3/7/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


Anticipate and act all day
coil tightly like a snake or perm
remember phone dial
pull on finger, New Haven
where you saw your father laze
your dog at heel, collective allele
your answers don't lie aft
set type, your els and ems
be braver than you're craven
bring on those midnight beads
smuggle in the answer key
green acres broad as Eva
Scotch as steelcut oats
Mother of Berries before the lid
slides to I'll bet the pair
we've every red print Ace
Give me this day my daily pen
the value's in the dally
in the valley we'll be shaven
and run away from her
but that is neither plum nor egg
you've time to yack in Yakima
it's all immediate, slow down, shag
your poker face grave as raven
you really ought to give Iowa
a nod or quarry from your hunt
hammerhead of sea or peen
say unto others yes and yeah
for what you reap you've got to sew.

3/6/08 Sheffer Crossword Poem

A flicker plies phone wire. Air blower blats nigh -
bird lifts, peanut cheroot, wire twanging from the sag.
If I were a real birder I'd memorize mohawk or tam
chant genera et cetera. That's not my area.
This entire opening a ploy
to lull you we're observing spring biota
while underneath I've got Tim Burton
his Zappa hair but you don't care I'm not your mom
in spring at school I penned immolation, ossify
admired tattoos and tights and all the blazing glaze
that meant exempt to
not accept the wheel
that's life. I was on the outs
with every oven's pie
remote as Alps
(which may not be how would I know?)
hills and dales I refused to go o'er
in those old smelly springs ere
have a good day sent me semi
comatose. I never tongue kissed LSD.
This isn't about me you know
Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam but I'm a comet
that with luck will fizzle through dark not an
April afternoon oblivious fauna
humping as I orient
for flashy burn which is our
Millay though Ms. McGraw
faded fair in love
I would not be her muling heir.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

You can still get my book nothing to hold onto on Amazon.com. They also carry In My Life: Encounters with the Beatles, which has a personal essay of mine in it.

We gathered all the baskets but forgot about the eggs.
the kid on the hillside with the ewes renewed his sos.
water bottle spilled across my skirt, some become alar
but I'm among the stung ones hoping for a moment alee
before the ratcheting paw
a day in the shade in Napa
another risible ruminate.

Waste of time to wait for facts

what's her name who cares it's Amy

Ama someone's mama but hey Aloha

smile to meet you why have to opt

feet choose and flit can't find a dinar

it's so hot I've nothing to conceal

cardamom waft a fancy stamen

hesitation walk your mother's oven

The Portugese arrived, the Jews, and Ari

how now brown cow calf at your hip

we have no need of saints here Agnes

Kashmiri silk, the Moor's last sigh

the garbage smokes at center stage

ayervedic fabric FabIndia. Ignore

is practice too. Hoard change and pencil

cotton baby blanket on the bed no parka

search the idiom for tome

flutist against a white wall lietmotif

so what's the motive where's the ore

in storehouse go-downs, nag

me never crunch fish coconut toast

caste marks calls to pray no hatred

thali meal curd meets dal congeal

creamsicle salwar limeaid kameez

blue tarp black pepper a taxi hit

red bus rumble scooter cha cha

stoplight means not stop but segue

looming doti, gold chains, condo ads

come Jew Town Spice Market on and ons

my wanderings my anxieties Max Ernst

Why the h#($*& would I post voice mail on my blog?
hey, this is me, don't forget the rhubarb. And the tp!
I'm, yeah, we just got in, yeah, I'm waiting for them to open the door.
Where are you? uh, oh, right, I see you. Hi hi! oh shoot. turn this thing off.
goddam it's taking a movie. I don't know. Here you do it.

2/28 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft:
Coda

You smote smell with one hundred Bans,
moon in the seventh dorm that's ebbed,
in the dark, exposed as Bela.
What else would you do in lieu?
Every clock strikes XII,
leaf pivots on its axel,
lilac on the breeze my favorite odor.
Oh sting we will not last the eon.
someday we'll play when we're retired,
hear our lives as through a cantor
each moment framed within its gotcha
the point described along some arc
the answer was always neither/nor.
Oh you were elegant as any ibex
on skis aswish as ice skate
oh Thunderdome thy name is Max
oh G. oh please that mellow sax
oh stannum balm, ah tin.
Every day was our premiere
every aspen from one seed
each dove who lived it cooed
and you, so eloquent when mum.
The dead are just the earth's alumni
so why does that sound psycho?
if there's a god is this his jobsite
the weatherman's Old Sol.
Inside each capsule there's a roar
amo amas amat and on anon.
But rest here with me in lea
of river maybe Nile
we'll perm our hair again be Pert
no matter that we've erred
sing for me again, your salient alto.

So well anyway jeez.

I am not going to go chronologically through my days in India. I thought I would do that, then was felled by a post-air travel cold, then got to thinking chronological order is a boring way to think about my trip anyway.

You can't borrow anybody else's life. I've tried more than once to sluff mine off, tribute to my reptile brain, the idea that I could just slump out of my too-small dead carapace and grow myself a new one. Those resolution types of incremental growth type changes are difficult, require diligence and discipline and drudgery, that is, day to day adherence to what I said I would do. This is the only way to get anywhere I've wanted to get myself, but I still dislike it.

Poetry, I, too, dislike it. Marianne Moore.

I'm wearing the new fragrance from the small hovelly perfume store in Cochin. They keep the fragrances under a glass counter in quart size stainless steel thermoses and fill a vial only when you order one. The fragrances are of the essential oil persuasion, not perfumes per se. I don't know very much about perfume, but I like the smell of this one: "green orchid." I also bought "Kerala flower." The last perfume I bought, a few years ago, was in Paris. "Jaipur" - and now it strikes me that Jaipur is in India. I stopped buying the perfume when they started the s/m bondage ad campaign. Obviously I am not in that company's demographic. The first perfume I bought was when I was in high school. "Wind Song". It went so well with Jim's "Jade East."

Kerala was hot and humid, a challenge for NW native me. I went up to the tea estates in the Western Ghats partly to see them and partly to wake up one morning with dry skin. The first week I was in India there were times at night I almost couldn't breathe, heat and humidity weighted my chest and my lungs got a little panicky.

The man came back in a small white car (not a Hindustani Ambassador, and not a Bajaj Rickshaw Taxi, these I would meet later,) a small white probably Japanese car with the word "Radisson" printed on the side. My luggage and I got in. We languished in the confusion of traffic, my driver honking and being honked at, the car suddenly lunging at an angle, halting, lunging, halting, straightening, swerving, halting, then driving into the hazy night to pull up ten minutes later at the door of the Radisson, which looked like any Radisson anywhere, except that there were doormen in white turbans out front, one of whom opened the door for me, while another man took my wheeled bag out of my hand and wheeled it to the front of the check in desk. As I checked in I looked behind me to see that my lugage had disappeared. I commented on this and was told that this was as it should be. How many pieces? the man behind the desk asked. Two I said. Another man walked me past a counter where I could see my luggage as we headed towards the elevator. I hesitated. He said, "they will be brought up." He pushed the elevator button, told me my floor and room number and presented my passcard key with two hands while bowing. I went up and locked the door, wondering how long I would have to stay up to receive my luggage. There was a dim glow to the room but the lights wouldn't turn on. I tried all the switches, then the knobs on the lamps. There was a knock on the door. Did I mention I didn't have any small denomination ruples? That is to say smaller than 100? ($2.50 US but my book said that was too much to tip) I felt uncomfortable as this new man brought my luggage into the room. He noted the lack of light other than the dim glow. "Put the card into the slot," he said. I put the card into the slot at waist height by the front door, simultaneously remembering that this was the method in Greece last year and probably other places. He bowed and left. I turned lights on and off. I ate most of the complimentary chocolates on the little white plate on the table by the bed. I lay in the comfortable bed and set my alarm for 5am. It was midnight.

Sentences of Three Words
from Learn Malayalam in 30 Days

You sit in the chair
The book is on the table
Smear oil on the face
Children should wake up in the morning
Must go to temple at dusk
Must wash the leg and face
There is no bitter gourd in the market
There is no limit to anger
Marriage is to-morrow

Alphabets Are the Outer Garments of a Language
-from the forward, Learn Malayalam in 30 Days

Malayalam is the language of Kerala, one of 22 official Indian languages, and impossible to show you without downloading the Malayalam font. I've been trying for 10 minutes. It's a Dravidian language, which made me think of Druids, but no, sadly, the Druids have (had) nothing to do with Malayalam. Malayalam the word is fun to say, and Malayalam the language is fun to listen to. It's also spoken in Sri Lanka and on the (in the?) Lakshwadeep Islands.

