Writer's Island

RIP, Nick Barkley

2012-02-11T09:22:00.000-08:00

I was sad to read that one of my childhood icons, Peter Breck, died earlier this week at the age of 82. He was best known as the actor who played Nick Barkley, the mercurial middle brother on The Big Valley.

I got hooked on The Big Valley when my sister Bev and I used to stay up to watch it in the late 1960s. She was seven years older than me, and up until then, we hadn’t liked each other—she was the haughty teenager who knew everything, and I was the geeky little sister who’d replaced her as the baby of the family. But, slightly bleary-eyed and watching TV after the rest of the house had gone to bed, for some reason we bonded over shows like The Big Valley and Marcus Welby, M.D. At first, we just sat in silence together. But eventually we started making fun of those shows—laughing at bad dialog and implausible plot twists*. We’ve been laughing ever since.

The Big Valley gets kind of a bad rap these days. Of course, Gunsmoke lasted longer, Maverick was cooler, and Have Gun, Will Travel had that great theme song**. But for me, The Big Valley trumped them all. This was largely due to my raging crush on Lee Majors, who managed to get through four years of playing the sullen brother, Heath, without cracking a smile more than twice. There were other things to love, too: We had Richard Long as the sensible brother, Jarrod, who always followed his moral compass while the rest of the family started bar fights, fell in love with swindlers, and generally made bad decisions. Then there was (Miss) Barbara Stanwyck as the steely matriarch, Victoria, and Linda Evans playing the slightly dim daughter, Audra***. And then of course there was Peter Breck as the brawling Nick, iconic in his neckerchief and black gloves.

For the first couple of seasons, the show placed all its bets on the hunky Majors, who seemed to have been recruited mostly for his tanned torso. Poor Peter Breck was often lost at the wayside as the impulsive, less photogenic Nick, a man who had a five o’clock shadow even at breakfast and rarely took off those gloves. (Now nearing 50, I can’t help wondering: psoriasis?) But without Nick, that show would have been a brooding mess—Jarrod and Heath would have pondered everything to death, and Audra would have been murdered by about eight different psychos. So, while Heath was out chopping wood with his shirt off, Nick was doing the dirty work—smacking the bad guys (and the occasional bystander) and shouting what needed to be said. Nick was the great air-clearer, the icebreaker, the jester who jumps in and stirs everyone up. In a way, he was the true hero of the show, the one who really ran the ranch and broke heads to get it done.

Maybe every family needs a loudmouth like Nick. Or maybe, as I discovered, sitting in the living room with my sister all those late nights, maybe it doesn’t matter who’s the shouter and who’s the thinker. What matters is that they’re family. You rode in with them, and at the end of the day—if you’re lucky—maybe they’ll be there to help you bring the cattle in.

*You just can’t bring up this sort of thing without mentioning Mystery Science Theater 3000. People tend to fall into two camps about MST3K; I’m in the Joel Hodgson camp. I like Mike Nelson too, but Joel would never have let so many sexist jokes into the scripts.

**A couple of years ago, during a Big Valley binge, I came up with words for its theme song:
The…Big…Valley!
The…Big…Valley!
Nick and Heath…and Jarrod are boys…and Audra’s a girl…
and they all…are…still living with their mom…
Barbara Stanwyck!
Bar…bara…Stanwyck!

***I never identified with Audra; most of her subplots involved her falling for one unscrupulous man or another, and she had a weird, clingy relationship with her mother. I have this vision of her, after all these years, still unmarried and living in that big house. She still puts on a satin dress every morning, and Silas, who’s about 105 now, still offers her pots of tea and tells her when there’s somebody at the door. Her mom is long gone, shot dead one day by bounty hunters when they mistook her for a lady outlaw in her bandolero hat and peg-legged riding pants. Victoria cracked one of those guys good with a bullwhip before she went down, but there was no arguing with that clean bullet hole in the back of her black leather vest.

A Jury of Your Peers: The Rattle “Readers’ Choice” Poetry Prize

2012-01-29T22:13:00.000-08:00

I’ll admit, I cringed when I heard that the poetry journal Rattle was letting their readers vote on the winner of this year’s Rattle Poetry Prize—at $5,000, one of the largest in the country. For years, I’ve been duking it out with thousands of other poets for this one, trying to find the right combination of tone, premise, length, and—well, hell, I don’t know what, and that’s part of the fun—that makes a poem worthy of such a large cash prize.

The news came a few months ago in an e-mail from Tim Green, Rattle’s superhumanly kind editor, a man who keeps in touch with his readers and writes a damned fine blog. Tim told us the plan: His editorial board would choose 15 finalists out of a staggering 6,000+ entries, publish them in an issue, and let Rattle’s subscribers vote on the prizewinner. It was a radical idea—Joe Q. Poets like me would get to decide who would take home the $5,000. And, since everyone who enters the contest gets a subscription to Rattle, a lot of us Joe Q. Poets already knew we were this year’s prizelosers, and now we would get to vote on the poems that had beaten us out, the grapes of wrath still fresh in our mouths.

I had my doubts. It all seemed fraught with emotional landmines. And it smacked of some sort of People’s Choice Awards, that lowest and most laughable of the awards shows. But Tim Green clearly had the same misgivings: In his instructions to us voters, he stressed that the contest was for the best poem, not for our favorite poet. This had crossed my mind, since Tony Barnstone*, one of my very favorite poets, was one of the finalists. Beyond that, Tim’s instructions were simple: “Use whatever criteria you’d like…. We can’t tell you how to fall in love with a poem.” It all felt weird—unfamiliar territory—but it seemed like my civic duty, as a longtime Rattle subscriber, to pitch in and see if this crazy thing worked.

So when the issue arrived, I sat down with the 15 poems and got to work. My first surprise was that I wasn’t at all bitter that these poems had been chosen as finalists over mine. It was just another contest—I’ve judged a few, and my brain goes into a hyper-slow, generous mode as soon as I have to write a number on a Post-It and stick it to a poem. I felt the usual mix of impulses: disgust over the absurd fact that I was judging one piece of art over another, and a sense of stewardship, of keen responsibility, when I found a poem that I loved.

I also was reminded that “judging” poems—pitting them against each other, whether for real or for fun—is a great exercise for poets. It forces you to think about each poem on its own terms: Is it doing what it set out to do? And because you’re considering a so-called finished poem, rather than one in progress as you might see in a workshop, it’s easier to take a step back and think about it as a whole product like a cake or a painting, without having to suggest changes. Does it satisfy me the way it is? Will I remember it later? Does it, in a word, work?

Another unexpected benefit was that I got to study what the Rattle editorial board picked as finalists. I can tell you that they favor long poems—only 5 of the finalists fit on one page, and there were several three-pagers. They also seem to like stream-of-conscious poems, ones that take the reader down unexpected alleys in long, convoluted, sometimes poem-length sentences. Narrative storytelling and complete sentences are the order of the day; few if any poems featured sentence fragments. Only one poem played inventively with white space; all the others were one long stanza, a few long stanzas, or consistent couplets, tercets, or quatrains.

In the end, I picked a poem that I felt was the clear winner, with a nod to a very good runner-up**. The others, for the most part, didn’t do it for me. This was perhaps a major flaw in the plan: I was constantly aware that I was choosing from among poems that someone else had already pre-picked, someone with a different aesthetic than mine. I’m a fan of paring down, of compactness, and I didn’t see a lot of that. And as I read those 15 poems, I couldn’t help wondering which of the 6,000 originals I would have picked, or which ones you, dear reader, would have picked. Such is the nature of contests: You’re at somebody’s mercy, and no two judges are alike. It’s just the way it is, and all the more reason to celebrate when you find one that fits.

So overall, it was a good exercise, and I liked the sense of community that Tim Green has established at Rattle. And while I’m glad not all journals let the readers run the show (cue the American Idol poetry nightmares), I’ll be curious to see how this experiment turns out.

*Here’s the first Tony Barnstone poem I ever read. He had me at “an amazing spread of food and drugs.”

** I will not say which ones I picked, unless drinks are involved.

The Lost Decade

2012-01-21T21:28:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Judy and I went to see the new Charlize Theron movie, Young Adult. Early in the film, there’s a scene where Charlize pops a cassette into the car stereo and starts singing along to a plaintive indie-rock song. I’d never heard the tune before, and I figured the filmmakers had saved some money by finding an obscure song and sticking it on the soundtrack. Later, I noticed another song that I wasn’t familiar with. Then another, and another. No big deal; I didn’t think about it much. But when Judy and I were leaving the theater, she turned to me and said, “Wasn’t that great music? It was like a soundtrack to the ’90s. I hadn’t heard those songs in years!” Then it dawned on me: Those weren’t obscure songs; they were just ones that I’d never heard before—not a single one of them*. And then I realized why: They were from my Lost Decade.

It wasn’t that I fell into a coma in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It was just that, for about ten years, I didn’t listen to FM radio or watch TV. My media blackout was partly intentional, and partly by accident. I had just moved into a tiny cottage after parting ways with a roommate who'd watched TV every waking moment. She’d been a good roommate, but I was tired of the constant barrage of laugh tracks and ads. So I decided to not bring a TV into my new house. And after my beloved ’67 Cougar caught on fire one too many times, my dad persuaded me to trade it in for a (safer) Pontiac that had only an AM radio—no FM and no cassette player. At the time, I had no idea that I was about to miss out on an entire decade of pop culture. And if I’d known, I wouldn’t have minded, and not just because I’d be spared having to listen to Guns N’ Roses. No, it wouldn’t have bothered me because I was about to discover two things that filled the cultural void: radio shows and big-band music. Unknowingly, I’d transported myself back to the 1940s.

