moving

I've been having some troubles with my blog at this website and so I've moved this blog to a new website

Please please please come join me there. It won't be the same without you.  Instead of being a follower on this blog, you are able to subscribe at the new site by clicking on "subscribe" either in the header or on the sidebar at the new website. This should make it easier to "follow". Bbbbbut "follow" implies "lead" aaaannnnd I'm not comfortable with being the lead, so let's just meet up over at the new place!  Hopefully my blogger troubles will make it easier for me to comment with those of you who leave me such great comments!!)

SO click here to switch over!  Same name, same Sherry, but now hosted by wordpress(dot) com.

drift

I've been carrying this photo on my cell phone for weeks. 

It was with me when I flew to NYC and spent timeless days with others not of this earth and  yet entirely of this earth. Why did I go and what happened to me while I was out there? Before I could determine the answers I came home to family fighting floods and spent an evening gauging atmospheric conditions in our tornado-ripened sky (when do we dive into the crawl space for shelter??) All the while this quote I found hanging in the Western Heritage Museum staying with me. 

How does this feel -- to follow one another out of this world? And what of the text left unwritten: And into the next world.

How did the Northern Cheyenne end up in Montana? History tells us they drifted. The Chippewa were pressed west, which pressed the Sioux further west, which displaced the Chaa to areas in North Dakota where they could still occupy fixed villages, make pottery and practice agriculture. And then came the day they were driven into the plains, losing their arts and learning instead to become roving buffalo hunters in order to survive.

To this day, in sacred ceremonies, the spiritual keeper of stories tells how it came to be that the tribe lost the corn upon being forced to live after leaving their eastern country. 

If you study the stories of Dull Knife and the Northern Cheyenne, you will be told how the Indians drifted. Did they, do we, do I? Underneath the buffalo-hunter's robes is the spirit of a roving corn-planter.

wearing a YB hat

Click here!

Yeah! Wanna see what I (as in We) have been up to these past months? Rose Hunter's YB Poetry Journal just went live and I've been a guest editor there, along with John Riley. You only thought you knew about windows! Come take a peek! And if you want to download a copy for free to read on your Kindle, there is a link for that as well.(Get your free eBook version here!)

(This is my first eBook I've formatted! I am eExcited!)

tremble, rattle and flood

My father writes: Can you remember how the windows in our house would rattle when the water was this high?



I do remember. From this angle, up river, you can't tell how far and fast the water falls where you see the white water, but we lived downstream from that fall. And so we grew up knowing the power of water, the tremble in the ground.

Meanwhile further downstream the U S Army Corp of Engineers have decided to open the spillgates and let the Missouri River rush past. Towns spread along the banks in North Dakota are preparing for the flood.

plane talk

 

Somewhere in Brooklyn are these open windows and this one bend of fuschia petals. I wonder if the petals have dropped now that I am back home.

And somewhere in Ohio are the two cowboys who sat next to me on last week's plane taking us from Montana to our Minneapolis connection. From there, they were headed out to see Rick's barn. Middleseat-Wranglerjean-Man asked Windowseat-Levijean-Man how big did he suppose the airport was in South Bend. Windowman was surprised. After a bit he cleared his throat and said, I thought you'd want to know how big Rick's barn is. That's the only thing I know.

I confess to wanting to know how big Rick's barn is. Now I'll never know.

And flying back from Brooklyn via Charlotte to Denver the couple behind me fought. Both had aisle seats. Apparently she couldn't trust him with the simple issue of renting a car once they landed. Apparently ever since he bought the wrong brand of cheese at the market last Christmas, she's not let him make a decision. What's it going to take, he asked in the sleepy-dark cabin of our plane, to prove he's a worthy man?

This is something else I'll never know.

And then came the final leg back home: Flying in from Costa Rica, the young couple seated next to me confided they had just relocated to my home town and were camping at the KOA until they had enough money to move into a house. Tomorrow he was off to work the oilfields near the North Dakota border and she would remain behind. They are trying to have a baby, they confided in the dark, but so far nothing they've done has worked.