I've reread my 200th entry, in which I had many worries about my arrival in India, especially because it would be late at night. Lots of flights arrive in Delhi late at night. It is possible that most of the flights arrive then. The airport has been under construction for a few years, and is ugly and incoherent. After I cleared passport control and customs I dragged my luggage towards the "arrival lounge" which is an elegant phrase but doesn't match what met me. Through the automatic glass doors there is a metal tube railing to either side of the cement walkway. The walkway slopes uphill and along the railing on either side are people crammed in two, three, twelve deep. Each is holding a sign with a name on it. I panicked. What if I didn't see my name after walking through the entire gauntlet? I could barely focus, let alone read. I breathed. If I missed my name I would turn around and walk through again. My ability to read improved. Man, there were a lot of signs. Then I saw that some of the signs had logos around the periphery of the white space where names were printed in sharpee. Soon thereafter I saw "Radisson" on a group of these signs, and lo, my name was on one. This registered on my face. A man made eye contact from behind the sign, and walked to meet me, taking hold of the handle of my suitcase. I followed. Another man in Radisson logoed jacket took over. He walked briskly forward, I ran to catch up. He stopped at the curb, handed my luggage back to me, said, "wait here." I did not move. I think he said, "I must get the car." Cars careened past. People got in. I stood where I was on the edge of the roadway. An interplay of horn honking chorused around but not at me. Cars zoomed forward, clustered, blocking each other from moving, broke apart, honked, drove on, reconnected, separated, disappeared beyond my sight. I stood. People clustered outside the airport building. They yelled at each other. It was coolish, cooler than I thought it would be. I wished I hadn't left my jacket at home. I wondered if I was on my own now. A woman smiled at me. I smiled back. I breathed. The cool air felt good, knocking the airplane staleness out of me.

POST 200 Moment of Silence

I'm off to India on Sunday. Off to I N D I A. I've engaged in email conversation with someone at the bajillion dollar hotel I'm staying in my first night near the Delhi airport and have finally gotten him/her to reveal to me the meaning of the phrase "appropriate transfers have been arranged." Their website stated they had an airport shuttle. How would I get the shuttle? I wondered. Would I have to call the hotel? Would I have to go outside and stand on the curb at 11pm while people tried to "help" me? Would someone be waiting in the lobby with my name on a card? It took several emails back and forth to learn that someone will be waiting in the arrivals lounge with my name on a card. YEA! Unfortunately I have not been able to obtain any rupees. The local supply has dried up. I have to call around today and tomorrow to see if any returning traveler has cashed in rupees, or I'll have no money to tip the person with my name on the card and look like a cad or bad person. There is an ATM in the hotel. Last resort. What is an appropriate tip? What is the exchange rate?

I got my shots. I think it's excessive to buy the steriPEN for $80 at REI when bottled water is available everywhere. Right? I'm not going out in the bush on an elephant. I'm going to the biggest city in Kerala. Why use commas when separate sentences are so punchy? I am currently in pursuit of noise-cancelling headphones for my flights, airplane ambient noise being high on my list of fatigue inducing bother. I bought some for $34 yesterday at Bartell's, brought them home, and Jim and I tested them by running the garbage disposal, dishwasher and his espresso machine. There was some noise reduction, but not as the box claimed 70% noise reduction. I took them back. I've looked online and there appear to be cheaper options than the Bose Quiet Comfort 3 ($350). Sennheiser sells the PXC-250 for about $100. Etymotic Research ER6 is another choice. My eyes are blurring. There's also JVC and Creative Aurvana. (not Nirvana.) Brookstone and Sharper Image sell their own brands. Who knows how good they are? Brookstone and Sharper Image say they are great! We are deep into an area of no interest to me - I just want peace for the hundeds of hours I'll be aloft.

Also for my flights I have purchased pressure hosiery, oh yes, and these will be so comfortable on arrival in India though my feet will not be the size of elephant hooves (feet?) which is a good thing. Also JetLag homeopathic remedy and some moisturizing solution to spray up my nostrils to prevent dry nasal passages, the cursed cause of inflight illness induction! YIKES!

1/23/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

Do you guzzle or do you sip?
Ask around. Ask Roy, ask Dana,
let's go. Chop-chop.
Do you scream, rant, coo?
I'll know your answer by its odor,
your language by the lira.
Own disgruntlement or awe,
pay compliments or mortgages.
oh and so I'm Bambi
now, and what's the sum
of your parts? It's all enol,
grease monkey or mogul.
Moreover,
we've got enough rope
to you know go ape
among the sumac.
write AB or eta
we've sewn the same seam,
you, me, Morrison,
Archimedes and his screw.
von Leewenhoek's near
mirror, germs sending sos,
seen now, soon taboo.
Make me no Morse Code
and put me in no urn
send me to Oahu
in April or in Adar
I'd go there any sec.
Pull hard now on that prop
and throw out your meds.
Dig something living with that hoe.

Oh my goodness, here's a video of the University of Miami Women's Crew. View it! My daughter the athlete is the Assistant Coach of this team. My heart swells and soars.

10/18/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Draft


Never marmalade always jam
the story of a life without leis
without ever calling "Fore!"
the ability to conjure ice
without opening your freezer, Aria
without costume, amen without evil.
We do not need the Mesozoic
to remember living in dens.
Oh sigh you say she's
not even trying to forge,
I don't know she roams
through this poem off a pier.
My dears, here's your eggs.
Pitch 'em mesdames
if you're so sure of who you are.
Are the planets only balls
hurled out of another era
unpremeditated, minus mesquite?
GSAT, MCAT, PSAT
results dead without urns
and here's another beau geste
earnest in its way as essay
necessary in this heat as sari.
Did you catch them there that pair?
Do I need another messmate?
The answer once again isn't
no or I don't know go feel your oats
while you have the tune. Oh HAL.
House of me, chez
you you're never too busy
to fall down. Another round of I Spy?

1/1708 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

All that cleans you is not soap
all who love cannot wed
all your alibis aren't ironclad
there are those who see thru
you raw as you are and hero
supermam tarzan liontamer emir
All who believe in NASDAQ have IRAs
All who listen don't hear mermaids each
lithe all impossible as psalms
When Scylla speaks does she rasp?
Do we care we're out of style?
On Donder Blitzen, Rudolph Cupid
and what do think of all this Wes?
I'm dangerous as moray eel
Hard pressed as an iron
near the Tannhauser Gate in the end
Don't we all seek Batty's sass?
All that underskins our ads
All the wincing of our age
All the treasures in your purse
All you love goes out of order
your dog and Depp, pals, Pitt
this is it (you knew I'd say) inmost
the utmost awful word now cool
now gone now charged as ion
All can get the wrong idea
All and any, Arnie, Anne
All the many loves of Sue
and you (groan) do you sort
wheat, chaff, doer from the deed?
Does it matter Mr. Mr. Mr. Mrs.?
All this fiddling all these eras?


I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. - Ray Batty (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner

Last night I read at Hugo House where I haven't been for a year or so, not since the changing of management, but still it looked the same except the guy at the front didn't know me and vice versa. I was a few minutes early so there were barely any people and nobody who wasn't reading too, chairs around the little round tables, little stage with too high lectern and black wall behind, a line of wine beer and water bottles on the bar on the left side of the bar, kitkats, peanut butter cups and skittles on the right. A lot of us read. All WITS writers. Rebecca introduced us via anagrams of our names which was lively and fun. Not everyone timed their reading beforehand which always bothers me ever since a poet at Arizona AWP read forty five minutes so that Philip Levine had about ten without going over time. We were all women last night: poet, young adult author, poet, poet, poet reading memoir, children's nature writer, poet, and poet. Subject matter: Hanford Nuclear Reservation, high school love triangle at the Showbox, deep play, three gringas (putas) in Mexico, lesbians in Yellowstone's landscape, service dog coming of age story, Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans for so many, sex swearing and silent suffering. Time well spent.