Not having a television turned out to be a rocky adjustment. I spent the first few weeks of my TV-free life in a restless, disoriented funk, constantly glancing at the clock—I hadn’t realized how much my evenings had been tethered to the TV schedule. Eventually I decided it was okay to have some noise in the house a couple of evenings a week, so I turned on the radio. At first, I couldn’t fathom A Prairie Home Companion—why in the world was this corny, catatonic show so popular? But I warmed up to it eventually—maybe my brain cells just had to tune themselves to its quiet humor—and PHC became a Saturday-night staple in my little house. Then one night I found a station that played radio shows from the 1940s, like Jack Benny and The Life of Riley and Lights Out (“It…is…later…than…you…think”). Before long, I was hooked, and Mortimer Snerd from Charlie McCarthy was my hero (“When they was handin’ out ignorance, I musta got two scoops!”). Radio shows were enjoying a little renaissance right then, and even NPR got in the act with reruns of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a refurbished Doc Savage (“with Johnny Littlejohn, the fighting archaeologist, and Renny Renwick, the two-fisted engineer!”).

Meanwhile, without much to listen to in the car, I kept running across a local blue-hair station called Magic 61 that played music from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—basically, anything pre-rock, from Benny Goodman to Brenda Lee. At first, this seemed corny, too—I laughed at Perry Como gliding his way through “Papa Loves Mambo” and “Round and Round.” But there was a lot that I admired, like Hoagy Carmichael doing “Ole Buttermilk Sky” and anything by Glenn Miller, Dinah Washington, or the Mills Brothers. Magic 61 kept drawing me back, like a strange food that left a good aftertaste. And before long, I was addicted to that too, and found I was learning a storehouse of great songs like “Stardust” and “Mountain Greenery” and “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” full of more poetry and puns than any of the rock music I grew up with. I was even starting to like Perry Como**.

I loved all the old radio stuff so much that I wasn’t even aware of what songs were popular at the time—I completely missed grunge, and George Michael, and Janet Jackson. So if I had to make a playlist of songs from the ’90s now, I’d be up a creek. But if you need to know the lyrics to “Up a Lazy River,” I’m your gal. I can even put a little Mills Brothers swing on it. So far, it’s been a pretty good trade.

* The song she sang to in the car: “The Concept,” by Teenage Fanclub. Never heard of it, or the band. I had to look it up.

** “Round and Round” is now one of my favorite hiking songs: “Find a ring…and put it round, round, round / and with ties…so…strong that two hearts are bound...”

Personal Belongings That I Brought Home from Work After I Quit My Job Two Weeks Ago

2011-11-23T21:05:00.000-08:00

Sis-Q Rollerz roller derby button

Oakland A’s button

Ugly avocado-green tape dispenser that I bought in 1981 so people would stop stealing tape dispensers off my desk

Nolan Ryan action figure

Page-Up paper holder with fake goldfish inside

8-ball keychain

Vegemite coffee mug

My grandmother’s brass letter opener with Pisces fishes on the handle

2 houseplants

6 notebooks detailing everything that happened in my last two jobs since May 2005

Post-It with the phone number of a man I like

Rusty railroad spike

Voodoo doll

Mechanical pencil

Glass jar for mixing protein shakes, with Italian sticker on it so people wouldn’t throw it in the recycling bin

Jar of Zinke Orchards almond butter

Jar of almonds

Button that says “Screw the e-book”

Button that says “Pet a Yorkipoo”

Bag of Stress Less herbs

Can of WD-40

Wonder Woman stamp

Take This Job and Gently Put It Somewhere

2011-11-19T22:41:00.000-08:00

Oh, how I wanted to be Jerry Maguire. How I wanted to put a goldfish in a bag, tell the boss to shove it, right in front of the whole staff, and spirit myself and that innocent fish out of there into the open air. But of course Jerry Maguire didn’t quit; he was fired. And of course I wouldn’t put a goldfish in a bag unless it was in imminent danger.

But still, there were so many times, on so many jobs, when I wanted to make a scene and storm out the door. I wanted to shout “I quit!” and throw a sheaf of papers on the floor. Or buzz into the intercom system and sing, We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when… and walk away, all hips and swagger, giving the finger to the building on the way out.

Oh, how it has not gone like that.

I’ve quit a lot of jobs in my life, and not once have I made a scene. It’s not that I wasn’t tempted: The boss who patted my butt and tried to French-kiss me in the mailroom certainly deserved it. And the über-Christian co-workers who grumbled when I dared not to read the Bible in the lunchroom were good candidates. And as for the crazy-making, exasperating managers—I’ve worked for more than my share of those. But in spite of all that, when it came time to quit, I just couldn’t make the big exit. Instead, my quitting usually amounted to a short meeting with some paperwork exchanged, or a strained phone call with me telling my nit-picky, overbearing boss that it had been a pleasure working for her, and I’d send her a Christmas card. (I did.) In my dreams, I’m a bad-ass. But face to face—well, my mother would be proud. Good manners trump drama every time.

Except for once…almost. It was my dream job—I’d landed a gig as the manager of a riding stable, handling a small fleet of horses, teaching lessons, and greeting customers from a window cut into a very rustic tack room. There was no electricity, no running water…and, most of the time, nobody working there but me. This last bit turned out to be a problem. The owners were a young couple who fought a lot, and when they were mad at each other, they went their separate ways—often for days at a time. So, again and again, I found myself having to run the stable alone, with customers streaming in all day, and horses to be watered and rested and re-tacked, and the phone ringing, and the cash box never coming out right. It was a gigantic juggling act, way too much work for one person. And the pay was terrible.

So I started rehearsing a little talk I was going to have with the owners about this. And one day, it was the right time to do it: I won’t go into the story now—suffice it to say that my day featured a rampaging pit bull, an injured child, and a hungry chicken, and it still ranks as my Worst Day Ever, on Any Job. And when the wife-owner returned late that afternoon, mellow and dreamy after a day of hiking or shopping or whatever the hell she’d been doing all day, I was ready to shoot off like a Roman candle, and that entire speech that I’d been rehearsing flew out of my mouth at about 200 miles an hour, right in her face. I think I may have actually spat on her a little. I ended my tirade by saying that the job was not what I’d signed up for, and I didn’t even like it anymore. That last part came as a surprise even to me.

The effect wasn’t what I expected. In my rage-addled brain, I thought she’d be chagrined, that she’d admit she’d been a bad boss and had made a terrible mistake. Maybe she’d give me flowers or something; certainly a raise. But, to my surprise, her face darkened and she hissed, “If that’s the way you feel, how about if we make today your last day?” Bewildered, I said, “Fine.” She peeled a few bills out of the cashbox and handed them to me as my last day’s pay. Then we busied ourselves with putting away the tack and letting the horses out to their pasture, all in silence. Eventually, her husband arrived, and he was solicitous and kind, as he often was. Then the wife explained to him, with a fake cheery smile, that I’d decided to move on. “Gosh,” he said, “that’s too bad. Well, let’s have a drink.” Then, to my amazement, he whipped up a batch of margaritas in the RV that sat next to the tack room, and the three of us sat down in patio chairs in the dusty canyon and drank to each other’s health. We had a long, slow talk about nothing in particular. It was nice. I was reminded that I liked these people. And I felt bad about the yelling. But the die was cast, and it would have been awkward to change my mind just then. And I got the sneaking feeling that it wasn’t the first time they’d done this—that people had quit suddenly on them before, and they knew the drill.

So that was my sort-of big scene. The music didn’t swell; the crowd didn’t cheer. I drove home and tugged off my boots and took a long, hot bath. I didn’t regret quitting—I knew they’d taken advantage of me, and I was proud that I’d spoken my mind. It just wasn’t a Hollywood ending; it was…complicated. Later, I found another job that, like that one, was not simple and was not perfect. And since then, I’ve found that they’re all like that, to one degree or another—even the best ones, the ones I kept for a long time. And even in the worst ones, I still remember the look on my boss’ face when I reamed her out. And more than anything, I remember those margaritas, that quiet talk with two other human beings while the sun set over the canyon.

The Book Fair: Still a Good Day

2011-11-06T14:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I spent the day exhibiting my wares at the Oregon Book and Author Fair at the Jackson County Expo Fairgrounds in Central Point. This was my fifth year at the Book Fair, and 62 of us authors drove in from all over the state to do it. The day wasn’t without its challenges—the heating system in Padgham Pavilion was on the fritz, plunging the indoor temperature into the meat-locker range. And the County Expo—well, it’s a bit far off the beaten path for most book shoppers, so let’s just say the attendance was not robust. (Extra thanks to you visitors who did come.) The fair’s human-dynamo organizer, Trisha Barnes, managed to keep her composure even when her duties must have felt like herding cats, particularly when we writers all got together and set a Guinness World Record for “number of authors signing their books simultaneously.” (We pulled it off, even though we looked like a team of people assembling a 50-foot-long sandwich.)

