Happy my birthday to all!


Eat more yams, fewer marshmallows
hugs to all your folks and fellows


When I was four, my mother hugely pregnant with my brother-to-be
we had Thanksgiving at our neighbors' house, where my friend Katie
was excited about the turkey bird, turkey bird, turkey bird, until
Mr. Simon cut into it. She screamed and ran ran ran - struck crazy sad.

Happy feasting.

Daily Crossword Poem Draft

Let he or she cast a stone who's never erred
or watch us goofy apes in play and grin
have you a pet iguana? I have pet peeves
which I will share for chips you saved from Reno
or let us fly to Lanai and compare leis
or sing them, lays I mean, I think. My deal.

In Seattle staring into the alley behind my house from my writing room
stacked with boxes from nine weeks in Chiloquin. I have put books away,
washed clothes and put them away, cleaned nine weeks of grime from
kitchen surfaces, spent a joyous family evening with both daughters,
their sig others, their in one case dog in the other case human infant.

I need to take a shower, I need to restore order to this room,
I need to sit alone and weep a moment. I do not do transitions well.
I need to write the word "I" several more times as though that will
restore my self. How long does it take for a soul to complete a journey
it takes a body 8 hours in a car to travel? A writer whose name escapes
me gave a reading at the UW probably twenty years ago. He posited
that human souls couldn't travel as fast as airplanes and so those who
travel often are often soulless. He wasn't a spiritual writer, born-again
but maybe he was nuts. I (there it is again, look back, yup, another I)
feel oddly absent and so feel a kinship with the soul-travel idea.
In my mailbox yesterday a rejection from Hayden's Ferry Review, with
a "Thank you Laura!" perkily placed at the bottom of the quarter sheet.
Next to "The Editors." Longer than "Onward ho!" from Zyzzyva. This one
could go into the "mixed-message rejections" folder if I had one.

This paragraph poses the question: "Why does my grocery store have
living orchids in boxes on the floor of the flour aisle?"
and "Why does my local City Peoples have orchids 20% off?
Why so many orchids here? Why ANY orchids? Aren't these orchids
destined to brown and die on the coffee tables of Madison Park? Why?

Got to school early to be sure we were set to use computers - it says in my contract I have access to 40 computers. This is fiction and I haven't even signed the contract yet, didn't even read it till after I couldn't get more than 10 computers reserved for kids to type. Got to school, it was dark, dingy, dismal, unlit, cold and teeming with excited teenagers, the entry way that doubles as cafeteria. They were trapped. The metal floor to ceiling gates, identical to baby gates except metal and floor to ceiling, blocking them from entry into the halls. No power. No computers. Maybe no school. The power came back on five minutes into first period, but the power had been diverted in the neural pathways of the kids, who did not return to school for the rest of the days, some of them via turning away and wandering off to somebody's house, some of them though physically present, psychically, emotionally, mentally on short break and short fuse. Tonight is the student and community culminating reading. Who will come? I have no idea. The rain is raining all around, and beginning to turn corn snow ish. By tonight it may be snowing. This is not a limiting factor here where the snow sits six feet thick in winter and school trundles merrily along. Merrily is not the way I am doing anything at the moment. I will go home, eat stew I made last night and listen to Seu Jorge sing David Bowie songs so beautifully in Portugese. I do believe, I do believe, I do believe. There are kids who earnestly asked me to help them look over their poems and kids who cut into pens with scissors and acted like I was a piece of dog crap, though I showered this morning and smile at the kid and like him. "Loveable asshole" is the way the teacher describes him.

Chilly at The Daily Grind in K Falls,
day sunny and cold, coffee gone.
I am unequal to the Saturday
crossword puzzle, which I misuse
for poetic muse. My talent unproven
my work rejected by VOLT
Why Poetry? my students ask
though become smitted by Matthew
Dickman whose work and swearing
smote their distance, their remove,
they love me for introducing them
I'm poetry go-between, gateway drug
all dullness scoured from the hours
we spent in Bend befriended by
poetry and Sherman Alexie. All
was golden and I'm beholden to many
for the money honey and now must
do the diligence as penitence for forging
forward without forethough, collecting
cash before considering consequences
other than happening our trip. I've made
a grid with addresses and amounts,
have downloaded donations from PayPal.
My extemporaneous accounting amounted
to more than anyone can count. Peace out.