Because I could not look you in the face
I used a macrolens and photographed your toes.
Our mother pretended you were like any of us
only lazy and trying to abuse her patience.
My sister who lived through worse she says
says you were diagnosed borderline paranoid
schizophrenic. At school they said you were
emotionally disturbed. The drill at home was we
ridiculed you, looked down our noses, ignored you.
my father pinned you down once in the kitchen,
a commotion of brussel sprouts and grunts.
Our father who as I was setting the table,
I lofted forksspoonsknives off a placemat trampoline
picked them off the floor and hit him again
but he wouldn't make a sound of his own at all.
He's a nice man my mother said, but
I sat in a chair and listened for hours. You
were downstairs yelling or playing your drums.

Today is Post #190, ten more days to #200. I may make cupcakes.

In the 6th grade today, we read a poem in Wu-Yen-Shih Meter. Say that again, out loud, Wu Yen Shih. Ah, now here is the poem:

Pools and Wells

Rain pools heed no dreams,
but wells, deep, reach far,
drink earth's chill dark streams,
tell us who we are.

I just sought the poet by typing in the title and first half of the first line. The first entry is about Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man" (best musical EVER) :

young ones peekin' in the pool hall window after school Ya got trouble, folks, right here in .... Oho, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin' down the street ...

Next is a Walter de la Mare poem reference:

George Herbert Clarke, ed. (1873–1953). A Treasury of War Poetry. 1917. 56. The Pool Rings his Bells. By Walter de la Mare ...

on to H.G. Wells:

And far away beyond the ditches and pools and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank ...... “‘I have taken no heed of any news for many days,’ I said. ...ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/w45tw/complete.html - 440k -

then George Sand:

The Devil’s Pool George Sand The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, Vol. ...... Despite the Cold LITTLE MARIE seemed to give no more heed to the child’s odd ...www.scribd.com/doc/395560/George-Sand-Devils-Pool - 271k -

and from Lyrics and Comments:

Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow! Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you .... Sand and stone, and pool and dell Fare you well! ...

But I digress.

We continued writing Lunes in ELL classes which today was one large teeming noisy chaotic and productive hive. Here are some lunes by kids in the beginning and second level ELL classes (grades 6-8):

brick scream loud
chair fall down, cry out
loud, forgive brick.

***

ducks like rain
and Toyota Corolla in the
park as always.

***

Sun through snow
melt the cold of season
shine our day


***

I write my
story at my school and
at my house

***

I saw mother
in my heart and father
in my lung

***

sleep in New York
I will read in Monchasa
as you dream

***

the pretty princess
she is in the castle
she has toes

***

In Philippines there's
alot of fruit that they
planted and harvested

***

go to Africa
to the Heaven and boxing
the people's houses

***

Window is broken
wind is coming from outside
it is cold

***

Superman sleep flying
Batman sleep jumping and the
Spiderman sleep webbing

***

there's a book
that talks about a werewolf
that pushes rocks


****

These are all lunes, the rule for which is three lines, first line three words, second line five words, third line, three words

1/15/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
Just So Story

When carpet was psychedic shag
green as your eye after a jab
from the boy behind you, a kind of mash
note for the tongue-tied, (his name was Carr,)
but he and the carpet belong ago,
like the Galicians' olla podrida
lost (it was food) to the French, or how alga
seem gone and then mushroom
green as a corroded room key
trapped where ogees
meet floor, while out the window mtns.
unless you, poor you, have gone to Fla.
And so this poem brays
memory, never keynote
or, let's face it, coming up for air.
We're off my dears to see not Wiz
nor stories of my childhood woe -
Stop writing on your notepad!
I'm here at behest of zest and color,
to load these words in this van
of sound and I hope sense, to mob
your mind with whimsy then scoot,
for I today ignore the padlock
to my deepest June Lockhart.
I'll leave the underworld to Odin,
I'll probe no plangent ache,
just what my dears is here to see
to do and what oh no is nono
I leave to you. She who woos
what wounds is not my favored spy
just so I'm here therefore I grew.

Back in the classroom this morning, with a 6th grade class that's learning about China and with two ELL classes who have just published a book with 826 Seattle. 826 Seattle has just won a golden apple award from the State of Washington. Yea them. Also they have a space travel store for those needing to provision themselves. Could that possibly be correct?

I have spent several teeth gnashing minutes on the NY Times website hoping to be able to get the crossword puzzle. I even purchased a one year crossword subscription but none of the activities I tried allowed me to fracking play the game so I could use it as the basis of a poem on this blog. Dang it. Now I have to depurchase the subscription too since I have to purchase some fracking widget to allow me to play online which I DO NOT WANT TO DO. Troglodyte (is that the spelling? ) that I am I thought I could print out and play the crossword puzzle using my antiquated pen (G2 Pilot, black). Even when I pushed the supposed "PRINT AND PLAY" button, no dice. I am not even that spazzed and jazzed about playing crossword puzzles in the first place. I just have trouble finding words to make poems and so use the puzzles to get words to get me going as I don't actually think I have any thoughts or ideas of my own until borrowed words kick me into gear. This was a problem for Peter Sellers, or sort of this was his problem. He thought he wasn't a person really, and needed a character to play to feel like a person. See how that is the same sort of problem? Mine is much less dire of course, unless you are a poet. This morning I said hi to a teacher I worked with earlier this year. Outside her room on big paper is this quote: "I, like my poem, am a work in progress." One of her sixth graders wrote that in her journal. Oh YEAH!

Gorgeous day with the mountain visible as I drove my sister to the airport so she can go back home to San Francisco. I finally got out for a walk about 3:30, aiming as directly as I could given houses and fences for a water view. Some days, most days looking at water makes everything better. Now the sun is down and the white house across the alley gleams sickly yellow like sheets that have been bleached too many times over the years. I have a space heater at my feet so my leg won't spaz out. I went on the walk sans snow pants and sans uggs boots. This is to say I went walking around the neighborhood dressed like everyone else, which was a boon for my sense that I am on the mend. I still don't want to prepare to teach tomorrow however. I want to lie about on a divan and have someone peel grapes for me. They could throw them against the window on my command for example if I didn't feel like eating them.

I've sent off six poems to meet whatever fate.
airplanes, vans with zipcodes on their sides
cinched canvas bags, conveyer belts,
white plastic mail crates, dump and sort
then into some grad student's hands.

1/11/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem
DANGER, It's a Brutal One

Finger to the counter I flatten another ant
things fall apart Yeats said, in the gyre
and I hasten that, hand bone hard as boot
I don't wonder anymore, girl or boy
I've gone killer, made that evil leap
I'm a Jack or Kelly the Ripa
of ant murder, I'm the Capriati
swing on solenopsis invicta, also
they multiply like bamboo shoots,
skydive foam atop my black and tan,
my logic trail along the baseboard, you'd act
not blue as Wilson after Hudson,
more Wallace in his black watch,
forward thrust of cornered boar or sex
you'd drop that mein of lamb and ewe
social justice aint for ants dear, hush,
punch me that ant trap from my kit
I'm no Buddhist, my hands meet
ant gut not in prayer. This Ira
is my American life. They ride fax
machine, ring glasses, add curds
to yogurt. This no way to garner
kudoes, though I'm brazen as RAF,
I lift floured arms like my Aunt Ida
drop rolling pin in time
no prisoners in my brig
I kill, brutal as cousin Jennifer
each spiky hair another ouch
I'm Jason steering the Argo
into the fray, I go, all to no fro
you bet I'll beg you to abet
to suss out their nest
and squash them. Yes.

1/10/08 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem

Here are today's rules: begin line with down word, end line with across word,
when there is no down or no across, only use the numbered word that exists.
And we're off:

Seer, squinch your saggy eyes, swab
wine from your viewing globe. Trace
arcs to messages in my palm
behind your porch light. Loretta
Lynn of visionaries, read my leaves. I
Eat your wisdom true as Dots,
ale to my fish plate till I'm fed up.

