It's room temperature around here, sky of blue, trees that deep almost too green September green. I received another rejection today, by email. So ephemeral, email, I can almost believe I dreamed it, like the last one, which was from Bat City Review. Oh, they say, we received so many many poems from so very many earnest diligent talented (more talented than YOU) poets working in far more interesting and involving ways, and etc.

I'm a tad discouraged about my poetry writing career. I think this is slightly funny, given that I will be going on a writing/teaching retreat for nine weeks this fall. I like to totally blow myself out of the confidence water so nobody will think I have a swelled head. You can tell where this is going so I will stop.

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle 9/5/08, a poem draft


At the antique/junktique mall I bought a short pew
with gum varnished tight to its underside, the sum
of my religious observance. Sitting there, alas alack
does not transport nor titillate my tongue. Like beef
I lack a home in Jesus here in the hallway, the urn
with my dog's remains beside me no Ouija accessory.

The antique/junktique mall moved farther out
soon after I moved farther into town. I wanted from
it what I never discovered though I uncovered
Franciscanware in bisque and taupish pink and blue
and bought it wouldn't you? and a pitcher stamped
with Shirley Temple's face. I liked that place. I liked

the junk that made me sneeze, dust furze on plates.
Logic asked for none of this accumulation, nobody
would make a million dollars from this place. The
town moved into wealth and million dollar condos,
we moved away. Crystal amber glistens on the gum
I never chewed. Was this about religion?

I've got my Ughs on, the ones I bought for January in St. Petersburg Russia. My feet are still freezing, the sky glows gray, it doesn't seem like it's going to hit any eighty degrees today. I'm preparing to go south to Oregon to reach high school kids with poetry, change their lives with poetry, fire them up, wake them up with poetry, but my feet are cold and I have to go to the bathroom. People I do not know have been living in my house for weeks, several groups of them. What do I think about this? I feel invaded, but squelch that since there is money in it, since my husband has relaxed into thinking about what he might like to do instead of what he must to keep us afloat, working a job he's grown to hate. I just read on the heel of my lambswool boot that I'm wearing Uggs. I prefer Ughs since that's how I feel about cold feet. I have such cold feet.

Last night my friend told me about getting radioactive iodine treatment for her thyroid cancer. She always used to be cold - wore her wool coat in restaurants in summer. After the 18 hours she spent in isolation in a room where everything was covered in paper so she wouldn't irradiate it, where another woman stood six feet away and pointed a geiger counter at her, where she sat behind the yellow danger! radiation! tape, she isn't cold anymore. She wanders her living room on cool days in a tank top and shorts.

Here are my last five poetry postcards for the August Postcard Poetry Fest:

I remember whe I wanted
to read every book in the school library
I remember I couldn't carry ten books myself
I remember I wanted to eat a Woodland Park
Zoo at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor - thirty
scoops of every ice cream flavor drizzled
with hot fudge, caramel and
marshmalow cream
I remember when I believed my desires
fired the whole world.

---

I have seen the Paris scene
at night, all those white lights,
driving where revolutionaries
and the cast of Les Mis piled
tables and barstools in the streets
burning down the unworkable
to find a path to the new
before Claudia fronted Vanity Fair
before the twenty-first century,
before we thought
it meant progress to be self aware.

---

I am leading a quiet life
in my place every day
waiting for inspiration
waiting for Godot
waiting for the mail
and all that ails us
makes us wail to be gone
I am leading myself into
temptation to forget my own
legs, my own heart, my own
miraculous ability to speak.

--

I tried to pay attention
watch the Republican Convention
listen to Sarah Palen speak.
I wanted to know who she was
and if anybody would be fooled -
believe the jive live at five.
Walk, someone told me, into
the roar of the world. The crowd
roared, lifting patriotic balloons,
the old man still a POW
roaring now in my ears
all these long long years.

--

Not a single one among us
knows what this is about -
we tell our own stories
try to plot what comes next
read the stars and name them
for our sons and daughters
point our boats into current
faces squinted with sun
try with all our force
not to break sweat and run.

---

Farewell August
Hello back to school.

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

New York Times Crossword Puzzle Draft 8/26/08

Ahead of us the chorus of meows
echoes alleys, I make the Theda
face, you cross your eyes, not sad
nor sheik. We have trampled atria
like grapes our toes digging dunes
our tongues flaming. Ah, you cry,
but I don't know what you mean.
What we knew has turned to chant
and we're not the ones chanting.

