Wheatena

When I discovered I could make my own Wheatena cereal I was ecstatic. The results were a million times tastier than the store bought cereal. It's so simple. Place a thin layer of wheat berries on a baking pan or in a large cast iron skillet. Put them in a preheated 350 degree oven. As they bake take a spatula and redistribute the berries so they get toasted evenly and they don't burn at the edges of the pan. Stick around, they toast fast and they can burn easily. When the wheat berries darken a bit they are toasted. Let them cool off and then grind them coarsely in a hand cranked grain mill. I don't know myself but it might be possible to grind them in a coffee grinder or a food processor. Boil the cereal in water and salt. Enjoy! You can use the toasted wheat berries in bread and soup too. You can cook up the cereal and serve with vegetables as a supper dish or make a Middle Eastern tabouleh!

Snow Bake

I just walked through Oak Hill cemetery and then played in the snowy Bouley ballfield with Lily and three kids from the neighborhood while my leftover potatoes and onions were baking in the Dutch oven. As we entered the park the boys spotted a fluorescent lime green softball stuck up in the bare tree. I found a stick and poked at the ball and it fell out of the tree. Then we all took turns throwing the ball for Lily. It sank into the foot-deep snow and Lily ran like a bunny chasing it and the boys raced after her as she fished it out of the deep snow. This game was repeated for over an hour! Sometimes Lily couldn't find the ball but the boys did. They made snow angels too. This morning Lily ran with the neighbor's black Labrador, Xena, running in high speed circles in our snow-filled backyard. Hurray for the crescent moon on the shortest day! And a warm supper and warm dry socks on a cold night.

Sugary Snow

Lily is a leaping snow leopard! We walked to the baseball field in the foot-deep snow last night before sunset and she ran and ran. She eats the snow as she runs to cool off, then she wakes up at three AM to pee! Today is the shortest day and the longest night. The snow makes the streets and bushes look like they are covered in confectioner's sugar.

Poetry

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
-Robert Graves

The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
-Lionel Trilling

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
-Carl Sandburg

Stéphane Mallarmé

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
-Stéphane Mallarmé

The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

By Robert Bly

Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,

He cried, ""You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.

We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.

And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life

Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.

My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.

-Robert Bly

Peter Conners

A Man Learns to Fly

In his younger years his father had toted him out to the bird feeder. It was brown, bent, speckled with white droppings - angled against all seasons. No mix was sufficient to keep the lesser birds away: Old bruise-colored grackles arrived on the scene. Meager starlings. Rusty female cardinals. At each new mix, elated, they waited, but the loveliest of feathered winds never blew their way. And so the father taught him to love the ugly ones. Named them after earls and dukes, invested them with flight patterns to shame the baldest of eagles.

In the boy's front yard, truly, the meek had inherited the earth.

Such is the ornithology of family.

A boy flew away one morning to return a man to find his father turned to ash beside a bag of grainy seeds. And this note: Help me to fly.

-Peter Conners, Of Whiskey & Winter

Mark Halliday

CHICKEN SALAD

Everybody’s father dies.
When it happens to someone else, I send a note of sympathy
or at least an e-mail. It’s certainly worth the bother.
But when my father died, it was my father.

*

Three hours before he died
my father felt he should have an answer
when I asked what he might like to eat.
He remembered a kind of chicken salad he liked
weeks ago when living was more possible
and he said “Maybe that chicken salad”
but because of the blood in his mouth
and because of his shortness of breath
he had to say it several times before I understood.
So I went out and bought a container of chicken salad,
grateful for the illusion of helping,
but when I brought it back to the apartment
my father studied it for thirty seconds
and set it aside on the bed. I wasn't ready
to know what the eyes of the nurse at the Hospice
had tried to tell me before dawn, so I said
“Don't you want some chicken salad, Daddy?”
He glanced at it from a distance of many miles—
little tub of chicken salad down on the planet of
slaughtered birds and mastication, digestion, excretion—
and murmured “Maybe later.” He was in
the final austerity
which I was too frazzled to quite recognize
but ever since his death I see with stony clarity
the solitary dignity of
the totality of his knowing
how far beyond the pleasure of chicken salad
he had gone already and would go.

*

Everybody’s father dies; but
when my father died, it was my father.

-Mark Halliday

Carmen Hererra

I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure.
-Carmen Herrera, painter, age 94

Jeanette Winterson

And art is always about relationship — to the material, to the self, and to the world in all its chaos and intrusion, its terror and its glory.
-Jeanette Winterson

Spontaneous Breasts

My mother sat me down at age 13 and told me I guess I won't be getting big breasts like my father's tall sisters all did. I didn't particularly care, in fact I didn't understand why she was forecasting this. Was she looking for proof that I was Tom's daughter? I began having dreams that I woke up one day with large breasts. Meanwhile in real life I gave up eating nearly everything. I was living on apples and grapefruit juice blended with ice cubes in the blender. I shriveled down to scarecrow size. Then I ran away one winter to Rhode Island and got a job as a carrot juice maker and whole wheat bread baker in a health food restaurant. A few months later I woke up with breasts. My sister came from NY to visit me and it was the first thing she noticed when I opened my apartment door. You've got breasts! she said. They popped overnight just like my dream told me they would.

Transmission

I was walking Lily home from Turbesi park when an ambulance rushed by with all the sirens blaring and lights blinking. I held my ears with the leash in my left hand. Lily began to howl as the vehicle drove by. Her voice was transmitted across the green leash, through my orange gloves, and into my black hatted head.

Blonde Envy

All of my long-legged blondes envy is showing. I need to take pinup photographs of my dog Lily for a holiday card. She is much more photogenic than me with her pink nose and black eyeliner and svelte build. My friends call her a super model. I am in love with Lily's muscles, the chiseled ones in her thighs and the slender ones running down each side of her gigantic rib cage. They catch the light when I run her in the park as the sun is going down.

Edna O'Brien

I opened it to a section from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the Christmas dinner scene, with the blue flame over the Christmas pudding. Up to then, I had been writing rather fancifully, with a lot of adjectives. When I read that, I realized one thing: that I need go no further than my own interior, my own experience, for whatever I wanted to write. It was truly, without sounding like St. Paul, an utter revelation to me.
-Edna O'Brien

Left and Right

In kindergarten I made the same painting every day. I painted a full round yellow moon with a dark ultramarine blue sky surrounding it. The blue tempera paint sat in a pint-sized glass jar on the long wooden table. I painted with a two inch brush onto a huge piece of white construction paper taped to the table top. It was always still wet when my mother came at noon to pick me up.

Some days Miss Estep had us sit in a semicircle in our short wooden chairs behind her. She would stand with her back to us in her long bumpy wool skirt. She would point and say left. Then she would point and say right. Years later, as I drove a friend around town, he confessed he'd never properly learned left from right. I told him that in order for me to know which way to turn I have to picture Miss Estep, my kindergarten teacher in her Wheatena skirt, in the center of the room, with her back to me, pointing and saying left and then right.

Walking Around

This morning I heard a few men standing in the Elks Club parking lot next to The Castle Luncheonette talking about me. "I see her walking her dog everywhere!" "The dog is walking her!" They didn't realize I could hear them from across the parking lot. The moist air carried the sound perfectly.

Last night I had almost 12 hours of sleep. I woke up eager to put my pants on. This morning, when I took out the trash, the garbage can lid was frozen shut. But now the sun is out! It's warming up. Hurray!

Coffee With Milk

It is very deep to have a cup of tea
Also coffee in a white cup
with milk
a hand has to go around the cup
and a mouth to take it in
it is very deep and very good to have a heart
Do not take the heart for granted
it fills with blood and lets blood out

Good to have this chair to sit in
with these feet on the floor
while I drink this coffee
in a white cup
To have the air around us to be in
To fill our lungs and empty them like weeping
this roof to house us
the sky to house the roof in endless blue
To be in the midwest
with the Atlantic over there and the Pacific on our other side

It is good this cup of coffee
the milk in it
the cows who gave us this milk
this
simple as a long piece of grass

-Natalie Goldberg, Top of My Lungs

Chinese Proverbs

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.

Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.

If you want happiness for a lifetime - help the next generation.

To talk much and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish.

One generation plants the trees, and another gets the shade.

Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.

To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without root.

