upstream from black eagle

Today's shot comes from my father's camera. He emails me around two or three almost every morning with shots from the day before. His words are sparse. What he has to say about this? Upstream from Black Eagle. I know exactly what he means.

In this way, poetry is all around me. And when I say me, I include you, too. We have only to listen to the way we speak. (And then jot it down on a scrap of paper before we lose the beat.)

Yesterday I called the roofer who has yet to reshingle my roof from the tornado incident we experienced in June. I listened to his wife flip through schedules and work orders, looking for detail regarding my house. Oh, you are the triple tear-off. Since then, I've been thinking about what that means. When I look in the mirror, I wonder if others see what she saw in me.

It's not always just about the cadence in our words — our words can also reveal what we see when we look. My sister and her husband have some of their straw for their sheep farm stored on another man's land. Where would these straw bales be? Underneath the main power line where you look toward the Birdhead country...you know, through the chicken wire gate.

the case of the curious horse

Because my sister loves horses, our father sent her this photo first. I'm the daughter he sends photos of land and sky. Only after he caught himself returning to look at this photo again and again did he realize I might also like the photo. But for reasons not involving horses.

My sister focused on the horses. The middle horse is angry and the left horse next to him is merely curious. Dad focuses on how the shadows tell you about the grade of the ground. He sent me the photo after realizing I'd likely enjoy the way water curves against land.

In my photography class, our Irish instructor tells us he brakes for S curves. He will stop what he is doing — even stop his journey if he is on a doughnut run — to take a photo of any suggestion of an S curve. Such formation allows our mind to travel all the while experiencing the very edge where contrasts meet.

Field alongside water. Curiousity corralled with anger. Straight against the curves. Daughter versus daughter. Shadows on warm earth. 

Here's a place to sit while we think about S curves and the curious horse. Photo courtesy of said dad.

Last week my daughter wanted to buy a book, which for this bookmanicmother was a moment dipped in 24K bliss. She doesn't think she likes to read because compared to my sister and me she doesn't read often enough to consider herself a reader. She doesn't think she is at all like us in that regard. We walked into Borders Bookstore with an understanding how we'd just dip in, get the book she wanted, and then dip right back out.

An hour later, we were still in the psychology section. We were dipped in bliss, having discovered common ground between us. We had pulled all but two-three-four books off the shelf. I had four books I wanted to buy (had I mentioned my NoMoreBoughtenBook Vow?) and she had three in her WannaBuy Pile. We agreed to share our books at home having discovered we both enjoyed analysing why minds do what minds do.

In this way I ended up breaking a solemn vow, (a subject for a future post.) But for now I am reading a book about finding my true passion and place in life.  The Element by Sir Ken Robinson tells me much of what I already know and much of what I didn't dare to know. Halfway through the book, I've bent the corners of eight pages.

Somewhere on page 86 or so is a comment about growth. We move towards a dynamic life and away from living a static life when we allow our minds to consider how contrasting things in life share common features, rather than when we consider the differences between these same things.

Such things, for example could be . . . oh, I dunno . . farmland and water, straight lines and curves, shadows and fence rails, daughter, daughter, granddaughter.

click

Very Like A Whale is asking questions. What do we think about Web-Active Poets? What do I think? Nic Sebastain posted her interview with me regarding these very question on her poetry blog.

As much as I do not want the stacks of books in my house to go away (and as much as I know they will never go away), I love-love-heart-love accessing poetry on the web. If you've not yet clicked over to Whale Sound to listen to Nic read, I hope you give it a click. And while you are clicking, this is where you click to hear my poem, At Ruby's Diner.

I'll be back in a few clicks of time to post a post sans clicks.

elm jury, or what is autumn without a tree poem

Grounded

Tell me I don’t reach

in the way that elm trees arch

for blue heated sky,

stretching with beggar limbs

for one more soak in yellowed light

before the moon hustles in

with the blackwash we call night.

