On the road many a which way
proof of too long gone
I left my notebook
in the Wallowas.

Fishtrap folk found it
it's coming home
who knows who read what
probably nobody
boy do I feel exposed.

Gray day east of the Cascades
I'm more blue than gray
not ready not ready
to do what I should do.

Let's all run and play
lie in the sun and not care
our skin is folding pleats
in face and neck
let's throw ourselves
into the lake and not care
it's so cold too cold

Let's not only be me
let's be a tribe
like my little brother
and his "mans"
when he was four
before what came
I won't name

the ravens cry their raucous cry
they fly at each other and lash beaks
they'll devil the bald eagle
until he drops the fish
if he catches a fish
don't you wish the world
was more benign
that when your friend says
"I'm fine" you believed her.

I wrote this morning en plein air
my pen a whimsical cudgel
walloping my malaise calmly
as mayonnaise. The lesson
we never learn or I don't
is to get up and go again
all is forgiven in doing
all done is done and sun
wags no accusatory digit
I go low in disbelief until -
relief - I lift my pen again.

Today it's MONOLOGUE with 8th grade fictioneers.
Yesterday in the frigid classroom and I do mean frozen cold
though it was 52 degrees outdoors I exhorted them to play
deeply and they sat in their seats. One boy asked if
a character could - as in "Hurt Locker" - de- rather than e-
volve. So someone was awake and curious, so hurrah.
I said absolutely not. I did not. I gave permission.
I am a permissive creative writing teacher which is why
I need that master teacher in the room -
Oh three are enough lines beginning with I.

Have you read "Jubilate" by Galway Kinnell?
It celebrates Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno"
which I didn't know was more than the "To My Cat
Jeoffry" section. Kinnell's poem is in the latest
American Poetry Review, which I subscribed to
after seeing my friend Martha Silano had poems
published by them last issue. Huzzah!

Kinnell celebrates Smart and smartly celebrates
the celebration in '79 when poets gathered
to read 30 line sections of "Jubilate Agno"
to a "large and ardent audience." Huzzah!
Kinnell calls Smart Kit, calls the reading
... a source of joy and truth
the lung-ether of the living loving the long dead.

2011, so new it's still damp,
the unfolding green of its leaves
still furled so we can imagine
they could take any shape,
even our own.

I've committed to a budget,
and have made a chart,
an excell spreadsheet,
but now I have to enter
money actually spent
and I don't want to.

I claim I don't know how.
I don't understand Excell,
can't even spell it, and
my daughter's dog wants
me to throw the Kong
over the railing so she
can flail after it down
the hardwood stairs.

I don't want to throw
the Kong either. I don't
know what I want.
I want a cape with a P
on it for Poet or Prophet
or Princess or Priest
or poopoo head perhaps.

My clothes are too tight
my head is too foggy
the air is clear and bright
but I'm not.

I'm turning a big age
this year - turning as in going
off or bad, rotten enough
to be thrown into the compost
or off the deck to roll
downhill until I lean against
the railroad tie wall
maybe next to the lost Kong
or last year's pumpkin.

For my birthday
Pharmaca will give me
a lip balm and a chocolate bar
if I give them a penny.

My mother is on morphine.
She forms words like
a dental patient fresh
from the novacaine shot.
Her sentences drift off
into the football game
which she may or may not
be following.
She's dying of cancer
but I thought she
had months.

I have years and years
and here's to that
and to making new
thoughts and plans
and living within our means
and living with meaning.

Home. Home from Centrum and Blue Heron in Port Townsend. Home from driving south along the west side of Hood Canal to Oyster Bay Road in Olympia to read for a Fishtrap Fund/Friend Raiser on Friday night. Home from playing with Miz Q this morning while her birthday boy daddy and mommy slept. Jim drove over and we took Quinn with us to breakfast at the Salmon Bay Cafe, famous for its big, big breakfasts, and as of today famous with us for baby-friendly staff. We then drove to the Locks and walked around the gardens and into the fish ladder building where no steelhead were coming up the fish ladder, though the bubbles were very entertaining if you are, for example, exactly 9 months old. Shawna called - mommy needed baby home, so we took her. Reluctantly. Obediently. Then went to Cafe Fiore to read the Sunday paper all by our grown up selves. Sigh. It was about three weeks ago, give or take, when we took Shawna and her sister on Sunday jaunts, those starfish hands sticky with breakfast syrup clinging to our sticky-by-association clothes.