Sunday Walk

I walked through Precious Blood Cemetery, overlooking the pond, and then kept walking to Turbesi Park. I moved the big white plastic trash barrels to block the baseball field entrances so I could let Lily off the leash to chase a stick. Nobody was around. Then we walked toward the reservoir, taking a path through the woods next to the junkyard of a million cars, stopping to visit the lonely coon hound, the chocolate Lab, the lively Jack Russell terrier, and the cocker spaniel. I love the gray weather. The bare trees stand out in crisp contrast to the white snow. The clean cold air is a delight to breathe.

Gustave Flaubert

I can imagine nothing in the world preferable to a nice, well-heated room, with the books one loves and the leisure one wants.
-Gustave Flaubert

Kenneth Patchen

Think enough and you won't know anything.
-Kenneth Patchen

Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread

The use of leavening in a cake is first recorded in a recipe for gingerbread from Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, published in Hartford in 1796; I guess you could say it is the original great American cake. Early-19th-century cookbooks included as many recipes for this as contemporary cookbooks do for chocolate cake. This recipe, from Claudia Fleming, pastry chef at New York City's Gramercy Tavern, is superlative—wonderfully moist and spicy.

Ingredients

* 1 cup oatmeal stout or Guinness Stout
* 1 cup dark molasses (not blackstrap)
* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
* 2 tablespoons ground ginger
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
* 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
* Pinch of ground cardamom
* 3 large eggs
* 1 cup packed dark brown sugar
* 1 cup granulated sugar
* 3/4 cup vegetable oil
* Confectioners sugar for dusting
* a 10-inch (10- to 12-cup) bundt pan

Preheat oven to 350°F. Generously butter bundt pan and dust with flour, knocking out excess.

Bring stout and molasses to a boil in a large saucepan and remove from heat. Whisk in baking soda, then cool to room temperature.

Sift together flour, baking powder, and spices in a large bowl. Whisk together eggs and sugars. Whisk in oil, then molasses mixture. Add to flour mixture and whisk until just combined.

Pour batter into bundt pan and rap pan sharply on counter to eliminate air bubbles. Bake in middle of oven until a tester comes out with just a few moist crumbs adhering, about 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan on a rack 5 minutes. Turn out onto rack and cool completely.

Serve cake, dusted with confectioners sugar, with whipped cream.

Cooks' notes:
- This recipe was tested with Grandma's brand green-label molasses.
- Like the chocolate decadence cake, the gingerbread is better if made a day ahead. It will keep 3 days, covered, at room temperature.

-Gourmet Magazine

Great Blue

Yesterday we walked to Cass Park and let Lily poke around the baseball field. Her paws were still too tender for her to run like crazy. We only stayed for a few minutes but as we were walking out of the park we spotted a great blue heron on the far side of the pond, standing on the thin ice. His wings were blue-gray and he looked like stone. He almost disappeared into the landscape. As we got closer he lifted himself up in graceful slow motions like a pterodactyl dinosaur.

Raw Paw

Yesterday I walked Lily in the hard blowing wind and sunshine, to the snowy baseball field. She loved running and ran and ran! The snow was crusty but she managed to stay on the surface even though she is 78 pounds! When we got home she was licking the side of her paws. They had gotten a bit raw from the rough snow. Perhaps I need to ask the shoemaker if he would make her booties!

I Object To Violence

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

-Mahatma Gandhi

Bad People

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks - what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams - that's the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four states.
This man told me things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god - who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge - can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

-Robert Bly, Morning Poems

The Glimpse Of Something In The Oven

Childhood is like a kitchen. It is dangerous
To the mice, but the husband gets fed; he's
An old giant, grumbling and smelling children.
The kitchen is a place where you get smaller

And smaller, or you lose track. In general
You become preoccupied with this old lady
In the kitchen... She putters about, opens oven doors.
The thing is the old woman won't discuss anything.

The giant will. He's always been a fan of Aristotle,
Knew him at school. It is no surprise to him
That the Trojan War lasted ten years, or how it
Ended. he knows something you don't.

Your sister says, "Say what's that in the oven?"

-Robert Bly, Morning Poems

Conversation With The Soul

Conversation With The Soul

The soul said, "Give me something to look at."
So I gave her a farm. She said,
"It's too large." So I gave her a field.
The two of us sat down.

Sometimes I would fall in love with a lake
Or a pine cone. But I liked her
Most. She knew it.
"Keep writing," she said.

So I did. Each time the snow fell,
We would be married again.
The holy dead sat down by our bed.
This went on for years.

"This field is getting too small," she said.
"Don't you know anyone else
To fall in love with?"
What would you have said to Her?

-Robert Bly, Morning Poems

Two Sisters

Pomegranate and corn,
Colorful kernels, juicy flesh.
Skin husk peeled in layers
Or thick round red elephant skin torn open.
Complicated insides, hairy belly button
Or oblong, green, layered wrapper with silk tassel.
Both born to be eaten!

I Work Standing

I work standing because my body is my antenna and I need to feel my feet flat on the floor. My buttocks, spine, and ribcage hold me upright while I think. Words flow through my soles, toes, ankles, shins, kneecaps, thighs, and rise through my groin, pelvis, abdomen, spine, lungs, and fly out the top of my head.

Orange

I dreamt I was at a Tibetan summer camp
I was looking around,
Hoping to see the color orange.
I saw white soup bowls, black clothing.
There was no orange at all.
Everything was black and white.

Sharon Olds

The Daughter Goes to Camp

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning—
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to reassemble the hot
gritty molecules in the car, to
make you appear like a holograph
on the back seat, pull you out of nothing
as I once did—but you were really gone,
the cab glossy as a slit caul out of
which you had slipped, the air glittering
electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

-Sharon Olds

Bathing in Your Brother’s Bathwater

Bathing in Your Brother’s Bathwater
by Nin Andrews

Bathing, Miss De Angelo informed us in health class,
is very important, especially once you become a teenager.
In fact I can smell many of you this very day,
so I advise every one of you girls
to go home and take a good long bath tonight.
I know some of your folks like to skimp on water,
but consider it homework.
Say Miss De Angelo assigned it to you.
But Girls, let me warn you.
Never take a bath in the same water as your teenage brother.
Why?
Just picture this:
all those tiny bubbles settling on your legs
when you sit in a nice tub of water.
If you could count every itty bitty bubble,
that would be only a fraction of how many sperm
stream from a single man.
Even if he doesn’t touch himself,
the water does.
And it only takes one.
One fast moving whip-tailed sperm.
And you know how easy it is to catch a cold,
how quickly that little virus races clear through you.
And once that happens,
no one will believe you’re any Virgin Mary,
no matter what you say.

-Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews

Being A Writer In Your Later Years

My father was a talented pianist. But as he aged, he lost his ability to play. Or so he said. His friends didn't believe him, and sometimes at parties they would ask him to perform. I remember the late time he obliged. I was in grade school, and on this particular night, he played one piece after another with such zeal. I liked to watch his hands race over the keys, so I went to stand by his side. It was then that I noticed a sprinkling of blood on the keys. A small sprinkling, to be sure. But I announced it to the room. My father stopped suddenly, wiped the keys with his handkerchief, and sat down.

He was on several kinds of medicine then. I don't know which or what diagnosis he had a that time, but I do know he always said his skin was thin. And he would often mix his meds and take more than was recommended.

After he sat down, the room felt so quiet. A bleak mood hung over the room. That was when Eleanor Ross Taylor, a poet and friend of my parents, turned and said to me in her quiet voice: being a writer is one of the kindest arts. You can do it well even as you age. In fact it can become your friend in your later years.

I've always taken comfort in her words.

-Nin Andrews

Mario's Magic

We are having a beautiful storm, snow falling rapidly wrapping every branch. Last night Mario fixed our oven which had suddenly stopped working Sunday night when I was about to bake a cornbread. I had been worried; what if we can't fix it? Mario showed up at 4 PM as promised. He took a look. Then he asked me for a short stool. Then he asked for a towel to protect the top. He spread the towel out over the top of the stool. I said are you going to perform a magic trick? Do you need a black hat and a rabbit? He laughed. Then he pulled our vintage 1960's Thermador in-the-wall oven out of the birch cupboard. It looked like major surgery to me, but he was not worried in the least. Lily-dog refused to move from the spot on the turquoise linoleum at Mario's feet. She is in love with Mario, as we all are. Mario found the dead wire in the cupboard behind the oven. He replaced it in a few minutes. I am celebrating by baking through this morning's storm.

