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

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

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

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

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

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

Maira Kalman possesses curative powers!

See her Thomas Jefferson post from the New York Times for proof.

This hiatus has gone on long enough. I'm afraid to look at my site minder or whatever it's called. I'm afraid of a lot - other people's emotions, my faults, falling from high places, seeing anybody in a position to possibly fall from high places, how vulnerable our necks and wrists and fingers are to injury, my own ignorance and stubborn unwillingness to change. This morning I went on a long bike ride along Lake Chelan. It was actually a shortish bike ride for me since it was 42 minutes long and yes I keep track in my notebook of the length of my bike rides. They are fun and restorative and sweaty and healthy. But first off they are fun. I love wind whistling through the holes in my bike helmet I am so grateful is light and airy since I did the bulk of my bike riding in the 70's probably before bike helmets had been invented. Jim and I rode our bikes from Seattle to Disneyland in 1977 without bike helmets or diaper pants. I still do not wear diaper pants. I bought a pair without trying them on at REI the last time I was in Seattle. The pair I bought are meant to look like sporty beige capris, but underneath is the thick wadding that keeps the bottom from being in pain, or so I'm told. I bought size large, whatever that means in sport clothing, and each of my thighs looked like the arm of an overstuffed chair so I immediately wadded them up in the back of my closet muttering silent curses that glow on the inside of the back of my skull even now a month later. I did later unwad them and fold them neatly, tags still attached, and set them under two other pairs of pants on a shelf as if I might wear them one day, and maybe I will but not today. I already rode my bike today in a pair of capris without a wadding feature under the rear but with paint on them and also too small but they don't LOOK too small. I found a Scrabble tile with the letter R on it on the cement floor of the arbor on my return, while I was clipping extraneous grape vines with the dullish clippers we keep in a V where a brace runs from top lattice to 4x4 leg. I thought to myself "I have the habits of a gardener," which was a nice thought I thought though not true. In those moments though, puttering with pruners and then weeding on my knees, I was utterly totally all gardener, fused, knees, fingers and mind to the task which is what bliss is.

Riding home, almost hands free, I passed a bank of name signs and actually read them. Name under name under name, SUMMERS, WORTH, name, name, and I grinned and breathed the sage scented morning air and steered and stared out at the lake and felt happy. And then my friend emailed Maira Kalman and soon I'll hold my granddaughter so her mommy can sleep and daddy can work and and and.

PARTIAL FOIL
for Odie

She sets a tinfoil square close
to my scalp, separates a hair
section, dips her wide brush
into lavender goo and paints.
Comb for straight edge
she folds the foil, says I
could choose my own name.
I've decided on Ama-
it rhymes with Gramma,
but has way more glamour.

Baby Quinn is out of the womb
and in the world and I have made
three lasagnas in three days
which you wouldn't think would
be related except that I'm gramma
not mama so I'm the one with the oven mitt.

I'm in my place. Once again, doing my job that means I try to make it so that I'm out of a job - two mornings holding the baby so mommy and daddy could sleep then this morning I let myself in and they're all zzzing away in the bed so I crept downstairs and washed strawberries and put dishes away as quietly as I could. This is not my dance. My dance card not only is not full my dance card is in a foreign language from the past and my daughter radiates heat and health and smells of mother's milk and beginnings. Her daughter falls asleep at the breast without latching on and has a tiny mouth. A lactation consultant suggested sacro-cranial manipulation for the baby who also has a tight string under her tongue. Like I do. That foreshortened thingy-deal that a doctor recently asked me about. "Did you have a speech impediment when you were young?" No. Do you want a punch in the eye? I didn't really ask him if he wanted a punch in the eye, but I had a reflex inside my mind that said it. My son in law made a jokey fist and waved it at me when I said I have the short thingy deal that has a very official sounding name that people who have normal tongues can remember. Mine is too tied - it's that tongue-tied thingy deal I could probably look up right now on the internet except that my temper like my tongue holder is short and I don't want to and in my refusal is my power. I'm a powerful refuser. That's not such a great skill, really, but I'm good at it. Let us all celebrate and exaggerate what we are good at for at least a few minutes a day. I'm going to add caveats to that one. If you are good at holding back like me that's okay but if you're good at socking people in the nose then just cool it and get some fricking help already.

If you are bearing with me, I will continue about my granddaughter who is a little pea in a pod in her little green swaddling blanket. Her mommy or her daddy hand her to me all pod-shaped with her beautiful perfect little face with eyes like her mommy's and lips like her daddy's and an intensity all her own. She isn't radiating baby-heat yet, so new out of the womb. Her daddy goes downstairs to work, two floors and it's too far away to stay longer than ten minutes, he says. He misses her smell. How can anybody doubt we're mammals? Take OFFENSE that we're mammals? My best friend for eleven years was a dog mammal. She didn't hide her empathy or hold blame or invest a minute of her valuable time on recriminations. She'd have loved this new girl baby. I love this new girl baby. She makes my eyes water just to think of her out here with the rest of us. All of us opening and closing our hands and squinching up our faces, our little chins quivering. We don't know what we want, but we want, we want, we want.

Tell Me That You Love Me, Baby Q

Another night with no phone call to come to the birthing center,
My daughter thinks maybe the placenta's gone rogue
My son-in-law undulates an arm, says "One-armed squid,"
we all laugh though my younger daughter, squeamish,
squeezes her face and makes retching noises. That belly
bulges enormous, baby maybe seven maybe nine pounds
and growing. My younger daughter's dog leaps at the bulge -
"Dogs do that," my daughter says. They want to get at
that little being. That little being we want to get at too.
Count those fingers and toes, snuffle that fuzzy head.

That's what I'm talking about!

A poem that riffs on "Ballad of the Gypsy" by Langston Hughes written by a 7th grade boy, PERFORMED by the boy and two friends at the cafe reading - whose idea? THEIRS!

The teacher said she found the 8th graders clustered around a computer at lunch, thought, "They KNOW they aren't supposed to be playing video games," walked over, found they'd Googled "Bang Bang Outishly (for Monk)" by Amiri Baraka, which I'd had them listen to in class, and were listening to it. OH YEAH!

Poem from Daily Crossword 5/26/09

Li Po, Tu Fu, the house of Usher
all those chimneys in their pots
as chins are cleft so treble clefs
will tremble violins, so we stove
the wall sides in. Osage oh Ohio
so all we had to do was Live?
Oh much that would have eased
to know when chaps were worn
and we cast in pantaloons amid
the rumpus and fear our ear
to track as others learning tap
trapped as we escaped by thread
a needle in a camel's eye, a plan
to set for tea or stoop for raid
and all you say to me is "I see."
Never hunt or fish, are urban,
never tendre croppes but items
on a shopping list, cars idle
so do we who peer down alleys
through corn rows to our van.

--

An auspicious day for Quinn to emerge. I was born on the 26th, Shawna was born on the 26th. It's the 26th.

Out my window, dogwood leans
towards rampant kiwi as I wade
into another May day. No pony
for me, one trick or no. No aria
that I can hear. No one will punt
for my points, point perfect toe
and pirhouette prettily. No pest
either or rampant turkeys
on the lawn we do not have. Ten
blinks of an eye. Another mocha.
Your life on Oprah. Hired, fired,
we're hard-wired tired. Oh tenor
Dyer Bennet when all is dire err
and nobody will notice. We span
eras in our careening bobsled.
Go back to bed. What's snapped
has sped. Deny them exit polling
Let's go bowling, eat limes to rind
no one left behind, the doors ajar.
---
Did I say that was a Daily Crossword poem (5/19/09)

--
And today at school we'll poem like ancient Greeks. Eek.
That is to say I'll rip up poems and have them make like experts, like antropological, archeological poetry experts recreating what's been lost like people, maybe poets, did for Sappho. So many ways this will be fun and not so educational but somewhat educational but hitting that other side of the brain, whichever it is, that is the creative, random side. I always forget because, well, you can guess. I'll ask the fifth and sixth graders what the 9 muses were for. That's always fun.

I googled "You are Here image" and got BOOKSHELVES!
I like them though I don't know how, except with rocket skates or suspensors, you get TO the books in the upper left photo.

After long absence, I return to this page, the time between a blurrrrrr of what the heck WAS I doing - putting together books and readings (one my own - at Hugo House with other WITS writers. I sent out no publicity. I am already sitting in a corner,) teaching at two schools, finishing work for two others. It's May, tra la, and while I have woodruff flowering in my garden, I have not gone a-Maying.

Here is a poem draft using the May 13 Daily Crossword. Ahem.

Be glad she'll have a girl, just think of Herod
NSync, Anvil, Woodstock, any band,
or any man with all their plans to blot
a blotch upon the sea or map. Let's evade
GI Joes and wonder if that skirt is boxy
do you want red velvet or the lemon?