I sold a few books, enough to pay for the table rental and the gas to get there. But, in my philosophy, book fairs aren’t about making money. They’re about getting your book in front of people, whether they buy it or not. And secondly, they’re about spending time with other authors, most of whom are in the same boat you’re in—trying to catch the wave of e-book technology without getting the wind knocked out of them, submitting their books to prize-selection committees, and learning the publishing business by the seat of their pants.

So, with a lot of time on our hands, we authors spent much of the day talking amongst ourselves. With Ken Lewis of Krill Press, I talked about Kindle vs. Nook formatting and his decision to turn away from the traditional author-agent-publisher triangle and start his own publishing house. I had a short chat with nonfiction writer Sue Lick, who posted a funny and candid recap of the fair on her blog today. I was happy to run into my tablemate from last year’s Douglas County Book Fair, novelist Bob Mayo, who wasn’t exhibiting but had made the drive down from Roseburg to see the fair. My favorite book of the day: To the Woods, horticulturalist Evelyn Hess’ award-winning memoir about her years living on 20 acres of wild land southwest of Eugene. And, with 14 of us poets exhibiting, there was plenty of time to trade poetry books, swap news, gossip, and debate the relative merits of New York Times vs. Oregonian crossword puzzles.

I also got to spend some quality time with Oregon’s Poet Laureate, Paulann Petersen, whose table was next to mine. From Paulann I got a glimpse into the life of a state poet laureate—she tours like a rock star pretty much year-round, and, in spite of being a long way from home, she never lost her good cheer all through the chilly day. It made me wonder whether they stress-test candidates for Poet Laureate, much as they do with astronauts—whether they subject them to the literary equivalent of the G-force chair and the underwater space-walk simulation. I guess in a poet’s case, they’d have to coop them up with their spouse in a hotel for weeks on end, or strand them at the side of the road in a September blizzard.

After all that, while I was driving home and thawing out, I felt remarkably good. Despite having spent the day shivering and not selling as many books as I might have liked, this not-great day at the book fair was still a great day.

Walking Around Talented

2011-11-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

My friend Amie Tyler has a new blog. She e-mailed me yesterday, sweetly asking if I would mind if she put a link to my blog on hers. Being new to this blogging thing, she wasn’t sure if it was OK to do that without asking. I took the high road and did not grovel with gratitude. (“Oh, God, yes—please, please, please link to my site and I will get on a plane to wherever you are and paint your house.”)

So I toodled over to Amie’s blog, and…holy smokes, what a good blog. So far, she has just a few posts and two videos of her singing and playing guitar. (Actually she’s too shy to film herself singing, so for now it’s just audio.) Now, I’ve known Amie for 8 years or so, and I’m astonished that I didn’t know she did any of these three things: write, sing, or play guitar. And, even more astonishing, she’s excellent at all three—like bestseller good, like Shawn Colvin good. So now I’m bombarding her with embarrassing e-mails about how great she is. I already knew she was wonderful—you can’t spend two years in a book group with somebody, eating Chinese food and drinking martinis, unless you think they’re pretty wonderful. But I had no idea she had so much talent. I mean, she was sitting right there in front of me the whole time!

This makes me think about people in general, about how each of us is a walking encyclopedia of cool stuff, each a very different and very interesting universe. I’m reminded of it every time I go to an open mike where singer/songwriters are up there, strumming their guitars and doing their thing. Like poetry open mikes, those shows suffer their fair share of scratchy, tone-deaf exhibitionists. But every once in a while, somebody gets up there—usually the least likely person, the beanpole high-school girl or the smoke-smelly guy with the sailor hat—and the next thing I know, my jaw has dropped open and I’m sitting there with tears in my eyes because this person is just so damned good. This person, like my friend Amie, is just walking around every day with all that talent inside them? How is that possible? Shouldn’t it register, like some color on the spectrum? Shouldn’t they trail a stream of it as they go by?

I used to get a similar feeling when I was spending a lot of time at the assisted-living place where my dad used to live. To overcome my sick-old-folks phobia, I’d go with him down to the dining room at lunch and talk with his tablemates. I did this dozens of times, and I’m telling you, it was never, ever dull—those people were so freakin’ interesting. Once I said hello, smiled, asked where they were from, and managed to tune in to what they were saying over whatever impairment they had—a stroke, or Parkinson’s, or a tracheotomy—I was astounded to learn that these people, every one of them, had led fascinating lives. At the time, I also ran a reading group at a senior center, and it was the same way there—these people had lived all over the world, ranched inhospitable land, danced with stars, and worked in the White House. And to top it off, almost all of them had a wicked sense of humor.

It’s so easy to walk through my days, elbowing past people on the street, interacting with them at work just enough to answer a question or say hello. It’s easy to think of people as being the sum of what they say, or what I see. But sometimes something comes along, like Amie’s blog, that reminds me that each of us is a practically infinite soup of possibilities. While not every one may be to our taste, it’s pretty miraculous anyway. Bon appétit.

Poem: When I See the Heart

2011-10-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

for Danny

Mine swallowed the dark.
Tonight it’s a blood-red velvet moon,
forgetful of the hour.

Yours is a many-limbed
med-school toy: yellow for valve,
blue aorta, rusty blood
on a wild water ride.

The surgeon is young.
The surgeon is old.
There are so many surgeons,
so much metal,
the shot clock sending its stick
around and around. Shoot,
it says. Air it out.
It says, Nothing ventured.

The heart is every little engine: the cat’s
sure flutter; the great horse
with the hammer inside;
your delicate, rushed, bone-bound
flywheel fresh from the book
of miracles. All

stop in time, watch
unwound, somber moon set
over a quiet field,
bright just hours ago.

Posted for OpenLinkNight #12, dVerse Poets Pub

Comfort Video: Epidemic-Style

2011-09-11T21:53:00.000-07:00

Epidemic movies, how do I love thee? For some reason, when the going gets tough, I like to curl up with a disease movie—even a bad one—where some poor schlub brings a virus back from overseas. Before long, a lot of people are red-eyed and sweaty, and a character we care about dies in a plastic tent, and some clumsy pathologist infects himself by breaking a beaker or ripping a hole in his hazmat suit. Why, oh why, is this all so entertaining? I mean, if anything like that really happened to me, I’d hate it. The insurance paperwork alone would ruin my week.

Today I saw Contagion, the latest epidemic movie, and an all-star one to boot. I fully expected to love it—I mean, it’s got Steven Soderbergh with his signature glowy lighting, and Matt Damon in his everyman mode, and scary-smart Jennifer Ehle. But I can’t decide whether I love this movie or merely like it—because it’s too good. Specifically, it’s too real, and it lacks the all-important cheese factor: There’s no villain who gets fired by the indignant president; nobody has to rappel out of a helicopter onto a heaving cargo ship. No, this one unfolds slowly, letting us get attached to the characters and creeping us out with the garbage piling up in the streets and looters overrunning a small Minnesota town. And the mysterious virus doesn’t look like some preposterous bug we’ll never get, but in fact it looks a lot like the Spanish Flu (see below), which was very real, and very, very bad. Contagion hits too close to home, which, for me, takes all the zip out of a disaster movie. This could actually happen? Not fun at all!

Here, then, are some of my favorite fun disease movies—scary-fun in some cases, and campy-fun in others.

Outbreak (1995). No disease-movie list would be complete without this cheesefest starring Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr., both of whom chew the scenery like bulimics at a buffet. It’s got everything: an infected monkey roaming the countryside, a helicopter chase, a young and wry Kevin Spacey, and a nuclear detonation. And, as a big added bonus, it’s got my former 4-H friend from Westfield, Mass., Michelle Joyner*, playing a housewife who gets infected and is then hustled off to quarantine, which, in this movie, means certain death. And we get Hoffman and Gooding trading dialog that they seem to have made up during the walk over from the makeup trailer. Not that it matters.

Quiet Killer, a.k.a. Black Death (1992). Never heard of this one? You’re not alone—it was a TV movie starring Kate Jackson at her sensible best, and it disappeared so quickly and completely that you can’t even get it on Netflix. (A “collectible” copy lists on Amazon for almost $200.) It involves a young woman who comes back sick from a trip (stop me if you’ve heard this before) and infects most of New York City with pneumonic plague, a deadly sister disease of bubonic plague. The highlight, aside from the usual pleasures of people coughing up blood and packed like sardines into hospital hallways, is epidemiologist Jackson peering into the corners tenement buildings with a flashlight and declaring in her flat Alabama accent, “This is the same disease that infected half of Europe during the Middle Ages. Haaaff.”

Children of Men (2006). Sci-fi and a disease movie? Shoot me now, ’cause I’m in heaven already. But this is a disease movie of a different stripe, with the mysterious illness long past. The story is about the disease’s aftereffect: No one on Earth can conceive children anymore. That wonderfully simple premise drives this scary plot, and no one is more scared than our reluctant hero, Clive Owen, who gets dragged through terrorist bomb-blasts, riots, and anarchy that’s hammering away at the foundations of civilization, looking all the while like he just wants to go home. This movie is right up there with Minority Report and 12 Monkeys in its depiction of an unhinged, dystopian near-future.

American Experience: Influenza 1918 (2006). Okay, this one isn’t comforting at all. It’s a genuinely frightening documentary about one of history’s worst pandemics—one so recent that my late Aunt Helen remembered it. (She was fond of saying that she didn’t know if she lost her sense of smell during the Spanish flu pandemic, or when she poured a bottle of perfume up her nose.) This flu, of course, was the mother of them all, and the prototype for many a disease-disaster movie. This was the flu that infected a third of the world’s population, killed more than 50 million people, and caused such high fevers that it turned Katherine Anne Porter’s hair white for the rest of her life. Influenza 1918 scared the socks off me, mostly because of the punchline: No one ever figured out how to cure the Spanish Flu, and then it just went away. Meaning that it could just come back.