Enclosed with SASE is hope ebb
Bebe pellet, lock of faded hair.
Best to you and to your ketchup.
Sealed aeorgramme for Eire
Yale locks twice twined then bolted
Birth certificate born to nee
I wish so hard to be enchanted,
ago is where I'd go
beyond the range of CBS
from post everything I resign
my new apartment I'll unlet
answer the future No
Relay regrets, let 'em repro
Eddy Sonny Ernie who've
skiied or somehow sped
pin dropped, dis-
encamped from now
robes billowing, that red
cellophane over Asia
Kin of old that ends.
back out inch by inch
HBO can't hold me
views of the polluted bay
okapis revived, beating odds
views of the sinister abbey
ply or two of tp I'll leave. I
had a chance at humor
prep the ecto plasma
call forth the asp.

TOO FRICKING MUCH.

Graffitti edit inside Madison Valley Essential Baking Company:

original:
FUCK MADISON PARK
edit: (in red ink):
FUCK! MADISON PARK, our love,
has left us.

1/9/08 Crossword Puzzle Poem

Line up your tools, coins for the slot,
ignore blower worse than faux pas,
remember yourself as not the ogre
you imagine when you're alone,
what's left of your dog in an urn.
Don't throw yourself off that pier.
For you no wretching roulette
or other *groan* predictable plan.
Into this your only turn let's insert
a dive in a tutu around the atoll,
tongue out as the clock strikes XII,
poof! No godmother with magic dose
ever ever ever. Oh yeah you'll ebb.
nobody but you can make you new.
Discard the guidebook, get on the Metro.
There will always be junk mail to sort
You're a member of the get set
You don't need to wait for some stud
enchanted evening in an exurb
rip off your own dotted bra
peace to ya we all croak in the end
rub their noses in it, your neb
with sense of smell pointed as awl,
cowdunglilacpinesap into the breach
carpediem gagme yes but lifegoeson.
Who cares you go on the outs
with you? Another olive for your omelette?
Oh yeah, it's boring to be so onto
you. So help the bees and frogs and cod
whose lights too are going to do it
you know what so on your navel keen
who have eyesearsnosefingerstoes keys
every breath through alveolar sacs.

She said move me, move me
I'm locked up inside
Well, I didn't understand her
though God knows I tried
She said make me angry
But just make me cry
But no more grey morning
I think I'd rather die
from "No More Grey Morning" by James Taylor

I was thinking the last four lines and four seconds on the internet later had located the whole lyric. Miraculous. Xeroxing too is miraculous.

Thus it is that a mood can turn upward. Another miracle.

I am reading at Richard Hugo House with other folks from SAL WITS next week. Though I just popped miraculously to the site and do not see my name listed, which endangers that upward momentum, dang it. Even if I am not reading, things get cooking 7pm Wednesday, January 16 in the cabaret. More news on the subject in this blog. Cost: FREE!

Another free reading in Seattle, this one tomorrow night, January 10 at Seattle Art Museum. Very adult time: 8 to 9 pm. Curated by the ubiquitous Cody Walker, SAL Writer in Residence and Seattle Poet Populist. The theme is the perils of poetry, poets are Richard Kenney, Eric McHenry and Jason Whitmarsh.

I'm listening to the family iPod - found a recording of my sister and her soon to be ex husband on cello and organ - am listening as I type. Every time her playing is less than emphatic I think, ah she wasn't eating! which distracts from listening to the music as music. My eyes tear up by the second stanza when it's Mozart. Here's something by Lizst! And now, because it's Mark, something like the soundtrack to a horror movie. Mark is a post modern composer - atonal, sometimes anti-melodic, often off-putting, cerebral, sometimes beautiful in a non-gorgeous way. Now there are so many chords screaming out of the organ. Mark's hands are huge and double-jointed. And now, oh dear, it's raining, Jim off on his new motorcycle. Luckily he's wearing the Musto rainpants we bought when we took sailing lessons. Will he make it to Carnation to his brother's house or will he return home momentarily? I am relishing time in the house by myself, something I haven't had for weeks and weeks. It may be for another five minutes or two more hours. The uncertainty keeps me on guard more than I'd like. I'm up in my room with the door closed and the iPod earbuds in my ears, so what is the difference then from being here alone and having the family home and humming around the other rooms? My antennae are not wiggling at every odd sound, lack of sound, vibration, rumble, crash or breath. The organ and cello are racing after each other loudly, a music page loudly flaps, and now a crescendoed end. Here's its got to be a piece by Mark - sound of a cello bow against the wood of the cello, plink plunks, this is a piano now not organ, flick of melody, flitter of piano keys, emotional bow draw on cello, piano cleaning chord, cello question, piano arpeggio, cello playing in violin range, piano like stream, like scale playing, cello high high high, end chord on piano, high high cello drawn out note, multiple tiny statements by piano, cello note slurs, piano note slurs, four note phrases, smush chords on piano, loud chords on piano, cello melody line going low and resonant, five notes from piano, cello mimicking violin piano insistent, the pair twining separating, cello sweet and low, piano silent, piano climbing stairs with bo jangles feet, cello sostanza, piano and cello leap frog flirting, trading phrases back and forth, can you do this? this? together, faster faster loud and louder, random note leaps, chords, then paired note swerving on cello, drippy drops on piano, together, little chase scene, sweet chords, building tension, a man falling onto the bass end of the piano keyboard and silence.

All shaky, having printed out five poems, written a cover letter, a SASE, and an envelope. Hope I make it up the stairs to the mailbox where I'll have to put the flag up, if I have any strength left.

I followed through with applying for my Visa for going to India next month, the part that is online anyway. I still have to go get passport photos and mail the application by some trackable means to the consular office in San Francisco. This trip is going to happen - I am going by myself to India to visit my friends and be far, far away and experience I don't yet know what sensations, which is the idea, idea, idea.



My leg squinch glitch is under control thanks I believe to the wearing of long underwear and snowpants, which are keeping my leg warm thus not allowing the soft tissue to seize up and strangle my leg nerves which then jangle and ululate their painful displeasure causing me to be unable to move around. Not that I imagine myself at all an occupant of a diving bell mind you, mostly due to lack of imagination and the omnipresence of what we in my family have in spades which is self over dramatization. My mother, who sighs deeply and groans often when she is not using English to articulate her unhappiness that she has difficulty moving and is constantly in pain, amen, used to say to me, "Cinderella, Cinderella, Cinderella." Which meant, for those of you who had different childhoods that I was being a punk baby. I'm thinking of my mother because of our yesterday phone conversation in which she sounded old while trying to exude Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step acceptance and gratitude while telling me current event negative experiences of her friends I do not know while getting bluer and older sounding and I true to form let her.



But back to the rain and white-gray sky of our alley view. I've talked on and off about producing a newsletter to be titled "Alley Chat" which I still think could be fun. Our chicken neighbors could write a farm column. Next door our neighbors are redoing their kitchen lighting and adding an indoor trellis to help the kiwi vines (from our kiwi) and restore light to their kitchen since the kiwi are heavy and pulled the hanging lights out of their in-ceiling moorings.



We went with these neighbors (the lawyer and the ornithologist) to the New Year's Eve gala at the Palace Ballroom. The lawyer loved my white top Jim bought me for my birthday in Coral Gables, Florida, but felt my red shoes would have been cuter without the addition of the smart wool black tights. I am back again to my "keep the leg warm" regimen. I told her I used self control not to put a pair of long underwear (lime green for the visually inclined) over the black tights.

NEW NEW NEW! I have added links! I have put a visual element atop my blog! It is so much easier to do these things now that the new blogger doesn't require the secret handshake of technological knowhow, though my brain could have used the exercise and I had resolved today to work out how to add links, not even realizing I could add the visual element. Happy, happy, happy.

Gray and rainy and rainy and gray today. The coach made it home to Miami last night, though my brilliant ploy of routing her through Baltimore to avoid Chicago didn't work as the plane stopped in Chicago on the way to Baltimore. First it circled in the sky for an extra hour so that the coach spent a moment panicked, wondering if she'd somehow gotten on the wrong plane. She got to sit on the runway awhile in Chicago over a "personal issue" that involved a police car and the removal of a carry on item and no further explanation from the flight crew. She also paid a cab driver $80 for the ride from Fort Lauderdale to Miami Beach. She could see the credit card machine by the driver's feet but he told her he'd take only cash so they had to go to the Publix Market where the ATM was broken so the coach went in and bought "some whole grains" and got extra cash. She didn't have the money for the guy to drive her the four blocks home so had to walk dragging her two full bags.