--

Here's your chance, one out of ten
so let's begin your easy tosses
hit the running light on this vessel
or miss and we'll whistle and snort.
(abort)

---

Children gather 'round I'm gonna talk like Plato.
You know the joke. The notebooks all say "PlayDoh".
---

From out of where came this Miss Manners-
we do not like her make her leave.
--


Seventh graders wrote like Emily Dickinson yesterday.

Poem 3,462

To make a Poem
you Need a pencil and a Paper
and an - eraser
an Eraser alone - will Do
if paper is few.

-7th Grade Boy

---

The 4th, 5th and 6th graders
write odes to their drawings of Grecian Urns
and I say
More rainy May
more rainy, rainy May.

Daily Crossword Poem 4/24/09

Now that I've become a crone I hoard my cache
I used to scoff as only gone-before, ad hoc
junk that went and then the real that hid
would show and off I'd go like phoenix yawn.
As every hen will tell you no one stokes the fire
but you and if you won't your gruel be thin
your sorry life answers who you've been.
My father chafes when grandson calls his age
and rages I am young. Now there's a cautionary
tale. He's eighty five and still alive though bleery
eyed and fading as am I. So yes I've been twit
and haven't earned a swell obit but lest I bore
you my arms though heavy breach for shore.

Never mind.

The hail unzips the sky with a sound between moan
and panic attack. My heart brattatats as I copy
notes into a smeared journal. Nothing today lulls
or consoles me. He says "it's not your money"
and I cower in my workroom but do not work.
What were these thirty two years if not to share
but he's too in despair to care he's wounded me
as he feels cornered without choices, all mine
meaningless when one can hurt the other with
few words and nothing but the pain is real.
It's not my money or my house and the car
outside hit by hail pellets is yellow but isn't mine.
I have no shoes on but if I had they would be his
not mine. None of it mine, though the law would
say they're mine or half. One shoe a half a car
the toothpaste tube but not the cap the withered
almonds on the pantry floor but not the door.
I hate days like these that pry the mouldings
from around the windows, tramp mud through
my, excuse me, his, rooms, show me my wishy-
washy self too frightened to stand up too angry
to run. I have no sword to sunder him limb
from limb no hatchet to chop a pound from
round his heart and he would say I've chopped
a pound from his or albatrossed his neck with
me and all my piddling need and greed and this
another screed we never agreed I'd write. It's
me, it's not alright. You're unhappy, you lash
and the floor's gone out from under the spinning
funhouse ride that turns me white and puking.
But I go to show you I won't give up or in and
I won't quit you or you me though how we got
here neither one can say a map between us
crumpled, torn, the roads rerouted, both
of us together and alone.

Saw/heard Sherman Alexie at Highline High School library this morning. He was wearing a dark suit, maybe blue, maybe black, but with a brilliant darker than sky lighter than navy blue shirt. He spoke to two groups of high school kids - I arrived at the tail end of the first presentation, lined up to speak with him, then stayed for the second, longer talk.

Book Release/Book Signing event for The News from Chiloquin poetry anthology on Thursday afternoon. A highly successful event for those of us who were there. Hurrah!

Listen to me and Chiloquin H.S. junior Vanessa Longley being interviewed on Jefferson Public Radio - streaming tonight, April 1, 2009 (not an April Fools joke) at 8:45 (ish) pm. Once at the site, you'll see three tabs: Classics & News, Rhythm & News and News & Information. Click on News & Information. We were on Jefferson Exchange, with host Keith Henty. Our few minutes of chat and Vanessa reading one of her poems will be worth your effort! We speak about poetry, about Chiloquin, and about, it could be, much, much more. We were both dazed and adrenaline laden, having screeched into the studio just in time to make the interview. It was over before we'd finished arriving like so very much that is important in life.

Yusef Komunyaaka: The Voice
oh that's what I didn't hear in his poems,
the warmth and many harmonics sound
he makes with his chest and vocal cords.
He said his poem, "Anodyne", lifted head
out from the book wings, eyes closed,
and intoned his body love, this poet
who gave us the whine-bone in kindness
who Rebecca Hoogs introduced as
poet of accretions and additions
who sounded Bogalusan, Louisianan,
bluesy and much deeper than smart.
I'd only before known him as smart.
I closed my eyes, my ears drank tones
rocked in the arms of his poems.
(which are not easy-sweet my dear.)
A poem has to have content he said,
though he believes in vibrancy, will
speak about Phillis Wheatley, at
Callaloo at Washington U. Public
poet by twenty, dead before thirty two.
What do I have to show for my years?
How about you?

Live Imperfectly With Great Delight

Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem (Sheffer, with the PI, is no more - at least on newsprint)

Ah sing to me of Cuzcos and of Limas
holy cities that to climb to abler
make it first. That's how it be. Ah bee
ah ant we celebrants do adore
thee also common sense took Paine
and he gobbled up the task, T Rex
of Americana. We bear witness,
give due to them that did or a
few who born to did not but were sane
(see Paine) and so sir octopus we begs
with our friend Nash. We love heroic
the stoic who lashed to spar
heard the beauty and did not die.
We worship command and master
and those who are faster. Toil at
the tedious they do not. They trot
and do not see us see the aster
in their button hole. Their reins
we've softened with our teeth
we live to worship then are gone.
Their deeds live on in texts dense
with unabated glory. Are we glad?
Ah yes we sing of him who opts in
and clank our casks of tepid ale,
smudges in the pub scene, tired.

In Flight From
for Icarus and Yusef Komunyaaka

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


RESILIENCE
for Lucille Clifton

Heel of my hand for backhoe
I scoop ants and flatten them,
swirl their ruined corpses
carelessly under the tap.

Spontaneous generation upon generation
spills in a single clandestine thread
along the baseboard from the door --
no matter that I kill some here come
more and more and more.


RESPITE
for William Butler Yeats

For I will arise and go now
to a cabin by a shore
where grape vines twine
through an arbor with a view
evenings loud with crickets
and nothing much to do.

Off to see the Lenin statue in Fremont today with a passel of sixth graders if a passel is twenty-some. We'll experience the statue with our five senses, writing from each of them for three minutes. We'll experience a Lenin statue presentation from aka which will further inform our poetry. Poems can be free verse or haiku or pantoum or nine line process poem style. The weather with luck will be dry enough that the words won't blur on the pages as though we wrote through tears, though through tears might be appropriate. How much do I tell them about Lenin the revolutionary leader who proved to be impervious to the suffering of his people? Do I tell him about the Moscow Red Square mausoleum where Shawna filed past his shrunken corpse wearing a red nightgown? We will eat lunch, 3" slices of sub sandwiches, apples, chips, juice boxes. We'll walk-hike-skip-bounce-lag our way from school to Fremont. Will we have time to stop by the Troll for comparison? Compare and contrast was quite large as a literary tool when I was in school. Isn't that what we mostly, naturally do?

Saw Jane Hirshfield last night - alighting from a car outside the Gibson Gallery in Seattle - the instantly recognizable hair. Inside the gallery where the reception was, she didn't need the nametag she was offered. I wore mine, with a little flag of cutout debris sticking out until Felicia Gonzales removed it for me. It was fun to be asked to come, and to talk with Jane and with Clare Molesworth who used to work at SAL but is now a practicing attorney! Yay! I remember her telling me that when she got to law school she "was excited to find so many people who think like me!" Here are some more !!!!'s. There. We're done. Oops, one more. I gave Jane a little book I made of poems written by some of my 8th grade poets at Hamilton incorporating lines from her poems, which she clutched to her chest and squirreled away in her bag!

Her reading style of hyper-enunciation which had turned me off on the online video did not detract from her poems in person. I like her, I like her poems, I enjoyed her reading. And that's probably enough with the I as well.

Rebecca Hoogs, the fashion front for poetry in Seattle, wore a sprightly gray dress with a skinny slip of a sweater with prominent round clasps and rasperry tights with gray heeled pumps to emcee. (Obviously she looked terrific.) Kathleen Flenniken's 5th grade student Michaela read her metaphorically veined poem to start things off. Michaela wrote that she felt like a cake topper set in her favorite place. One of my students will read something to begin Naomi Shihab Nye's second reading on May 8 in this series. Will it be the Palestinian-American girl who loves Naomi Shihab Nye? Stay tuned.

The q&a section began with Rebecca opening a water bottle and asking Jane if she wanted some. "Cheers" Jane said, they clinked plastic cups, and Jane settled back in her chair. "You didn't know; it's gin," she said. "Who knew Jane Hirshfield was so wild?" Rebecca said breezily to the crowd, and the q&a was off.