Tomorrow I teach at HIMS: smellorama by teacher request. I have to research smells of India, Greece and China so I'm coordinating with social studies. This is the type of teacher I love to be. Tangential. And trailing cardamom and lemon zest.

All hail hellibore and hasta
toss down that wassail
it's back to pasta.

Bright red cyclamen
with its upside down head
its 2010 aren't you glad
we're not dead?

Thursday right after school I drove just under two hours to Ashland to see Mark Doty. Culture shock just to drive from my little left-out town over the mountains to the mini-urbanity in muted toned nubbly fabrics of Ashland. Let alone going to see a major poet. How frightening would that be, to be written about as a major poet? Last year I went to Ashland to see Li-Young Lee. It's hard to think though since I'm sitting in the town library where a skeleton hand with a little speaker in its wrist and a motion detector somewhere laughs in a scary Halloween voice every couple of minutes. The motion detector is broken, it isn't that there are dozens of passersby at the desk. The librarian's smile has gone a bit grimace but she's game enough to keep the thing on, which draws the kids wandering around every so often so she can tell them about the free movie (Monsters vs. Aliens) at 2pm in the big room here at the community center.

Which reminds me of how Mark Doty's reading began, after the interminable fawning introduction that drew attention to the fact that the speaker whoever she so prettily was had heard him first at the Geraldine R. Dodge poetry festival. Finally, he walked on stage, they sorta hugged, sorta shook hands, he said a bit of a syllable (sorry, I don't remember which,) and then a prerecorded woman's voice boomed from the speaker above his head, telling us to keep our feet off the seats in front of us, this being the high school's very beautiful theater, and then the regular stuff all theaters remind us about. It'd have been nice to have done that bit before or perhaps during the stint of the introducer.

Doty opened by celebrating the broadside the one letter press printer in Ashland made for his reading, which I had bought before going in in the lobby for $10 (a bargain.) Before reading his poem he read the poem that he said it sprang from - "In the Same Space" by the Greek poet (I always think ancient Greek when someone says Greek poet, but I caught up) C. P. Cavafy. Here's that poem:

IN THE SAME SPACE

The setting of houses, cafes, the neighborhood
that I've seen and walked through years on end:

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.

And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.

-C.P. Cavafy


Doty said the last line over again, and we knew this line was what carried him into his poem of the same title.

He read in that markedly slowed down manner that puts me off for about a poem and a half and then draws me into the words. Jane Hirshfield does a similar thing - when I heard her last year my first thought was "how affected," but then I was transported. Ditto Doty.

The couple to my right just moved to Ashland from Zila, near Yakima. He was a journalist, she a children's librarian sucked up into management. They were so pleased with their relocation. Ashland has a cultural life, from the Shakespeare Festival to the Varsity Movie Theater to the Bloomsbury Bookstore, and the Chautauqua Series that brings poets like Mark Doty, who not only read at the evening event but work with the kids in the high school. No wonder they're pleased. It's also physically beautiful, and whatever my meaner thoughts about the slight affectation of the gentlefolk farmers in the vicinity, there's lots of wonderful local food, including artisan cheeses.

And now the librarian is talking with another local who brought in an unwatchable DVD he'd checked out, returning it now unwatched, complaining "you know how people are around here." Sigh.

Doty read a handful of new poems, one of which, about being greeted by the emissary goat from a herd, I really liked. He told an anecdote about Stanley Kunitz at his 98th birthday, then talked about his puzzling over Kunitz hitting his poetic stride in his 70's and 80's. "I think it's because of his garden," Doty said. Kunitz loved all phases of the garden - all year, from upsurge to rot. Like most of the rest of us, Doty said he struggles with any kind of acceptance of mortality. He read his poem "Heaven for Paul" wonderfully - it's set in an airplane about to crash, and features his partner Paul going glowily beatific facing death while he panicked. I liked his talk about Kunitz better than "Heaven for Stanley," but that's just me.

During the q & a, which I'm always grumpy about, the questions usually being more along the lines of "LOOK AT ME!" than sincere questions, someone asked about how Doty got started writing prose. He said after his lover died in 1994 he couldn't write poems - what he was going through wouldn't let him make poems. He started writing in sentences, then paragraphs, in prose. He began looking at them, thinking, "now, that sentence there could be better..." He said that opened an aesthetic distance, paused, then said, "Aesthetic Distance can Save Your Life." (caps mine.)