I am back on track for getting myself to India. I have so much guilt about doing anything that is just for me, and suddenly realized I had not applied for a Visa in the middle of the night. I still have not applied, but have seen that it takes 5 business days from when you apply, and have contacted my friends in Cochin so I can use their contact info for my India contact info. Maybe I should just go ahead and use the Radisson in Delhi. Oh but first I have to reserve the Radisson in Delhi.

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.

There goes my license to grumble about other people's purchasing habits for another year. Kids at St. Joe's will recognize the wrapping paper from their fundraiser. I keep claiming not to have a teaching blog, but I keep losing my license for calling it other than that.

Last night I dreamed that I was a new teacher at a Scottish boarding school. My information packet had been partially shredded so I didn't know important things like what time the classes were and what I was supposed to be teaching. The new teacher who moved in next to me - we lived in dorm accomodations on campus - saved her poop in paper bags wrapped in white cloth towels. What the heck was this about?

After a week of normal walking I'm back to the gimp crumple and a tad peeved about it. Blah blah blah. I watched my mother at Christmas, broadcasting her discomfort, never able to keep one tiny feeling to herself, physical or emotional, and I know where this can lead so that's it for that.

I've got bills to pay and the pantry partly cast upon the counter and table tops downstairs. I've got a workroom that needs my attention to organize and clothes to wash, dry and fold. I have poems to write and revise and send out and student books to collate. I have too a family holiday letter to compose to go under the above photo. The rest of the family is counting on it so I'll do it.

In 2007 Shawna went from a job she hated in Boise to a job she loves in Seattle, reporting for the oldest continuously publishing daily newspaper in Seattle, the Daily Journal of Commerce. Her beat is architecture and city government. Since he is a web designer and graphic artist, Todd is able to work anywhere, which now includes downstairs, right next to where Jim works. They've sold their house in Boise, but yet found a place over here.

Julia has moved from Seattle to Miami Beach, where she is the Assistant Women's Rowing Coach for the University of Miami Hurricanes. She loves her place on Miami Beach, four blocks from the U of Miami boathouse on the bay side and four blocks from the beach on the Atlantic Ocean.

Jim and Laura went to Greece in April where they fell in love with the island of Crete.

Etc.

At the risk of sounding like this is a teaching writing blog, I need to sort out what I'm doing today with the 7th graders. Thursday, I slightly tortured them with 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the first class anyway. They didn't talk! Since they wouldn't talk, I talked, which was a teensy tad bit deadly. Sort of like that last sentence. A few people jerked awake when I cawed being a bawd of euphony reacting to the beauty of blackbirds flying in green light. Things went better in second period, where I had kids do the pantomiming, including a man, woman and blackbird, all of them boys, one of them a good sport wearing his female teacher's hat and scarf for his role. In third period, my favorite act out boy acted out the blackbirds being beautiful for my cawing bawd of e. I like to enlist his acting out for my cause.

Last week we spent a day saying hey and writing lunes with strong nouns and verbs, then two days with an I am related to nature idea and two days with Wallace the insurance vice president. I told the kids about how his insurance company colleagues had no idea he was a poet, that he had a secret identity like a super hero. Poet,super hero. Same diff.

Today we might, it being 6am and my teaching at 7:40 it is rather disingenuous to put a might, but it makes me more comfortable to imagine my having all the time in the world to get this worked out. I am thinking of having them write personifications of qualities which they can then illustrate if they want, ala Ruth Gendler's The Book of Qualities. Okay, that's what we'll do. I have some great student examples and a decent handout that triggers thoughtful, engaged writing. We can start by brainstorming a list of human attributes - I like to start with something like attributes you'd look for in a friend, a leader, etc. Inevitably we'll get to evil, death, destruction, envy, greed, sloth (okay not sloth), and their ilk, but I like to give the kids a chance to imagine in a positive vein without beginning with some teacherly positivity lecture. And some people have knowledge of and need to write about those attributes that aint so fracking cute.

(photo caption: Beethoven at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, readying for his birthday)

Friday night I read with Beth Coyote, Kelly Boyker, Martha Vallely, Pat Hurshell, and Marta Sanchez at Phinney Ridge Community Center as part of the Intersections series. As I listened to each poet read, it was like adding an entirely different variety of flower to my bouquet, each vivid and particular to itself. A great evening! Thank you to Rebecca Loudon, master weeder, pruner, soil enhancer and deep listener! The musician, Helen Parsons, grew on me. Her lyrics were hilariously weird, her guitar plucking accompaniment spare and sometimes silly, her self presentation elfin. My son in law saw her get a glass of wine before the reading and thought he should grab it away from her, since she looked about 11. Now he wants her CD.

As for myself, not the reading or the poetry, which are fine, really, I have at this point to admit that somehow I am wired backwards because I always always always have the experience after a reading of becoming distracted, frantic, nervous, nervous, nervous and having to leave. Friday night I was convinced I had lost my cellphone, had a vivid image of myself picking it up and turning it off while talking with Rebecca and Martha before the reading. I went through my big bag three times, Jim went through it, taking out item by item, which was a bit embarrassing. Luckily I hadn't changed my underpants, just pants, shoes, socks and shirt, all of which were sitting on a folding chair for awhile there. No cellphone. I talked to a couple of the other readers, not to Rebecca, not to Mimi. I kept getting more wired and strange as though a cellphone disappearing was more important than anything in the fracking universe. By the time we got out to the car and found the cellphone sitting in the cupholder, I just needed to go home and lie down. When I got home my frantic upset self couldn't lie down. Eventually it was the next day and I felt embarrassed and regretful for missing out on celebrating everyone's success. Luckily I did tell Martha how wonderfully she read.

That's the luxuriantly tressed young Falstaff of Santa Cruz on the left, watching the cardboard tube caber toss outside the de Young Museum last Saturday.

Today I worked at middle school with 7th graders.
A fellow poet wondered from my blog if it is written for middle school students which certainly has me wondering about my level of deep thought and fine prose. I spent years trying to sound like a 19th century don while feeling like an imposter. These days the inner and outer are more accurately aligned, which means I dazzle far less often with my amazing mispronounced and hazzily grasped vocabulary words, am more adept at writing what I'm truly feeling and thinking, and am more frequently imagined to write for the young young adult. I'm having a fine inside the cranium fight about how flip to be about this.

I will quote instead David Bayles & Ted Orland, from their book ART & FEAR: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking:

A BRIEF DIGRESSION
IN WHICH THE AUTHORS ATTEMPT
TO ANSWER (OR DEFLECT) AN OBJECTION:
Q: Aren't you ignoring the fact that apeople differ radically in their abilities?
A: No.
Q: But if people differ, and each of them were to make their best work, would not the more gifted make better work, and the less gifted, less?
A: Yes. And wouldn't that be a nice planet to live on?

Talent is a snare and a delusion. In the end, the practical questions about talent come down to these:
Who cares? Who would know? and What difference would it make? and the practical answers are: Nobody, Nobody, and None.

So there we are, I am, anyway. I'm about to print out some poems, always a heady and scary moment particularly in the wake of a rejection letter. I was going to quote the one I received yesterday from The St. Lewis Poetry Center's Best Poem Contest, but I seem to have bitten it into tiny jagged pieces and burned it, which may explain the rug's absence. The form letter said what many say these last months, that the group in question (anthology, magazine, small press) has received an astonishingly large number of superior submissions it has taken rubber gloved professionals months to mull over, to leave me and my fellow rejected the comforting and simultaneously disconcerting sense that we are good, possibly very very good writers, and, with chins high and checkbooks open we may yet or yet again enter the holy citadel/Charon's vessel. Refer to book quote (page 28, A&F) for clarification.

And I saw my sister, James Turrell's "Three Gems" the view from 9th floor viewing deck at the de Young Museum, and kilted young men hurling a cardboard cylinder all in the same weekend. Amen.

I've revised my Sapphics poem for her, and am in love with it again. I'll read it Friday night at The Phinney Ridge Community Center. Fabulous poet, violinist and mentor Rebecca Loudon will introduce the fabtabulous eight of us.