3/10/09 NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD PUZZLE POEM DRAFT

What counts are not the thoughts but acts,
Who were the first to cache their bras?
Will you run pall mall across the Abbey?
Asking me for $2, she says she makes a meal
with something like top ramen very hot, each
bowl "guaranteed to keep me warm" I quote.
Outside the auditorium a woman asks, which
did you see? She's looking at the sympony, two
posters - very grand - I saw the poet, ye gods
disappointment as she waited for the bus.
Bernie Utz Hats - man atilt in the doorway divot
settling in for the night, he jumped a little as
I jumped, delicate dance of privacy by urban
display. Is this a permanent wave
new Hoovertown between third and sixth?

Does anyone know if Ayda Al-Jahani is still in the running for best poet title on "Millions' Poet" the Abu Dhabi TV reality show? She (yes SHE!) made it to round 3 - A Beduin woman who resisted pressure to quit, whose husband supports her, and whose poems celebrate womens' value. See the video on YouTube. There are TWO reality shows with POETS competing for prizes on Abu Dhabi TV - The Prince of Poets as well as Millions' Poet.

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


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

PRETEND
for Buddy Wakefield

Pretend the 6th graders in this room have the power
to slash lies with their pens.
Pretend they can use this power even when their
super suits are at the cleaners.
Pretend you can do the math and multiply this room
to get 7 billion.
Pretend every one of the 7 billion is writing a poem
right now - the whole entire planet - grammas
and tiny tiny babies bent over notebooks with the truth
spilling across unlined paper in every color you've
ever imagined.
Pretend we strung a line and hung every single one
of these fact sheet truths on that one line and that
we spent the rest of our lives reading them - time out
for community gardens, fishing, learning folksongs
around campfires - then back to the clothesline. All
our lives. Every written word, every rising sun heard.

I'm trying to embed fonts into a .pdf file, and this is way way out of my comfort zone, skill set, and identity profile. I look up tools on the internet, then I go downstairs and make tea. I chew the inside of my cheek. This is not helping anything, and it will be embarrassing for the dentist to notice, which I'm sure he's already noticed and politely not said anything. What do you say? "Hey, I notice that not only do you grind your teeth. but you also chew into the sides of your face - should I make you a permanent tooth guard? No big deal, we'll just have a j-tube installed into your stomach for eating, or I guess you could suck through a straw, though I'm a little worried what damage you could do to yourself with that."

February 24 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

We pass samples of divinity and swirled fudge with demi-
tasse spoons beside the beach - to pay the rent our biz.
Where the sea exhibit used to be an Asian woman sews.
We like it here where salty sand and sun are our providers.
We've found what we believe and stay in sync and link
to what we love. Like sand dollars, we haven't any
need for what's away from shore. Sip your orange
drink honey, we're listening to Haydn.
Do you think you smite us with ahem?
Go sit beneath the shade, rub in your aloe.
You're in the shallows and there's nothing else to say


---

What I'm wondering this morning is if more parents have sent their children to private schools over the past 15 years or if children have as it were lost their fricking minds over this time? Sadly I think that lots of kids are on the brink of having lost the ability to think or do anything interior at all without someone riding them - I'm talking about middle schoolers who I've always felt would be happier and more productive on twelve hour a day wilderness work crews than in school. Can you believe I've written that someone can ride a child into experiencing an inner life? That won't work! But what it will do is quiet the exterior, separate the ants from one another, stop the constant outer whoosh outer babble outer give and take and take and take that dominates their daily lives. Or not. Where I am teaching now it's a delight to walk around the room and talk to kids from all over the world, this generation, this kid, from somewhere hundreds to thousands of miles away. This is part of the problem. How to reach kids whose grasp of the English language is tentative - and many who've had little education in that far off place so that even if our language were the same they'd be behind. And how is it tjat some teachers blow off classroom management entirely in a room where people need to know how big the playpen is? And where it isn't? A kid yesterday who'd been suspended for weeks came back - I remembered him from last year when he'd been in school a day or two at a time between suspensions. He did well in that other idyllic now I see classroom where the teacher sat beside him. Yesterday he left the room several times - SEVERAL TIMES - and the teacher at her computer didn't notice. Her one disciplinary gesture was to deny him a writing implement. "Didn't you prepare for school?" or "Why is it you didn't prepare to be in class?" OBVIOUSLY the kid has a knack for chaos - give him a pen, and don't let him leave the room!

Fifteen Inch Ruler

Your excess length,
linear logic,
defers to whimsy,
your little recognized
talent as sockstand,
spitwad bat, oar.

How unlike the horse's
tooth is the nine-year-old's?
You count mysterious
increments.

Junk drawer multi tool,
I dip you into
peanut butter
and paint.

You are balacne beam,
fence post,
drumstick,
wait for secret messages
to wind about you.
Hoop skirted dervish
you are not.

Oh cobweb cutter,
baton, bulb planter,
hoe.

Babies are everywhere these days, and dogs.
Do you miss your childhood?
Did you have one?
I send my greetings
and bleatings also.
Send me yours and we'll console ourselves.
Did the waiter send what you preferred?
I suspect everyone has thought
the grocery clerk added weight
or someone gulped your final breath.
I guess. But have we laughed?
Are we laughing?
pumping hands above the groaning table?
Punch the keys. There is delight in pain.

Within the hidden city I am an Inca
fearing for my heart, a corn ear per
beat, Spaniards oblivious encamped
facial hair beneath helmets fearsome
unused to llama feist and spit, fit
European bucklements far stranger
than carvings leading here we needn't
fear they'll read dumb as bows on knees
they've wet behind a jungle waltz
and all their schmaltz as nothing and
that soon so buckle up and buck up
head 'em out and do not leave your lard
our lives are hard but we have all we need.

Think of when you were a kid, chid
for dropping tongs, cuffed like a cub,

that's what it's all about at the rink
never permitted any noise at home

you are careful what words you use
hip high snow at ten in Cashmere

camping was a tin cup and a tirade
fir tops not the ceiling in your room

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

many thanks to Naomi Shihab Nye


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your heartbeat speeds fearsomely
that massive wingspan shadows your car.

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

-Laura Gamache
2/5/09

Ah, it breaks my heart to hear the news from Chiloquin where seven out of thirteen teachers are incompetent, burned out, who cares what the reason, not teaching kids. Last year's graduating class of 36 sent 15 kids to college - 6 were still in school at the beginning of the second quarter or semester. Failure! Failure! Failure! If I yelled Fire! you'd run, Foul! you'd at least look. Failure! and we all curl into our fetal selves, turn seahorse in the silent sea of a filthy aquarium, immobilized by shame. And we should be ashamed of ourselves for abandoning children to the care of those who do not have the capacity to care, who do not try to teach. Oh, they're teaching something, these burn-outs, these cynical paycheck collectors, and you know the kids are learning what they teach.

What Incompetent Teachers Teach

So what your life expectancy is 35 -
you won't feel a thing beyond your teens.
Adulthood is the country of the dead.
Nobody cares about you.
Learning is not important.
YOU are not important.
You will be wronged.
You will not survive.

--
The Truth Without Flowers

If you open your heart it will break
but breaking open is what seed pods do
to receive water and air and light.

If you open your mind you'll hear lies
but you will learn to recognize truth
cracking open a book, or in a tender look.

See how the aspen thank the pines for
shelter - waving their green then golden
then again green hands in gratitude.

This fierce place with its buildings boarded
patrolled by raptors, where the rivers
bubble from under the bellies of rocks

is yours but not all that you own. Others
raise their hand to you, refuse to guide
you, but you get up every morning
alive, your heart urging you forward.

I cannot conceive boots marching through Gaza
having cupped the secret curve of your instep.

Bulldozers raze dust that hides what they raze
as I cradle a cool lemon in my palm to zest.

I cannot comprehend news of this new old war.
I map with a finger the dried tracing of a tear.

2/3/09 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
A LOVE POEM

your fingers patter at your cell
Chicken Little to my hen
Yo Yo to my Yeon-Hee oboe
I'm dizzy as a head cold
no noz me with more olla
oh yeah, even cards or odd
crinoline slip do si does not tit
for t'will not buy you bus
fare, Kia for your Audi
I'd trick to buy your gas
offer peony and stock
valentine box a heart bleed
my need a greased pig, eel
uber moon for you in bad
or beefsteak.