---

Back and forth from Seattle to Chelan I wake and don't know where I am, though I am forever cleaning wherever I am. How many millions of women have lived like that? Comet whiff perpetually under their nails. Hillary Clinton gave the best possible get with the program and support Barack Obama speech last night. She was more directly powerful than I've heard her for awhile - the "I work harder than anyone, can't you see it? SEE IT SEE IT" stridency gone from her voice. I hate to use that word along with shrill and the grab bag of anti woman words. I don't think Barack's victory means we as a nation are more sexist than racist, though that may be true. It feels true, as Rosie O'Donnell's character said in "Sleepless in Seattle".

There are people I don't know in my Seattle house, and Jim and I are the only ones here in Chelan. A young man emerging from the silver Prius with his relatives in my carport asked me how it felt to rent out my house. I can't come down entirely on one or the other side of that bed. We have a new sink in the powder room, one that isn't in a giant box to smoosh the powder room user into feeling the room is tiny and cramped. The little pedestal sink is perky and cute and the rolls of toilet paper and the basket of shoe shine stuff now live in the pantry. The wall behind the sink, where the box was and where the little rectangular tiles were I pasted to the wall with silicon caulk, is freshly textured but unpainted, the oak floor unfinished where the box was, though I am not entirely sure it is unfinished. Jim is certain it is unfinished, "I'll tell you that much," he said. But I scrubbed the floor and it sure seemed the same color as the finished floor. Defer, defer, that is my non-confrontational fall back position. As is reaction rather than action. What do you want? What do you want? Jim's brother took out the old box/sink and put in the new sink over the last day and a half, as we drove back from Chelan, then as I cleaned the house readying it for the renters. This is the part of renting I like: we make decisions for the house we haven't made for the house for us. We say, "renters would like ..." and we do it. This is better than saying, "the people we sell the house to would like ..." since we go back home and enjoy what the renters have or have not liked because of course that sentence really told us what we would like, and it turns out we like what we thought we would, veiling it as what others would prefer so we don't feel selfish or like we're doing something frivolous replacing a brownish ugly sink in an ugly box we've hated since we moved in nine years ago for glaring example.

American lady of perpetual worry, Sara
Bernhardt on this Euro sea. I lean to the bar
come so far for windswept awe hand hold crag
precipitous enough to whip away illness echo
I cringe from your stranger-face, creepy
crepey neck, yearn to be spun enraptured
forty days to change a habit we have fourteen
Cyclades, Persephone, no more am I Penelope
for whoever you are, you're home. Eruption
disrupted saffron gatherers, Akrotiri, sea
filled caldera below snowy summit wall
to take your breath away. I throw my mind
at history my hubby my razer my dog that loves
to fetch oh fetch me white wash blue door
more and more to read to burrow, sleepy
forgetful remembering everything. Nervous
Nellie, I remember everything.

Plucking blackberries from stick bushes
before sun flames the hill across the lake
browse is best, the feint to find behind
prickled leaf sweet burst bee fat and
luscious, trick to plunk more into bucket
than you though August means to wander,
paw and breathe like sated bear
among the busy buzz and whir.

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

We dreamed of Paris as we drove over the dam --
Eastern Washington August gold, "Jean, Jean,"
over the radio, her prime long ago and over,
ours too. Shadows move the round hills furled
then moving forward as cottonwoods stir
above the Wenatchee River entering Cashmere.

Sturdy red harvest bins line the roadway --
August and almost apple picking time --
these are filled with gnarled trunks, unbudded boughs --
behind them up their hill, lines of waist-high
grape vines fattening blood-purple clusters.
8/11/08 August Postcard Poetry Fest

I've signed up for another every-day poetry writing event. Offhand, in-the-moment, what-the-hay, let it fly, let 'er rip poems or poem-like utterances off into the mailbox to someone I've never met, one poem to one person each August day. Complicated for me by being out of town most of the month, far from mailboxes to send poem and a mailbox of my own to receive poems. I imagine a passel waits for me at the East Union Post Office in Seattle. A PASSEL!

I hope you are well and writing and manufacturing vitamin D on the skin of your bare arms, miracle that you are. We talked books my neighbors on the long long lake and I the other night. She reads throwaway tomes thick with historical reference - I don't feel guilty, she says, when I'm learning something. She pushes the books towards me and I pretend to forget them at evening's end. I like her, and I like that she and her family - husband and their grown son, have spent two weeks lying about reading books. I went home and plucked one of the beach reads someone left here off the shelf. I am a bad snob and I want to scold the author and publisher over the phone, red pencil the pages, but I also want to loll here and let my eyes breeze through to the end.