Will they ever have a baby? This is something I may one day know because they've invited me to pitch my tent next to their camper once the rains subside. It will be easy to know which camper is theirs when I reach the campground. The 4 foot tall, bamboo giraffe riding home on top of our three suitcases in the overhead bin will be playing sentry outside their trailer door.

cane

 

The lady in a blue pants suit had a mean cane. She tapped beat her way to the front of the line so she could enter the Reading Room ahead of us. That was fine with me. 

I was still reeling myself back in from coming across Virginia Woolf's cane in a display case on the main floor of The Library in New York City. Hers was bamboo-ish brown and found floating down river by her husband some days after she filled her coat pocket with rocks. Next to the cane was her last journal, turned to the final page.

What were the last words? Thin ink fading on the top third of a journal page. Though I wanted to feel the rhythm of her handwriting, how she looped and unlooped her letters, I didn't want to read those words.

In the Rose Reading Room, we were met with soft light. Here was and here is the place writers come to write. Sunlight flows through the windows suggesting  we write write write. We sat at a table further lit with brass lamps. The lady in blue was complaining too loudly that she deserved a security guard in the room. What if someone were to steal her handbag? Strip her neck of jewels?

And what of us, I thought. Who will guard us from her vent? 

And what of our first words? What would we write if we came here, seriously, to begin the work of our next poem? Downstairs in the marbled entry strangers were peering through thick display glass, discussing Virginia's cane.

the almost hawk incident

We were fishing. I wasn't aware of the fishermen on the far shore to my left, nor of the train tracks 20 stone throws behind us. I was tuned to feeling what I could feel beneath the surface of the choppy water. First you learn what the current feels like, and how the wind tosses your rod and line. And then you learn to tell the difference between seaweed and a trout bumping the bait on your line. And then you learn to wait while you feel a fish nibbling the worm on your hook, 3 feet beneath the surface. Wait, wait...be ready. When you feel the tug, you try to hook the fish. In mid-hook, I noticed a flash in the sky directly above my hook: a hawk in a furious nosedive!

Did I try to reel in? Did I try to hook my fish? I dunno. I was stunned. S t u n n e d.  The dive, the splash, the silence. The momentary pulse of time. And then- the hawk resurfaced, wings power stroking up and away from me. With my fish caught between his claws.  One split second between us. My fishing buddy came over to me afterwards: You know if you had caught that fish, you know, right?, that you would have lost your pole. The notion of which filled my lungs with the sort of breath I haven't inhaled in years.

Afterwards we came across an old park with outbuildings built from river rock. Whatever purpose they once served they are no longer serving now. But still. But still, the notion of what might have once happened inside the river-rocked cottage stays with me, just like what almost happened with that hawk.

tuned

When I ask how he is doing, he sends a photo of sunrise coloring the walls in what he calls his front room. It's easier to sleep in the living room recliner now; that angle makes it possible to breathe. 

When I ask again (Dad, how are you doing?) he emails a series of photos of cottonwoods along the Sun River. Each day Dad and Mom walk the river to watch the beavers work. Day begatting day, the trees are standing, but seemingly begats suddenly - one day the trees are chewed down. The day will come when the trees will be in the river, a part of a beaver dam.

We don't see the dams happen, we see them when they are done. My folks are hoping if they keep quiet and blend in, they will witness the making of  one said dam.

When I ask about his biopsy results, he sends instead a photo of these ducks. See how, no matter what, the ducks stay lined up?

All the while our world is zipping with TV shows and utility bills, test results, the rising price of gold, another section of our universe tunes to something different. The ducks will be ducks and the beavers  find their trees. And the wash of sunrise continues to color someone's front room walls.

sixth off, we laugh

This is what beavers do.

One day the tree is standing, the following day the tree is not standing. What happened in between? I've come to realize I use between an awful lot in poetry. Ok, so I use the word mitten quite a bit, too, so perhaps that doesn't mean anything. Oh! And I am just now realizing words like perhaps and mayhaps show up frequently. What's up with all that?