January 31 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

High in the ramparts he yells, "Serf's up!"
English king hates everybody, Imams,
witches, whatyagonnado but go all out
which serfs do, not to negate
or make them any deader
plunging from above a newsy header
magic middle ages rise off pages, let
imaginations wallow warrens legit
under stone cutouts sunlight min-
imum downstairs. Will we get even?
Stevenson or Charlotte with the web
the castle or the palace of the rani
not do over not recorded not reset
a pox, Black Death, a fishing license
finder's fee of how this west was won.
Oh posh and fie oh black tooth tabby
stones askew akimbo you misstep
who leapt this one time only
holy moley all time jolly on the urn
Walt's lilac fragrance by the stoop
yawp the rooftops say I do
Lemmings lean towards their leader
I conjure them cuz I'm a reader.

Sheffer 1/28 Crossword Puzzle: A Poem Draft

Micky Minnie's cousin winged afar
stared at the cartoon sky you sobbed
off-limits now, taboo, another area
cordonned off, fat pettable rope for loge
your chubby hand swatted, lonely, pal
eyes blooming shamed as critics blast
the cornball that you love. Oh liar liar
you pretend and bend to kiss the ass
deconstruct the Hutt and blanch at Babe
but you're a skipping girl across the quad
a tide of stupid tears that do not ebb
oh flow you do and even knowing error
you breach the dam you are not fussy
Owl and Pussy fine with you - so do you ail
and fail, as flightless as the emu
never honored in the east
once dead no resurrected cult
surround your dresser scratchings, each
underlined passage, no referential pastas
shaped to the likeness of your baths
give us this day no madelaine but oreo
for you adore the Cheshire not Prussian
blues. Oh bake me in your Keebler kiln
and let's be done eternity's no fun our
brownies almost done so take your ease
you're one in thousands or in ten
and I will love you always silly dolt.

INAUGURATION NEWS CONTINUES TO WIDEN OUR GRINS AND UP HOPE QUOTIENT!

FASHION:
Aretha Franklin sang "My Country Tis of Thee" in a fabulous, Detroit-made hat! See the Detroit Free Press's article here: http://www.freep.com/article/20090122/COL27/901220379.

MUSIC:
THEY ARE NOT MILLI VANILLI! Read New York Times article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/arts/music/23band.html?hp.

I forgot about the cool url-invisible highlight function available to me at blogger. Live with it. I also failed miserably to understand my husband's mini-lecture on how light particles can transmit data instantaneously. I do understand that light can be both particle and wave, and read Ellen Gilcrist's novel. See, what you do is to clone the particles, then line the clone pairs up in the right order in two locations and if you give one of the pair one form by looking at it the other pair member does the same thing, giving you the same sequence of 1s and 0s in the two locations, presently a distance of 2 meters. But how do you keep them in the same order? He mentioned fiber optics, electrical cable which corrals electrons, the printed circuit board with its obedient silica bits. Yeah, but this is the man who dreamed a transistor in a cowboy hat was after him.

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.

Does this go out to anybody?
I can't see anything on my blog after December 13.
Perhaps I have died.
Perhaps I am a refugee from my own life
Perhaps it doesn't matter if I cannot see my new posts
Perhaps it is better for me not to see my posts.
This will expand my universe
beyond its constant me me me
that all of us are so bloody tired of
bloody danged tired of
perhaps I should go to England
except that I'd wear a size 12 there
which shows the depth of MY character.

Day to cajole and wangle myself into compartmentalizing? organizing? but not trivializing or, by inaccurately analyzing, minimizing my experience in Chiloquin. Yesterday's Seattle Times carried an article, dateline Chiloquin, on the future of Train Mountain. The founder's widow, now owner, hopes to offer youth programs. Ride the miniature railroad! Sheesh, why didn't I think of this?

At Blaine yesterday, two classes of 8th graders played Acronymble and then I showed them how to write pantoums, using a past class pantoum as mentor text. Here are pantoums the classes wrote yesterday:

8A Pantoum

I opened the window and
saw Joe the ice cream man
ringing a bell
cling! cling! cling!

saw Joe the ice cream man
open the 7-11 door
cling! cling! cling!
He disappeared behind the Cheetos.

You opened the 7-11 door,
caught a glimpse of Joe before
he disappeared behind the Cheetos.
You heard the bathroom door slam,

caught a glimpse of Joe before
ringing a bell.
You heard the bathroom door slam.
I opened the window.


8B Sensory Extravaganza Pantoum

Shoes have a definat smell
opera music sounds melodic
ice cream cones tingle your tongue
my skin feels rough.

Opera music sounds melodic
the rainbow shimmers beside the pot of gold
my skin feels rough
dogs smell icky when wet

the rainbow shimmers beside the pot of gold
fire sizzles when you pour water on it
dogs smell icky when wet
bloated marshmallows ooze deliciously

fire sizzles when you pour water on it
ice cream cones tingle your tongue
bloated marshmallows ooze deliciously
shoes have a defiant smell.

In 8A, kids wrote pantoums fast enough, the class time is 80 minutes, that I handed out the Villanelle handout, read them "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," and gave them as homework having a general theme for the villanelle when we meet again Wednesday. 8B had a tougher time finishing the pantoum, so their homework is to finish the pantoum. I'll introduce the villanelle Wednesday.

In the afternoon, the two 7th grade classes played Acronymble and then I introduced the idea of transliteration. They study roots in these classes, and 7A remembered learning trans-, while the kids of 7B looked at us blankly when Kylie and I suggested they might have a clue to what "trans-" means. (across. Adults get the cheat sheet.)

EWRLOA Poem from Acronymble

Everybody wants radical literature on air
Elephants wandering really loudly over Asia,
Enterprising walruses riding Landrovers, (outsize animals.)
Ear wax ruling London, Ontario - ahhhh!

NELAMHF Poem from Acronymble

Nematodes elect large ant mayor
(how funny!)

FQMIRDTT Poem from Acronymble

Friends quiet me.
Reminder: don't tolerate taunts.

Follicles question meaning.
In radical departure,
twins talk.

QFAGON Poem from Acronymble

Quest for a gracious ovation now!

Quebec flyers arrived greatly overtired (nude.)

Quiet farts are going on now. - Harrison

ULMOFEZ

Usually, Laura manages on fried ectoplasmic zucchini.

---

Off to work.

End of 2008 Reflections as though I could be or am thoughtful at this juncture what with jangly coffee nerves and grand fir needles crunching underfoot, what with receding snow exposing kiwi leaves moldering in their thick leathery manner across the trex deck, what with Chiloquin behind me and two teaching residencies dawning the beginning of next week. Happy new year happy new year and a little panic what with no settling journal writing, no calming balm of alone time. Here I am alone in my writing room for the first time in awhile with piles and piles of papers and books unsorted unput away. In my bedroom are stacks of clean and stacks of dirty clothes. Stacks is an orderly word, a visual that doesn't coincide with the slidey humps that litter the dresser and floor along with the dog bed made of sheets for Julia's dog she leaves with us when she goes out - the undersheet abloom with blackish shapes created by said dog when she chewed open a green tennis ball a few days ago. But who cares about the sheets? Who can make sense of the residency several days past? This is my thirteenth day at home and I have reflected not at all, have done nothing towards making sense of what I did down south. Maybe what I should do is face that daunting task. Step into it. If I keep going I won't stop, if I bite off tiny bits, I'll be able to chew them. Maybe I am not equal to the entire task, but I could talk about one kid on one day, or about one encounter, or about the experience of driving in snow. I can reread my journal pages as I have begun to do. I can drink water to dilute the caffeine. I can cope and move forward.

It's snowing everywhere in the world
the entire planet a snowball hurling
and I am warm and dry and typing
and what more do I need than that?

In Ashland in the smallest room at the motorcourt
(I love a motorcourt) I wake to a disappointment of snow
I must have driven home last night in the entire falling
which makes me happy for my trip home (I mean
the motorcourt - we vagabonds bond quickly with place.)
Todays weatherground is peppered with winter weather
advisories all the way back to Chiloquin - not winter
weather warnings that might have stranded me here.
My reaction to Ashland was unexpected. I didn't like
the bookstore, the clothes store, the shoe store. I wanted
to sit quietly and write somewhere and there was music
glaring through the coffeeshop which I emphatically
wanted turned off. I longed for the not-enough of
Chiloquin that throws me back upon myself.