*Double bonus: Michelle Joyner was also in Cliffhanger, where she got killed off in the first reel. She’s a rock climber who gets stuck, and Sylvester Stallone tries to rescue her on some sort of improbable zip wire, and then he drops her. The accident then haunts him through the rest of the movie. (I think that’s “haunted” he’s playing; it’s hard to tell.)

Poem: Boy with a Lost Shoe

2011-09-06T20:33:00.000-07:00

for Mason

Already she mourns the summer,
the creek riding past, waving,
looking back over its shoulder,

her son with a tentative stick
in sand, uncertain of what to draw,
his pants a bunched elastic.

Already the swings have emptied
of the pushy girls. The dogs drag
their late-day leashes home.

She brought so few raisins,
impractical apples he dropped,
bothered by bees.

Madrones gripping their leaves,
the light on its August slant—
when did the trunks go red?—

and her son has lost a shoe
somewhere in the long afternoon
and he peers for it deep

in the cold-breath blackberries
lining the path he walks
so carefully, looking back
to see if she is watching.

Posted for OpenLinkNight #8, dVerse Poets Pub http://dversepoets.com/

(appeared in Alehouse)

The Books and the Boots

2011-08-23T22:08:00.000-07:00

I just sized down to a smaller house. It’s a good thing—a decision, a life plan. The house I was in was too large and too expensive, and I found a smaller one that I could actually own and not rent. All good.

But along with the excitement of a new place came the thing that I’ve done a jillion times but have never mastered: moving. I always think I travel light; I don’t have that much stuff. And then I spend a couple of weeks touching every single thing I own. By about day 2, I can’t believe how much crap I’ve accumulated. If I have to look through another box of mason jars or user’s manuals or letters from the 1980s, I might actually puke.

This time, the move was largely about books—namely, getting rid of them. Unlike the poet Thomas Lux, who once said that his ambition is to have 10,000 books by the time he dies, I think it’s possible to own too many books. These days, I’m embarrassed to say, I don’t actually read much. Since I’ve become an editor and have to read all day, I can’t muster much enthusiasm for reading when I get home. My shelves are filled with books that I haven’t read or didn’t finish. I also have a lot of reference books, but that’s a habit that I’m glad to have. I think it’s good for a writer to have a copy of Royce’s Sailing Illustrated and The Atlas of American History close at hand.

So there I was a few weeks ago, going through my bookshelves and closets, packing the “keeper” stuff in banker’s boxes and tossing the “get rid of” items in big, unwieldy boxes destined for Goodwill. I loaded up one Goodwill box with about 15 horse books, along with an old velvet hard hat and three pairs of riding boots. Now I was really making progress—vestiges of my childhood were sloughing away like unwanted pounds. I’d been carrying those horse books around since the 1970s—picture books like Horse Fever and Clear Round! and Steeplechasing. I’d finally started to realize that I owned these books, but I didn’t use them, and that wasn’t right. Their intended purpose—to be read and looked at by 12-year-olds—wasn’t being fulfilled. I pictured some little girl finding them at Goodwill and going gaga over them. Or maybe her mother or grandmother would buy them for her, as my mother and grandmother did for me. They’d make some kid happy. So it was easy—into the Goodwill box they went.

But the riding boots didn’t go quite so easily. One pair was only about 10 years old, and I’d spent more than $100 on them—beautiful black knee-high field books with lace-up ankles—but they didn’t fit over my calves anymore. (I kept thinking, what fat person gave me these calves?) Another pair were my “good” cowboy boots, ornately carved in beautiful chestnut leather, that I’d nearly worn holes in when I worked at a riding stable years ago. I couldn’t even get my feet in them, they were so small. And then there were the hardest of all to part with: my beautiful brown, calf-high English jumping boots that I bought about 25 years ago, that also didn’t fit anymore. I’d bought them when I took up riding again—jumping, in particular—with a vengeance in my 20s. So many of my dreams and ambitions were embodied in those satin-smooth boots—the Olympics and the U.S. Equestrian Team; of training show jumpers and owning a ranch. I’d wanted so badly to be worthy of those boots.

I sat and looked at them for a long time, at the worn spots where the stirrups had rubbed the finish thin, and the faint bubbles of horse sweat from years past. The thing that really stung was that those dreams all went unrealized. I could never quite figure out how to make a life with horses. One thing I did figure out was that it took a lot of money. Having even one horse takes a lot of dough; having a sick one, as I did when I was a teenager, can be life-changingly expensive. My family wasn’t rich, and I found out that a catastrophic horse injury or illness can pretty much bankrupt you and force you to sell your horse. I don’t know if I could go through that heartbreak again, that guilt. I have never really come to terms with it. And that hard lesson was all wrapped up in those boots.

But I kept coming back to the fact that those beautiful jumping boots didn’t fit anymore. I knew I should pass them along to someone who would take good care of them, make good use of them. But that’s a bloody uncertain thing, sending your ambitions and visions along to another person. I steeled myself and lifted the box of boots and horse books, getting ready to take it out to the car—and I just couldn’t do it. I put it back down. Physically, it weighed maybe 10 pounds. Emotionally, it might as well have been an aircraft carrier. I had to just leave it there. I busied myself with other rooms, other closets and bookshelves. A few hours later, I went back and looked through that box—and it was transformed back into just books and a hard hat and some riding boots that some kid would be thrilled to have. Then it was easier—out to the car with it, a short drive to Goodwill, a quick handover to the nice guy at the loading dock. It was just a box with beautiful brown boots lying there, dreaming and remembering.

Poem: Crocheting in Four Steps

2011-08-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

1. The Color

Know this: You
will end up hating it. Half-
done, the blanket will wind
through your sleep
in marled blue, horse-blanket
blue, a shower of chaff
in the barnlight,
red-flecked like the roan
you dreamed of riding. You wake
to solid white.

2. The Hook

An oar pulling the water. Pull
the face of it through, pull
the night behind you. Set
the face of it down. Rest.
Your hands must learn
the language of water, where
it ends, where the air begins,
where the dock is waiting,
stoic, hushed, a placid pole
that wants the rope.

3. The Knot

Build them alike, and they’re
an auspicious chain, as if
you never planned to pull them apart, as if
the knot were the aim and not
a mistake made over.

4. The Wool

Try not to think. The world is full
of things like this. In the morning,
you know the sheep are rising
like everyone else, and that
is living enough. At night, try not
to think of shears, or pens,
or moonlight speckled
through a ruined roof. Say
if they lived with you, you’d
take only what they brushed off
on a bush. You’d watch them
from the house,
clipping the hills like razors.
You’d never presume
to call them yours.

Posted for OpenLinkNight #5, dVerse Poets Pub http://dversepoets.com/

(appeared in Rattapallax)

Comfort Video, Disaster-Style

2011-07-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

The other night I got home from work, exhausted and out of sorts. I was debating what to do with my tired-ass evening when I saw just the ticket—some cable station was showing Deep Impact at 7:00. Perfect! It’s my favorite kind of comfort video—a disaster movie. There’s something wonderfully escapist about doomsday flicks; my own troubles always seem smaller when I consider the fact that I don't have to pack my car and head for the Southern Hemisphere like those poor schlumps on the screen. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Deep Impact, or chunks of it, and that got me to thinking about other movies that I watch over and over and never get tired of. They aren’t by any means my favorite movies; strangely, most of my favorite ones (The New World, Minority Report, L.A. Confidential) are so stressful that I can’t watch them very often. No, these comfort movies are different—they may not be great cinema, but I love them and I end up putting them on again and again like a pair of warm flannel pajamas. So here are the first three comfortfests that spring to mind, starting with the aforementioned Téa Leoni classic. Now that I see these in a list, I notice that they all have very strong female leads. Apparently when I want comfort video, I also want feminism.

Deep Impact. This is the one about the comet that’s on a collision course with the Earth (not to be confused with Bruce Willis’s hamfisted Armageddon, released the same year, which starred an asteroid and Ben Affleck’s fake teeth). What I love most about Deep Impact is how we see the disaster unfolding from the viewpoint of Téa Leoni’s greenhorn TV reporter—she’s the one who shows us what’s at stake, all in the way her hands shake as she clips a microphone to her lapel, or how she chugs a martini during an awkward get-together with her father and his new wife, who are oblivious to the looming disaster. The movie also got stellar performers for the smaller parts—Maximillian Schell, Vanessa Redgrave, James Cromwell, Robert Duvall. This movie’s full of good scenes, so I can tune in at any point and watch a half hour and enjoy it. But seen in its entirety (2-1/2 hours), it’s surprisingly touching—it makes me cry in all the sucker spots. The Duvall subplot is the only thing that holds on too long, and there’s a car accident in the first reel that feels completely gratuitous (you can practically hear somewhere at the script meeting saying, “If only it had a fiery crash in the first five minutes.”) And by the end, I’m always playing a game with myself—name any other good movie that Téa Leoni made. (I looked up her filmography just now. Thank goodness for Ricky Gervais’s Ghost Town.)