In the meantime, in the . . . uh . . . between time . . . with napo writing done (30 poems in 30 days in April), I thought I'd share one of the drafts here. It's (huh! go figure!) a between poem. This one takes place somewhere between the Emerald Hills and the Yellowstone River and was almost called "On Becoming Two Old Codgers" but I decided that what goes on in the poem is transitional, a between thing.

Rehabilitation North of Emerald Hills

Once you agree to walk with him,
you walk the crushed red track
with the disgruntment you’ve been
carrying around for days
ever since you did the math
and realized you were no longer
middle-aged and he tells you how
disgruntment is not a word and how,
second of all, you shouldn’t want
your face to match the poorly-
thought-out sky and how,
in the third place, today’s grey sky
looks like a painting
no one would ever buy.
The track you walk circles

a practice football field
behind the country school
funded by Exxon, the only
business in the river bottom
once known as Poverty Flats.
An orange Just Say No Frisbee
abandoned in the outside lane
reminds him of what he didn’t do,
and why he’s here now doing laps,
bagging trash, recovering wind
and strength and friendship.
There’s a softball, lost in deep grass.

His throw falls short
of the tool shed and he mourns
his aging mourn about the increasing
lack of distance in his throw.
You do the math and tell him how,
fourth off, he’s gained two yards
for every three years you’ve known him
and, fifth of all, it’s good he’s quit aiming
for that poorly thought-out sky.

Photos courtesy of William O'Keefe,

somewhere between the Sun and the Missouri River.

April 29/30, 2011.

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.

since

I don't know Andy. But once I knew a man who urged me to climb to the top of Pompey's Pillar with my sleeping bag. He'd come from where he was, I was to come from where I was and we'd meet at the top and you know. Cover ourselves with stars. Or some suchness.

I never did meet him there. But I've since slept at the base of that pillar. Somewhere in this blog is a photo of the prairie grass with the morning sunlight slicing through it.

My timing is often off.

Remember me? I was your wrong number the other day.

And once I knew someone else not called Andy. All over the Malibu we ate from a can-man's grocery cart. But never at McD's in Tijuana. He knew how to carve a crutch. He knew how to laugh when our Tijuana taxi driver got lost and asked us for directions. He always knew when to cross the border, how to get back home. But then some suchness happened. And guess what. Somehow now he's lost.

slope

I am not the mountain

          I need plank - this from the one who cannot take a hammer

                 to nails when depression closes in.

yet people come, people talk to me.

          This one gives back her hand and whispers:

                  I listen to no music when I sing.

I am high country, yes -- but without vistas --

          She nods her head. Today she wants to understand 

                  he doesn't believe in bridges anymore.

slopes of white bark, pine beetles setting in.

           I'd rather there be real bees the aspen tells

                   the river and the river tells

the mountain. And the mountain turns to me.

                 

the shutting of eyes

"Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."

- Roland Barthes - (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)


** ** ** ** ** **

Before I knew of the above quote, I wrote 101, which accompanies the header photo of this blog.



She lets him inside her life the first time
he hikes Two Moon with her. Ice-jammed

Yellowstone, gnarled beaver dams, blonde stalks
of endless prairie waving as they walked.

He sets the pace along the river bank,
anxious, he teases, to get to where it turns pretty.

Oh Jiminy, she prays to her Montana god,
forgive him-he knows not what he says.

He’s from Oregon and only knows
green colors. He laughs out loud with her.

She tells him about moccasins, the fleeing
Nez Pierce slipping through these trees.

He talks about Bear Creek Hikers, the odds
of John Wayne wearing them, if only he still lived.

When the trail runs higher and the water cuts
the bank, they single file quietly -- the sun leaning

on their backs as they round the river’s bend, a vista
point for them. Show him is the echo she sends out.

Her words strike against sandstone cliffs, skip across blue
water, settle into nested brush sleeping against washed rock.

A Chinook breath stirs when she explains to him
how beauty sneaks in when we close our eyes.

thin ice

May we skate on the thick ice as long as we stay away from the thin? And how do you stay away from the thin, a brother asked as we slid across the ice.