In Which I Copy Lines from Poems from Chiloquin Juniors


I live in the necks of trees
As the trees hide in the mist
My soul is hidden in a willow tree.
Spring rain burns away my listlessness.
You may see my thoughts like fish
swimming underwater.
I am unassailable within the citadel of my mind.
I try to fly, take flight from all
the truculent people in this world.
Pain is always combined with doubt.
Harsh stories as black and cold as night, mean words.
Can you hear me now?
The silence is like a yell being smothered with a pillow.
---


TODAY'S THOUGHTS ABOUT THE TRAIN THAT BRAYS
THROUGH CHILOQUINALL HEY AND HEY
HERE I COME I COME I COME ALL EGO AND PUSH
AND SHOVE THROWING ITS WEIGHT AROUND
MAKING CARS WAIT BARGING BETWEEN
CONVERSERS AND THOUGHTS WITH NO MANNERS
AND THEN GONE THOUGH WE'RE STILL HERE
RESUMING WHAT WE DO
A LITTLE ADDLED AND CUT THROUGH


HEY, wait up! wait UP! WAIT UP!
Posted by Laura Gamache at 12:49 PM

Poem Draft with Words from Oregonian Daily Crossword Puzzle from 12/8/08

There are kids whose resistance is elfin
and kids who dig in their heels, don't just goof
off but will themselves to fail. Dream of Sega
and think they're Peter Pan or a son of Milne
(who wasn't very happy was he, Christopher
I mean) back to the kid amidst remotes
and vids with earbud dangling, ceder
of any care. He wants to be anywhere but here.
He oscillates on a frequency, with ocelots
perhaps or owls. Is he more alive for eve
than celebration? Musician but no oboe
in that case. I watch the moon, it's out, his noon
and I'm about to go to bed. Is life a detour?
Are we there yet? Plane ticket to the cine,
musical chairs, can he think of other wheres
or is he playing catatonic on a diatonic scale?
He will not say or write or think but placid
sit and never spark the twinkling of a thought
for anyone like me to see for I don't elevate
his dreams, our hearts don't overlap.

Far away in the wilds of the Klamath Basin where the air is so cold, dry and laden with invisible particulate matter from all the old old wood stoves, in particular my old wood stove, I long for home even with its darkness dampness darkness and duties. I have a love/hate relationship with the mail. I have missed the dailiness of mail in the box and the walk up the stairs to the mail in the box. I have not missed flyers and catalogues. I have not missed bills, and I didn't miss paying bills today. Jim phoned them to me and I paid them online, a fragile tether, odd connection to home. I am off to make an imagined map of something like Forgiveness, Longing or Tragedy to show to the ninth graders as a model for sixth period.

Yesterday I revised a poem about Edward Hirsch in which Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewsky and Zbignew Herbert figure and this morning I see on the siteminder/meister that someone walked through my blog from Prague. That's some major telepathy!

Today, I am heading off up Route 62 to Fort Klamath to visit the organic store and to Wood River and the park beyond that. I packed a lunch (yes Jim, I did), binoculars and sunglasses. I am practicing intention. I love my spontaneity, flexibility, impulsiveness, but this triumvirate has limited my ability to listen to myself and proceed from a stance - this I think is what people talk about when they talk about being centered. I can become centered in the moment, before whooshing off in random directions. This morning I did not go with my impulse to hop in the car and disappear down any highway, but most likely the road to Ashland (HA you thought I would write ruin!)

The Humument, an apology

When I say The Humument is a cool book, I don't want you to get the idea I've read it. I've looked at it as a collection of wonderful images containing words that were on those pages to begin with. Sometimes I read the words on a particular page, sometimes not. I love the confluence of word and image, but image always seems to trump word. My newly former brother in law is a composer who wrote a composition called "Freed From Words" with words floating in it. Separated. Ineffectual as we all feel some mornings when our feet are cold and the fire won't light, the room ahaze with smoke.

What with all the collaging going on at school and home, I had to look again at Tom Phillips's cool altered book, THE HUMUMENT. Above is page 6. I own a copy. This is how I write now. Short declarative sentences. Or phrases.

I was planning to drive to Klamath Falls to meet my friend for dinner tonight, but she called to cancel - she's sick, her daughter is sick and her husband took a student who had a seizure to the ER in Klamath Falls.

What I was not planning to do today was teach. But I did.

A day abloom with personal creative endeavor capped by a night on the town is instead a day at school - well spent I think but still a day away from my own wordplay, and now another evening alone, though an evening I can devote to wordplay if there's any ticking left in my higher functioning.

Making beauty is the argument I can give for why I'm here in town. Let's make beauty. Let's paste colored paper onto white paper, let's write poetry, let's step away from the s(*& that surrounds us. Maybe if all of us do that the s@(# will cease.

Huh.

Camera left home however miles north and west of here,
though I have the cable to connect it to my computer. sigh.
No photos of my last three weeks in Chiloquin. Today I've
driven to Klamath Falls. Twenty miles north of town I hit
smog, the air inversion, the air stagnation the warning
says will be lifted Saturday. Yesterday it promised Friday
and two days before that it was today. Smog like sparkly
leek soup. Hills invisible. Upper Klamath Lake invisible.
How do the birds breathe? But I must shop and get away
point my yellow beetle north and drive into clear air. Up
at 4 am in tears over what a girl in one of my classes said.
I am so lucky, lucky, lucky, the more I know of these kids
the more I admire them. I will myself to stand with the ones
who speak truth who are truth tellers who point their brave
chins into the facts, focus their sharp eyes and speak and
make art with lives nobody had any right to throw at them.

Go to http://wordsmith.org/anagram/
All the best from,
A manacle harangue aka
harangue a manacle aka
huge almanac area aka
arcane human algae aka
humane arcane gala aka
manage area launch aka
a mean carnage hula aka
Laura Anne Gamache.

Acrostic Poems with Ninth Graders Today!

Lizards view me with slitted eyes
angry red, overheated and lazy
unknown unsung unwittingly
ridiculous floor liers,
acter-outers, resisters
against the gift of possibilities
new though latent in
nether minds brimming with
experience and perhaps love.
Get away from me, they scream,
afraid I will make them think.
Miracle imagination promises
antidote for boredom and dismal
childhoods. We are magicians,
Houdinis drenched but unchained,
each one a scaly multitude.

One benefit of driving eight hours south from Seattle to Chiloquin yesterday is that once I got to Highway 97 the sun was down and the crescent moon was joined by Jupiter and Venus in a clear clear sky all the way south from Highway 58 to the turn off.

Having been home for ten days, it was difficult to adjust to being alone in my little cabin. I ate dinner, read about two chapters of BY GEORGE, got into bed and was asleep before 9pm. The idyllic creative life redoux!

This morning I walked out to the wood shed and retrieved logs and kindling, built my fire and drank my half caf coffee.

Now I sit in the unheated library where there is internet access, but not for long. My right leg has resumed its unhappy cold-twinge, and I can't risk being unable to move at school.

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft 11/24/08

Lassitude palls along the loch
dense and airless as fog truck DDT
chilled lungs, sleeve from a slung on robe

What the heck is sangfroide? It came to me on my walk the other day, I wrote it down in my little notebook.

"self-possession or imperturbability especially under strain" says Miriam Webster online, with "equanimity" as synonym.

I could write an essay on my need for that quality, especially 6th period with the new feral ninth graders. But I promised I wouldn't write about my teaching residency on this website since kids might google me and find it and hear and mess with me because of what I say here.

I have pink eye! Conjunctivitis! Wow! It sounds pretty but is goopy and droopy in actuality. I look my age! My left eye nearly smeared shut with goo yesterday when I drove directly from school to a free clinic in Klamath Falls 30 miles away (the clinic is on the other side of town - if it had been by the library it would have been a scant 26 miles away.) I drove directly into the sun for part of the trip, mainly the part where I was driving along Main Street looking for the clinic and barely making out the traffic signal lights for glare and eye-squinting. At the Fred Meyer to get my prescription filled the pharmacy guys kept paging me back to the counter. My insurance company claims the prescription benefit ran out in March. We didn't have this coverage until March. I paid and took the receipt, wanting to get the first two drops of magic elixer into my eye with no further to-do. Since I am here in Chiloquin with no family or intimates from home, I entered the house and regressed to six years old. I wanted cinnamon toast and old movies on TV. I made myself salmon from the Fred Meyer and a cheddar quesadilla and opened the new bottle of Australian Malbec, which was the first bottle of decent red wine I've purchased since coming here. Anything on the satellite TV that looked good was something my satellite subscription doesn't cover. My (inherited, purchased by my landlord and actually a gift not a right) satellite coverage covers only heavily advertising-laden or Christ-filled or infomercial fare. I pressed one channel that said "Fabulous Boot" thinking it might be a movie, perhaps a sequel to Das Boot? and a woman's voice accompanied by a hand fondling a fur-lined shortie boot came into view. The boot was ugly and in an ugly shade of anemic taupe or I might have continued watching.

The light dims here in the community center - the curator has gone home and locked the doors, so I am deliciously by myself in the space, which never happens so that I am loathe to leave as the protagonist in The Piano Tuner might be wont to remark. Really, I am more 19th century than 21st except for the under and outerwear.

I love that Brok O Bama!