Afterwards, I wandered the lobby watching folks lined up to have their books signed. My broadside had come presigned so I didn't have to stand in the line. I hate standing in the line, forcing the exhausted poet to engage with WHO? little me there with my book out wanting his actual hand on my paper. Pah! And the fear I'll say something. If I could just thrust the book forward, stay mute, I'd avoid the possibility of blather. Kiss the anti-blarney stone before standing in a signing line.

In this morning's P.I., I say casually, this morning's P.I., as though it doesn't have a noose around its neck, but I digress.

This morning's P.I. brings happy poetry news - Mike Hickey, elected Seattle Poet Populist for 2009, gets a front page spread in Life and Arts. A few years ago, Mike put out a call for books - local prisons he had discovered had nothing in their libraries. He took up collections and took car trunkloads to Monroe and elsewhere until he was turned away. Sorting through the books, shelving and cataloguing them was too big a strain on resources he was told. All this to say, Mike champions reading and writing and loving words.

Towards the end of the article, we learn that not everyone is a fan of the Poet Populist Program, and it's guess who, someone who writes for The Stranger, the paper whose job it is to remind us that we are indeed all in junior high and that we are not emphatically not in the popular crowd, even though we may be poet populist or whatever. The Stranger's writer wrote, as quoted in the P.I. article, "Public poetry is almost always very bad. Think of Poetry on Buses, a program that consistently produces the worst poetry any of us have (sic) ever read." Unnecessary roughness, I say, and a little nasty of the P.I. reporter to report this gratuitous aside that assures me that if the Stranger's writer sent a poem to the Poetry on Buses program, it was not accepted. Here's my take on Poetry on Buses. I love it. I love the gigantic poet-upon-poet reading that celebrates the new round of poems on buses and I love the torrent of poetry writing in classrooms and kitchen tables throughout the county that precedes each deadline. And I love that poetry rides the buses, is read instead of ads on buses by thousands and thousands of people.

Let us now turn to Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem, the most public public poetry we have to consider for four years. Was it equal to the task of following our new President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address? How could it have been? What could any of us have written that could have spun us further into that momentous moment? Two million people filled the space from the capitol building to the Washington Monument. How many millions of us watched on how many screens, how many of us together in this hungered-for moment of national unity, this collective at last after eight years collective celebration?

After getting up for morning after how many mornings and writing, Elizabeth Alexander stood in front of two million souls and spoke - declaimed - affirmed her poem and spoke her piece of this historic day. I say hurray. Oh I can bring pettiness to the table, carping, my own hierarchies of who should have been invited, my correctives for her elocution, and all the sour grapes that never blend into a satisfying whine. The New York Times has the transcript of her poem on its website. I say read it, more than once. And then get out there and walk forward.

Paul Klee, Battle Scene from the Comic Fantastic Opera "The Seafarer" 1923

Battle-Scene
From the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer

It beguiles--
This little Odyssey
In pink and lavender
Over a surface of gently-
Graded turquoise tiles
That represent a sea
With chequered waves and gaily
Bear up the seafarer,
Gaily, gaily,
In his pink plume and armor.

A lantern-frail
Gondola of paper
Ferries the fishpond Sindbad
Who poises his pastel spear
Toward three pinky-purple
Monsters which uprear
Off the ocean-floor
With fanged and dreadful head.
Beware, beware
The whale, the shark, the squid.

But fins and scales
Of each scrolled sea-beast
Troll no slime, no weed.
They are polished for the joust,
They gleam like easter eggshells,
Rose and amethyst.
Ahab, fulfill your boast:
Bring home each storied head.
One thrust, one thrust,
One thrust: and they are sped.

So fables go.
And so all children sing
Their bathtub battles deep,
Hazardous and long,
But oh, sage grownups know
Sea-dragon for sofa, fang
For pasteboard, and siren-song
For fever in a sleep.
Laughing, laughing
Of graybeards wakes us up.

-Sylvia Plath (1958)

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.

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.

ESSENTIAL POEMS READING REPORT

At 10 minutes to 7 it was Paul Hunter and me sitting at a table with a box of his two books.
At 5 minutes to 7 it was Paul Hunter, me and my husband at the table.
At 3 minutes to 7 I put together the black music stand
At 2 minutes to 7 my daughter Shawna walked in
At 1 minute to 7 my next door neighbor Cate arrived
At 7 we were joined by Neil and Annie who run a book group and work at the cafe
When I officially opened the reading, at 7:10, there were eleven of us around three tables which we mushed together.
It was a sit-down reading that kicked bigtime poetry butt.
I introduced the work of bronchitis-stricken Rebecca Loudon, and did my best to represent six poems from Cadaver Dogs, soon to be released by No Tell Books. After I introduced Paul, he read celebrations of (vanishing) farm life from all three of his books. The third in his trilogy is due any day from Silverfish Review Press.
If you were there, you know.