"Three Gems" by James Turrell

My sister told me only that we needed to wait a minute. A group of kids ran towards and past us and we walked down a path and around a bullet shaped structure through a rose colored outdoor hallway to the entry door into the space. It could be a rocket ship capsule, the earth visible as the round stone set in the center of the floor, our destination somewhere out the view hole above us as we sat on the concrete bench built into most of the circumference. It was instantly a peaceful enclosure. We sat and breathed deeply, leaning back. When I started speaking I discovered the sonic quality - the undertones of my voice rang around us as though the space was a Tibetan Buddist bowl and I was moving a pestle round and round to create the resonance. Lyn said she'd never been there on a sunny day, never seen the light blob on the wall above us near the sky hole which moved and morphed as we relaxed into our bodies.

The new copper clad de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park has handsome angles and textures. The fissure that opens as a crack in the brick and fractures to crack rocks in the courtyards is a permanent installation by Andy Goldsworthy. I liked the installation, which is called "Faultline" though I've been rather off my Goldsworthy adoration since watching him ignore his family in the Goldsworthy documentary. Which gets us into the art vs. artist debate, which isn't so interesting really, is it? My husband got so mad at T.S. Eliot from watching the movie "Tom and Viv" that he refuted any idea of T.S. Eliot as having a place as a poet, to his poetry having any value or beauty. Which I love about Jim while still loving The WasteLand and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

In front of the lawn outside the de Young as we approached was a line of motorcycles and on the lawn was a group of mostly guys apparently involved in caber tossing. They wore skirts, from midi to mini. A couple of them wore kilt skirts, and one, who had dark brown hair luxuriously curly as The Cowardly Lion's mane in The Wizard of Oz and Robert Downey Jr.'s beard in Fur and reminded me of a young Falstaff, even sported a dagger in his sock, though nobody wore a sporan. Their caber was a hollow cardboard cylinder. Do not think paper towel roll. Think ten feet long and walls 3/4 of an inch thick. Not a tree trunk, but still heavy and awkward to manage. They were a Santa Cruz motorcycle club who'd asked permission of someone at the museum in order to put on this brief goofy contest that set my mood for our whole free museum experience.

The sculpture garden also includes work by Claes Oldenberg (a huge diaper pin) and Zhang Wang (a shiny metal sculpture that mimics though is even better than Chinese stone I've seen displayed as art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2001.

Going to SF to visit my sister this morning. We're meeting at SF MOMA where there is a show of Joseph Cornell boxes. Very exciting.

I have not yet written out my proposed syllabus for seventh graders. Maybe I never will. My friend who teaches sent this poem from a 6th grader she's working with. Maybe I'll just show them this poem and stand over them with my hands in fists on my hips and my head making a shadow on each of their desks and say things like, "why can't you ever write something this good? You're OLDER," in a growly slightly needy voice.

I am the Queen of History

With a voice like crackling wood
My hair is fine silver dust
My eyes are golden marbles
My hands are crinkling paper
My feet are the fossils of dinosaurs
I float about King Tut’s tomb
I play with the triceratops
Dance with the Incas

I know everything about a person before I meet them
I know everything that has ever happened to them
I can read their past like a newspaper

With my sparkling blue book
I offer the gift to let creatures see the past
But I will only let people who need
To see the past read my blue book
If somebody writes a question
In my blue book
The answer will come to them

When I cascade over a town
Everyone knows that I am there
They sense the past wherever they are
And they are flung back to childhood
They get together with old friends
Heal old quarrels
Cherish old memories

Everybody begs for me to let them see the past
I don’t let anybody who begs
But I would let a poor man struggling to survive see the past
If he needed to
My life is one of giving and moving backward
Watching and holding back
Waiting and listening

by S. S.-S., 6th grader

Bye now.

ANHINGA!

And in this morning's paper we discover that it rained five inches in the 24 hours of Monday. I asked Jim how much snow that would have been. He said multiply by 12, which would have been 5 FEET of snow. "Too bad we don't have global cooling," he said as we watched the gunnite truck with its long long snow crab leg lounging over the neighbor's new garage putting in what looks like a property line to property line cement patio. Yesterday I heard on Steve Scher's weekday show that city planners are thinking what we need to be doing is restoring to each plot of ground, especially in built areas ie my neighborhood, the ability to deal with its own water, which is to say eliminating runoff by such means as increasing permeable surface, like the new Ballard Library did by planting grass on their roof, collecting water for irrigation, laundry, flushing and filtering it for drinking. Part of the problem the planner said with our Puget Sound storm sewer system is also that it is tied to the sewage sewer system so that when we get for example five inches of rain in a 24 hour period raw sewage flows directly into the Sound.

Momentarily I leave for my osteopath appointment which I hope will shed some light and relief on my irritated nerve. Actually I don't care if light is involved. I want to walk like a person and not jerk to a halt while my after surge of nerve pulse calms down to a walkable normal.

--
Later that same day, when she was supposed to be putting together a syllabus for a ten day poetry workshop series for seventh graders, Laura encountered a thank you to a list serve which had the phrase "in this era of Pop Tarts and Little Debbie" which she felt compelled to copy into this blog.

In the Era of Pop Tarts and Little Debbie

where all is sweetness and flouncy dresses
even what is tart is sweet
comfort warm as a gag reflex

I have not died or produced coffee ground looking puke so the Aleve tm overdose crisis is behind us. Today's topic: should I go to the osteopathic physician whose office is behind the Quizno's which is located across the street from the Erotic Bakery? Sit with that a sec.

Having never been to an O.P. (or maybe it's O.D., which'd link thematically,) I am leary of the two hours the OP promises to meet with me. I want the irritated nerve or plastic insert issue to resolve and fast. I think what I need to do is make an appointment with an orthopedic person who can x ray the hip and see if there are broken off bits of plastic socket liner. Probably I should do both. Pursue both courses and see. Possibly. The O.P. doesn't take insurance, but is she covered by insurance? Can't I submit a form and see? Yes. Insurance crap makes my eyes have major major astigmatism. Also my brain.

Yesterday was an emotional fiesta of fun as my daughter and I confronted our miscommunications regarding going on a trip together, she waiting for me to discuss money, me waiting for her to tell me if she wanted to go. Then my husband and I confronted our miscommunications regarding money.

Emotions irritate my nerves.

The Cascades Train from Seattle to Portland on Friday and from Portland to Seattle on Sunday arrived on time. The Sunday train even departed on time. Probably because they didn't clean the bathrooms while the train was in the station. My friend Carol said, "Ah, the third world experience," and then she took it back. Her younger daughter is travelling for six months with her boyfriend from Mexico into South America working on farms for room and board as they go. Carol and her husband paid for airfare so they can bypass Colombia, but other than that Carol's (poet dancer) daughter and her boyfriend are doing this on their own. The boyfriend uploaded some photos onto the internet while we were together so we got to see some Mexican adventures - coconut palms, sugar sand, Spanish language billboards "La Mujer es Poder" por ejemplo, how cute this couple is.

Three of us stayed with our pal who moved to Portland from Kirkland about 11 years ago (note the land suffixes, hmmmmm.) Her younger son, age 23, was home to put in some time at American college so he can transfer to college in Holland where his girlfriend lives (who he met while seriously seriously taking flamenco guitar lessons in Grenada, Spain.) He's going to school for classical training including music theory, this boy who barely graduated high school he was so disinterested. His girlfriend is a flamenco dancer and about his height (6') in other words sorta a short girl in the Netherlands where they (there they are again) are building houses with taller doors and ceilings due to the upward trend due they (aha, them) think of better nutrition, which is not based on processed foods based on corn because unlike here in America they (!) do not subsidize the corn production industry. Coincidentally they (!) are not big drivers of big cars. Huh.

I was hobbling around due to my irritated nerve probably due to the last regatta of the year, The Head of the Lake, which had us sitting around in boats in the cold wind for 45 minutes while organizers forgot to communicate with one another resulting in my being out on the water cold and cramped up and probably sitting with my back torqued. It could also be due to structural disintegrity of the plastic cup of the ball joint part of my hip replacement or (less likely I'll admit) my titanium shaft working its way out of the remaining part of my femur through my quad muscle. One of my friends who has various unhappy making symptoms doctors have been puzzling over and experimenting with over the last few years said she has friends who use Aleve TM and so we got me some. It worked. I took two every four hours and I know if you're literate and or have taken Aleve (and maybe they have ads on TV?) you know what's coming next. Last night I was home and less distracted and actually read the use instructions of Aleve TM. One pill every 8-12 hours. I put the two blue pills I was going to take at 8pm back into the bottle and went upstairs to check for OD symptoms on the internet. One of the OD symptoms is barf that looks like coffee grounds. I didn't have any of the symptoms and I had all of the symptoms. I was afraid to sleep. My husband said he checked on my throughout the night. Throughout the night and now and now and now it has been raining like mad. Probably with intent to supersaturate the ground so the wind can come and knock down more of Seattle's trees, if you believe in the perversity of the weather gods.