"To the Best of Our Knowledge" on my transistor radio

Patricia Smith, whose Blood Dazzler is on the National

Book Award short list, Jay Parini who quoted Auden

like mad, and Australian poet, Les Murray, fathered by

a man with "an addiction to grief," who said, "I abhor

anything that demands human sacrifice." Last night,

in Chiloquin, Oregon, where we do, yes we do, celebrate

culture and poetry. Jay Parini, a poet, has written a

book called Why Poetry Matters and reminded me how

it does. Patricia Smith led with a poem about a girl

whose mother was known as a drug addict who asked

her to help her write a poem about her mother - dead -

that celebrated the person who sang while braiding

the girl's hair. The question Patricia Smith asked those

Miami-Dade County kids, was, who knows someone

who is dead. "I do," forty hands shot up, "I know a

dead person." Parents dead of AIDS and friends gone

to violence, and six year olds in need of voices, and

she realized that writing poetry is like having a second

throat, and that we poets, climbing to the lectern,

composing our poems, wield a very real power.

This is just to say
Barack Obama
has taken
the presidency
back
for the people
of the United States
as far as I
can see
and I
hope
we're up
for doing
the work.

YIKES!

---

I am the woman behind you in the check-out line
who leans in intimately, whispers, "my son is
dying." You're next. The other lines is longer.
You have to get home befor eyour kids do, your
rollicking, exhausting, robust, healthy daughter
and son. You look away, a social cue I do not
read. "The cancer," I tell you, "is eating his
parietal lobe." "Next!" the clerk says. You have
piled your canned goods atop the whole wheat
bread and your fingers fumble for the keypad
pen. My poptarts, HoHo's and M&M's topple
forward as the clerk lifts the divider with
cigarette ads on its faces. You pass through
the automatic door, see me through glass,
clerk's hand clamped in mine, my mouth moving.
---
I do not have a son.

Should that last sentence be IN the poem?

Presidential Election Day and I woke up to snow
transforming everything, which I take as talisman,
as omen, as foreteller: the transition is upon us -
Obama will be the next president of the United States,
changing the American narrative forever. AMEN.

I am wearing red, white and blue bracelets. I was
wearing my Hawaii sweater, but its wool and too
warm to teach in even on a snowy morning with
that special cranking radiator heat that plagues
our public schools. Yesterday I picked up on what
someone said, "The Short Bus", liked it - it seemed
appropriate for elementary school but the kids
laughed and turned their faces - turns out those
are the buses assigned for special ed - not here in
Chiloquin, but these guys watch TV, they know
the lingo I don't know. Here in Chiloquin it's hard
to get the news - on Sunday when I can get no
internet access I also cannot get the Oregonian,
let alone the New York Times. The Shell Station
has a placard in its window "The Oregonian on sale
here" but the truck doesn't come out on Sunday.
I read the Klamath Falls Herald and Snooze,
and have now fed most of it into the maw of my
wood stove. Let's pretend this is a poem since
I'm giving it a narrow margin. Oh I hope Obama
wins by a margin wider than we've seen in decades.
I want definitive, I want instant confirmation. Jim
said, "I have a meeting at 6pm, I'm afraid it'll all
be over before I get home." I envy his confidence.

And here's Walt Whitman, who as E. Ethelbert Miller
said on Jefferson Public Radio (NPR) to LeeAnn
Hanson on Sunday, "no matter how we see ourselves,
as red or blue states, Whitman saw us all as one."

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING


I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on
the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon
intermission or at sundown,
the delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl
sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else.
The day what belongs to the day – at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

-Walt Whitman


I hope to be singing tonight!

At the counter in the library
a man says "I'm 79, guess I've
got another twenty years to go."
Coughs. He and the librarian
chat about cancer and dead kin.
The acoustics here are bright
and his voice bounces off
blonde bookshelves, reaches
me as though I were wearing
an ear trumpet. "It was '54,
'55, something like that," he
says, chuckles, blows his nose.
The kids along the wall get
to jawing, lined up
at the free public use computers.
"I could tell you a bunch
more stories," the man says,
the librarian says, "I bet."
A kid from one of the carrels
comments loudly. Someone
else turns up the sound on her
computer. A truck blats past.
The man hawks volubly, it
bounces between the science
books and the plays. A boy
pushes back his chair, it rasps
and his friend says, "lays an
egg," which is unrelated. "That
right?" says the libararian, and
"yaaah." "I thought that was
ridiculous," the man continues,
"You take care," the libarian says.
"I'm doing what I can," he says,
and then they get to repeating
goodbyes, he isn't leaving and
she isn't shelving books.

---

Saturday afternoon, November 1st at the Chiloquin Library.
Last night more trick or treaters than I've seen in five years
in Seattle. I went back out to the store to buy more candy,
bought the last two bags - a KitKat and a Baby Ruth. The
remains I brought with me - they're now in the libarian's
basket on the check-out counter. Last night I watched TV,
first time since I got here - Halloween and Jim called from
Shawna and Todd's - Todd had made Jim a Vampire Blood-
tini, and they were about to watch "Shawn of the Dead."
I have lots of remotes, but can't figure out how to play
a dvd. "The DaVinci Code" was on what turned out to be
a Christian focus channel - one ad was for a five day pray-
a-thon the station will be broadcasting next week, over-
lapping voting day and its aftermath. The ad breaks
were long and I ate a lot of mini KitKats and Baby Ruths,
not even tasting them - greedy, needy and insatiable.

And as the foreground greenery bows to Wizard Island, so Crater Lake stays the bluest skies you've ever seen. The lake doesn't change depth more than an inch or two every year, no inlet or outlet, nearly 2000' deep at the deepest point. When Mount Mazama blew nearly 7000 years ago the Klamaths saw it go, saw this caldera seal its sides by lava floes, fill with clear water.

White people, who have never allowed not knowing to interfere with aggressive action, stocked the lake, which had previously been home to virtually no living thing outside of bacteria, with lots and lots of fish. Brown trout, rainbow trout and some kind of salmon survive. Obviously nobody migrates to spawn. Populations are small as there isn't much to eat. (notice sudden escape from documentary tone.)

When we came here, Jim and I, 32 years ago, we walked from the lodge down to lake. The trail is gone. Rangers said there's a walkable trail on the northeast side of the lake, but we didn't drive over there to find it. We didn't even ask if there was a boat anymore to take tourists around Wizard Island. I like that the lake is that much less accessible to human messing about.

At school, we talked about rap. I wrote a rap draft yesterday morning, in the persona of a mythical upper middle class white person, possibly commander in chief, who knows. Here goes:

(It's a draft remember. I said it in front of the juniors, no beats, and those who looked back at me looked stricken, except one girl who said it was AWESOME, who is awesome, you are awesome Vanessa!):

Rap of Our Supremacy


We pound the wrong, who are in our way and brown,
we’re righteous, we’re free, they all want to be we.
The weak make us angry, let us take things away,
they pray so they say in their temples and mosques
pray to animals, the Milky Way – we don’t trust them
so we blow them away, we cage them and burn them,
make them do what we say. We remember the Alamo,
foxhole. Don’t point out Viet Nam or Gitmo - we gotta go
and take what we need. It isn’t greed like they spew
in their ignorant screed, claim we’re imperial in their
funereal attempts to save their puny ways. We don’t rue
what we do. If we’re wrong, we’d know it, forego it.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

No time to help the poor, fix our streets, give kids
something warm to eat, we gotta beat feet anywhere
you others dare to keep what you have, believe
you have the right to save yourselves and your weird
way of life. We come bearing gifts to heal your rifts,
commerce in drifts. You want what we have, we know
that you do – Gap, Target, MacDonalds, Kentucky Fried –
inside you want it, to be just like us, drive fast cars,
blot out the stars with traffic lights and all night bars.
You’ve got your fists around our oil. What could you
want with it? We’ve toiled – best workers in the world –
your hearts yearn for our stars and stripes way of life.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

You hate us cuz we’re free. Watch our TV, don’t believe
what you see. That brotha, he lies, don’t go to his neighborhood.
They’re not good, don’t do what they should. Their minds are wood!
You can’t teach them to change – they won’t forgive the past.
They won’t last, lower cast, oh those are vast. Forget them,
don’t let them pull you down, this is the wrong side of town.
Turn up the jams and put the hammer down. Don’t listen
till you’re far enough away they sound like sheep, such a relief,
they’ll come to grief – and deserve it. They kill each other,
can’t keep a lover, their beef’s just a cover. We don’t owe
them anything – let them mow our acre lawns, sprinklers on
in the dark in the draught – we’re not doing without.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

The rest of the world cowers. What should we do – offer
flowers? Please. You die of disease in ugly places, don’t
wash your faces or change your clothes. You blow your
noses in the street, walk over it in dusty feet. You’re
missing teeth, have no education, no sanitation, we can’t
respect your nation. – we have an obligation to perpetuate
our way of life – be a light unto the world and take
what you don’t know you have, and if you do, we’ll charm
you, disarm you, we never mean to harm your mothers
and your kids, your flimsy houses full of mice and lice.
How could you be nice? We don’t think twice. What’s to
understand? You’ve been neglected, we’ll neglect you.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around --
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

We’re watching the news when the call comes in,
in midst of financial plummet, war and the election,
Bad connection, “Hey kids, It’s Dad.” Oh God.

