood-blissed and loony calling, come close,
go away, run. Do you know what I saw?
what I feel bouncing off reflected glow,
lopsided orb, your shadowed planet,
my high blonde haunch, no smell of you
behind your ear under cold-hearted light.

Last night was the first of three Jack Straw Writers readings at the JS Foundation on Roosevelt in Seattle. My friend, poet, storyteller, educator, and social activist Merna Hecht read, along with Jennifer D. Munro, Kevin Craft and Wendy Call. Jack Straw records these readings and KUOW airs them, usually, as I remember, the following fall. Having worked with director, actor, poet and radio producer Elizabeth Austen, each writer got her or his work to live in the air. It was a pleasure to listen. Merna's statement of purpose in the JS Writers Anthology states that she wants, as a poet, "to give witness to the brokenness in family and daily life that occurs as a result of war, violence and ethnic conflicts." She was successful. In Kitchen Confidential, she writes:

"Why not get lost in what we love,
the world hurts us anyway."

then moves from the ringing of her kitchen timer to an explosive device timed to go off that will grind down another woman's hopes.

"You will fare well in my kitchen
where a cornmeal dumpling
with freshly picked blueberries
puckered beneath golden crust
will surprise you with cardamom,
lime, and cassis,
guarded recicpes
for keeping the hungry mouth
of the world's pain
on the other side
of the kitchen door."

In the next stanza she compares a 375 degree oven to the incinerating heat of a car bomb that violently interrupts hands reaching for olives.

She writes of making bread with empathetic connection to the bread making mothers of her students from Somalia, kneading conscious awareness and care for the world into sensory experience to make us resonate too with disrupted lives, even, dear Merna, in France.

The other writer whose work moved me was Jennifer D. Munro, whose memoir-in-progress is about "marriage, miscarriage and motorcycling."

Before I went to bed, I checked my email and read that a good friend's third marriage is in shambles, that her current husband is seeing someone else. They were having problems, she knew, but thought they would work on them. He thought if she were the "right" woman, they wouldn't be having problems, and started looking for the "right" woman. There is always more, and it always hurts. I don't understand. One of the things I loved about Merna's pieces was that she wrote that she didn't understand this, didn't know that, kneading in that information, which added to the force of her work. Life is work if we keep walking into it. I am indignant my friend must walk through another failed relationship. My indignance does not help anything. I was indignant when Jim's dad was deathly ill, was going to die. Indignance distances with its righteous point of view. The fire around me keeps me warm and separate and spinning around my own soveign self. My husband's brother has been trying to get divorced for over seven months. His lawyer quit this week. He isn't he reveals a divorce lawyer. Everything would have been fine if everyone was amicable. I was indignant. This I thought was criminal. The lawyer should have stated his position early on. Perhaps he did. We stood away from the proceedings, we didn't do anything to help. What can we do? Who are we to take charge? And if we took charge, would we do a better job? We cannot right the wrongs of the world, or even of our family. We sneer at the decisions of people in power, people running for office, people who we have never met. We don't - I don't - know what to do either. I don't even know how to talk to my own husband to get him to listen to my point of view when it differs from his point of view.


A Poem Draft

If I pay attention how can I not feel mad?
What will I do, spend every minute at the spa?
The world's a maze, our corn, their maize
on days like these I seek the solace of the ode
healing waters of the Oh! Religious eau
to lave what ails, the pounding head, the ulcer,
sooth me with what I love, construct the sac
to cradle, spin me dizzy as with beer.
I can barely sit here, sun in my eyes, my ego
gleaming gold as a fake tooth for all the fruit
rotting outside Burma, diesel through Laos
I'll give you an earful, shuck you, I burn red
as the setting sun over melting ice, a slight
whip to the back end of the wind. Oh Enemy
thy name blurs. What have I set alight?
Ten billion acres with seeds of praise?
Can't take bulldozers from razed schools' flanks,
can't raise children from death's ranks. Give
thanks? Water brought to boil, shuck sheaves,
inedible silk, slide ears into the pot, table set,
fresh butter pat on a blue plate. Now wait.
I have hands to smoothe napkins, snip tulips
for the vase, eyes to sense steam to stop
the pot boiling over, ears that have heard
too much, mouth to call loved ones to my table.

For all I am unable to bear, I apologize, for
all I do not do or seek to do, for all who suffer
whose names I will never know, I am sorry.
All the power all the glory. Holy Holy Holy.

NaPoWriMo 25

I want badly to be heard
but I have nothing to say
am mum on the matter of money
impotent as to prosperity

for you to get what you want
I must sacrifice what I want
and I'm not willing to do that
whimsical as you say.