Jimmy is on conference call or whatever they (uh huh them) call group call with simultaneous computer linkup so they can chat and maneuver each other's mouses without having to get dressed and go to an office together. In this case this is good because Jim is in Seattle, some folks are in Salt Lake City and others are in Pennsylvania. This is bad because the head honcho who called the meetings is in Pennsylvania so the meetings are at 6am from this morning through December. I assume they won't meet Christmas day though I realize this is Christian commerce centric. I don't mean to say the meeting is continuous from now through December, just that each day M-F they'll e-meet (I know this is the wrong term. Sheesh) at 6am Pacific time.

Having exposed my inability and unwillingness to retain terms having to do with electronics, I will move on into my morning which will include taking one blue pill and hoping I have not induced peptic ulcer or coma by doing so. Don't call the masochist protection agency as I am only joking in an off hand aren't I clever sort of way to prevent my thinking about anything I have to do which I feel constitutionally opposed to doing.

It helps me to be with people who are similar to me in ways that Jim is not, for example who are women.

I hope I am done having an irritated nerve by Thursday so I can enjoy San Francisco with my sister without worrying her and myself. I love the term irritated nerve. It's really annoyed, my nerve, and it's trying to get back at me.

Alligators, alligators, alligators
Just go there metaphorically
and I'll see you below in a minute.


Thanks to everyone in the writing group last night for
confiding your insecurity and reluctance
and exposing your brilliance, wit and poetry
and making me feel so much less alone
and more alive
also the laughing was good.

I've sent in my manifesto for my December 14 reading. The one I didn't send went like this:

Artist Manifesto


This is just
to say
there never is
a perfect time to write
so I have to do it now
even though I don’t want to
I’m not good enough
my pen is out of ink
and I have a fever
and chilblains.


---

Boy do I like the word "AND" and the run-on sentence. Check out Gertrude Stein's "Paris France" and know I'm in excellent company. Of course she's writing in a child voice. I worry I mostly write in a child's voice also, but big whoop. Keep writing. That is also my poetry manifesto. Amen.

Right now I am supposed to be packing. Who is supposing I am packing you ask? Two friends who are arriving at my house this morning so we can carpool to the train to take us to Portland where I guess it might be snowing. I am sitting here on assignment, my own assignment, I have pledged better dilligence and to stop already with the discouragement and just jazz away at the keyboard and f**k em if they can't take a joke. I'll be happier. It's obvious I'm never going to be any kind of productive in a USA sense (cue flags not fiddles) or for that matter in an instrumental sense (now cue violins, pianos, congas and recorders. an odd assortment but I've played them all and am going for accuracy here.) What the heck was I driving at? I guess that I have to quit with the worrying about my worth and just do what I do - write and cut and paste and read and work with kids to say it's okay to dork around with creative stuff. I want me for a teacher actually because in the classroom dang it I am convincing and convinced that this life I advocate is worthwhile. I hate the word and concept worthwhile. We're all rooting in the turquise mud its just that some of us are wearing Keens and some of us are wearing Manolos and some of us are barefoot and there's that and again, which I really really like. I also like the word really and the word so and the word anyway. I like to write anyway as anyways, which I think is hilariously funny.

Here is an edit of my poem I wrote in 6th grade last week:

Eulogy for Mesopotamia

O once magnanimous land,
irrigation pushed
history's heavy plow
through muscled soil
steady dowry for generations
stylus cut metronome
free-writing language
altered earth carrying
civilization into mist
as silt lifts skyward,
topsoil gone to myth.

--
My daughter says she is often disappointed at how dull people are who she's met through IMing - she imagines the attitudinal slant she would put on phrases like "LOL" and discovers lots of folks are happy to exist on the boring straight ahead level. I hate IMing though it has made introducing the game Acronymble in school much easier because the kids know zillions of acronyms now.
I am all over the map as I ready (or delay readying) to go south a bit on the map.

Two books on my must-read list:
Set this House on Fire by Matt Ruff
Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick Bass

Have you seen Darjeeling Limited yet? Ah
Wes Anderson Wes Anderson Wes Anderson.

Thinking about an artist manifesto instead of preparing to teach

Two days more, counting today, with the eighth and sixth graders. Today we're revising. I'll bring my bucket'o thesauri and my handouts. Some of the eighth graders will bring their vast aleoli wiggling lungs and some will bring their quiet writing selves. All the sixth graders will wiggle. And write. Meanwhile I will think about what I believe as an artist. Not what I believe as a teaching artist or a teacher or a mother or a wife or a homeowner or a gardener or driver or political being or coxswain. What does my artist believe?

Joy exists in, among, between, under, inside and through words.
It doesn't matter if I'm good or published or part of a movement when I am inside my work.
What is beside the point is the point.
The truth lies in the gaps.
Seek and ye will find diddly squat, keep writing.
Read, read, read, read, read, read.
Write, write, write, write, write, write.
You won't always know art when you see it, keep writing.

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle for Thursday, November 8

Pass the pita, mash the yam. Byte
me. Ono bounced like Roo above
Lennon's sour mood. Kid, whose egos
ache indigo? Elaine's?
Ooh, but OTB means nothing - B for
Boys? Can't, he says, take me anywhere. So much ado, wacka doo. Moo cows moo, we ail
like redcoats surrendering arms.
age like eons, ebb like tides,
eat halves, stare at menus, myopic.
What brings you to Erie?
The lei speaks to my ulna.
Where was art last noon?
Sigh and measure sag in dynes.

Today at School and more

Today I taught the Pantoum form. Kids began with their "My Name" poems from yesterday, their homework notes if they had them and the handout with hundreds of icons radiating out mandala style from a central giant word YOU to make pantoums. All three classes got the pattern and got to work. Here are a couple of the pantoums:

Glorious soldier
that’s what my name means
nice and cool on a hot day
comforting and warm on a cold nite

that’s what my name means,
my name is sometimes angry, but
comforting and warm on a cold nite
my name is sometimes sad

my names is sometimes angry
my name is dumb once I think too much
my name is sometimes sad
but I love my name

my name is dumb once I think too much
nice and cool on a hot day
but I love my name
Glorious soldier

My name makes me famous

it is pure and will never get old

it has no regrets

my name is always being talked about

it is pure and will never get old

my name is a fairytale story with a happy ending

my name is always being talked about

it will never break a promise

my name is a fairytale with a happy ending

my name is rock -- it will never be broken

it will never break a promise

it echoes through your mouth just so it can be heard

my name is a rock and will never be broken

it has no regret

it echoes through your mouth -- just so it can be heard

my name makes me famous

I've just spent too many minutes looking through a bunch of stock images of middle school online. Lord it is entirely too easy to waste time pretending to do something using the internet. The site is sorta hilarious, with such photo titles as "Asian teacher with middle school students", "African American woman teacher with middle school students," etc. And what is my theme?

Today at School with the 8th and 6th graders
by Laura Gamache

At the end of my teaching, MK and I discussed the student who had the cell phone AND digital recording device up his right sleeve in class. When I had engaged him in brief conversation, he being new to me (not at school this week till today) I asked if he had notebook paper. Yes, he did. I asked if he had a pen. Yes, he did. I asked if he was left handed (since his sweatshirt sleeve was wrapped over his right hand. No he was right handed. How can you write? I asked. The girl across the table, who he had recently whacked in the wrist with a calculator, said he had a cellphone up his sleeve. I asked for it. He refused. I tattled to the teacher who took him into the hall and had him take everything out of his pockets, and confiscated his cellphone, digital recorder and some little toys. She says he cannot read or write. The kid was sharp, calling out hilarious acronymble solutions which I encouraged him to write down. I noticed he did not, which had me suspicious he couldn't write. MK said his mom thinks MK is singling her kid out for bad treatment. MK thinks that recorder is to document possible MK singling out of the kid, whose little kid, dorky glassed self radiates hostility. Lordy. As we were talking, MK said, "Are you wearing two different earrings?" I felt my ears and yes I was unintentionally wearing a yellow beach glass dangly in my left ear, a silver heart with large red something stone in my right. I laughed. I'd had about five minutes at home to eat something and change from crew layers and layers into school attire. I was especially rushed since I had promised to meet the person from my arts organization who was coming to observe my teaching in the office before class which meant I needed to allow more time for photocopying. Photocopying is my rhythmic zone out from day to day poet/coxswain to teaching poet. I love choosing colored paper from the office stash and walking into the copier generated warmth of the copy room where nobody ever seems to be but me. I love entering the "1234" code and pushing "ID", and I love the photocopying choices - 1 to 2 sided, 2 to 2 sided, paper drawer #. I even love the jammed paper alerts which force me to open the door shown on the front of the copier and clear paper by pushing down on the levers and pulling out drawers as the copier instructs me. Inside the copier is a warren of possible paper jam locations, very Rube Goldberg, and entirely solvable provided you are not late for class.