-Laura Gamache
FIRST DRAFT, 10/28/08

Gotta go. SIX MORE DAYS! Believe that Obama will win, and that he will work for positive change in this country. I do. I believe. And I'm not a fool.

That's Mt. Theisen behind the Klamath Marsh in the photo.

Here I am in Chiloquin, Oregon, south of anywhere on the west coast I have previously called home, autumn in the high country, clear cold air, quaking aspen, three kinds of pine, lots of kinds of people, though their numbers are few. Chiloquin, population 720, according to my Oregon D.O.T. map.

While I've been gone, Seattle poets have gotten over themselves in a big way at Green Lake, standing in a line to tell passers by "I love you," a pile of poetry books on a chair nearby.

While I've been gone, Seattle's Conibear women's crew sent two fours to Boston, where they placed 4th and 7th in the highly competitive Head of the Charles regatta.

I've come here to get in touch with my inner poet, and make her come out and write.
And get organized already! Which is rather beyond her, so I've brought my inner Hun, who used to cox for Conibear, and she's still busy with getting her headgear on, so more on that.

I've come here to teach creative writing at Chiloquin High School two days a week. I'm working with 23 juniors, 32 sophomores and 13 middle school, oops junior high kids.

I've come here to curate an adult writer group, three sessions in Sprague River, four sessions in Chiloquin. The first Sprague River session was last night. Five writers, six counting me. We're launched. Sharing writing is a kind of liftoff. We all agreed the sessions provide deadlines. Our audience awaits our best work! Make time for it! I suggested everyone write down ten observations a day. These can go towards a piece of writing, or augment the other work you're doing. I quoted Henry James, not from the Golden Bowl, but what he said about the writer being a person upon whom nothing is lost.

I've come here to learn something about here. As Perry Chocktoot, Culture Director at the Klamath Tribes said to me two days ago, "You don't know where you are." I asked him to tell me, and he has started to do that.

I've come here to develop reading habits. I've read Buy the Chief a Cadillac, by a cowboy, I've read parts of Stories Along the Sprague, am nearly through The Echo Maker by Richard Price. I have read poetry out of published books and poetry by my students. I like a balance of seasoned work and work by sprouting writers - so that my ear doesn't turn tin. The aspens are turning - leaves swivelling, and going golden. I began accumulating books my first weekend at the local bookstore, half of the Chiloquin Art Center across the street from the grocery store that has a liquor store in a closet straight back from the entry door. Last weekend I went to Portland to be with my Bookarina friends and had the dt's for Powell's. My friend Susan and I wandered the purple, orange, pink and other colored sections of the store. I think poetry is blue, so I spent a lot of time there - I don't look for color, I follow my worn path to get there. Oh, I bought books. I bought a few $1 books, there are sections throughout the store, for the Chiloquin School Library. I gave them to the librarian, along with some I'd brought from home. The books she turned away, Haydn took. Not Haydn the dead composer, Haydn the very alive young teacher I'm working with at the high school.

I came here to write, and I'm writing. I'm writing about my teaching, which is halting as the teaching hasn't found its footing yet. We are not within our flow as yet, my writing about my teaching is a boat I haven't quite gotten my butt to the seat of yet.

I came here to be away from home, to be out of sorts, alien, to look homeward into myself. This is going on. The first couple of nights I was jittery with nothing to do and nobody to be with. It is odd that there's no little cafe to hang out in here. There's no real dependable day to day sit down and jaw with your neighbors place. No wonder the different groups - so far I understand ranchers, Native folks, new transplants with high ideals and money. There's the new community center, where I sit in the library typing. It houses a gallery, the CVIP (Chiloquin Visions in Progress) and the sheriff's department probation officer. There's a Friday night Teen thing happening I think, though I do not KNOW this as a solid given.

Time is a different entity here - I don't trust my pace yet, am still holding back, holding out, unsure of what the hell I'm doing. I keep going. I don't stop. I would like to flow and soar, but that is never an all the time thing. I am a community resource here. I was shocked to discover the writers had not seen each other (the adult writers) since Ellie was here last year. I think I have a mission to help them learn to continue their group in between writing residencies without the group devolving - I have ideas how this could happen - certainly meeting no more frequently than once a month, having a rotating roster of group leaders presenting out of different writing resources. Keeping the same rules as when the writer is here, and in anticipation of the next annual writer visit.

See Madison Alley Chat (another blog) for my last two Chiloquin posts - who knows how my blogs got transposed? Not me.

I miss the anonymity of city swirling around me
that lets me focus within that swarm,
see my work within a web,
humanity's sweaty perfumed proximity.
Out here I'm the ant who went too far
my feelers touch no other feelers,
I pick up a poem or a dirty sock,
put it down, that 100 mile stare,
wonder where I am when I am not
where I am known. I am only me
but I come trailing everyone I've read
each a bright ribbon on my particolored
fancy dancing dress, all these poetry lines,
poetry minds, best minds who haven't
crashed and burned, or have but caught
some gist of what they were in words
before they left, they soared.
Would you rather be bored?
Hoard your trove of been-done-wrongs?
What about all the yet-unwritten songs?
I want to board that train and ride,
window wide open, vista dome sky,
watch as the world scrolls by.
Do I dare? and do I dare?
oh TS, I do and care to come and go,
What is bliss? What do I not want to miss?
baby you die if you don't try
to see beyond the fence you hide behind
it isn't safe for any of us
to jump off between stops
but we - each of us - face a window
that will can open.
Stick your tongue out
I only want to teach you, reach you.
Come back with me to steam engine days
through the haze at the station
we'll run to clasp hands and board,
fly into the past and get past the pain
that makes us vain. Why me?
Who did this to me? and Why? That's
a hard candy you've gotta suck
till it dissolves. That sweet ache
in the roof of your mouth that leaves
you craving for this vast passing
damaged dangerous person-pulverizing
world with its jagged edges you jerk
back from. You've bled before
and will again, sure as moon draws tide.
Grasp the handrail, pull yourself up
and ride.

I missed posting yesterday, Michelmas Day, the day after which it is not okay to eat fresh blackberries until next year. I was looking for blackberries.

No, I was not looking for blackberries, I was in Klamath Falls, buying produce at the last farmers' market of the year - baby bok choy!!! the cutest Macintosh apples, the size of baby fists, etc. I found the local NPR station, 90.9 (this may be wrong, my brain is slightly hazy from the absense of oxygen in the wood stove heated innards of the Chiloquin Community Center.)

There is a used bookstore here, run by a man named Richard, who told me it only took him fifty some years to find out what he wanted to do with his life. He opened the bookstore fifteen years ago. The bookstore is labyrintine, and packed floor to ceiling with books and more books, including one area I did not dare enter yet full of old and rare volumes. By here, I mean maybe half a mile from my cabin. He has placed the business and finance bookshelves in the rest room. I think he said he has 100,000 books, but I was slightly delirous at the time so I may have misheard.

I am taking a pine needle basket making class this Thursday from a woman named Hope at the Curio Shop that shares the building with the bookstore, (together they're called the Chiloquin Art Center.)

I spent two hours reading my poems aloud to myself last night, and talking aloud to myself about them. I was practicing for the community reading/welcome Tuesday night, but I felt entirely comfortable opining about myself aloud. Do tell me if you notice me doing this in a public place. Speaking of public places, the Klamath Library is pretty swell, and I found some good books there while listening to a three-woman flute ensemble that was part of the dedication for the memorial garden outside the library yesterday. I'm still feeling a bit hazy and not quite here, not entirely due to my slightly aged woodstove and less than Annie Oakley cowgirl fire laying skills. Though I leap to tell you that I'm one mean beach fire builder.

The train goes through town several times a day with horn blaring, and it does not stop. How does that register with a person growing up here? Do you not hear that horn after awhile? Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance, everybody thinks it's true is what Paul Simon says, but he didn't grow up here. I wonder what these kids have to say about it.