NaPoWriMo 30

My father and I tour the basement.
I hold my breath, forgetting I needn't
close my eyes for the bathroom -
they replaced the tortured toilet,
bashed-in sink six years ago. We talk
mildew on the windowledge, do not
worry about falling through the floor.
He says the sliding door is single pane
my mother yells down it's double.
I put my fingers either side, verify
his version. The day darkens here
in the dark corner. She wants me
to look at the broken German clock
and the broken blonde one behind
she's giving to my brother. Why?
I ask. Because he remembers it,
she says, and I say, I remember it,
but that doesn't mean I want it.
She points at 33's and 78's my sister
has told her she doesn't want.
She fusses about shipping them.
I say, She doesn't want the records.
My mother sits on the stuffy sofa
blossoming batting out its ugly arm.
"Such a lovely piece," she says, points
to the end table my sister does want.
The detritus of two lives jumbled
around us, ill cared for as we were,
even cases of his Mark Fable wine
mixed - empty, full, stacked together
like a mind perpetually elsewhere.

NPWM 5

I Google "furor", am shown a photo of art
made of feathers and a pickled fetus head
that image in my head forever after
this an age of disconnect and shocks
blue TV haze, a pistol in each clutch
reptile brain screaming run or crouch.

---
Triolet

In April, Flickers descend upon the building
openings the size of soup cans in the wall
they've got the nesting instinct it is spring
In April, Flickers descend upon the building
Picture birds in flight and how they sing
These peck fist sized holes, we hope for fall
hang faux owls in hopes of stopping
openings the size of soup cans in the wall.

3/28 Sheffer Crossword Poem Draft



I pull it from the oven careful in mitts
when that one's sold paste the red dot
There's better hot water at the spa
we love the Hunt Club but we ate in
Pablo and Pindar immortalized the ode
I profer regrets that everybody has
calf with three legs bound at the rodeo
Bindweed, Loosestrife, Dyer's woad
Sunday in the Park, The Ironers
all who publish are not male
I'd rather spite my nose than coo
Vodka stinger for Elaine, get me a mai tai
Spears to tell it all till she goes splat
cut a figure, up, above, a rug
if I love the book I read the intro
what you've never owned you can't resell
you'll know barbarians by their hoards
hold me tight to your chest don't be a miser
you imagine flute but blat the tuba
fifty ways to leave your habit
the heroes of our film are those who rob
I keep a shrine at home for Owen
condo on the magma in Hawaii
jointed goatgrass, puncturevine, millium
You be Lone Ranger, I'll be your scout
You play Saint-Saens, I stumble over Sousa
this room is empty but not for let
I cannot place exactly what I'm for
nobody warned me at the onset.

Last night the culminating reading for the school I've worked with since 1992. Yes, 1992. Not these particular kids, who didn't exist in 1992. They're fifth and sixth graders - and poets. I handed each a poetic license, entitling them continue to write and revel in poetry. One of the kids came up to me afterwards to check out the meaning of revel. One mother asked, "They wrote those poems?" "Yes," I said. "Except for A.," she said. "He wrote his too," I said. "But you said he memorized it," she said. "He wrote it and then he memorized it for the reading," I said. "I can't imagine those words coming from him," she said, at which point I realized A. was her son. Every year there's one sixth grader who is so truly sad our poetry making/reading time is over she/he gives me a touchingly awkward goodbye speech and hug. Here's what this year's fellow traveler, a boy, wrote and read at the reading:

Ode to Poetry

Traditional

Ode to poetry
the awesome power of blah
a river of words
leaving people in awe

a picture may be worth 1000 words
but 1000 words is one great picture
cutting, crafting, working words
make a wordily overture

Rhyme

Poetry is an art as some might agree
true poets that is to a certain degree
but my goal is, surely you'll see
to make other people believe like me

Haiku

Poetry is fun
it isn't true poetry
if it isn't fun

Discipline is key
strong nouns, strong verbs, strong writing
rhyme sometimes won't work

Come With Me

Come with me
to the place
where there is poetry
don't grab your keys
you're already there

Traditional

there it is, that's it
I know that that was short
but I was kind of hoping
you'd be the poetry sort

in the humongous hole of poetry
I've only shown you a dimple
it may look just like building words
but I can tell you, poetry isn't simple

-B.