What is important? What is worth putting energy into? If you could sit in a chair with your iPod earbuds in your ears, leaning back, room hot and dry from the radiator and redolent of skunk, wouldn't you lay down your work ethic and take a seat? If you could get away with it, wouldn't you color another person's pumpkins or draw them a haunted mansion? If you could sit with nothing to do, wouldn't you? If you were sixteen, seventeen and you had a school project the teacher wasn't going to enforce that you work on, wouldn't you claim to be doing it at home? Would you wear a blinking minor's lamp on an elastic strap around your forehead? Would you cross your arms and doze? I mean if you were sixteen years old and tomorrow was a no-school day on account of Veterans Day, wouldn't you just chuck today's work? If nobody was twisting your arm, wouldn't you let it hang down below your chair seat with the other one? Wouldn't you talk about basketball line ups? If your assignment was to make a kids' book, and you couldn't draw, would you accidentally not hear the teacher ask if you want some help downloading images in the room with internet access? Wouldn't you, given a choice, write ambiguously pornographic statements on the white board with a red pen? If your last football game of the season ended in a 42 - 0 score, and your team was the 0, and you were on the team, would that make you nobody? If you were given time, space and materials, would you put yourself into your project or would you stare into space? If I mean you were a boy sitting next to the cutest girl in the school? What if you forgot your work at home? What if you convinced even yourself that you had left work at home? When is the deadline? How many hours have we devoted to it in class? What if there were little dinosaurs lost in the forbidden land? What if a scuba diver was looking for a pineapple in the Mariannas Trench? Could the Gorse save Christmas? What if Death and a guy played checkers and Death chopped the guy's head off - would it make Death's jaw drop if the guy stayed alive? Would you be able to draw that picture? What would a were rabbit look like? If you had a hickey red as a Christmas bulb on your neck, would you turn your head so the teacher couldn't see it? What did you ask me? What are we doing? Can we go to lunch ten minutes early because we were so good?

At night I hear the calling of the Great Horned Owl
woods flight, talon drop to limb, My Gramma Jo
hunched and quilted. Card shark on the weekends
her hose rolled below her knees, set a gruesome
painting of our suffering lord on her trestle table,
I ran outside. Lurid Geographic painted Aztec
no stranger. I feared danger and the dark, horses
teeth and shaming. My parents hooded raptors,
I met nobody's gaze, more mouse than anything
aloft. My husband longs to fly, I shut my eyes.

Oregonian Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft



Once I'm unliving will you remember all I left undid?
Boxes emptied of tea and cereal, microbrewed ale.
Born November, shriveled to an apple doll by April
My corpse adrift in a flaming flimsy boat, Norse-
like, as moon and mist and all that shivers rises.
I'll have stiff upper lip by then, jacket like Nehru
and all you'll have to do is shove my love or sit
while all you've loved burns out, tears seared.
You say you forgive me always but life's a maneater
we lose to it limb by cell, slump into our serapes
too soon our boom goes bust and all our rooms relet.
I'd not have missed your smile, our child, for all my noise.
Though I falter on the icy edge, there's little I would alter.

HAPPY DIA DE LOS MUERTES!

BONUS FILM REVIEW: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
The wild things fuzzy feelings
too enormous to handle
for one small Max who cannot
rule them and so sails home.

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

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

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

IN THE SAME SPACE

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

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

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

-C.P. Cavafy


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm jangling - we asked for money for our trip to Bend and have gotten LOTS of money for our trip, which has made me weepily grateful and worried that some of the seniors are trying to not go because. I don't know why. Because we are old people. Because we (the teacher and I) are white. I know in one case that is probably true. BORING and STUPID and TRUE. Ok, I'm using boring the way the kids use boring. I don't understand what's going on and I want it to go away.

I must email the teacher to see how we can be sure everyone is on board we want to be on board. I worry we'll have fewer Tribal kids than the college has assigned Tribal guides. Isn't that dumb of me? But at this point I feel we OWE everyone who has donated our absolute danged best to SHOW THE HECK UP!

Which is the theme pretty much of a well-lived life: SHOW UP. Goof up. Mess up. SHOW UP again. Sometimes don't trip over anything or say a spazzy thing or spill coffee down the front of your white shirt. SHOW UP the next time. Say "I wonder what blah blah will be like?" and SHOW UP. Get nervous. Chew your nails and the inside of your face but SHOW UP. Wear what you wore to bed last night trying to keep warm but SHOW UP. Hitchhike. Scramble through the brambles, the sage, take a kayak, a bus. When your car breaks down, stick out your thumb. When you get bad news, grieve, and then, put on the walking shoes and SHOW UP.