Along Bluett Pass Highway we see elk not beef
though buffalo gather beside the "meat for sale"
sign where the road ribbons Swauk Prairie, air
sweet with ripening wheat. Car tows boat hull
to Lake Chelan, Entiat or Roosevelt, hefty
hitch, lurch into our lane, frisson of fear. Aria
from the back seat, another disappearing era
in the American west though summer hordes
mob overlooks and fist fruit leather at stands
as though they never saw it at Safeway. Oven
outside our air conditioned bubble, we're bent
on home and not farm houses gone wineries,
apple stumps along their margins, imported
French oak barrels beside their drives. As gas
dwindles, we strategize, agonize over refills,
huddle close upon our fate like lounging buffalo.

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


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

Sheffer Crossword 7/28, a Poem Draft

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

Bulletin from Holiday Inn Express on Bishop Way:

Who know Pullman was home to the National Lentil Festival?

To lay tile against your wall, smear adhesive
as though you never learned to color between
lines - who cares it cakes your arms and
countertops. You're a worker not fricking fop.
Keep motions loose and gymnastic, you're
not a spastic though you feel that, lunged
at the odd angle necessary to lay corners and
straighten gaps. Get the hang of this cuz soon
it's time to buy the float and learn to grout.

SEATTLE PUBLIC TOILETS GOING ON EBAY!

Today's SeattleScape blog provides the details. Minimum bid $89,000. As if you don't already have enough problems with prostitution and drug use over to the Honey Buckets. I think you can use the stainless appliance cleaner on the exterior. (Restoration Hardware has it.)

Meanwhile, at Totem Lake, flickers flagrantly rat a tat
while here I hear a Boeing jet, my Boeing blood, my
father there forty years, blonde mantel clock memento,
Mrs. Boeing's house on the way to Tolt Hill, snapping on
the tonneau cover to his red Triumph TR 3 outside Plant
Two, last one to leave Seattle please turn out the lights,
Christmas Party at the Coliseum, materiel. Rare, he
told them in Texas, threaten that steak with a match.
Two foot baby alligator gift cover story, Boeing News.
My father's proud grin, half my age, so very long ago.

Her life fit into one suitcase cinched with a strap
every word, though from her parka pocket one verb
looked about to fall. Let's call her Paula. Her limp
was legendary, and the boys knew she had no idea
about her power, the devastating down of her ear,
hair about to tumble, jumbled amber locks and pins,
her sweet breath warm and gentle as camomile tea.
Now we're post millenial we can view much on screens
but she has gone, tra la, one more digested morsel.
You needn't live in Citges to wake up and taste paella.
Ah Mahalia, girl with gumption, gospel queen, like
you she travelled and believed as yes we do in magic.

If only we had taken the "can do" drive of NASA
and applied it to our planet. What if we had felt
desire for cello suites or educating parakeets?
What if we had yearned to return pepper scent
to carnations and would not let the no nose rose
be sold? If we weren't so adaptable, inured to all
they say we ought but do not love, who could we
have become? Give glory to the green thumb,
praise cooking scents from private residences,
bring bards to roads and farmers to the dells.
Dare to prattle about Yeats and memorize him.
Dawdle, pause, perambulate. Never multi-task.
Easier not to do than unknot what's been done.

July 3 Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

White caps churn down lake. They don't tire
like I do fiddling with nothing at my desk
How would it feel to flash so momentarily
in the fading sun - remember Star Trek,
the episode where the crew pities the girl
whose species lives only ten years, like my
dog, who lived for twelve, my brother with
a life expectancy of eighteen who hurray
lived to twenty one. I cannot follow a single
white cap, each lifts and disappears. As
we do, my love, as we do.

7/1/08 New York Times Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
(It's Tuesday, I can do the Tuesday puzzle)

The harrow is fancier than the plow,
using spikes or spring teeth to turn
soil. Simple implements don't cease
their toil as we tilt crystal goblets to
paint rainbows across the decking.
Blisters are the province of the doer.
As greens twine forks, are we callous
or indifferent? Do we enjoy the dado
trim, arty swag lights, lavender hand
cream in the restroom? Unease
undoes satisfaction in our bellies.