---

You wear the gauge that measures depth
neoprene mitts and wetsuit dull the act
your partner gives thumbs up,
flutters through fan coral's vertical array
all for fun and beauty until POW
your air has fled you're in the cave, no Tom
to save you now. Just so we go for broke
for all that glitters in the proverb
face mask whether fogged or vented
fresh water muddies what you thought was ease.
Oh please. Keep your mind on pressure, ami,
before this boat lets drop another rider --
if only we could plan this from a desk!
Orca bulk menaces like Orson
your fingers ridiculous and reedy
reserve tank holds more air to draw
you give yourself a moment to adapt
nothing in the midst is solid
how will you provide, provide?

NaPoWriMo 24

Rhodie buds swell to Christmas lights as I pass
tolerating shade like me and Yew
this spring when winter cannot seem to stop,
that which was to be demonstrated, not.
Robin drops straw, dips, flies off with more --
a million tales in this not so naked city acre.
Sprays stop rot and encourage blossom set
in the 40s here, but 59 degrees in Oslo.
English ivy pushes itself upwards
I yank its fingers from fir trunk furrows
jump away as it falls around my arm.
Sky thickens from gray to puce,
alder splats spent catkins as it sways
above the wavering chicken windvane.
Maples begin within asphalt crack
and in spaces between decking.
Last year's thumbthick seedlings hide
in the prickly hawthorne between yards.
For all I have missed I wish to be forgiven.

NaPoWriMo 20

Ye Gods and Little Fish Hooks


Holy crap! he says as the day begins
April 20 and the sky awash with flakes
hillside tree limbs and cabin roofs,
our neighbor's new boat lift white.
In front of me, Lake Chelan undulates
gray near shore, melds into weather
overhead and around us. Will we
see color open from six stiff-necked
tulips or will their lips stay sealed?
Arbor grapes with leaf buds the size
of bebes and our apricot blossoms
falling with the snow. Where are
the birds today? Can the fishes see
it snowing?

NaPoWriMo 19

Auto Penitence


Forgive me others for I have directed
another to fill the oil receptacle
of my vehicle with water to the brim
I have turned the key, oblivious
to grim consequence, and I have
phoned AAA in willful ignorance
of my error. I have stood haughty
and sniggering at the piddly belief
a boy held that water would spew
and burn us if we did not wait two
hours for the engine to cool. I chided
him "you silly" for his ignorance
as I turned the oil receptacle cap,
turning my face away from water
contained to my left. My ego grown
godly my haughtiness knew no
bounds as I bid him from his carwash
hose to pour. "How much?" he asked
and I said, "More!"

NaPoWriMo 15

Mineralite structure defines opal
ugly gumption fills the toad
Refind Bogachiel on this map
Don't choose only at the deli
squirrel shares color with the hare
mugclub mits on microbrew ale
a penny for your etiquette
we have eternity to rot
wonder at ginzu knives' hundred uses
take time and take your pique
it all has value Bogus Basin
on Sol Duc trail and off the menu
So here is where we are, Egad!
Hesitate you lose. The Frankest
sourpuss, picklepuss, gloomy gus
urges latex gloves and tongs
cautions delays, defy them too
cedars do not emulate sequoias
pursue your pencil to its stub
Quillayute moves as does the Ural
Dig beneath the soil it's fiery
golden geese emerge from beans
poplars' sticky gum makes balm
Ungulates look forward to the rut
feldspar and copper form turquoise
missives take the sky along this arc
who cares what Joseph did to Essau
the sentimental crap from Noel
do-si-do my way just don't say Doh!
I'll miss my life more than its data.

npwm 14

Limulus polyphemus


Its carapace outlives the horseshoe crab
beach house chatchka ashtry scams
aside, fishery vessels mine the copper
in their blood not blessed like ours with hemo-
globin, the true blue bloods of Maryland.
Arthropods like trilobites except they lived.
Red knots and loggerheads eat their eggs.
Regrow limbs like seastars, check your notes,
Paleozoic lives in them and they're not over.
Hoover upright ugly, salt marsh cord grass,
book gills so they breathe awhile on land.
Rough surf flips them helpless as ladybugs,
Mezozoic underdogs who outlasted dinosaurs.

NaPoWriMo April Poetry Challenge Day 3

NapoWriMo 3

Near Valladolid a man shows us old pesos
burro on his porch, his wife serves Oreos,
chicken scratch, the polyp on his neck, now
buitres shade our map, a temple, on the road,
Colonial town squares yellow as ether
old encountered new we stare agog
Mayans in hardhats oompaloompas at the inn
Quintana Roo all candy for our ids.
Jaguar rite ball court I'm a mutt
no family here a thousand years ago.
Tulum women to my shoulder, prim,
their laundry in the ditch, do not quote Hesse--
no one on earth as smug as we
who milk it all and swipe the cream
gave the world flush toilets and sonata
x's on the map for cinnamon, gold, and oil
worthless hump of coins we're on the town
there's more where that came at the ATM.