small change

gray monday

I was quite taken with the sudden brightness of morning light a few days ago. A rare morning that wasn’t shrouded in the usual summer fog. Even through the dusty window, the light seemed to promise so much sparkle, so much heat, and obviously, the light itself by which to banish shadows.

 

This morning was cool enough for me to turn on the furnace briefly. The fog hung heavily from the skies, dulling the horizon, as well as the view of the garden from the window. For the better part of the day, the weather seemed perfect for Churchill’s black dog to romp in the doldrums. The nasty beast has been sniffing around our house lots lately, and though I have a pretty good stick with which to send it running with its tail between its legs, not everyone in my household has the kind of experience I have had with playing dog whisperer to these unruly hounds.

The sunset, laced with fog, was everything that the morning couldn’t be. Bright and colorful, even if still tinged with a hue of melancholy. Not for me that odd hue, because what I saw was only the brilliance of the sun that was still here. I had no other choice. It’s easy to be an optimist under duress. To be blind to the night. To see the artless light.

Fringed

The prompt for July 16 from Big Tent Poetry was “to write using a hidden code” along the lines of steganography, “a form of ‘security through obscurity’ in which a secret message is sent via an innocuous medium –– an image, a letter –– and decoded using a method known only to sender and recipient. The beauty is in the message being truly hidden in plain sight.”

Since I consider all lyric poetry a form of “steganography” in that the secret message of every poem is always in plain sight, there to be gleaned in every element, from structure to tone, I don’t think a key to the meaning of the message is necessary. Should you be looking for one, you need nothing more than to suspend your quest for certainty, at least for the type that can be had in the bargain basement of prose.

Fringed

The dusked hour when the tangled jasmine in your garden turns a muddy white and gives up a sorrow-sweetened scent is also the hour when the moon, caught in the dawn-bleached skies, turns the color of cinders.

Who is to say if this not the tinctured ash of the flower calcified, the spirit that revives an impossible past? Who is to say if this is not the fire about to catch its stride, or, having had its day in the sweep of flames is now spent?

Make light of the matter then, as if you were an alchemist whose heart of gold has finally turned, transmuted in the still.

playing with memes

Hmm, I would have never guessed, but apparently

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Was not expecting that.... The strange thing is that, apart from some essays of his that appeared in various publications, I haven't read his work.

malapropos of grit

Here is my first ever response to a prompt from Big Tent Poetry. This week’s prompt was about “changing a word relationship,” going the way of Mrs. Malaprop on one of the words to help revive their meaningful romance ... well, at least that is my take on it.

Gut

Let your lips be pillared pillows

on which to lean your hard-churned words

that tumble on, hapless heap of clowns

though they may be, it’s what you got,

the proofed pudding, even if it turns

sour on your arched tongue, go ahead,

this is what it’s about, just grin and bare it.

notes from midair

As we flew home from Boston to San Francisco, a few nights ago, I made some notes in flight. Since I wrote in a mostly darkened plane, my writing is almost illegible, but obviously, back there in midair, I thought I had a few important things to say. I even took a photo from the plane, just before we reached night’s domain, having chased the light for more time than a day’s allotment of it. Anyway, here are the notes:

Going west, the one direction that feels natural to me, back into the light that hangs on past the limits of the day set back east. The skies are halved and held by a sash of electric red that cinches the blank night of what’s below the plane to the hourless day above -- another night, its dome bolted by the random grid work of the stars.

I am watching Pretty Woman on the small screen of the seat in front of me.  A movie I didn’t like when I first saw it [back in 1990]. But right now, I really like it because it is taking me across time, the way this plane is taking me across space. A past with the allure of the future. A past in which grit is gold dust blown in from the future.

Like Julia Roberts in the movie, I am young again, my head filled with dreams, just as big as hers, though my legs are so much shorter, and my hair a third in volume of her mane. Back then, in that time little did I know how wide open the horizon was and how narrow was that sash of dreams that cinched my hopes and plans.

So here I am, dreaming again. This time, it’s the present, with the allure of the past with its gold dust, and the mysteries of the road not taken.

 

Update: Interesting notes on the pre-rpoduction of Pretty Woman at Wikipedia, listing all the actresses who turned down the role of Vivian because they considered the script and role sexist and degrading to women. also, the original idea for the film was a dark one, and not the fairytale that it became in the hands of studio execs.

April retrospective

During the month of April I committed to writing a haiku a day. I knew next to nothing about haiku when I blithely went ahead with this project. But my goal wasn’t to learn as much as I could in a month about haiku either. My goal was to write a poem a day.

Given my track record for biting off more than I can chew, I decided to make the challenge of writing a poem a day both easy and hard. Easy, because the haiku, at least as defined structurally by The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms consisted of 17 syllables and 3 lines. Surely I could manage 17 syllables a day. Hard, because the haiku I was to write had to be 17 syllables and 3 lines, not less and not more, every single day. Hard also, because if I were to follow the full tradition of the haiku, with its imagery imperative of natural elements, seasonal, religious, or historical references, and the quick lightening of satori, or the epiphany, I would have quit before I started. So I decided to stick strictly to the numbers.

I felt like quitting after the first week. I could not see how I was to write 21 more 17-syllable and 3-line poems. But with encouragement from you who have left comments often, I plodded on. I am grateful for that boost from all of you, because you taught me not only about poetry, but also about myself. I learned to persist a bit better, but most of all, I learned that I write to be read. I write because I want to share a story, even if that story has no plot, just a series of images.

At the end of April, I had 30 (well 32, with the dog’s haiku) poems. These daily poems make an arc of sort. If they don’t tell a story, they do tally a month of days. And they also stand as little witnesses of an experience I had with poetic form as the torch that welds the jumble of the world, from things to seasons to people to feelings, into words.

I collected the poems in two formats. One is a small booklet with illustrations for each haiku. This file is a hefty PDF.

The other PDF file, laid out like a calendar on one page, shows all the poems together, so that they can be read in columns or across the page, giving a slightly different sense of unfolding in each case. 

  A Month of Haiku, the "book" version

A Month of Haiku, the "calendar" format.

purple prose

 

The rhododendron bush went a little mad with putting out huge clumps of blossoms this year. I've neglected it for years, feeding it now and then and trimming it rarely.

I tried this same approach toward my writing these last couple of years, too. Feeding the muse now and then, and rarely trimming the excesses of little volunteer shoots of text that sucked the sap out of the roots meant for sturdier growth. Alas, my prose and poetry did not go the way of the rhododendron ... which explains why most of this post is taken up with a picture.

haiku #30

Suddenly the scent
of orange blossoms. I am
done with April's chore.

____________

haiku #30 for napowrimo

And this concludes the round of the daily haiku I took on for a challenge for the month of April. Whew!

the dog's take

I want to walk right
now! Unleash those words. I got
a bone to bury.

*

Shucks! She's still at it,
and I must bury my dreams
in sheets of fake grass.

haiku #29

Doves at dusk huddle,
puff their chests, as if this were
shield enough for night.
____________
haiku #29 for napowrimo