Contact. Confession time: I usually can’t make it past the part where they figure out the alien Rosetta Stone. And though it's not technically a disaster film, up to that point, Contact is everything I love in a movie—an ambitious sci-fi plot; the biggest discovery in the history of humans; an obsessed, socially challenged female scientist (Jodie Foster); and even Matthew McConaughey, before he got ground down to a soft powder by all those romantic comedies. Again, the best part is seeing the thrill of the story—somebody out there is trying to talk to us—through the eyes of Jodie Foster’s character. In fact, the first, crucial moment of discovery—when Foster hears that pulsing screech in her headphones—is played out in an extreme close-up of her eyes, which suddenly fly open. And then it’s all headlong, techie bliss as she throws her laptop in her old convertible and fishtails across the desert, yelling right ascension and declination numbers into her walkie-talkie to her napping crew back at the SETI lab. Later, after they crack the code on the alien transmission and figure out what the message says, they lose me with the fanatic preacher guy, and the weirdly gratifying death of Tom Skerritt, and a few clumsy forays into religion vs. science. But the charm of the movie is that it’s a love letter to the universe penned by the always upbeat Carl Sagan, who was a treasure—sort of a Gene Roddenberry for the real world.

Twister. This one is pure guilty pleasure. I know the special effects are cheesy, and houses don’t actually roll like tumbleweeds. And the way they call the benign, doughy Bill Paxton “The Extreme” makes me wonder what actor that line was originally written for. But I love the way the two women play off each other. There’s Jami Gertz, with her pretty teeth and terrified-deer eyes, playing—let’s face it—the sane one. And then there’s Helen Hunt in her wifebeater tank-top, basically playing a hyperactive ten-year old, with just a touch of oil-rig worker. And there’s poor Bill Paxton in the middle, getting smacked by both of them, and then by Mother Nature as well. He sort of saves the day, but Helen Hunt saves it too. And handsome-but-evil Cary Elwes gets his comeuppance (I like to imagine him yelling “By…your…leave!” as he’s sucked into the tornado). But of course the actual twisters are what move the movie along—pretty much one for every scene, more of them than most storm-watchers get near in a lifetime. And a special shout-out to Alan Ruck, who is sweetly memorable in everything he does, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to Eureka to—again—Ghost Town.

More later.

New Things in the New Neighborhood

2011-07-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

Jumping spiders

Very big ants

A brown grasshopper on the freshly painted front door

The whispery poplar tree in the back yard

Canada geese honking overhead

Quails running into the blackberries at the end of the dead-end street

The wuhf of the neighbor’s Basset Hound

The big, empty softball field behind the Mormon church

Box elder beetles walking across the driveway

Skylights

Air conditioning

The Swiffer

The oven, which beeps annoyingly whenever it’s done something that other ovens take no pride in, like reaching the temperature I set it for

The sliding screen door that doesn’t latch

My neighbor, whom I can barely see over the back fence, a man who never seems to wear a shirt and may be naked entirely

Middle-aged women talking to themselves in the aisles of the Shop-N-Kart

The gun aisle at Bi-Mart

The two horses grazing across the street, their long tails sweeping across their hocks

My neighbor Alissa, who goes for walks in the middle of the day

My neighbors, two young men who open their garage door on hot days and play ping-pong

My garage, which smells like my father’s work clothes

Top 5 Scariest Things in Houses for Sale

2011-07-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

I recently bought a house. This didn’t happen overnight—it was the culmination of a 15-month search during which I toured 42 houses and drove by about 100 more. With the help of my saintly real estate agent, I feel like I just finished a college course (ask me anything—flag lots, tankless water heaters, asbestos siding). And during the journey, I saw some scary stuff. Sure, there were the usual horrors—water damage and crumbly carpets and retaining walls that were about to fall and kill somebody. But it was often the small things that soured me on a house, the little stuff that made me scratch my head and say, “Who thought this was a good idea?” These, then, are my top 5 house turn-offs.

Cutesy wallpaper. During the Victorian era, wallpaper served a purpose—covering up old horsehair insulation or something. But the 1960s had no such excuse, unless people thought there was a shortage of ducks and flower baskets, judging by how many families glued nostalgic patterns of them to their walls. My favorite is the wallpaper that runs in a strip around the top of the room, a busy motorway of violets or frolicking children that pulses at the top of your view no matter where you look, making even an empty room look messy. It’s basically two-dimensional clutter.

Blue countertops. What was it with blue kitchens in the 1980s? Did interior decorators make a deal with psychotherapists and try to give us all clinical depression? Some of these gloomy countertops still linger, bathing whole kitchens in their sickly glow—dingy yellowish blue, leisure-suit powder blue, plastic-turquoise blue. Just try to find potholders that go with those.

Religious icons and new-age kitsch. I’ve got nothing against crosses, crystals, or Buddhas, but even for a skeptic like me, those objects leave a kind of spiritual wake behind them. I can’t help thinking, are the old owners taking God with them when they move? How will the spirits of fortune find me when all those prayer flags and guru pictures go somewhere else? In one house, the owners had taped “affirmations” to every wall—little strips of paper with empowering messages typed on them, like “I am wealthy in every way” and “I will always have more than enough money.” Ironically, it was a short sale. This made me think way too much—about how these people so obviously failed; about how religions prey on people who are down on their luck; about how some people soldier on with only their paper-thin faith. It sort of got in the way of “my couch would look good in here.”

Strange smells. This was a tough one—I’m sure that most owners cleaned the house before they showed it. But I still picked up on odd smells all the time. Over and over, as I walked into houses that smelled vaguely of dogs, or farts, or old people imprisoned in the attic, I thought of that cliché about how you should bake cookies just before you show your house. It’s good advice, and not just because it masks bad odors. Sometimes the “clean” odors are the worst of all—one person’s “fresh” is another person’s “motel smell.”

Slipcovers. I know you’re not buying the furniture when you’re looking at a house, but I was surprised at how much slipcovers put me off. I don’t care if you dress them up with piping or velveteen ropes—those ill-fitting muslin sacks are the decorating equivalent of the scariest type of horror movie, the kind where all the gore takes place off-screen. That couch can’t possibly have as many cigarette burns and cat stains as I’m imagining. Or can it?

OK—your turn. In the comments section, what are your top house-for-sale turn-offs?

Things I'll Miss About This House

2011-06-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

Deer sleeping in the yard

The Cecile Brünner climbing rose

The muddy spot, a.k.a. “the spring”

The sound of the wind in the pines

Woodpeckers climbing the telephone pole

Foxes

The way it always snows more here than downtown

Watching the mail truck try to get up the icy hill

The way the neighbors' terrier looks out their front window, perched on the back of the couch

My other neighbors' three Labs, who bark only when it's important

The pin-drop quiet in the middle of the night

The bright, warm living room

The way the back yard always smells like the woods

The big, deep linen closet

List: Nicknames for Vomit-Prone Cats

2011-06-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

Next week, I'm getting a bamboo floor installed in my new house. So I thought I'd better study up on how to clean puke off it, because even my digestively angelic cats have been known to spew a load of stomach acid now and then. In my search, I ran across this wonderful site—an Ask MetaFilter forum where people write in with their cat-vomit anecdotes. The best part, aside from their idioms for barf ("gack," "petrified sickup"), was their nicknames for their own puke-prone cats. Here are my faves:

Madame Barfary

Miss Yaksalot

Ralph

Blargh

Lady Spewtastic

Hurkenstein

Yacky the Wondercat

Van Upchuck

So Long, and Thanks for All the Barf

Ms. Scatterbits

Baron von Barfsalot

Lord Launch Lunch

The Duke of Hurl

RIP, AMC (& OLTL)

2011-06-08T17:24:00.000-07:00

Recently, over a round of beers at the local pub, I found out that three of my closest friends and I all shared a dirty little secret: At one time or another, all of us had been addicted to soap operas.

I wasn’t really surprised that we’d all watched soaps in our youth. After all, countless American women—and a fair number of men—have been hooked on them for decades. All those paper-towel and ant-spray advertisers rely on it.

But what did surprise me was that in the 15 years that I’d known my friends, we had never, ever talked about soap operas before. And it turned out that all four of us had been hooked on the same ones—the ABC lineup of All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital. Those shows had been part of our lives—the afternoons after school, the fleeting lunch hours home from work, the so-called sick days, the hushed conversations with co-workers over the salacious lives of people who didn’t exist. For all those years, my friends and I had been sitting in our separate homes, glued to the TV, pondering what the hell Laura ever saw in Luke, and laughing when Phoebe Tyler married that chubby con man. Before we knew each other, we all knew Dorian Lord and her sleazy husband Herb* (who turned out to be a good guy). Without knowing it, we’d had this connection all along, this deep love of camp and melodrama.

And then, a few days after my friends and I discovered this strange connection, I heard the shocking news: ABC was canceling All My Children and One Life to Live. I hadn’t watched either one in 20 years, but still, I felt like a piece of bedrock had crumbled from under my feet. Where would I go for the switched-at-birth stories? The evil twins? Where would I go to root against mean, manipulative women?

But the answer to all of those questions is, of course, the reason why so many soaps have been canceled lately: I can now get my fix of meanness, absurdity, and big hair by watching “reality” shows. And a truckload of nighttime dramas, from Grey’s Anatomy to Desperate Housewives, and even genre-benders like Glee and True Blood, are essentially serial-plotted soap operas. That’s not the only reason why soaps have gone belly-up; there’s also cable TV and the internet and women’s changing roles in our culture. But the bottom line is that soaps aren’t dead; they’re just freakin’ everywhere.