I read two Matthew Dickman poems to the seniors today, as preamble to our trip to Bend to see him read with Sherman Alexie and Karen Karbo. The first poem I read was called "Amigos" - over a page long, single spaced. The second poem, "Love", I was afraid to photocopy and pass out due to its adult subject matter - sex. Sherman Alexie's young adult novel was banned a hundred miles from here because the narrator says (this is a paraphrase, but pretty accurate,) "I masturbate. I admit it. I'm pretty good at it. I'm ambidextrous." In "Love" Matthew Dickman (coincidental last name) mentions a woman having legs around someone's waist, and oral sex. Though three junior girls spent fifth period discussing anal sex, I'm probably not allowed to knowingly expose the seniors to any sexual references. Oh well, oops. I told them I was going to read them a poem probably inappropriate to school and that I was only going to read it to them once. Then I made copies and handed them out.

In fifth and sixth periods the students are making books. They're in the early getting it together phase, so I did a show and tell of book making. A few are interested in pop-up books, so I'll see what I can put together for Thursday's show and tell, including a storyboard for planning. We're out of my expertise area, but what the heck, I like to wing it and see where we go. I love to explore the intersection of word and image. The important thing is for me to stay on track and not confuse those who need more structure by heading off in many possible directions. "What am I supposed to do?" they ask. And they want one answer.

In answer to a question from one of my students, Sherman Alexie replied, "A successful literary career is mostly about postage, and I guess email now." In which case the last two days I have been mid-very-successful-literary career, having sent out probably 13 submissions, not counting the book manuscript I sent to a contest. Now that I've reproofed (I reprove myself for not having done this BEFORE sending to the contest having caught several typos from what I thought was a 100% clean manuscript) the book, I might as well send it off to some other book contests. I've duct taped the big flapping lips of my inner critic and set her out in the bike and kayak shed to entertain the clumsy and loud-walking ground squirrel with her deep sighing.

The teacher's back! Yay! All of us need his structure and that feeling of purpose that comes with it. He's younger than my younger child and so much older than the high school kids. Luckily I stopped aging when I gave birth for the first time.

The sophomores, here in this rural school where everyone is Indian, white or maybe Mexican, did not like Amiri Baraka's "Bang, Bang, Outishly (for Monk.)" How is this poetry? They said. I wouldn't download it for free, they said. I'd played them a little Thelonious Monk beforehand and that didn't seem to register - the connection between the music and the poem. Such a different response than from an urban classroom. Is this relevant? I don't know. I do know these kids are very afraid of what they don't know or understand, that is not already in their world. Maybe part of it? I played the Monk quietly through the period while we wrote poems - today we wrote "Where I'm From" poems inspired by last year's poems from our book THE NEWS FROM CHILOQUIN and a little bit by Georgia Ella Lyons' poem which had started those last year poems. I'm trying to heavily insert the reality of the book into proceedings. Thursday will be revision day.

I forgot there is break after second period and walked out of the class when the bell rang since the teacher had left, saying something about coming back. I didn't realize the break mistake until I was driving towards, nearly to, the library where I now sit typing instead of talking about syllabi development or going to meet with the principal to see if we can take the seniors off on an overnight trip to Bend. HA! No issues there. None. Zip zilch, cannot think of a way things could tip off the high dive into the deep end there.

10/7/09 Daily Crossword Poem Draft


I advise you buy the bag with clasp
not one sagged open that says naif
or nothing in your wallet, Euro earl
noble pearl, ramparts tumbled, vent
to sky events, sleet, drizzle, rain, etal
Rochester, the moors, and heather
in the flu borne English weather. Nod
and hope I'll lope along and leave you
to your purchase, hie me home to sew
or show whatall I know to one who
isn't you. Dispense with talk as you
disburse to buy that purse I bet
I'll bless you yet and yet I'm double
parked, my tires marked, the chalk
but not the ticket. Oh sticky wicket
I'll call you at home another day
cut crusts away and harvest cress
your guess as good as mine for
who am I to say or bless unless
that fanny pack's zip has broken.

---

Third teaching day without the teacher in the classroom - Thursday, Tuesday, now this Thursday. Six days and maybe counting he's away and all his order and purpose far away and how many days will that take to rebuild? I pick up litter, put the desks back in order, shelve the books and still he is not here and tensions and chaos rise. Today's sub was a stickler writing referrals right and left, making good she said, following through she said, but breathing discord in this room where trust was building block by stick by gluey mortar, now a tumbled heap. There's a history here of teachers, English teachers, fleeing. The kids feel uneasy. "Is he in the state?" a teacher asked in the teachers' room. A question. He's been on the phone or email calling in his absences. I want him to come back, a student says. I want him to come back.