Instead, tell me

you feel the stubborn way

I burrow beneath groomed grass

the same way elms seek water

in a neighbor's yard,

reaching deep into musty earth

to battle the northern front.

First published in  Hobble Creek Review

Where is the balance between reaching for something and staying rooted?  If want is on one end of the scale and stay-put is on the other end, where is the balance and how do we recognize it? I wrote this poem a few years ago when I was thinking I shouldn't maybe reach for that blue sky. Jury is still out on that debate. And you? How is your jury doing on that debate? Or is it a debate for you?

scrap

Red dawns have been happening without me. This experience requires an exit procedure: Slipping out of a warm bed into cold stiff jeans, finding a pair of socks,  keys, camera and mittens in an unlit house with an unlit mind. Sometimes this is beyond me.

Shhhh —somewhere  earth  is meeting water, water is lapping against light.

But elsewhere I am following rules: getting to work on time, obeying the dotted lines, not talking to strangers, writing a grocery list. Staying on task, staying within the lines.

After x number of days staying on task, I find myself tying silver maple leaves to knobs on kitchen cupboards,

carving pumpkins — not for the resulting lanterns — but for the scraps that happen as we cut.

And somewhere will sit a pumkin on a doorstep — a pumkin without lips.

all things unnamed

I name my world. When I can't, when I am unable to -- let's say I am camping inside a wet tent and am down to my last pair of wool socks, if I am quiet and listening carefully, comes the shadow against the blue of canvas, presenting words like roasted mittens, or long-elbowed boy. Naming the world realigns the stars etched against the life lines on our palms.

You can only see them when you do not look.

We took a long walk this weekend, along a creek which runs through a canyon. We threaded our way through ungroomed stands of trees, around a bend and over hillsides- taking photos of all things unnamed.

I name my shoes, the vehicles I drive, the pumkins we carve, but realized on this walk- I didn't know the names of anything we saw. Moreso, I wasn't inclined to rename anything. Everything had already been named. We have names for the flower and its petals, we have names for the October air. When we name something, do we stake a claim?

I didn't want to stake a claim. I took the Vow of No More Making Names. Dropped the vow into the HeretoforeThereafterUnamedCreek- with three witnesses pressed against me.

Sometime after crossing the bridge, I caught myself from naming this delicate fluff:

 The Stuff Little Kids Are Made Of.

And this one, while I was on my knees, holding steady, waiting for the slight breeze to subside so I could take this photo- I was almost thinking: Flattened Bloomer.

When we returned home (all our lanterns waiting for us on our doorstep.) (all of them named before the Vow Ceremony)

Jack O'Jacky, brother to Jack O'Punch, son of Jack O'Dult

I uploaded the photos to my laptop and read my email. A letter from a friend had arrived, detailing his plans to continue climbing the highests peaks in each of our fifty states. This time - Mount Marcy in the State of New York. I toggled over to Google to learn a little more about this peak. First thing I learned was the peak was once known as Tawahus,  an Indian name for cloud splitter.

 Second thing I learned:  the local Indians back in the day had no name for this mountain. The name Tawahus was given to the mountain by white settlers.

level 255, white without detail

I'm early, which means according to my watch (if I could find it) I am on time. I park between two vehicles in the parking lot at the Lincoln Center such that the brilliance of the evening sun cannot find me. I roll my windows down. To my left, a macho 4x4 pickup with exaggerated tires. To my right, a mother in a van. I'm not eavesdropping, but she's talking on her cell phone about how to heat up breadsticks, and Aunt Sally can show him if he's not sure how to run the oven. And Zach is walking to his cross-country run. Save three sticks for him and a plate of spaghetti. She won't be home til nine.

I'm not as organized as she sounds. Last week's banana is still in my book bag. There aren't bread sticks warming in my oven, but I know there is a wasp waiting underneath my favorite antique tea cup in my kitchen sink. This is how things are.