Poet Nin Andrews

I am always unhappy if I'm not writing. And when I am writing, I am not finished yet, and so I am wanting to write more and finish. But I never ever want to be finished because then I am not writing.
-Nin Andrews

Adrian Mitchell

I find it hard to talk about the things I care about most, even to my family and friends, and poetry is my way of telling them what I feel. I try to approach an audience as if it's made up of friends, or people who would be my friends if we knew each other. 'No communication is possible except between equals' as Illuminatus! teaches us. I write my poems for love - love of language, love of my family, friends and animals, love of the planet, love of life, and I'd be a damned fool if I didn't.

-Adrian Mitchell, Adrian Mitchell's Greatest Hits

Swamp Man

Twice I've seen him walking around town. Once in the Park Square parking lot walking into Job lot, and again on Cass Ave walking into CVS. He has long dreadlocks, down to his knees. He stares like he's plugged into dictation from Neptune. He walks like Frankenstein's brother, a remote control robot, lifting his knees very high with each slow step. He wears no shirt with his overalls, even in winter! His tan skin isn't even chilled. He actually drives a car! My husband assures me he isn't reading this on his laptop back in the swamp.

Kenneth Rexroth

In that hour I have seen
The long white gleaming throats of mountains
With faces lifted
To the moon.

-Kenneth Rexroth, A Lantern and Shadow

Albert Camus

We have preferred the power that apes greatness- Alexander first of all, and then the Roman conquerers, whom our school history books, in an incomparable vulgarity of soul, teach us to admire. We have conquered in our turn... our reason has swept everything away. Alone at last, we build our empire upon a desert. How then could we conceive that higher balance in which nature balanced history, beauty, and goodness, and which brought the music of numbers even into the tragedy of blood? We turn our back on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our miserable tragedies have the smell of an office, and their blood is the color of dirty ink.

-Albert Camus

Winter Soup

Last night at supper I was too lazy to leave the house and shop for groceries. I found a quart of pork stock that we made in August in the freezer. I put the stock in my largest pot with a quart of water, a big bag of frozen corn, four carrots and four stalks of celery and one large onion all chopped, a pound of rinsed lentils, and a dollop of olive oil. I brought it up to boil, then let it simmer. In another big pot I boiled nine potatoes. After the potatoes were done I fished them out and kept the water they boiled in.

The vegetable lentil soup got thick as it simmered. I thinned it with the potato stock, added some more olive oil, along with salt and red pepper flakes. It was out of this world. We ate it with my latest molasses raisin sourdough bread, slices of cornbread, and the naked potatoes. I looked out the window and saw an inch of snow was already accumulating on the ground. The wind was blowing hard and the wet snow clung to all of the branches, outlining them like shadows in reverse. A beautiful sight on a wintery soup night.

Cowgirls

Today I drove to Wright's Dairy for fresh milk and eggs and visited the cows in the barn. I saw a big momma cow with four black polka dots the size of dimes on her pale pink nose. The tag on her ear said Apple. I would have named her Polka-Dotty, or Dot!

I saw my favorite cow named Blue with her black eyeliner and her white fur with the black flecks that make her look blue. She was in the maternity barn, she's expecting! Mr. Wright said I could have a baby calf, but I live in the city.

The bare trees looked like glass, blown with snow, shimmering with ice in the sun. I felt like a cowgirl stomping around on the muddy smelly farm in my boots, loving it. The fields were white with snow and the tires holding the tarp down on the manure pile were all white, like a hill of sugared donuts.

Snapshots

I have never seen a bad photo of President Obama. How does he look so good from every angle? I'm serious. I hate the way I come out in photos. I usually cry over it too. Bill says, "It's because your face is always moving!" Since he told me this I have calmed down and now I come out better in photos. My family always took an annual formal family portrait as a Christmas card, and it's funny how as a kid I was always doing something weird with my hands.

Meredith Monk

. . . After a while, okay, you've worked twenty years or twenty-five years. Okay, so you've got this many grants, you've got this long resume, you have these people that hate you, you have these people that love you, you've done this piece, that piece, this piece, that piece . . . and then you go to your grave. And what do you think you have - a piece of paper that tells you all the pieces you've done? So what? The only reason for doing it is that you might have the joy of discovery on a day-to-day level. The only reason for doing it is really that you love doing it . . . What it gets down to is: how do you want to spend your time on Earth?

-Meredith Monk


I always think of the way that I work as similar to making a soup. You have vegetables and then you put them in the water and then the vegetables stay vegetables for a while. You just allow them to be separate — the carrots are carrots, the peas are peas and everything is just simmering. You're working very slowly, and little by little the vegetables start boiling down, and then little by little the soup becomes absolutely essentialized. That’s what I really think the process is about. And that takes some time and patience.

I think I still have some confusion about the critical mind. But it seems that there’s a difference between the critical mind, which is a kind of judgment, and has a harshness built in, cutting off impulses before they can develop, and discriminating intelligence, which can differentiate between what is authentic or genuine and what is contrived or forced. That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.

-Meredith Monk

December 4th

It's a summery 55 sunny degrees today. Which is a delight for us but I'm afraid it's not good for the polar bears and melting ice-caps. Lily and I walked to the library, and I got three gigantic books of poetry, two by Kenneth Rexroth and a book of prose poems, while Lily patiently waited for me. Then I walked to the shoemaker and brought him my other pair of worn out clogs, the ones with the gaping holes soles. He said he could fix them!

When I arrived at the park there was nobody but Lily and me, and we played fetch with the muddy-pink ball. I worked on her sit-stay-fetch skills, giving her little triangles of cat food from an old pocket-sized tea tin. On the way home I looked for the jumping fish, but the sun was not on the water, so the fish was not jumping. I did see a bright sun dog in the sky when I was nearly home, in view from East School Street. It was amazing!

My pal Rachel stopped by to pick up Daniel Ladinsky's book of Hafiz poems and have a cup of coffee. I was so thrilled she was coming that I vacuumed the whole house even under the bed! I opened all the windows to bring in fresh air. Perhaps this bout of spring weather has brought on spring allergies and spring cleaning. I washed Lily in the backyard, rinsing her with the green rubber hose. She was very tolerant. She even let me trim her dew claws which seem to grow very fast.

I made a big yellow cornbread for supper which we ate with the last of the turkey soup. I slow-roasted two trays of almonds. And I shipped a painting to its new owner. A good day indeed.

Mary Karr

That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reach me. There was a poem about a goat-footed balloon man I recited everyday like a spell, and another about somebody stealing somebody else's plums and saying he was sorry but not really meaning it. I read the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and fancied myself running away to Africa to find just such an ape man to swing me from vine to vine.

-Mary Karr,Cherry

December 3rd

Yesterday it was rainy and it cleared up this morning. Then the sun came out and it was 65 degrees!! It's hard to imagine that it's December, people were buying Christmas trees last week! It reminded me of winter days when I lived in North Carolina. This afternoon I walked to drop off my clogs at the shoe repair man. The heels had worn off and the metal was showing through. I brought Lily into his shop. He loved her!

His shop had moved to a teal-trimmed Elm Street storefront halfway to Cass Park, so I continued walking to the park's fenced-in baseball field. A woman showed up with a huge, muscular, tan male bulldog the size of Lily. Lily established territory and then they ran in big circles having a blast exhausting each other! A young girl and her mom showed up with a little Boston Terrier who was running all around. The girl was throwing a pink tennis ball but the dog was happily distracted by all of the dogs and so he ignored it. Then Lily drank from a mud puddle, and then the male bulldog lay down in the mud puddle, flirting. When he got up he looked like he was wearing waders made of mud! Sexy to me, I thought. The girl with the pink ball wanted to play in the mud puddle too. She jumped in and stamped her feet splattering mud on her bare legs and summery dress. A tall lady arrived with a sweet white dog with spotted ears and tightly curled tail. She told me of her adoption of her dog. She said that it had been abused and kept in a cage for four years. The dog is new to playing, she said, and one woman chimed in, She's doing great! There arrived a brindle puppy bulldog, he looked like a tiger! His owner was a young delicate woman with dark hair and skin white as milk. She received a phone call while we stood around admiring our dogs and then hurriedly had to leave, telling her friend it was an emergency and that her father would come get her dog. The dogs and people all were getting along enjoying the unusually warm weather. I had a knapsack full of plastic poop bags I shared with people. The tall woman filled her dog's water bowl. All the dogs lined up to have a drink, then she gave all of the dogs treats. I called her the dog treat fairy! For a brief moment we were a little community. Then we slowly broke apart, hoping to meet again. People got into their cars with their dogs and drove away. I picked up the abandoned pink tennis ball which was no longer pink.