Here's the poem the mom didn't recognize as her son's:

My Mind

My mind is a mass of incandescent gas
a giant nuclear furnace
where hydrogen turns to helium
with a temperature of 17 degrees

-A.

as Hamlet knew to be is not to do and
if you've gone behind the shed
you know what clings to you like odor
unless you're alpha dog, a Leo
honey bees desert the hive
you left the door wide open
your missing eye won't make you Odin
all that staggers in your stead
cacophony begins with gavels
we claim too many gods to seat
you're not the princess and the pea
emir bowing to the east
which brings us to the vole
we are the proles with tails to wag
mucking lodges as they ski
for all our thorns we won't meet Herod
Caspar Milktoast Mitty not one ace
Used Fleetwood Prowler bachelor pad
Ramen fills the cart not orso
ground-bound as emu
we've no Aunt Bea or Opie
doff porkpie or fedora
you will never reign as champ
a perfumery of leis
did not turn you someone else
you have a turn, it's not the end.

Received an email from a colleague (with an mfa in poetry btw) that included the phrase "we're fast encroaching on national poetry month" and I think to myself jezus h god in a lampshade why the fracking he#(* do I take seriously the rejections I get when supposedly educated supposedly language loving people don't take the time and brain to use our language with attention. I know this person was not writing tongue in cheek nod nod wink wink but earnestly. I'm a little disheartened. Do I have an audience? Can they read?

I spent two hours this morning looking for a place to take five or six poems. A couple of weeks ago I sent 16 poems to Alaska. They said they wanted up to twenty. I send work every Saturday and look forward to it, which is funny, given that in past years I've sent a flurry once every six months unless someone asked me to send them work or someone local had a cool/funny/weird submission idea - tee shirts, bookmarks, bus placards. With sending work every week, it doesn't matter if one week I have a brain fart and send strange poems or poems inappropriate to the journal, because the next week I'll be sending somewhere else so the stakes aren't as high as when I was throwing poems to the one and only wind I could ever trust I could generate - would I build steam a second time in the year? I couldn't trust that I would. I circled contests in Poets & Writers and sent with thousands of other desperate once or twice a year submitters. I felt prostrate. I get excited now, thinking about who I'm going to send to, about what I'm going to send. Maybe some journal - I'm sending to many more now that I don't have to do it all at once - will take my work. If not, at least a lot more undergrads are reading my work.

3/22 Sheffer Puzzle Poem Draft

When the rains come, he marches us two
down the squelching trail . The view
is stunning but the stench has me rapt.
The brain is wider than the dust bin
and all the world's a bell jar
its so dark we dare not stare to sky.
Before the wonder bra, before the lei
all that's grim that will come after
he steers by sextant and weathervane
we live on hardtack and pesto
there are no tracks to put an ear
to. We believe in radius and ulna.

3/21/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


Caveat-Containing Epigraph
you gotta read these babies fast cuz I'm yanking them from the site
as I revise and send them out into the vast poetry-in-print universe
for I do believe I do believe


up the rutted trail tromped the laden ass
musical with metal pots not even a tail to wag
prehensile ears heard grins on every face he met
but that's a portent for another age
like Egypt's fall involved a viper
we've had court cases and president for ape
and no one sweet as Jack to Rochester
cars toddle through potholes as we sit
we count comets with our toes in Yukon
flash our gold encrusted sash
we've been there too
up through the crenellated pine
we gotta leap or fester
gather rosebuds to our chests or plunk
piano in dingy parlors, taste
cardboard or cardamom, the jester
laughs at you pal
seven league boots across the seas
jeeze dive into it with all our mites
the strobe light's lit we've got the stage
greens in our teeth, berries now for Sal
Dostoyevsky peels another onion
it's awful quiet under sod.

PONTOON NUMBER TEN

Floating Bridge Press has come out with a double anthology of Washington State poets for their tenth anniversary - a "best of" section of poems from the first nine years, and the selected poems for year ten. My poem, nothing to hold onto, is included! They have also published an anthology of poems from Metro's poetry on the buses project, which you can buy at the same site. Mine, from 1999, wasn't chosen. Wah. But still.