someone else's lobby

Frankie, the owner's cousin, is in the lobby reading our newspaper. I'm always thinking I should write about Frankie, but this is all he does: Watches the lobby TV, reads the lobby news; waits for a chance to visit with anyone who isn't busy.

(This is me being busy.)

(It is still April in poetry land and I still have five more poems to write.)

And the photo is from my nephew. We can call him He Who Knows How Fast A Bee Can't Fly.  Up until recently he ran an engine crew during Montana's wild fire season. And then he thought how fun it'd be to be a lineman. And I thought I'd lift his photo because of all the metaphors that came to mind.

And then I suddenly felt like Frankie in someone else's lobby, climbing someone else's pole, stealing someone else's photo.

(This is me realizing I won't ever write a lineman poem. Which means I still have five more poems to write.)

(This is me getting back to work.)

eating the last o'keefe

There's a limb on the family tree that spent money on spendy M&Ms as a gift to my father- one of the last of his generation. What to give a non-material man? The leaves on that limb thought: M & M's with his last name on every M.

My mother served them in a crystal dish, but none of the leaves on my own limb wanted to dip in. Not that we didn't want to eat them, we just didn't want to be the leaf to eat the last one. It became a race, then, to get your M's eaten before the tension of eating the last one heightened to a finger-pointing conclusion.

I'm not pointing any fingers, but I'm saying it wasn't my mother. It might have been the main trunk himself. I'm noticing he's not complained they are gone.

throwing rocks in dallas

I miss being here, but it is April - the month for poets and poetry. Some poets participate in Write A Draft Every Day No Matter What. The theory is if we keep forcing ourselves to be tuned (available) to some sort of channel, we start tuning in easier, quicker, and our ability to fine tune increases.

Does it work when it happens? Yes, when I am able to tune in, I start to notice more colors, finer tunes, the grace of nature. Does it result in better poetry? I say it results in more consciousness. Um, if that can be measured in quantity.

Before we learn to crit ourselves and before we learn to see us as others see us, we start out knowing we are creative. At one point in our lives we all believed we could draw. We all knew how to hear the sun. The photo here is a series of self-portraits of my daughter's kindergarten students. This is how they see themselves. If we were asked to draw ourselves, under what constraints would we draw? April is the month to rid ourselves of constraints. You know, it's time to remember what the sun sounds like. Time to remember which one of us was throwing rocks and time to quit keeping track of what time it is in Dallas.

Nothing herein should be construed as being the writer's opinion. The April muse has her writing a poem about throwing rocks in Dallas.

mesh

I've been working on a window project, so to speak, for a couple months. For those of you who click over to my photo blog, you might have noticed this. What I learn everytime I head out in pursuit of a photo, there are no good photo moments to be found. Last weekend I had arrived too early for the Bag O'Books Sale at the library so I decided to drive through the downtown alleys. My phone rang, I bemoaned to my caller that there were no good windows to be shot. Look up, my caller said.

At the library, good novels were a quarter a piece. No kidding! I thought to pick through the titles and fill two bags. And instead of keeping them at my house for those no-good-book nights, I planned to give them to my sister. Why? Because I've been reading Mary Karr's book, Lit, and even though what I've learned in the book mostly reinforces what I want to say I already know . . . there is one line from the book that stays with me.

For many years, she had traded joy for excitement and then went around feeling hungry and messed up.  The excitement of two bags of books weighs against  the joy my sister will experience in receiving them.

Karr talks about two other things she traded lightly, but I'll be back to write about those another time. It's still April inside my head- the poem-a-day challenge continues.

drawing the line at pineapple

One of my favorite notes from my daughter. She's one of two of my favorite sources for poetry. I tell my kids they are Walking Poems. They roll their eyes and grin at each other. They are used to the way we talk to each other. For example, when she debriefs after a day of teaching six-year-olds with an assortment of special needs, she tells us she draws the line at pineapple in the pocket.

And her brother and I nod our heads. We know exactly what she means.

**

Here's a quote that I've been wanting to share with everyone touched by the poetry gene.

Do you know the book, Lit, by Mary Karr? Mary's memoir is like reading page after page of poetry. Her prose is easy to skate across, and yet you slowly realize the pond of water is filled with poetry.

She shares this quote from The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms:

"The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language."

**

April is the National Poetry Month. Many of us poets are trying to draft a poem each day. While I think that some of my blog posts are poetry in disguise, I am taking the time this month to extract more of the poetry from some of my blog posts and turning them into drafts.

When I find a way to draw the line at pineapple in my pocket, I'll know that I've arrived.