The man who owns the large pickup next to me comes out of the center, pauses to unlock his door. He's wearing cowboy boots and has sneakers in his hands. He smiles with a sort of shrug and tells me he has to drive to where he runs.

Once he drives off, I turn back to my journal and study notes from last week's photography class.  Photography = light + drawing, which  means drawing with light. Before the 1950s, burning magnesium was how we made our light. In shadows, light is bluer than one might think.

A camera is taught 18% of everything it sees is gray. There are times we must override this by studying the histogram of each photo taken. My notebook has four pages of etchings to demonstrate a variety of bad shots as graphed in a histogram.This graph has a sliding scale from zero to 255, with zero standing for darkness and 255 being white without detail.  Who would want shots like that, our instructor asked. He took his green marker and made a messy circle in the center of the graph on the board in front of the class -- showing us where the detail of most life exists.

I flip to the back of my journal and write a note to remind me when I get home at nine to let the wasp loose.

.

on naming her twelve hundred months

On Naming Her Twelve Hundred Months

For example, she gets August and Tuesday mixed up
and she’d like to name the next month Caesar. Julius
after that. I sense that she prefers infinity, avoiding
things that go around and come back again—which is why
her father asked my mother to tell me the least I could do
is write to her, maybe apply for a visitor’s pass.

I show her the piano in the day room with keys named
one through eighty-eight. Octaves don’t exist. She skips
the scales we learned as kids but plays killer
ragtime blues. Speaking of music and Tuesday,
my puppy stops barking when I say things
like Excuse me, or Ruby Tuesday, or when I sing the blue

shoe song she likes. Layla is the Irish Setter I rescued
from the pound. Her previous owner gave her up
because she’s afraid of a rifle going off, bullets
in a barrel, the click from a trigger’s pull, the sounds
of hunting season, the sound September makes.


Previously published in Fifth Wednesday Journal.

Photo Credit: William O'Keefe

morning glory - mary macgowan

Dirty dishes kept me company the other night. We won't talk about how long they had been soaking in the sink. Catching up on my dishwashing turns out to be good Home Alone on Friday Night therapy. I filled the sink with hot sudsy water and listened to tunes on my CD player, recapping the past week in my mind.  Was there anything good from it I might want to remember?

 How was it that the only good conversation I'd had this week was with the roofer who plans to reshingle my house?  The debate over natural wood or wet wood three-tab shingles almost turned fun when we started renaming the shingles' colors. But it didn't take long to discover he wasn't, never will be, a poet. For every shattered red and auborn grey name I invented, he invented bright green and vivid yellow.

The next good conversation I'd had  . . . (thinking) . . . might have been, must have been when I woke in the middle of Tuesday night to listen to voice mails on my Blackberry. I have a few friends who call my voice mail when they can't really talk to me "live." I envy their ability to leave a long voice mail that doesn't sound like this: Hi Sherry, It's McGillicuddy......Guess you can't answer your phone.....It's Tuesday night around midnight....call me when you can.

I buried myself under my comforter and listened to the rambling chat of a friend who leaves pauses in his conversation with my voice mail...knowing when I eventually listen to his voice mail, I will talk back to it:

Remember when you were here and we all had tea? I forget now, but what about my tea did you not like?

(pause.........)

Cuz I am making tea right now and I thought I'd pour you a cup....listen, here is the sound of hot water boiling on the stove.....

(insert the sound of a whistling tea kettle)

.....so if it was the honey you didn't like, I am not putting honey in your cup

(insert the sound of a cupboard being rummaged in)

... say, how about a drop of spearmint in it instead? are you up for that?