Even after all these years, my soap-love is still there: I get hooked on serial shows—from The Tudors to Battlestar Galactica—at the drop of a hat. I could get all literary here and talk about we’re drawn to the same archetypal stories again and again, but the truth is that I like to see good-looking people get in trouble. And I like to see pretty people kick ass. Now all the old warriors—Erica, Viki, et al.—are kicking ass in soap-opera heaven. They’re in some kind of Valhalla, stealing each other’s husbands and discovering that they gave birth to babies they don’t remember.

Meanwhile, down here in our own little Pine Valleys and Llanviews, amid our own tangled families and misdirected loves, we are muddling through. It just won’t be the same without them.

*My favorite Herb moment: In one scene, Herb was at home, talking with somebody while he held a cat in his arms. The actor who played Herb, Anthony Call**, was standing there cradling this cat, and while the other person was talking, he quietly kissed the cat on the top of its head. There’s no faking that; he was definitely a cat person.

**Bonus: Anthony Call also played Lieutenant Bailey on the Star Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver.” (“You represent Earth's best, then?” “No, sir, I’m not. I’ll make plenty of mistakes.”)

Things I Couldn't Eat on the Three-Week Hidden Springs Detox/Cleanse Diet

2011-06-01T17:24:00.000-07:00

Beer

Tomatoes

Peanuts

Chicken

Cheese

Little Debbie Boston Creme Rolls

Lard

Tootsie Rolls

Bombay Sapphire gin

Birthday cake

Mayonnaise

Coffeemate

Coffee

Potato Flakes

Oatmeal

Milk

Eggs

Hash browns

Bacon

Toast

Bagels

Grits

Orange juice

Gorton’s Beer Batter Fish Filets

Wheat tortillas

Whiskas

Soymilk

Eggplant

Count Chocula cereal

Black tea

Cadbury Hot Choc Chunks

Papa John’s Six Cheese Pizza

Pop-Tarts

Tuna

Tater Tots

Stagg’s Chunkéro Chili

Wendy’s Frosty

Indian food

Corn

The Requisite Royal Wedding Post

2011-04-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

First of all, I didn’t even know that the wedding was going to be last night. That is how much of a royal ignoramus I am. But there I was, up at 2:00 a.m. to hunt down a little snack. On a whim, I turned on the TV—something I rarely do on weekdays (I save the bad disaster movies for the weekends, when they always cheer me up). So I turned on BBC America, and damned if there weren’t a bunch of people wearing big hats and pastel clothes. And it was on every freakin’ channel. Well, I figured, I’m up and it’s on. I’m watching it.

So I sat there for the next hour and half. I got to see the Sultan of Brunei, along with his wife in her very colorful, very covering dress.

I saw the king and queen of Norway. I saw Princess Grace’s daughter; I forget which one. Or maybe her granddaughter; somebody royal and Monacan. I saw Elton John and wondered what it would be like to have to sit next to him and sing a hymn.

And then, of course, came the main attraction—the British royals arriving in their shiny cars that looked like those cellophane boxes that corsages come in. There was Prince Charles and Camilla, and the Queen in butter-yellow, along with her husband, whose name I can never remember but whom I will always think of as James Cromwell. And then the young princes—William the Upright and Harry the Scruffy, looking as relaxed as if they’d just popped in to Westminster Abbey for a round of poker.

And then Kate herself. The veil killed me—so sheer, so clingy, even sensuous, in a cold, windy, British way. I’ll skip the details; you’ve seen the photos—the dress was great, she looked beautiful. Her sister, however, got stuck with the worst job: She had to rearrange Kate’s six-foot train umpteen times (into the car, out of the car, onto the red carpet, around the weird little font in the portico of the cathedral). And on top of it, Sis had to do it all in a skin-tight mermaid dress; I could only imagine they hadn’t realized she’d have to climb stairs in that thing. And she had to ride herd on all the little royal kids. ("Pipe down, now. There's a small island nation in it for you.")

And after that, there was the walk down the aisle, a quick exchange of vows, and then a lot of sitting around. Hymns were sung, Bible verses were droned, and it all started to feel like a Catholic funeral—it just went on and on. The cameras rarely left Kate and William, and maybe it’s just a function of my age, but I found myself counting up how long it had been since either of them had had a chance to pee. And the more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became. I mean, if I were Kate, I’d be worrying that I’d faint, that I’d stumble and rip the dress, that I’d puke, that I’d have to go to the bathroom in the worst possible way, at the worst possible moment. My hat's off to her—she didn't look like she was thinking any of that, but how could she not be? Clearly, she's a keeper.

Speaking of hats, there were a lot of them. They were even better than the Kentucky Derby ones, and probably a lot more expensive. I was a little concerned for the bower bird population of the world, though—either that, or some hat maker has gotten very good at faking springy, spoon-shaped feathers.

And the black horses! We didn’t get to see enough of them. So many beautiful black horses. I wouldn’t mind being a princess just for that.

NaPoWriMo Day 27: Kvetching, Cheating, Coasting

2011-04-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

Al…most…done with the write-a-poem-a-day thing.

I hit a serious wall about halfway through the month, when it seemed like I was writing nothing but junk, and cranking it out only because I had made this obligation to write every day, not because I wanted to actually be writing every day. Oh, the kvetching! I even cheated one day, and dredged up something from a couple of months ago. I did at least revise it and trim its scary hair a bit. Then I felt bad and didn’t cheat again. Yet…

But even in the midst of that mid-month whinefest, I made a few discoveries. One was that I never knew what was going to come out of my pen on any given day or night. I would sit down with the simplest of intentions—usually, to write the shortest poem possible to hurry up and post it and get the damned thing over with so I could watch Being Human* and go to bed. And after the usual many minutes of staring into space, something would come to mind. Then something else, and something else. And an hour later, I often wound up with something I was not expecting to see—a poem about losing my mom, whom I still miss after 10+ years, or a poem about the evocative title of a fiddle tune, or one comparing house-hunting to boyfriend-hunting. Of course, writing poems is always that way, but it was happening pretty much every day.

During that tough going in the middle of the month, I was bolstered by a lecture I heard by animator Miles Inada. He talked about the dreaded “40% point”—on any given project, he said, there’s a period of despair that you hit when you’re about 40% done. You’ve done so freakin’ much work already, and there’s still so much ahead, looming in front of you like the Himalayas, and you’re standing there with your pitiful little ice pick and Clif Bar. And you just want to quit and drag your sorry ass back home for—what else?—a few more episodes of Being Human**. Well, Inada didn’t say all that, but he did talk about that 40% thing, which rang especially true right then, in the midst of the poetry marathon.

But for the past week or so, NaPoWriMo has seemed more like coasting downhill on a bicycle—not such hard pedaling, and the finish line is well within sight. I’ve also gotten into a nice groove of getting up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and writing a poem then. I always get up in the middle of the night to eat a spoonful of almond butter (thank you, crazy blood sugar), and it’s my favorite time to write, when the skin of dreams still hangs over everything and seemingly random phrases dart through my head. Ideas come out at that hour that I don’t get at any other time of day.

So far, I’ve gotten maybe six poems out of NaPoWriMo that I think will turn into something usable. So that’s pretty good. About a half-year’s supply, normally. Well worth the kvetching.

-----

* I’m going to be dropping this name a lot. I love this show. It was nominated today for a BAFTA (British Emmy) award, about which I am nerdily excited.

** I like the British version better, although the American version is pretty great too, and is more shockingly violent.

NaPoWriMo, Day 18: The Long and Short of It

2011-04-18T08:33:00.000-07:00

Here we are, day 18 of the April poem-a-day marathon: 18 poems behind me and—well, I don’t want to think about how many ahead. The going has officially gotten tough.

What I’m finding now is that I miss writing long. It’s hard for me to write long poems when I’m cranking out one every day. Most of the time, I’m up against some deadline—I’ve got to go back to work, or I’m on the way out the door to a poetry reading, or the clock is ticking and bloody hell, it’s bedtime and I can’t think of anything to write about and maybe I could recycle some Coleridge and nobody will notice.

This past weekend, I had the great pleasure of hearing Rick Barot read at Southern Oregon University. Rick’s poems are exquisitely crafted, unfailingly poignant, and…well, long. Not too long, but long enough for the reader to really inhabit the story for a few minutes. That accounted for much of the satisfaction in his reading—that entering and staying and absorbing his measured, finely wrought lines and story arcs. He read for 20 minutes and, to my amazement, read only 4 poems. If I were doing a 20-minute reading, I’d have about 12.

And like the listener, the writer of a long poem has to stay and inhabit the story. You have to go down all of its blind alleys and find your way through to the end. Of course that’s also true with a short poem, but the alleys and roads of a long poem are simply longer. The process is longer; there’s a certain thoroughness about it. To me, it’s the antithesis of NaPoWriMo, or at least the way I do NaPoWriMo: The poem-a-day business has to be shoehorned in among a full-time job and freelance work and the month-long party that is National Poetry Month here in Ashland and the jillion other things I like to do. And as a result, I tend to write short for it. Or if I write longer, the lines are short and it’s some sort of stream-of-consciousness meander, anything but a finely tuned arc. And of course nothing can be edited much yet, or expanded upon; that will come later, if I decide it’s worth working on. Right now, there’s just no time because tomorrow it’s another poem.