As I left the park, I looked back and noticed the sun reflecting on the rippling pond. I saw motion in the water. I stopped. I saw it again, I stopped and stared. I saw it a third time, it was a huge fish jumping ten inches into the air into the sunshine! It looked just like a miniature dolphin leaping for joy! I watched amazed, hoping it would happen again, hoping to share the experience with someone walking by. I saw three teenage boys coming down the sidewalk. Have you seen the jumping fish before? They laughed at me saying I was making it up. I was beginning to wonder if I had. Maybe it was a sight meant just for me.

Dawn

Some love to watch the sea bushes appearing at dawn,
To see night fall from the goose wings, and to hear
The conversations the night sea has with the dawn.

If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.
Now you know why I spent my twenties crying.
Cries are required from those who wake disturbed at dawn.

Adam was called in to name the Red-Winged
Blackbirds, the Diamond Rattlers, and the Ring-Tailed Raccoons washing God in the streams at dawn.

Centuries later, the Mesopotamian gods,
All curls and ears, showed up; behind them the Generals
With their blue-coated sons who will die at dawn.

Those grasshopper-eating hermits were so good
To stay all day in the cave; but it is also sweet
To see the fenceposts gradually appear at dawn.

People in love with the setting stars are right
To adore the baby who smells of the stable, but we know
That even the setting stars will disappear at dawn.

-Robert Bly

Listening

The goose cries, and there is no way to save her.
So many cheeps come from the nest by the river.
If God doesn't listen, why are we listening?
Very deep water covers most of the globe.
Whenever I see it, I think of St. John.
There is no remedy for deep water but listening.
The King and Queen already know about love;
—They search for each other through the whole deck.
While we play our hands, they are listening.
The day we die, we'll each be like the fish
Abruptly jerked out of the water.
For him, it is the end of all listening.
Like thousands of others, I'm eating beet soup
In some Russian inn. People write letters
To me from Heaven, but I'm not listening.
The hermit said: "Because the world is mad,
The only way through the world is to learn
The arts and double the madness. Are you listening?

-Robert Bly
from The Night Abraham Called to the Stars

Mailing a Poem

I love that a poem can be slipped into an envelope and stamped and mailed for pennies, delivered through a slot in the front door, landing on the wooden floor. The dog barks at it, the black cat looks up from her red cushion in the window sun patch. My friend comes home and finds a letter, and reads a poem that is equal to a hug and a kiss.

Call and Answer

Call and Answer

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.

Have we agreed to so many wars that we can’t
Escape from silence? If we don’t lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.

How come we’ve listened to the great criers—Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass—and now
We’re silent as sparrows in the little bushes?

Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.

-Robert Bly

Jane Hirshfield

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

-Jane Hirshfield

Mirabai

The Coffer with the Poisionous Snake

Rana sent a gold coffer of complicated ivory;
But inside a black and green asp was waiting,
"It is a necklace that belonged to a great Queen"
I put it around my neck; it fit well.
It became a string of lovely pearls, each with a moon
inside.
My room then was full of moonlight, as if the full
moon
Had found its way in through the open window.

-Mirabai, from Mirabai, Ecstatic Poems, translated by Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield

Sweet Dreams

I was having a fabulous dream. I was hosting a two-night Brave Combo dance party at an inn somewhere and everyone I knew was there. My friend Karen from high school was there too. I was remarking to my friend about having just seen my first cobalt blue Scottish Terrier. The dog looked like a toaster! I said, remembering the year all kitchen appliances were cobalt blue, and fire engine red.

I woke up in the early morning dark. The moon was full and sitting right over the backyard. Yesterday Lily and I had had two three-mile walks and a run in the fenced-in baseball field. A perfect day is prelude for a perfect dream.

Elephant Eternity

by Adrian Mitchell

Elephants walking under juicy-leaf trees
Walking with their children under juicy-leaf trees
Elephants elephants walking like time

Elephants bathing in the foam-floody river
Fountaining their children in the mothery river
Elephants elephants bathing like happiness

Strong and gentle elephants
Standing on the earth
Strong and gentle elephants
Like peace

Time is walking under elephant trees
Happiness is bathing in the elephant river
Strong gentle peace is shining
All over the elephant earth

-Adrian Mitchell

Adrian Mitchell

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

-Adrian Mitchell

Human Beings

HUMAN BEINGS

Look at your hands
your beautiful useful hands
you’re not an ape
you’re not a parrot
you’re not a slow loris
or a smart missile
you’re human
not british
not american
not israeli
not palestinian
you’re human
not catholic
not protestant
not muslim
not hindu
you’re human
we all start human
we end up human
human first
human last
we’re human
or we’re nothing
nothing but bombs
and poison gas
nothing but guns
and torturers
nothing but slaves
of Greed and War
if we’re not human
look at your body
with its amazing systems
of nerve-wires and blood canals
think about your mind
which can think about itself
and the whole universe
look at your face
which can freeze into horror
or melt into love
look at all that life
all that beauty
you’re human
they are human
we are human
let’s try to be human
dance!

-Adrian Mitchell

Mother Of Bread

When I mix up dough I become the mother
of fermented yeast and fresh wheat
rising in my kitchen overnight.

I bring forth loaves from my hands,
breasts and loins.

The next day loaves bake on hot stone
the aroma fills the house.
I am the midwife bringing forth the golden babies
tapping the bottom of each
listening for the hollow sound of being done.

I arrive at a dinner party with my newborn
still warm, wrapped in a blanket.
The hostess becomes shaken, frightened of her own infertility.
She snatches the bread from my arms
and burns my child in the oven.

She produces a pale impostor
made by robots on some distant planet,
something her children will prefer, she assures me.

But her children delight in the slicing and eating of a warm
homemade loaf smeared with fresh butter.
Even a naked slice is good.
There has never been a child who didn't love my bread.

-Emily Lisker 12/2/09

Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry


What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

-Wendell Berry


A Warning To My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

-Wendell Berry

Rexroth

The conscience of mankind went to school to learn methods of compromising itself.

- Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Patchen

When We Were Here Together

When we were here together in a place we did not know, nor one another.

A bit of grass held between the teeth for a moment, bright hair on the wind. What we were we did not know, nor even the grass or the flame of hair turning to ash on the wind.

But they lied about that. From the beginning they lied. To the child, telling him that there was somewhere anger against him, and a hatred against him, and the only reason for his being in the world. But never did they tell him that the only evil and danger was in themselves; that they alone were the prisoners and the betrayers; that they–they alone–were responsible for what was being done in the world.

And they told the child to starve and to kill the child that was within him; for only by doing this could he become a useful and adjusted member of the community which they had prepared for him. And this time, alas, they did not lie.

And with the death of the child was born a thing that had neither the character of a man nor the character of a child, but was a horrible and monstrous parody of the two; and it is in this world now that the flesh of man’s spirit lies twisted and despoiled under the indifferent stars.

When we were here together in a place we did not know, nor one another. O green the bit of warm grass between our teeth–O beautiful the hair of our mortal goddess on the indifferent wind.

-Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Rexroth

At Least That Abandon

As I watch at the long window
Crowds of travelers hurry
Behind me, rainy darkness
Blows before me, and the great plane
Circles, taxis to the runway,
Waits, and then roars off into
The thick night. I follow it
As it rises through the clouds
And levels off under the stars.
Stars, darkness, a row of lights,
Moaning engines, thrumming wings,
A silver plane over a sea
Of starlit clouds and rain bound
Sea. What I am following
Is a rosy, glowing coal
Shaped like the body of a
Woman - rushing southward a
Meteor afire with the
Same fire that burns me unseen
Here on the whirling earth amongst
Bright, busy, incurious
Faces of hundreds of people
Who pass me, unaware of
The blazing astrophysics
Of the end of a weekend.