(insert another pause for Sherry's reply)

But back to doing dishes on Friday Night. My Aussie pup was outside playing Tire, the shepherd was inside eating an ice cube on the kitchen rug. The music on the CD player had switched gears. A sweet voice sang out, "and she asked me: are you okay? Those are the saddest words ever heard".  Whoa. Someone was singing my name. I dried my hands, turned the music louder and listened to Mary MacGowan sing my kind of song, talk my kind of talk. Where did this line come from? I decided to write and ask her. She sent me back the lyrics to the song. Here's the second verse:

Cooler aka Bright White Winter Day aka The exquisite torture of new relationships

        and you have so many friends

        oh maybe right now might be the best time to end?

        I don’t want – to – watch it all fall

        oh then my sister will call

        and she’ll ask me: Are you okay?

        Those are the saddest words, ever heard

        on any bright, white winter day.

Mary, turns out, was in the midst of purchasing a new home, accepting the risk of starting up a private art therapy practice. I admire her courage and the work it has taken to record this CD, write her poetry, build her life. It’s not easy to push through fear. When I wrote to tell her I related to her music, she wrote back:

“. . . have survived the basics. the jitters

are still there, but i'm okay.  Although

i just had a crazy tumble face down

coming out of our natural food store,
so i can tell i'm not quite myself.  but
since i'm here, with nothing to do, i am
delighted to take this chance to respond to you!

Words like that from Mary, whether in her soprano voice or her Garamond typed words renew my conviction to keep on believing in what I can’t prove. I wanted this post to be an interview of Mary, but she wrote back to say I should share in my blog what I wrote to her:

I believe in the exception to the rule. I must be in a space with open doors. I might not go through the doors, but need them to be open. I've said no to enough relationships in my life for that very reason....and keep finding out that while it is painful it remains necessary. I have friends who choose relationship over open doors. Somehow I keep believing the two can co-exist, that I won’t have to choose one over the other.

Want to be part of this multi-media dialogue? Check out this link to Mary’s music. Listen to her songs. Maybe, come back and tell us how you like the harmonies and the clarinet, the mandolin and the lyrics. No need to tell us when you tumbled down. When we don't ask if you are ok, you will know that's how we show we care.

    

mach 1 and lost lockets

The latest photo from my father: An F-15 from the nearby Air Force base leaves its mark across both sky and water. I grew up in this area. On one side of the river -- teepee rings lingered from the 1800s, and on the other side, fighter jets experimented with sonic booms in the 1960s.

When something moves through something else -- a boat through water, a jet through air -- waves are created.  If the speed and power of something gets to be so fast and strong, the waves created by said passage start to pile up against one another. It gets to where they can't get out of the way of one another. That's when the sonic booms, so to speak with poetic license.

Across the kitchen table from me, my daughter was working on lesson plans for her first grade students at a school designed for kids with emotional and social issues. We can, at times, act like an old married couple where when one says "Are there any more plums left in the fridge?" the other might reply, "I forgot to tell you the neighbors brought us a pumpkin." 

I told my daughter about the lastest photo from her grandfather and what I was learning when I googled sonic boom. She talked about math centers, parent permission slips, and a locket found on the playground. What did I suppose was inside the locket? she asked.

Perhaps what was inside the locket would help locate its owner. Maybe it was a photo of the little girl once found miles away from home at the fishing bridge, at 3 AM. Maybe it was the girl who often sits on a neighbor's doorstep at night, waiting for someone to let her in. Maybe, my daughter thought, it belonged to one of the students who wears a whistle on her backpack.

Whistle on a backpack? Yes, for in case her father shows up again -- she and her brothers are instructed to grab their whistles and blow as loud and long as they can, summoning help. Apparently there is a lifelong restraining order to keep him away from his kids. A photo of him is taped inside each teacher's desk drawer. Just in case he storms in.

I put aside my Mach 1 research, closing up my laptop with its bookmarked page filled with talk of boom carpets and overpressure profiles. We picked out pretty papers and spread them on top of my laptop, set the locket down. When my daughter opened the locket, I expected to see a photo of a mother, a father, maybe someone's happy dog - but not this: a dull black pebble, carefully glued inside.