The world divides in two: Those who think the sign warns that all the ice is thin, and those who think the sign reminds us to stay off the thin ice, but allows for skating on the thick.

**

I was watching a video on David Foster Wallace last night. He spoke about what we lose when we allow ourselves to gratify any and all of our desires, often times instantaneously Where do the chunks of quiet go we once had in our days?

"We don't want things to be quiet anymore," he said. "The part of you that can think for thirty minutes of silence never gets fed." When did living start feeling so thin?

**

I asked Hewhoflies about silence and living thick or thin. He told me about a month spent in Ireland a few years ago. The only time he and his wife spoke on their drive along the Irish coastline was when they reached a small village overlooking the sea. To their right, a police station. In the window, a sign: For Rent.

They shared a hearty laugh.

They drove on. Now they are back in the States and he entertains the notion of renting that active police station. For what, for why? To see if he can.

quiet

We get quiet when others cry, Mary Little Cross whispered decades ago. It's like lighting candles on an altar; it's the way we send our prayers. The Bear Don't Walk  kids were boarding our school bus a few days after their mother had died while painting the ceiling in their kitchen.  

I feel quiet. In the wake of Japan's disasters, everything I have to say is small.

**

I wondered if Hewhofliesplanes would be flying rescue in Japan the way he did in Indonesia a few years ago. In the middle of wondering, my cell phone rang. He was calling to say he was involved in a different mission and so he'd not be in Japan.

Where would they, how would they find the courage they will need to recover? How would any of us? Whenever Plane-flyer and I visit the subject of courage comes up. Mostly we were quiet, but then he shared this quote with me:

"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; Knows not the livid loneliness of fear."  -Amelia Earhart

Photo courtesy of Nadine Hergenrider.

icicle

Of the two photos my father emailed to my Blackberry in the middle of the night, I open the one he's named Chop. The other one, Self Portrait with New Necktie, is one I can't bring myself to open. Not yet. Instead, I start my day earlier than usual. I take a photo of an icycle icicle hanging from the eaves of my house. The colors of a winter sunrise are distorted when looking through the ice. I'll send that photo to him before I go to sleep tonight now that I've looked up how to spell it.

icicle: noun: a pendent spear of ice formed by the freezing of dripping water.

On my early drive to work, Hewhowatchesmoviesfromthebackporch calls with today's weather forecast. He's surprised I am already out of bed and on my way to work. He just got off night shift so he knows how snowy our roads are and (surprise) he's watching I Love You, Man. Did I know, he asks, it was filmed at Venice Beach? Remember where we found that great parking place in the shade of a rundown garage's awning one alley from the beach? Everyone else was parking a mile away, but not us. We had found a secret parking spot.

Oy, I remember. So does he. He tells me that for years afterwards he would sometimes drive to Venice Beach to see if anyone else had discovered our spot.  

icicle: M.E. isykle, from is "ice" + ikel "icicle," from O.E. gicel (rel. to cylegicel "cold ice"), from P.Gmc. *jekilaz (cf. O.N. jaki "piece of ice," dim. jökull "icicle, ice, glacier"). Dialectal ickle "icicle" survived into 20c.

In how many ways can something keep hurting?  I am driving up the slick hill to my office, thinking about this but I don't say it out loud. Instead I tell him about my dad's latest emails and how I don't want to open the Necktie shot just yet. Moviewatcher-Parkingspotrememberer clears his throat.

I flip my left-turn signal on and ask if his movie has reached the sad section, but he says no-- he was just remembering my dad back when we were together. Remember how your dad took photos of his radiation mask when he had throat cancer? He measured it and emailed everyone a photo of the mask, the diagram, the radiation table, and the prognosis of oxygen tubes someday hanging around his chest.  

Traffic clears. I turn left and bounce across my office's icy parking lot. I turn the engine off and sit in the silent pickup cab, phone held against my ear and listen to him tell me: Taking photos and documenting pain are forms of detachment which help your dad find the courage to deal with what he must.

icicle: A pendent mass of ice tapering downward to a point, formed by the freezing of drops of water or other liquid flowing down from the place of attachment.