-Kenneth Rexroth

Naming

I have always loved naming things and I'm fascinated by the meaning and impact our names can have on us. Look what I found today when I Googled the genie box!

from Wikipedia
In Judaism, someone's name is considered intimately connected with his fate, and adding a name (e.g. on the sickbed) may avert a particular danger. Among Ashkenazi Jews it is also considered bad luck to take the name of a living ancestor, as the Angel of Death may mistake the younger person for his namesake (although there is no such custom among Sephardi Jews). Jews may also have a Jewish name for intra-communitary use and use a different name when engaging with the Gentile world. Chinese children are called insulting names to make them appear worthless to evil spirits. They receive a definitive name as they grow up.[citation needed] Chinese and Japanese emperors receive posthumous names. In some Polynesian cultures, the name of a deceased chief becomes taboo. If he is named after a common object or concept, a different word has to be used for it.

Rumi poems translated by Coleman Barks

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
they're in each other all along.

-Rumi
Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks



When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.

Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

-Rumi
Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks


A Smile and A Gentleness

There is a smile and a gentleness inside.
When I learned the name

and address of that, I went to where
you sell perfume. I begged you not

to trouble me so with longing. Come
out and play! Flirt more naturally.

Teach me how to kiss. On the ground
a spread blanket, flame that's caught

and burning well, cumin seeds browning,
I am inside all of this with my soul.

-Rumi
Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks


Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

-Rumi
Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks

Busted

BUSTED
from Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison (album)

My bills are all due and the babies need shoes,
But I'm Busted
Cotton's gone down to a quarter a pound
And I'm Busted

I got a cow that's gone dry
And a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills
Getting bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away,
But I'm Busted

So I called on my brother to ask for a loan
'Cause I was Busted
I hate to beg like a dog for a bone,
But I'm Busted

My brother said, "there's not a thing I can do,
My wife and my kids
Are all down with the flu
And I was just thinkin' about callin' on you,
'Cause I'm Busted."

Lord, I ain't no thief, but a man can go wrong,
When he's Busted
The food that we canned last summer is gone,
But I'm Busted

Now the fields are all bare
And the cotton won't grow
Me and my family's gotta pack up and go
But I'll make a living, just where, I don't know
'Cause I'm Busted

Sandwich Dreams

I woke with the song BUSTED in my head! Our ensemble band performed it last winter in our Johnny Cash Carter Family Show. This morning I woke from a dream that I was making a spaghetti sandwich and then I got this image of a person eating his own toes between two slices of bread, while still attached to his body!

Coleman Barks

Coleman Barks describes his real training as a poet:

You get trained by other people whose writing you love.

John Steinbeck

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
-John Steinbeck

Moosenose

Yesterday morning I took a walk to Cass Park and Lily ran like lightning in big graceful circles. She doesn't need to chase a stick or a ball to enjoy running. She just loves to run circles in the field. As I was leaving it started to rain hard and my maroon cotton coat got dotted, and then soaked with rain. I was warm wearing my rain boots and layers of shirts and fleece pullover under my coat. By the time we got home I didn't want to stop walking so we continued on to Precious Blood Cemetery and Harris Reservoir. I liked the quiet feeling walking through the neighborhoods.

Too bad I'm not a novelist, the cemetery is filled with great names for characters. One of my favorite names is Silas D Bunker. Every time I go by his stone I get a vivid picture of him wearing overalls. Speaking of character names, my wet, smelly dog made me think of the name Dinky Staug. This morning I dreamt of a chocolate Labrador that looked like Bullwinkle the cartoon moose but with a black circle for a nose. In the dream I told the owners they should call their dog Moosenose.

Drop The Knife

Once a young woman asked Hafiz, "What is the sign of someone knowing God?" Hafiz remained silent for a few moments and looked deep into the young person's eyes, then said, "Dear, they have dropped the knife. They have dropped the cruel knife most so often use upon their tender self and others."


“Drop the knife. Those are profound words to me, for they encapsulate and distill the essence and goal of spiritual aspirants, and anyone who has entered a recovery program. Surely every human wants to avoid suffering, though self caused afflictions are complex. Most everyone is a kid in God's chocolate factory (this earth) with a belly and soul ache and gas. There is a poem in "The Gift" where Hafiz says "I have found the power to say no to any actions that might harm myself or another." Think about that a moment. My take is that one's experience of God - one's joy, one's creative potential - is in direct proportion to the ability to no longer harm oneself and others physically, mentally, emotionally spiritually."

-Daniel Ladinsky, The Subject Tonight is Love

Nin Andrews

ADOLESCENCE
The winter her body no longer fit, walking felt like swimming in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Everything stuck to her skin: gum wrappers, Band-Aids, leaves. How she envied the other girls, especially the kind who turned into birds. They were the ones boys hand-tamed, training them to eat crumbs from their palms or sing on cue. What she would have done for a red crest and a sharp beak, for a little square of blue sky to enter her like wings. But it was her role to sink so the others could rise, hers to sleep so the others could dance. If only her legs weren't too sodden to lift, if only her buttons were unfastened by the water she kept swimming through, and she could extract from the shadow of her breasts a soul as soft as a silk brassiere, beautiful and useless, like a castle at the bottom of the sea.

-Nin Andrews

Mashed Potatoes

Last night I took a walk with Lily to Precious Blood Cemetery just as the sun was setting and then I kept going toward the reservoir. It got dark but I didn't mind. I was starting to warm up and I was on familiar streets. I stepped from one circle of light into the next. There were very few cars out. It was comforting being able to glimpse into peoples' lives. Their homes were like doll houses in the dark. I spotted a lamp in one house, pictures over the mantle, bookcases, a fridge covered in magnets, a chair with a coat on it. Another house was completely gutted and being worked on. As I walked by it, a woman on the porch said "mashed potatoes." She was talking loudly into her cell phone. I figured it was what she was bringing to Thanksgiving. As I turned the corner I heard her say, "We're at my brother's house, the one he bought. We're here helping him fix it up." On our way home Lily and I said hi to all the lonely dogs that were outside in their yards.

Alice Hoffman

Perhaps what people said was true, that any man who lived long enough would eventually realize that the way in which he was cursed was also the blessing he'd received.
-Alice Hoffman

Lily and Dudley

Yesterday on the way home from the Big Apple orchard we took a side trip to Cass Park to let Lily run in the fenced-in baseball field. We chatted with a young couple who had a white Labrador puppy wearing a red harness. Their dog had us picturing what Lily must have looked like as a pup. The couple said he was 11 weeks old and that they had just gotten him three weeks ago. He had a pink nose and pink pigment around his green eyes. They said he was a Dudley Labrador, which is the name for a Lab with this albino-like pigmentation. His fur was like a bunny's, so soft, and his skin was loose. I said I would give birth to Labradors myself if I could, laughing.

While we spoke, five boys showed up and began a game of football. I asked them if we could share the field for about three minutes to let Lily run in circles. They said okay! I unhooked Lily's leash and she ran full throttle in exuberant graceful circles around the field, ignoring the kids who continued to play and watch Lily run at the same time. I admired Lily's long thin muscles on both sides of her rib cage. The boys were amazed at her running speed and grace too, as she ran top-speed through their football game. After a few minutes she had tired herself out. I thanked the boys and we left, closing the gate.

Hafiz Poem

BURGLARS HEAR WATCHDOGS

If one
Is afraid of losing anything
They have not looked into the Friend's eyes;
They have forgotten God's
Promise.

The jewels you get when you meet the Beloved
Go on multiplying themselves;
They take root
Everywhere.

They keep mating all the time
Like spring-warmed
Creatures

Burglars
Hear watchdogs inside of His
Gifts

And run.

-Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Now Is The Time

NOW IS THE TIME

Now is the time to know
That all you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child's training wheels
To be laid aside
When you can finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time
For you to deeply compute the impossibility

That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

-Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Hafiz

COVERS HER FACE WITH BOTH HANDS

What
We speak
Becomes the house we live in.

Who will want to sleep in your bed
If the roof leaks
Right above
It?

Look what happens when the tongue
Cannot say to kindness,

"I will be your slave."

The moon
Covers her face with both hands

And can't bear
To look.

-Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Andrea Barrett

I think science and writing are utterly the same thing. They are completely rooted in passion and desire, if they're any good at all. You can fall in love with the natural world in the same way you fall in love with a person. There's that same sense of helplessness, of lacking control over how much of your life you want to devote to it.

-Andrea Barrett

Two

This morning when I was walking Lily I was consumed by money worries, and thinking that I should just let go and cry about it. Then I looked down and there was a folded dollar bill sitting on the storm drain. I reached down and picked it up. It was damp. I put it in the front pocket of my jeans. Then I crossed the street, and spotted another folded dollar bill in the gutter, so I picked it up. It was also damp. Two damp dollars that warmed up in my pocket.