I'm at the Courtyard Marriott in Springfield, Oregon, typing at the Room 115 desk next to the giant flat screen tv on a swiveling base. I could point that thing right at me if I so chose. I'll be long gone before you could get here. Since I'm right next to the exit door, people are slamming out at and shaking the lampshade on a regular basis. I've traveled alone a bit, and find it interesting that I have more often than not been placed in a room right next to an exit. I'm a woman alone and the desk clerk, usually a young woman, chooses a room next to an exit. I don't get it, but then maybe she doesn't get that there's anything more vulnerable about a room that gets more traffic past it than any other in the whole fracking hotel. But I digress.

Today I see Chiloquin for the first time. I don't get to move into my cabin today, but I do get to meet with the teacher I'll be working with at school.

My car is full. I cannot find my swim bag with my suit, goggles, cap, and Ultraswim shampoo. Jim packed the car, so I have no idea where he put it, or if he put it in at all. He would have packed anything that arrived on the entry rug, but would he have noticed if I hung the bag by its strap on the stair rail? I don't know. I was in no condition to pay attention by the time we left for our late lunch date, after which he went for acupuncture and I headed south on I-5. I stopped at Zupan's on Burnside in Northwest Portland at about 7:30 pm. Comfort of the known. And the outre. A shrine to precious food. I bought devilled eggs, toothpaste and unbleached coffee filters for insulated melitta style coffee pot I brought from Chelan. Out of body, out of place, not yet in process, en route to the unknown I've sought, discomfort and opportunity for change I'm driving toward. I've found a biodiesel source online in Eugene. I've written out directions on the "Accomplished List" notepad here on my desk. I could play video games if I had any idea how to do that with the three fingered hockey glove looking dealie behind the giant tv.

Check out time is noon, but I see no reason to hang out as I cannot locate - it is cold outside and the ground damp - my swim stuff. I love to split sentences awkwardly. Maybe one of the reasons I can work with kids in schools. Though slogging through the 8th grade stories this week made me somewhat sad. Most of the girls wrote variations on what the teacher told me are "gossip girls" plots. Is this a tv show? The protagonist moved from LA to NYC or NYC to LA (or somewhere in the "perfect state of California".) The girl is tall, blonde or auburn haired and hothothot with a perfect body and boyfriend she has left behind/has dumped her for her best friend. Or he doesn't know she exists. Since these are pre-dating girls, the boyfriends are like the "immaculate beemers" they drive, the huge designer purses they sling over their "perfect shoulders" - accessories! The people they love are their friends who 1. they left behind in LA/NYC 2. they meet in NYC/LA 3. betray them 4. forgive them or 5. die after having been betrayed by protagonist. (or all 5.) The protagonist may not realize how hothothot she is until the climax (unfortunate choice of nomenclature.) The protagonist may realize this is not all there is to life, and these girls got better grades. Uh, yes, I did this. The stories were so trite, banal, insubstantial, and frighteningly similar that I wound up evaluating them based on the choices the protagonist made - was there any thought put into the story at all? If the protagonist spent time sorting through what was going on in her fendi/prada or whoever world and I could feel the writer thinking and feeling her unique way into the story, up went the points. People who got the most points were those who wrote about entirely different subjects. This is a Catholic school and it runs on points.

There's a level of self loathing and frantic whizzing I have managed to achieve over the fact that I forgot my inherited iPod in Chelan - came home with a snazzy speaker dock, the charger, the ear buds, a cylindrical duhicky that pulls in radio signals, but apparently the iPod sits alone or next to the current car insurance form for our vehicle, probably on a very visible countertop. I am leaving for a nine week sojourn in southern Oregon this Thursday, so this lack of consciousness is worse than nagging or bothersome. I know I cannot 1. drink 2. eat candy unless I do not care if I can 1. think 2. function.

I have a couple of deadlines looming before I leave, also two hair appointments. THere is a squirrel outside in the drizzle frantically whizzing from my yard to the chicken yard across the alley. He or she has a more coherent handle on his/her activities than I have at the moment. Also, I am wet. I'm hysterical and I'm wet.

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Draft, 10/3/08

Here we go again with all the imps and emus
though to confuse the mind we add a tapir
and a mongoose so he will not be alone
though what I'd rather be is bicycling.
I'll ask again how many years I should allot
to idleness and how many thoughts to squalor
and you remind me of all I have to do.
When eek we hear out back beside the ewes
Have we gone mad? Just ask Elvira
she's busy with her navel by that easel
propped in Pollyanna's field. Yield!
we cry like knights not from Columbus
and who among us hasn't channeled Ezra
but back to ewes and their distress, at best
it's someone fussing with recycling
but we are in I fear for drama. Call your mama
or an ant. We wander Walmart (no agora)
and meet again for tea before the spelling
bee. Hee Hee. But as I said before, now, Holst
can keep us spinning when we fall like this to
err to whistle badly by the hour.

--

no animals were hurt in the production of this poem.

--

The essential human act at the heart of writing is the act of giving.
-Peter Elbow

I'm sending almost daily postcards to Chiloquin, to the teacher and kids I'll be working with at the high school starting October 13. Who are they? What are they thinking, if anything, about this weirdo mailing missives from Seattle. The postcards have collages on their fronts - today's has the Peter Elbow quote, as part of a collage I made almost eight years ago. Here's the text:

I am looking forward to meeting you all, and to doing good writing work together. I believe learning to hear yourself/myself think is a great gift - like creating a map as we wander through the wild country of our lives. Looking forward, Laura Gamache

The challenge for me is to continue creating that map, continue looking at my course. My tendency is to close my eyes, back away, sit beside the trail and reach into my grubby bag of huckleberries and eat them, all. I'm discouraged by rejections, by my own disinclination to push myself, by the current political climate, by anything I can come up with as an excuse! I used to tell people that the Fulkerson Family Motto was: LAY DOWN AND DIE! I'm still a Fulkerson, and I have to fight that tendency to GIVE UP! When I was nineteen, mother said, "I don't understand why you're so unhappy. Just wait and good things will happen to you." WAIT! I HATE to wait! But I am a master at that pose, that stance, that opportunity to ditch the work and do nothing and feel HORRIBLE about it. I loved school as a kid, and felt guilty that I liked my teachers better than my family - my teachers didn't make me clean the toilet, take care of the other kids, listen to their adult yadayadayada about "your father is a good man, but..." When I was eighteen, my mother started to offer wine to me as she whined to me in her bathrobe, hair mangy, wine at her elbow or down the hatch. I sat across from her at the kitchen table, pinned there, with no voice of my own. I didn't drink. My rebellion was in my refusal. Silence. Inaction. Not lifting that glass. Not making facial expressions. I built my ability to completely out, to blur my vision and blunt my consciousness and slam down the door of my emotional reaction to anything she said until it was safe to flee. I've fled. Years and years and years ago, but the habit of distance, of going blank, comes back to me daily. It is so familiar and easy to embrace. My impulse gets me into trouble - I need an adult to take my child in hand, like my therapist offered and I turned away. She's right though. I let my little child self rule - a package of hershey's kisses - you bet. Facing the manuscript, the poems with all their fricking difficulties, primarily their checked-out, freaked-out qualities, not happening. I don't wanna. I don't haveta. Nobody's grading me, nobody cares if my work never gets done, my workroom is a riot of misplaced papers, my car key's left on the freezer shelf and I'm in a sweat to find it but have no memory of where I set it because I'm in that backed-away pose, that waiting to flee stance. There is an enormous amount of exterior crap to flee and it is easy to pin my dis-ease, my refusal to face the roar of the world (thank you Michael Meade) on the $700 billion bailout, on Sarah Palin, on the entire Sudan. It's a lie. I can try. I don't have to lay down and die. I got that DNA din in my ears saying why not? and why? and oh you are so tired, you work so hard, just rest, rest, rest. But that is death talking.

Learning to hear myself think is a lifelong activity. The map has lots of vacant places, vast expanses, dark continents. It isn't just learning, it is doing the practice. Practice practice practice, because that is all I have. Get up in the morning and practice again. See if I can hit a sweet note and love that note, love those minor chords, that dissonance, and when the harmonics accidental though they usually are, kick in, breathe through them and go on, look forward.

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft for 10/1

when we lie down we must obey
drooping eyelids, dropping pulse,
cat stretch to the farthest toes
and down we go and far away
where everything will be okay.
Our leaders lead and we obey
daylight, we are far from home
our fears beset our sleep, we're
apt to toss our cookies for an ace
this petty place rapacious sheaf
another boy cries wolf our roles
woo nightmares, noone in the nick
can rescue gracious dames while
slither tongues and liquid clocks
wind spacious orbits at a slant
we can't quite see but spacious
to sleep perchance to stir another
fate that doesn't smell like skunk
another punk voracious and in
vain so vain windvane spin
the bottle punch the throttle we
barely toddle. Close our eyes.