October 6 09 Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


I collected postage stamps from Chad
that came in glassine slip covers, rode
the bus to school, strapped on skates
to circle the basement, drew hula
dancers on construction paper, aped
my elders, made a plaster of paris tibia
took in TV from Miss Elaine to Igor.
National Geographic meant the Nile
and piles of sunken gold refound, the
flu was more TV and toast and jam
but here I am and I am groping
not to scream, my mother phoning
news that she is old and failing. I let
her worry, as I always have, aloud,
which worries me but I don't dare,
I spin my skate wheel, still eleven.

Here in Chiloquin the Shell Station gets the Oregonian newspaper, except on Sundays and Mondays. The mail people bring the paper, so it makes sense we can't get the paper Sundays, but the Monday missing paper is a mystery. The clerk behind the counter with the plastic wrapped muffins on it told me sometimes the Oregonian doesn't get here cuz the Oregonian people are late and the mail people can't wait.

September 23, 2009 Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

Scared to be paired, you stomp
the street in your ratty coat, owl
hoot out the back window, awl
in your hand, not ready to accede
to what you don't understand:
area of Mobius strip, weevil path.
You don't believe in evil, sky
brightening, door bolted, humanity
on the other side of the road. Is art
the only answer you have? Pascal
in velvet cloak, no camera snap,
but you're held rapt by any story.

Sunny and warm in Chiloquin, Oregon,
I'm once again at the back table at the library
checking email and listening to conversations
between the librarian and whoever comes in.
I arrived Saturday, in time to meet my landlord
at 10am. The new house is on Agency Lake.
ON AGENCY LAKE. Out my window are
cottonwoods and beyond them AGENCY LAKE.
This morning I took out one of the kayaks -
sadly the one branded "Emotion" is too large,
but I wore the radiation yellow life vest
and once I was afloat - butt in the boat,
then feet tucked in and no turning turtle,
I was level with abundant water bird life
and the whutter of wings as flocks lifted
to set down further from my whisper paddles.
I set off towards the Wood River Wetlands,
until recently somebody's farm reclaimed
from wetlands, water drained and a dyke
put in place which was dynamited to restore
the wetlands - "Only in Klamath County"
my informant told me. Ah but the result!
I paddled over algae green water, then
over water browned by peat, keeping my
eye on the broken peak that once continued
up as Mt. Mazama. On the water were
what looked like two rafts of white pelicans
so far and so immobile I began to doubt
and thought them first duck blinds and
later chalk graffiti, though they were
two rafts of white pelicans, dozens in
each, and three posed on an underwater
island closer to me, one of which fumbled
into flight and joined one of the rafts.
I didn't get close enough that they would
all take wing, deciding to leave them
to their fishing and visiting, while I
turned back to my house. I panicked
momentarily. How would I recognize
where I'd come from? I remembered
the large green house I'd walked past
yesterday, very close to shore. If I
got to that I'd know I'd gone too far.
It took me nearly an hour to reach
the pelicans, maybe twenty minutes
to get back to the cabin, where I
successfully disembarked without
falling into the lake, losing neither
kayak nor paddle.

Scattered every which way
every room humped with mess in progress
brain hot with synapse fire
mired mainly in too much to do
no time to see it through (no will
most of the year to do) And how
are you?

Is there a wonderful new feature on blogger that disallows you to copy and paste, even from your own blog, even when logged in? This will reduce my paranoid fantasy that other people are copying my blog poem drafts, recrafting them and making millions in the frenzied money making world of international poetry. Someone has written a book entitled FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS. Jess Walter. Coming to the U Village Barnes & Noble on September 22. I'll be in Chiloquin, Oregon. But you could go. Will he speak about Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot? Period? Subtitle: The Music of Failure. An actual book. My current favorite title. Not about poets and finance. I was going to quote myself from early 2006 but I'll leave this.

Texas Crazy Ants aka Rasberry ants are real. Also Caribbean Crazy Ants. Their generic names: paratrechnia species near pubens and paratrechina pubens. See their blog.

Moisture Ants Are One Thing

But when Texas Crazy Ants amass
we flee, cow poke congressman or co-ed
grab skivvies and our horn rims
run for the hills "Not it!" "NOT IT!"
we choose our molten thoughts in lieu
of creativity. We'll go you know - atop
the onion domes of former Doodyville
nurse ants ferry larva and we're nada
how's that gotta carve your melon?
You're hell on wheels, ants smile
whether Lancaster and Ewing
you won't be doing what you're doing
when Texas Crazy Ants scramble
like the anarchists they are. Fazed?
oh I suppose. I'm scared
this drama is worse than opera
larvae nurseries in mailbox, vases,
so we retreat with diddly squat
trot off as these ants carom
harem scarem over every place
obliterate your face not even in a rage
I may exagerrate a tad
hordes eat hot dogs and your honey
and also honey bees. Oh, jeeze.