Martha Brooks

Each book takes me where I never expected to go. For this reason the process is organic rather than planned. I don't plot. The energy is all in the internal workings of the character and the external workings of place.

-Martha Brooks

Think of yourself as a writer who is navigating in a larger playing field than maybe you have dreamed about. Other writers struggle with words in Memphis and Paris and Beijing and Berlin - just as you are doing in your own corner of the world - so you are part of a big family. Language is the most important thing we own because it tells others who we are, what matters to us and what we need. As such, it is sometimes the only ticket we hold to freedom.

-Martha Brooks

Reading Outdoors

Today was amazingly warm and when I stepped out to walk Lily I saw the woman across the street sitting on her second story porch wearing a blue terrycloth bathrobe reading a book. Then when I got to the bottom of the hill I saw the man who lives in the pale yellow house sitting on his porch reading too. I have seen these neighbors for years but have never seen them reading.

Each Day

Each day I feel like a bird hopping off a branch, hoping my wings will open.

André Aciman

Not a sound could be heard on the empty road except a faraway dog and the rickety squeaks of our carriage, whose horse, for some unknown reason, knew Brahms horn trio well enough to let his leisurely footfalls stamp to the rhythm of the music.

To be dead meant that others could come into your room and never know it had once been yours. Little by little they would remove all traces of you. Even your smell would go. Then they'd even forget you had died.
-André Aciman, from Out Of Egypt

The Shift

The three month shift has arrived.

I am in the other house. Everything is upside down compared to the last three months. I wake up and take Lily for a very long walk, trying to lift energy up into my body from the chilly damp earth. After a few miles I am smiling again, feeling my leg muscles working hard as I walk Lily with the sun on my face.

During the other season I am walking to bring energy from the sky down into my body. Same challenge, opposite source. My body is my anchor.

In this house fear and worry are amplified inside my head, and the sensory impact of the tastes and sounds of words has dimmed. I don't want to get swallowed in worry but instead make use of this house. I'm sitting in one place for hours reading memoirs again, instead of poetry.

Nature made the variables and I am a perfect specimen.

Dog Bath

I just gave Lily a long over due double shampoo using the extension hose in the bathtub. She was very tolerant about it when I lifted her in! Giving her treats helped. Bathtubs are always frightening for dogs because it's hard for them to get a grip and if they struggle they slip. She did jump out at one point and shake while I was bending over to scoop the clumps of hair blocking the drain. So I lifted her back in, first her front paws and then her hind quarters and continued the final rinse. She was very good about it all. And now she smells so clean I can't stop hugging and petting her. I used the free sample herbal pet shampoo we were given when photographing the doggie parade this summer.

Edward Said

All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in the world with my parents and four sisters.
-Edward Said

Josephine McKee

No matter how energetic I felt, writing made me focus and relax. It interested me. I understood something in it, and so there was a chance I could resolve problems. Then maybe pain would disappear.
-Josephine McKee

I Do Not Understand

I do not understand cake mixes.
Like sex with a blow up doll
all the fun is taken out.
For me, the fun part is taking out
my big brown earthenware bowl from the cupboard,
scooping the powdery flour, salt, and baking powders,
and leveling each scoop with a knife.

The scent of the vanilla wobbling on the teaspoon,
like an eye with the reflected light its pupil.

As a kid I used to hypnotize myself at lunchtime.
I'd move my head in circles over the oil globes floating
in my chicken soup,
a dozen eyes orbiting in unison, watching me,
kitchen moonlight overhead.

Mixing up the cake batter with my hand-held mixer
vibrating like a sex toy,
then lovingly licking the bars of the beaters
one at a time
while standing over the sink.

I have never understood ham sold in a can either.

-Emily Lisker

She Dreamed Of Horses

I recently had a dream where the word "peace" was written in cursive, in molasses, on the top of my closed blue laptop and my horses were licking it off.
-Laurie Giemza

She Dreamed of Cows

She Dreamed of Cows

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed
her body and put on the nightgown she'd worn
as a bride and lay down with a .38 in her right hand.
Before she did the thing, she went over her life.
She started at the beginning and recalled everything—
all the shame, sorrow, regret and loss.
This took her a long time into the night
and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief—
until sleep captured her and bore her down.

She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree.
She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood
under the tree and the brown and white cows
came slowly up from the pond and stood near her.
Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms
with their great coarse drooling tongues. Their eyes, wet as
shining water, regarded her. They came closer and began to
press their warm flanks against her, and as they pressed
an almost unendurable joy came over her and
lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly.
She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and
she flew with the cows.

When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror.
She looked a long time at her living self.
Then she went down to the kitchen which the sun had made all
yellow, and she made tea. She drank it at the table, slowly,
all the while touching her arms where the cows had licked.

-Norah Pollard

Twister Dream

I dreamt Bill and I were on our street but it resembled Brooklyn. There was a twister in view off in the distance, but coming towards us. We ducked into a basement level Chinese restaurant. I had Big Lily-dog under my arm balanced on my hip (all 75 pounds of her). I was thinking, this is just like The Wizard of Oz except Toto is awfully big!

Who Says I'm Not Good at Math?

Who says I'm not good at math? I've calculated every mistake I've ever made, to date!

Gifts

Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.

-Marge Piercy

Henry Gould

Papa was always working on the house,
his long shadow bent across the sill
like a letter in an unknown alphabet

-Henry Gould
from the poem Hieroglyph

Sixteen Tons

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain
Fightin' and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebrake by an ol' mama lion
Cain't no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

If you see me comin', better step aside
A lotta men didn't, a lotta men died
One fist of iron, the other of steel
If the right one don't a-get you
Then the left one will

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

- generally attributed to Merle Travis, possibly by George S. Davis

Langston Hughes

Democracy

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

-Langston Hughes

Al Giordano

The garden of authentic democracy grows stronger when the weeds are pulled out of the soil. And so day in, day out, we tend to this garden, water and feed it, watching the seeds we planted and protected grow bigger and stronger than the former parasitical vines and weeds that society mistook, based only on their size, for the garden itself.

-Al Giordano

Marge Piercy

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

-Marge Piercy

Laundry Monday

Laundry is beautiful
hanging on the line
makes your sheets, socks
and underwear
simply smell divine

using all that 'lectricity
makin' towels dry fast
don't you know it ages them?
make 'em linger and last

I can't compete, buying
a new towel and sheet
'cuz I wanna have
enough to eat!

Grandma hung the laundry
every Monday at sunup
you'd know it was Monday
just by looking up.

When the sun can smile once
to dry our pants and shirts
We're happy, baby,
and we can eat desserts!

Tiny Poem

I care about the writing,
forget about the toys,
I just wanna stay home
and make a lotta noise!

Greg Brown Song

Slow Food

People want that slow food
Two minutes and they grouch
But give me ham baked all day long
And help me to the couch
Help me to the sofa
Put the quiet music on
I will lie and think about that ham
Long after it is gone.

I want some slo-o-o-o-ow food.

I don't want no food with cute names
No neon on a sign
A man can't live on advertising slogans
And conceptual design
Let somebody else go surf and turf
Someone else go carry out
Me, I want my food to know itself
Before it knows my mouth.

I want some slo-o-o-o-ow food
With all the love cooked in.

Why don't we start it in the mornin'
Leave us plenty of time for lovin'
Weekend homemade hot fresh bread
Make the whole house smell like an oven
And let it all just simmer
Cook in the good juices and the greases
Then we'll sit down at the table, baby
And slowly tear it into pieces.

I want some slo-o-o-o-ow food

-Greg Brown

Live It

I read today about the breakthrough:
A doctor prescribes the six cookie diet.
He insists on six cookies!
His own cookies of course, baked in his white coat laboratory,
chock full of amino acids and proteins that only he can sell.

America wants to eat cookies and grow thinner.

How about no die-its.
How about living well?
Live it!

Play with your children,
do not plop them in front of a screen
in the name of Einstein.

Make food together,
Break bread together.
Eye contact,
I contact

You.

We are in a new time.
Our First Lady hula hoops 142 revolutions
on the White House lawn
and all the planets notice.