Today's lesson began, after Acronymble of course, with having six students read the six paragraphs of the "My Name" chapter of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. In my first class one of the kids read HOMS this summer in Spanish. He's bringing it to school for me to borrow. Ya-hoo! Another thing I love is how middle school students, even my second group of squirrely chatty 8th graders, quiet and listen when their peers read. We talked a bit about the chapter, and then I read them a poem written a few years ago by a then-8th grader at another school:

My Name

My name tugs at your shoelaces
it springs out of your mouth faster than a shotgun
listen sharp or you'll miss it
My name is a hero of the stars
It is a bright light, breaking up the darkness
My name won't make you trip
But if you fall, it will help you up again
My name is mischievous like a fox
It will sneak up on you when you least expect it
My name will laugh when you tell a joke
It will make you happy when you're feeling down
My name is Batman
Or at least, it is his bat symbol searchlight
My name is like a happy summer
It is warm with a cool breeze upon entering your ears
My name is like the feeling when your foot falls asleep
It actually kind of feels good
My name is not meant to be whispered
It's meant to be screamed!

-L.S.


Yowsa, but that is one personified, metaphorically, sensorally alive piece of writing! Between that and the Chinese zodiac I put next to it on the back of the page with the chapter from HOMS, the kids had lots to work with to begin their "My Name" pieces. Lots of them found great directions to go, and some shared with the group. My focus in that last group is to get other voices than the six always-talkers up in front of the room. Successful today!

Monday Monday

So anyways I taught today. A class of 8th graders, a class of 6th graders and a class of 8th graders. The last class could not would not stop chattering. They come straight from gym and ordinarily I found out from the teacher during the uprising they have a half hour of SSR (sustained silent reading - so weird and funny that 13 year olds have the idea this is torturous.) I said I'd like to have them return to their usual routine after she (the teacher, M.K.) told me they really settle down during that time. Why didn't she tell me this before? I have an idea it's because at the planning meeting (8 or 9 teachers plus me so the one on one was a bit on the lighter side,) there seemed to be a drive to get me in and out with no breaks, have me push through quickly. I can understand their reasoning, but I'm going to dig having 30 minutes breather after two classes and before this one that did not gel at all on the first day and which I'll need to do a bit of remedial work with towards our community and group project.

Well, sheesh, the group project is the 8th grade class project which is (and here I hope you have the image of the mirror image inside the mirror image inside, etc.) based on Georgia Ella Lyons' poem, "Where I'm From." "Where I'm From" is a fine poem but has become a nearly universal poetry prompt in middle school so that say for example today a girl said, "oh I did that last year." I remember being in middle school. If you have done a thing, a sonnet or a book report or an algebra proof, you have done that thing and have no further interest in exploring another facet of that project, your mindset being, "Next!" cuz you're 13 and damn you have lots of new things to get to.

I am not entirely sure what the teachers meant when they said to me, "We want you to do that "Where I'm From" project. I do not hit up one poem for multiple sessions and have decided to keep my own counsel on my approach. I'm taking it as a broad theme. I read the poem to them today along with a poem I wrote influenced by it which felt badly in need of music as I read it to them. I veered mightily off course and read them my poem in my own made up language along with the translation. In both 8th grade classes a boy in the back right corner asked, "How did you do that?" about the translating piece which I thought was an interesting question. The first class I waved my arm and made a "psst, pffft" response, but I tried to answer the second boy. I realized I had gone too far when he put his head down on his desk.

After I read WIF to the first class a boy said, "she never said where she comes from!" And she didn't tell us where geographically she came from so his question let me open the topic of what she did tell us and the topic of being poetry sleuths trying to discover what a poet is doing so we can copy and move forward or "embrace and extend" which is business lingo, at least coming from Jim.

I felt back in the saddle after the first two classes but the third class wore me down and sored up my throat since I mistakenly attempted to talk (yell) over them which everyone who has ever worked with eighth graders knows is an invitation for them to get louder. They got louder and louder. At one point I said, "Do you know what your job is at this age?" One of the boys said, "To be quiet?" I said, "well yeah, but I mean developmentally," which was kinda passive aggressive because kids never want to think of themselves as incomplete evolving beings. Then I said, "At your age, your job is to bond with your peers," and then I paused and said, "and you guys are really got at your job!" and then asked them to can it anyway. I said, "Just for these few minutes, while I'm meeting each of you, you can decorate your file folder, write your secret name inside your name plate or pass notes to each other, just don't talk. They talked. Loudly. This was a test. MK was stepping in ineffectually every few minutes to tell them to be quiet, then I would step in ineffectually to make my plea and it just wound up and up and up ridiculously. Even so, several kids got up and read their poems to the group at the end. The rules for the poems were: write a poem in a made up language with no words in any language you know, the poem has to be at least three lines long and has to have at least four made up words per line, and it cannot make any sense whatsoever. I wrote this in my notebook which I'd set so the document camera would display its image on the screen for all to see. One boy asked, "What does the poem have to be about?" "You can't make it be about anything," I said. "I can't rhyme," another kid said. "Don't rhyme," I said. "Oh!" both boys set to writing.

The eighth graders come in sizes from four feet tall and 80 skinny pounds to 5'11" and a lumbering 200 or so pounds. Some of them look 10 and others look 18. Standing outside the door waiting for MK to come unlock it, I was in the shorter third of the class, which I forget when I only work with 6th graders.

I returned to the 6th grade classroom of a teacher, SM, I worked happily with last year. One girl came up to me before class and said, "I'm going to be your biggest fan!" We had a blast in there, everyone including SM writing own language poems of twice plus the length of the 8th grade assignment. 8th graders are far more easily exhausted than 6th graders. SM, who lived in Russia for a couple of years, read her poem along with several kids. Hers had a slavic growl to it.

The sky is blue above and through the branches of the big alders across the alley above the white house of my urban chicken farmer neighbors. Light falls on my three orange pumpkins which I will soon pitch into the yard. The first year we lived here I had the most fortuitous lovely pumpkin vines that grew pumpkins all through the landscape in a charmingly haphazard way as though I'd orchestrated the composition. I tried the year after that to orchestrate a composition but as you already must know nothing of beauty came of that. Now I pitch the pumpkins onto the hillside once they begin to sink into themselves and pretend not to hope.

Thanks to no more daylight savings time we had light on us for rowing practice this morning. When we loaded into the boat I could see the expression on the face of the stroke, and expressions not to mention faces and oars of the other rowers and oh yes out on the water, buoys! My eight which according to the regatta central website will row together for Head of the Lake this Sunday, November 11, went out with Eleanor. I haven't gone out with only Eleanor before and was a tad nervous. Before Head of the Charles we were out in the fracking dark one morning and, after I'd run my two seat's oar into a buoy, Eleanor said, "You are not taking into account the oars sticking out from the boat," which I let lie. The fact was I had not seen the buoy in the dark. I was fit for glasses soon afterwards. Eleanor said quite gruffly that morning after I thanked her for her help with wind direction, and other things, "Your crew has to be able to trust you." She was right of course but not very kind about it. This morning as I came up on the inside of a visible buoy I had my eye on, Eleanor said, "It looks like you're going to hit that buoy." I said, "I've got lots of room. Trust me." I did have lots of room. There was a bit of rower chat in the boat. Perhaps my little head will be popped off the next time I goof up.