-Emily Lisker

An Urban Retreat

A retreat in the wilderness can be a good thing for many artists. I wouldn't know first hand, I have always retreated to an urban studio. I was born in NYC and lived in the suburbs until I escaped on my own to Chinatown in NYC and then to RI. My grandparents loved urban too, they lived on Brighton Beach, in a little apartment right beside the boardwalk. I love New England cows and trees and apple orchards but I am an urbanite! I love the sound of trains, buses, bicycles and people. But most of all I like my solitude within the city. I find comfort in being near people. I travel on foot most of the time, when I walk my dog over to pick up library books or go to the post office, but my exchanges with people are usually simple. So far, 21 years in this town, nobody has tried to run my life. Hurray! I have not encountered snobbery or presumptuousness and I am grateful. This is a poor little mill city of 45 thousand people, 17 miles from the state capitol, Providence. Many folks here have never been to Providence. The town is full of characters, many of whom are early birds. When I wake up in the dark to go to my studio I always look to see which lights are on in the neighborhood, and it comforts me.

Public School 190, Brooklyn 1963

by Martín Espada

The inkwells had no ink.
The flag had 48 stars, four years
after Alaska and Hawaii.
There were vandalized blackboards
and chairs with three legs,
taped windows, retarded boys penned
in the basement.
Some of us stared in Spanish.
We windmilled punches
or hid in the closet to steal from coats
as the teacher drowsed, head bobbing.
We had the Dick and Jane books,
but someone filled in their faces
with a brown crayon.

When Kennedy was shot,
they hurried us onto buses,
not saying why,
saying only that
something bad had happened.
But we knew something bad had happened,
knew that before November 22, 1963.

-Martín Espada

When The Leather Is A Whip

When The Leather Is A Whip

At night,
with my wife
sitting on the bed,
I turn from her
to unbuckle my belt
so she won't see
her father
unbuckling
his belt

-Martín Espada

Hafiz

SHE RESPONDED

The birds' favorite songs
You do not hear,

For their most flamboyant music takes place
When their wings are stretched
Above the trees

And they are smoking the opium
Of pure freedom.

It is healthy for the prisoner
To have faith

That one day he will again move about
Wherever he wants,
Feel the wondrous grit of life -
Less structured,

Find all wounds, debts stamped canceled,
Paid.

I once asked a bird,
"How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?"

She responded,

"Love lifts
Me."

-Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Norman Rush

The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.
-Norman Rush

Pablo Neruda

I am here, watching, listening,
with half of my soul at sea and half of my soul on land,
and with both halves of my soul I watch the world

-Pablo Neruda
Translated by Robert Bly

A Question For Dreams

A Question for Dreams

why do you bring the dead
and write yourself
in love’s light

why her still and
empty face
the blue eyes and
tangled nylon hair
she doesn’t cry ouch
at the knots

dad wants to know
where he is
i didn’t tell him we threw
the videos out

-Jon Frankel

The Day I Discovered I Had Primate Wiring

I was driving.
I saw a face behind lightly tinted glass
turn towards me.
All I could see were her voluptuous shiny red lips
just like in a magazine,
and I got a shooting spark
running through my groin;
Zing! Zing!
Whoa,
what was that?
Shiny red lips
behind tinted glass.

Charmed

I am charmed by the fat councilman who stands in his above-ground pool
With his penned-in Pointer watching
From the window.
His pressure-treated porch, his pink plastic flamingos.
He must have married recently.
The yard was never decorated before.
Just a dog cage in the back corner with a wrinkled blue tarp over it.
Now he has a pool, and a path of white gravel,
And stones painted cadmium yellow placed on the green slope,
Pots of geraniums and mums, an octagonal picnic table,
And colorful plastic chairs facing the lake.

Thinking

To be a painter, a poet;
Compared to a teacher, a dentist, a butcher,
I am invisible.
Listening to the cars, the clock, the pen scribbling on paper,
A strange life this is.
I have no framed testimonials from academia,
Source of weary diseases.
I thank my grandfather for great legs, blue eyes,
And the audacity to go my own way.
I thank my grandmother for loving all of the children on the subway.
For simply loving me.

Listening

It's a delight to be in my north-windowed work room.
Only the sound of the pen on the paper,
Cars driving up and down the street,
Clink of neighbor's chain link fence.
The sound of a person spitting, twice.
I watch children gather at the corner, waiting for the bus.

Ray Dream

I dreamt I was helping Ray pick out a shirt. He was about to give a talk and needed help choosing from four large, colorful, patterned shirts. They were on plastic white hangers and I held them up, one at a time. One shirt had an orange, red, and yellow pattern. But I picked a black and white patterned one thinking it would bring out Ray's white hair, black eyebrows and long black eyelashes.

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Roots and wings. But let the wing grow roots
and the roots fly.

-Juan Ramón Jiménez

Russell Edson

Conjugal

A man is bending his wife.
He is bending her around something that she has bent
herself around.
She is around it, bent as he has bent her.

He is convincing her.
It is all so private between them.

He bends her around the bedpost.
No, he is bending her around the tripod of his camera.
It is as if he teaches her to swim
as if he teaches acrobatics
as if he could form her into something wet
that he delivers out of one life into another.

And it is such a private thing they do.

He is forming her into the wallpaper
he is smoothing her down into the flowers there
and he is kissing her pubis.

He is climbing into the wallpaper among the flowers
his buttocks moves in and out of the wall.

Ortega y Gasset

So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.

-Ortega y Gasset

Grateful

I am grateful that when I walk out my door there is a town full of people doing things. A city with buses and people and cars and dogs and hot coffee.

At night the baseball lights come on and the top of the apartment house next door is lit by a triangle of light shining until the games are over.

Each night before I pull the bedroom shade, I look for the triangle of light, and I miss it on the nights they do not play.

Trunga Rinpoche

First, let us look at ourselves. If you put one hundred percent of your heart into facing yourself, then you connect with this unconditional goodness. Whereas, if you only put fifty percent into the situation, you are trying to bargain with the situation, and nothing very much will happen. When you are genuine in the fullest sense, you do not need the conditional judgement of good or bad, but you actually are good rather than you become good.

If we face ourselves properly, fully, then we find that something else exists there, beyond facing ourselves. Something exists in us that is basically awake, as opposed to asleep. We find something intrinsically cheerful and fundamentally pride-worthy. That is to say, we don't have to con ourselves. We discover genuine one hundred percent gold

- Trunga Rinpoche

I could never live in a town with mean librarians.

Bald Men Poem

Whenever I drive
and by chance there is a bald-headed man
driving in the car front of me,
And this has happened more than once,
I have the same daydream.
I dream of sitting on the man's shoulders,
his bald head between my thighs
my naked breasts draped over him.

-Emily Lisker

I Love Candy Corn

I love candy corn,
once a year, at Halloween,
delicious colorful witches fangs;
it can go stale, you know.

I once kept it
in a square squat
glass jar
on my shelf,
for color.

Years later I took a bite;
a rock that could break your teeth!

I love People magazine
once a year at the dentist.
Dramas of peoples' lives,
with glossy photographs.
The stories always pull me in

away from my own pain,
while in the other room
my dentist is mending teeth.

-Emily Lisker

James Thurber

Interviewer
Does it bother you to talk about the stories on which you’re working?
It bothers many writers, though it would seem that particularly the humorous story is polished through retelling.

Thurber
Oh, yes. I often tell them at parties and places. And I write them there too.

Interviewer
You write them?

Thurber
I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.” I have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occasionally—in the proper sense of the word—using black crayon on yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between two and five, I call in a secretary and dictate to her. I can do about two thousand words. It took me about ten years to learn.

-James Thurber, The Paris Review, Fall 1955

Dream

This morning I dreamed I was staying overnight at a hotel. I woke at three am and wanted to walk on the hotel treadmill but was too afraid so I called down to the kitchen and the chef said "I have a cleaver the size of your head, I will stand over you and protect you."

I have a show of paintings we need to frame and a few still need to be completed! We have to hang it a week from today. My butcher has been one of my biggest local advocates of my artwork, hanging my paintings in his butcher shop on Main Street.

Only One Rule

ONLY ONE RULE

The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish that swim.

The planets are the white whales I sometimes
Hitch a ride
On,

The sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves into my heart
And upon my
Skin.

There is only one rule
On this Wild Playground,

Every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.

They all say,

"Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,
In the Beloved's Divine
Game,

O, in the Beloved's
Wonderful Game."

-Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

I Have Learned So Much

I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me

That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even a pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
my mind has ever known.

-Hafiz, from The Gift, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Hafiz

THE SUN NEVER SAYS

Even
after
all this time
The sun never says to the earth,

"You owe Me."

Look
what happens
with a love like that -

it lights the whole
world.

-Hafiz, from Love Poems from God, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Beloved Hafiz

THE TRUE NATURE OF YOUR BELOVED

Know
the true nature of your
Beloved.

In
His
loving eyes
your every thought, word, and movement
is always, always

beautiful.

-Hafiz, from Love Poems from God, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Antonio Machado

Traveler, there is no path
Paths are made
by walking

-Antonio Machado


Mankind owns four things
that are no good at sea.
Anchor, rudder, oars,
and the fear of going down.

-Antonio Machado

Ernest Hemingway

When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

-Ernest Hemingway

Gertrude Stein

Ms Stein... prefers to write outdoors, after she gets dressed. Especially in the Ain country, because there are rocks and cows there. Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing. The two ladies drive around in their Ford till they come to a good spot. Then Miss Stein gets out and sits on a campstool with pencil and pad, and Miss Toklas fearlessly switches a cow into her line of vision. If the cow doesn't seem to fit in with Miss Stein's mood, the ladies get into the car and drive on to another cow. When the great lady has an inspiration, she writes quickly, for about fifteen minutes. But often she just sits there, looking at cows and not turning a wheel.
-The New Yorker October 13, 1934

Anthony Lane

I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I'm working in the morning, I don't allow myself a cup of tea until I've written two paragraphs. It's harsh.
-Anthony Lane

Günter Grass

Interviewer
What is your daily schedule when you work?

Grass
When I’m working on the first version, I write between five and seven pages a day. For the third version, three pages a day. It’s very slow.

Interviewer
You do this in the morning or in the afternoon or at night?

Grass
Never, never at night. I don’t believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it’s not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o’clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music. After breakfast I work, and then take a break for coffee in the afternoon. I start again and finish at seven o’clock in the evening.

-Günter Grass

Toni Morrison

At first, thought I didn't have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that's a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space I can only call nonsecular... Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It's not being in the light, it's being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

-Toni Morrison

Fork Lift

Yesterday we got two fifty pound bags of whole wheat flour and thirty pounds of raw whole almonds, ten pounds of sunflower seeds, and seven pounds of local peanut butter at J.A.R. Bakers Supply. They brought it to the loading dock at the warehouse by fork lift. On the way home I thought that's the way to get groceries, by fork lift! What a cool name for a diner that would be.

Dream

I had a wild dream at three in the morning when my dog woke me up. I was on Brighton Beach close to where my grandparents lived, near Coney Island and my deceased friend Maynard was there. My pal Sally said I'll let you two have a chance to talk. I was beside the boardwalk walking close behind him on the sand. He turned said why are you following me? I was thinking because you might die.

Then I gave my brother Peter and his friend apple pie slices that were perfectly whole but inside a plastic water bottle. They were eating the pie with a fork and it seemed like a great way to have portable pie. It wasn't until I woke up that I realized the logistics were sheer dream magic.

Poverty Economy

Our neighborhood has such poverty that when some families hang out their laundry to dry the towels are so worn out they look like gauze. It is heartbreaking. Some neighbors dry their clothes on their porches if they have them, if not they hang their T-shirts and jeans pinched between their apartment storm windows, or drape wet clothes over fire escapes or chain link fences. A few neighbors regularly raid the big blue recycle bins. You hear the clatter of bottles as they're searching for refundable bottles. They wheel hijacked supermarket shopping-carts full of empty bottles and cans collected from all of the neighborhood apartments to get a a nickel-a-bottle return at the Stop and Shop down the street in Blackstone, Massachusetts.

Chief Arvol Looking Horse

When you do ceremony - you can not have money on your mind. We deal with the pure sincere energy to create healing that comes from everyone in that circle of ceremony. The heart and mind must be connected. When you involve money, it changes the energy of healing. The person looking for help wants to get what they paid for; the Spirit Grandfathers will not be there, and our way of life is now being exploited! You do more damage than good.

No mention of monetary energy should exist in healing, not even with a can of love donations. When that energy exists, the Spirit Grandfathers will not even come. Only after the ceremony, between the person who is being healed and the Intercessor who has helped connect with the Great Spirit, can the energy of money be given out of appreciation. That exchange of energy is from the heart; it is private, and does not involve the Grandfathers! The person who received the help can now give the Intercessor whatever gift of appreciation they feel their healing is worth.

- Chief Arvol Looking Horse

Brenda Ueland

Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?

Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.

-Brenda Ueland

Andrea Gale Goodman

GROUND GIVES WAY
for Rose, August 24, 2009

I’m looking out my window—
mass of yellow flowers,
late summer blooms that
carry into autumn:
school-starting time
for all my childhood
and all yours.

This year, you’re leaving—
leaving childhood
leaving this house
leaving me.
Perhaps I’ve been clumsy
but it was my best I gave you
and somehow good enough
that you are ready to go,
ready to begin your life
without me, our house, the rock of Maine
under you.

If the house, even after 200-odd years,
were to fall down and blow away,
the rock that supports it would still be rock.
If we were to abandon
this solid, cozy house,
sell it, move away,
it would still be a house
though not quite the same
without your artwork or my piano,
curtains I sewed for the kitchen
twenty years ago,
or the sounds of our feet and voices.
It would miss us,
yet still be a house,
happy to shelter another family.
What am I
when you lift off?
I don’t sense the gravity
to hold my form steady.
Without the daily bearing of you
I can’t say
I am here.

You have no idea
how I treasure
your rare smiles,
the honey color of your hair,
the luminosity of your skin.
The mother-heart bursts
impossibly
for a gesture, a word!

And maybe it’s best you don’t know
Or how could you move freely?
Ah, that’s why you hide—
always out or behind a door—
you do know and can’t move,
knowing I am feeling every
nuance and ripple
from my place under your footsteps.

Just consider that when we began,
I carried you
inside me,
and then always in my arms
close to my heart,
and then in my lap
if I sat down!
I learned to be available
whenever possible.
Yes, it was long ago,
but then remember
when Daddy moved out
leaving just me here with you,
I used all my forces
and many beyond me
to give you solid ground
and space to grow,
and how to balance
solid with spacious?
Groping blindly, listening hard,
as you pushed
to separate.

I don’t expect you to imagine your mother.
Or to think of me
at a time like this.
Who thinks of what the Earth feels
as we walk and travel,
meet and part?
Do we ever imagine
how much She is loving
each creature
drawing sustenance
from her breast?
Perhaps our rare gratitude
is to her as for me
your smile.

I bless your going,
Precious Daughter,
and trust you know
I will always
eternally be
here.

-Andrea Gale Goodman

Loveable Robots

I.B.M. has patented a computerized voice that is said to be almost indistinguishable from human ones. This voice is programmed to include "ums," "ers" and sighs, to cough for attention, even to "shhh" when interrupted. According to Andy Aaron, of I.B.M.'s Thomas J. Watson research group speech team: "These sounds can be incredibly subtle, even unnoticeable, but have a profound psychological effect. It can be extremely reassuring to have a more attentive-sounding voice."
-Roy Blount Jr.

Song to Grits

Song to Grits
When my mind's unsettled,
When I don't feel spruce,
When my nerves get frazzled,
When my flesh gets loose -

What knits
Me back together's grits.

Grits with gravy,
Grits with cheese.
Grits with bacon,
Grits with peas.
Grits with minimum
Of two over-medium eggs mixed in 'em: um!

Grits, grits, it's
Grits, I sing -

Grits fits
In with anything.

Rich and poor, black and white,
Lutheran and Campbellite,
Jews and Southern Jesuits
All acknowledge buttered grits.

Give me two hands, give me my wits,
Give me forty pounds of grits.

Grits at taps, grits at reveille.
I am into grits real heavily.

True grits,
More grits,
Fish, grits and collards.
Life is good where grits are swallered.

Grits
Sits
Right.

-Roy Blount, Jr.

Oscar Hijuelos

In the hallway of our building on 118th Street, or mailbox had the name of Basulto instead of Hijuelos on the buzzer, because my parents' names were not on the lease. For years and years we knew that the name should be changed, but somehow couldn't be changed, because the landlord might then pass some judgement on our sustainability as tenants and evict us. Multiply these simple but dislocating experiences by a thousand and know that they are far away and nowhere as vivid in my mind now as they were then, and you can have a vague idea of what it's like to be raised with a feeling of what I would call "second classness."
-Oscar Hijuelos, Cool Salsa