Another reason I tend to write short for NaPoWriMo is simple fatigue. The tiredness creeps up, and now, past the halfway point, I’m running out of carbs. And as it gets harder to sit and write a serious poem every day, I tend to resort to joke poems. As it turns out, damn, they’re hard to write too. So they all count. But now I have to make a conscious effort to squirrel away ideas for future days; my notebook has little lines jotted at the tops of pages to remind me of things to write about later: “I am looking for a house that’s like my first boyfriend.” “This is not the motion that hurts.” “Sorry angel.”

But today is a good day in the NaPoWriMo marathon, because I was up at 3:00 a.m., writing today’s poem. Part of it came from a dream, so apparently my subconscious is also jotting down ideas. Keep ’em coming, subconscious.

NaPoWriMo, Day 14: The Dreaded Ending

2011-04-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

So here’s what I’ve discovered, two weeks into NaPoWriMo: It’s not hard to write a poem every day. The hard part is finishing one every day.

I have no particular routine about this poem-a-day thing. Sometimes I’m up at 3 a.m., writing that day’s poem already; sometimes I start it at breakfast or lunch. Occasionally I don’t get underway until the evening, when I panic and make myself turn off Top Gear and for God’s sake write something because I have to post it by midnight and I’ve been a lazy slug and time is running out.

But no matter when I start the poem, the rest of it goes more or less the same: After a fair amount of staring into space and thinking that I’ll never come up with an idea, a few words find their way onto the page. And then the writing snowballs and seems to take on a life of its own. For a while, things are going pretty well—lines are coming and life is good and the radio station of the cosmos is transmitting loud and clear.

And then I start feeling like it’s time to end the poem, and the whole thing screeches to a halt. My Great Thought has petered out like a semi that can’t quite make it to the summit. I get out and pop the hood and stand there and stare at it. This goes on for a long, long time—often twice as long as it took to write the rest of the poem. I tinker with it and back it down the hill a ways—cut some lines to see if I can get a running start from someplace else. Sometimes I take parts out and rearrange them. Sometimes I have to unscrew entire stanzas and chuck them to the side of the road. Eventually I manage to get the engine going and drive it over the crest, but I’m not always happy with the ride.

Regardless, it’s done—for now—and off it goes to the Yahoo group, to the showroom where it pulls in alongside the poems of my friends and peers. Whether I ever drive it again remains to be seen.

NaPoWriMo, Day 8: Not So Warm to Your Form

2011-04-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, that’s the last time I’ll attempt to write a sonnet on a workday during NaPoWriMo.

Sonnets just take too damned long. I usually have to hack my way through one over the course of several days. And this one yesterday couldn’t decide if it was funny or poignant or what, and then the last four lines wouldn’t come and wouldn’t come. I had to pick it up and set it down over and over during the day—in between tasks at work, while balancing a sandwich on my lap at lunch—and finally finished it late at night, as the pumpkin hour approached and I was too sleepy to wrestle anymore.

Still, I love writing sonnets. In the past few years, I’ve been trying take the stereotype of the sonnet (that it is stately, elegant, and usually about one of the Big Three—death, love, or nature) and give it a good smack in the head. Though I have plenty of sonnets from my youth about butterflies and music, lately they’ve veered toward subjects like plumbing and barflies. This one yesterday was about cat litter. It was not a success, except maybe as the dreaded Light Verse. But the wonderful thing about NaPoWriMo is that it doesn’t matter how good it is—you just finish it, and you move on.

I had thought that I might try to do several of the major forms this month—pantoum, sestina, villanelle, etc. But after yesterday I’m rethinking that. A villanelle! Those things take forf***ingever! And I have yet to write a good one.

But then again, didn’t I just say that good doesn’t count? And, to quote The Great One (not Whitman, but Gretzky), “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

NaPoWriMo, Day 6: Heady Optimism

2011-04-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

Six days, six poems. So far, more or less so good. I haven’t spent too long staring at the blank page, and I haven’t flat-out forgotten to write a poem yet (though the month is still young). And I haven’t had to rouse myself out of bed at 11:45 p.m. to dash one off and post it. I did have to break out the emergency haiku kit two nights ago, when nothing longer wanted to take root. When backed into a corner, I always say, write a few haikus. They’re short, they’re harder than they look, and they still count as poems.

Yesterday, in the interests of expediency, I even wrote a poem on the computer. I never, ever do that—the process of writing on a keyboard is too fast for my poet brain to work with. I need the slow pace of pen on paper—the extra milliseconds before the thought makes it out the end of the pen give the internal editor time to rewrite the line about to form. Consequently, the poem yesterday on the computer was sort of stream-of-consciousness. It was different. I liked it.

As often happens when I’m writing a lot, I’ve started writing a cycle—this time, it’s poems based on fiddle tunes. I wrote two before I realized it could be a cycle, and then I thought, “Hey, I’ll do that.” It seems like fertile ground, these songs steeped in history and hard times. Cycles are often a good way for me to get out of a writing funk, but it’s hard to find themes. But then, when I’m in mid-cycle, I can think of all kinds of other cycles I’d like to write, such as types of fences, parts of ant anatomy, or names of Caribbean islands.

Meanwhile, my cat Deja is dozing contentedly in his little blue cat tent, which I bought at Ikea about four years ago. He used to venture into it once in a while, but he would never stay. The other day, I finally figured out the key—I put a folded towel in there. I swear, if you put a towel on anything, Deja thinks it’s the best thing ever. So now he’s curled up in there, having claimed the Ikea tent for Dejadom. It’s a small kingdom, but he rules it with the power of snore.

NaPoWriMo: The Case for Every Day

2011-04-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

A few years ago at a local open mike, my friends Carol Brockfield and Dave Harvey announced that for April, Poetry Month, they were planning to write a poem every day. Not only that, they would post their new poems each day online where others could see them. It was all part of NaPoWriMo, they said—National Poetry Writing Month, a project where people all around the country sit down and write (and, what’s more, finish) a poem every day, and then thrust it out into the public eye.

I’ll be honest: I thought the idea was nuts. I am not a writing-on-the-fly kind of gal, and I am not prolific. My poems come to me at a maddeningly slow pace, and I don’t like them sashaying outdoors until I’m sure their shirts are buttoned and their faces are clean. And the other thing is, I hate routine. Having to do anything every day, no matter how fun, turns that thing into work—something I have plenty of already, thanks.

But in March of 2009, I was in a bad writing rut. Again, Carol and Dave mentioned this crazy NaPoWriMo thing coming up in April, and I thought, what the hey, I haven’t written diddly in months. Maybe this will at least make me write something. So I screwed up my courage, signed up for their Yahoo group, and embarked on a month of—well, I wasn’t sure what.

At first, it was weird. Every day, I got e-mails with poems—a lot of them from people I didn’t know. Our local group had maybe a dozen poets in it, and the whole thing seemed like a weird mixture of anonymity and publicness—who were these people flashing their poems at me, and where did I fit in? I scribbled down my poems each day and fired them off to the rest of the group. At first, it felt a bit competitive. Was I good? Was I bad? Did it matter? We were like a pack of marathon runners who’d just started a race, jostling each other as we sorted ourselves out and tried to find a rhythm that would take us through the long haul. Before long, that feeling of competitiveness morphed into camaraderie as we began to trade compliments back and forth and started little mini-discussions on the side. By the end of the month, I’d gotten to know and like these people, and I’d read a staggering spectrum of poems—dozens of unexpected topics, takes, styles, and forms.

But perhaps the best thing about NaPoWriMo was that it made me take ideas that had been rattling around in my head and put them to paper. And when I ran out of those ideas, I had to look at everything during the day—work, apple blossoms, frogs, fried eggs, wars, soccer—and think, How will I make this into a poem? Not would, but will—because I had to post a poem that night, good or not, come hell or high water. In the end, I had about 25 new poems (I missed a few days), and seven or eight of them were decent. That’s a very good number for me; normally a month might yield one good poem, maybe none. Bolstered by that first year’s success, I tried it again last year. But the grind of writing a poem every day proved to be too much—it’s an astonishingly hard thing to do, and after a few days it already felt like digging for gold with my fingernails in a deep, spent mine. That time, I flaked out after a week because a deadline at work overwhelmed me. Still, I got maybe five usable poems out of it—again, a good number.

So here I am again, kicking off another NaPoWriMo. This is my third year, and it’s Day 2. Already, two new poems have wandered out of my brain and onto the street, their clothes askew and their hair sticking up. And I see poems incoming from my NaPoWriMo compadres, and our glad conversation has begun. Welcome, spring, with your daffodils braving the rain. Here are some poems to add to all the new.

Spring: A Catechism

2011-04-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

Baseball takes
as long as it takes.
An inning is like
reciprocal dinners: first
they eat, then we do.
That man’s throw
is a hairpin shape:
leg and arm
snap, a bow
of brittle energy.
A cloud pulls
shadows across the field.
We’re all small,
sturdy animals stunned
by the April sun, wedged
hip on hip, peanut shells
all over our shoes. We watch
the men out there. We speak
their Irish,
their Spanish names,
speak their same
strange language:
Split-finger. Short porch.
Wheelhouse. Fly.

(Appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. I wrote this poem after seeing an A’s game at the Coliseum. The “hairpin shape” is Nomar Garciaparra, whose body snapped into the shape of a hairpin whenever he threw to first. He was with the Red Sox at the time, but I can’t remember if the Sox were actually the visitors this particular day; I just always thought of his body as an iconic baseball image. Anyway, I was sitting next to a woman from Ireland who was touring America and had come to the game alone, curious to see what baseball was all about. That day, Mark Mulder threw a no-hitter through about the seventh inning—a thrill for us fans, but boring as hell to someone who’d never seen a baseball game before. At one point, the Irish woman turned to me and grumbled, “How long does it go on?”)

Open Mikes: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

2011-03-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

About once a month, I put on my ears and go to a poetry open mike. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve sipped coffee in countless cafés, fidgeted on innumerable uncomfortable chairs, and pondered art—the visual and the spoken kind—while poets belted out their work at galleries. I even co-hosted an open mike for three years, which was like planning a birthday party every month: I worried whether people would come, and then they did, and we usually had a blast.

And after all that, I have a confession to make: I hate open mikes.

All right, sometimes I love them. But I hate them, too. I hate open mikes for the same reason most people won’t go to them at all: I don’t want to hear poetry that I don’t like. And what’s more, I don’t want to be bombarded with it while poets blithely motor past the time limit, shout about hand grenades, or torture the audience by demanding that we chant their lines back to them, or ask us to vote on which poem we “want” them to read. As I sit there with a bland smile on my face, pondering whether it’s medically possible to slit my own throat with my car keys, I think, “Why do I keep coming to these things?”

It’s no idle question. It’s something I think about a lot, because, God help me, a month later I’m sitting there, doing it again. Part of the answer is that open mikes have another side: a kind of beauty that comes from randomness. I might, for instance, see an unexpected genius come wandering in off the street, with dog-eared pages clutched in one hand. Or someone might take a form—a sonnet or villanelle—and turn it inside out, exposing a whole new world of possibilities. Or there might be a shy kid who gets up and reads for the first time in her life, and ain’t half bad. Some nights, there are a lot of these moments. Some nights, there are none. But, like flashes of gold that a prospector sees in a muddy creek, they're enough to keep me coming back.

Mostly, though, I go to open mikes because my friends go to them. And the more I go, the more friends I make, and then the whole thing begins to emit a gravitational force of friendship. I also go because I like to see what’s going on with poetry—what’s new and surprising. Poetry is one of those fields where the breakthroughs can happen at any level, to anyone. Some of them flare and die out, but some of them take hold—because someone else was listening, and liked it. Thus the giant life form of poetry grows, cell by cell.

So back I go, full of caffeine so I don’t nod off during the long bits, and armed with a couple of poems in my pocket. God knows who’s nodding off during my five minutes, but they’re kind enough to let me read, and I return the favor. And there we are, once again, throwing our poems in the creek. And hoping a few of them shine.

Poem: When the Aliens Ask of Art

2011-03-13T21:58:00.000-07:00

Odd you should ask me,

inclined as I am to offer

a thousand sorrows humans

visit upon each other, but I see

you’ve grown tired of random,

dime-a-dozen litanies,

when you’ve caught the scent

of art. Very well.

Of art:

Here are figure skaters.

A line is left describing

where they’ve been, a cold

cartography. The patterns?

They mean nothing.

They do not commend

one route over any other.

That would not be art.

I see you understand this.

You see how arms can grace

a circle or make you think

of wind on grass. Note

how the female seems

to push her heart out

through the palms of her hands,

then brings them back empty.

Art is a ladle you offer

to passersby, never asking names.

(appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction)

List: Things that Ayla, Heroine of the Clan of the Cave Bear Series, Did Not Invent

2011-03-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

the Clapper

Count Chocula

letterpress printing

online voter registration

Wii

mayonnaise

madrigals

B-2 stealth bomber

the novel

rack-and-pinion steering

Hot Pockets

(thanks to Melinda Allman for the idea)

Hay and Bliss

2011-02-19T11:57:00.000-08:00

Walking outside at dawn always makes me think of horses.

When I was a kid, I competed in a few horse shows. And part of the horse-show ritual was to wake up in the pre-darn dark. Then there was a fast breakfast, a car, and a day of horses—their manes braided, their coats shimmering with citronella Shoo-fly.

Later, when I was in my 20s and had rent to pay, I got a dream job as the weekend manager and riding instructor at a small rental stable. And what time did I have to get to work? 6:30 a.m.: dawn.

So there I was again, waking up in the dark, this time with my clock radio set to a hard-rock station. I’d pull on my boots, choke down a fast breakfast, and drive off to the hills as the light was just starting to paint the eastern sky. When I got to the ranch, the only human there, I’d make a quick pit stop at the restroom—a turquoise Porta Potti on the dusty path to the corral. Believe me, there’s nothing quieter, or more lonely, than a cold Porta Potti at dawn.

After that, I’d head for the feed room. Flashlight in one hand, grapple hook in the other, I’d pop the wire on a bale of hay and check it for mold. Then I’d go out to the corral, scatter eight hay flakes on the ground, prop the gate open, and head across the wooden bridge over the creek to the pasture where the horses spent the night.

Horses at dawn are entirely unlike humans at dawn. They’re not curled up, stiff, or cranky; they don’t look the least bit sleepy. They look, in fact, like they’ve been up for hours, browsing the scrub oak and shaking off flies and stamping their feet. Climbing through the gate into the pasture, I felt as if I were walking into an alien world, as if the horses experienced a never-ending day, enjoying the damp air and gaining in wisdom while I wasted a third of my life, shut down in the land of nod.

I’d check the horses, count that there were eight of them, and then I’d open the pasture gate. Slowly, one by one, they’d plod out, wind their way through the neck of the little canyon, splash into the creek, and wander up to the corral. They’d done this a thousand times before. They knew where the hay was.

I’d walk back to the corral, close the gate behind them, and climb over the fence with a curry comb and a brush, a hoof pick in my back pocket. I’d groom each horse in turn, warming my hands on their smooth coats, watching the steam vent out their nostrils, listening to the hollow sound of their great teeth grinding all that hay. I’d check their feet for stones, work the burrs out of their tails, brush out the night’s layer of dust. They were used to this kind of care, this sure-handed straightening. And for an hour or so, before anyone arrived at our little ranch, it was just me and eight horses and a band of sunlight moving down the walls of the canyon, the cool air pungent with bay laurel and eucalyptus, as the hay dwindled to a few scraps in the dirt.

I only worked there for a few months, but at dawn, even now, I can hear the squeak of the gates and the clump of my boots on the wooden bridge. Somewhere out there, horses want to be fed. And somewhere there’s a woman pulling apart a bale of sweet, green hay and not thinking a thing about it, lost in the simple tasks she gets to do in paradise.

Book review: John Porcellino & King-Cat Comics

2011-02-13T20:54:00.000-08:00

I’m not much of a graphic-book person. Girls weren’t encouraged to read comics when I was a kid, and the entire genre passed me by. But a few years ago, a comic book called King-Cat caught my eye at SF Zine Fest, a vibrant book-arts show where I was exhibiting my chapbooks. The smiling, crowned cat on the cover of King-Cat invited me in, and soon I was standing there, paging through a curious hand-drawn collection of author John Porcellino’s stories and mini-essays. They were mostly his unique take on relationships, family, memories, moving, pets, jobs—all ordinary, workaday stuff, somehow rendered poignant by John’s deft drawings and disarming, poetic writing. After I’d spent a few minutes lost in this comic book, I looked up, and there was John Porcellino himself—a tall, shy, youngish guy who looked like the bass player in some indie band. We talked for a few minutes, and I bought several copies of King-Cat, along with a logo button whose cat, all these years later, still smiles down from my bulletin board.

Since then, via the internet, I’ve checked in on John Porcellino and King-Cat often. His website, Facebook updates, and blog all have the same autobiographical touch as his comics—we find he’s moved, then moved again; his beloved cat, who featured in many King-Cat stories, has died. There are hints of a breakup or divorce. And all of it is sketched out in John’s spare drawings, unflaggingly charming prose, and thoughtful photography (look here for his photo series on a neighborhood cat).

For me, keeping track of the life of someone I met at a little trade show years ago, whose talents caught my eye even among a roomful of talented people, has been one of those miracles of the internet. And judging by how many Facebook friends he has, I’m not alone in feeling that way. John’s comics are a reminder that everyone’s life is interesting; the only question is how you tell it. Or, as he says in King-Cat Number 63, “Time, like a footprint / someone was here once— / something happened.”

Little short poems that live in my notebooks

2011-01-31T20:51:00.000-08:00

The literary world, so full of epics and 40-line free verse and fat sestinas, doesn’t seem to have much room for little short poems. So these babies don’t get out much. It’s okay, little poems–don’t be scared.

* * *

Call

The dog’s note, a word.

We know his bark at night

like your daughter’s voice on the phone

saying she’s fine, but can she come over,

a stranger laughing behind her,

can she have dinner,

can she please come home.

* * *

Change

Her laugh

like a coin

in the laundry dryer

of your heart—

seven more minutes

warm,

maybe eight.

* * *

Evening, July

The cat slides two paws

under the screen door. Outside,

wind scratches the grass.

* * *

Tag

She writes goodbye on her nametag,

avoiding that middle step

of breakfasts at the window

and nights on the steel chairs

of the hospital. She says

it was nice to know you,

fixes her lipstick

in the smooth face

of a steak knife.

* * *

Horse Dreams

ten years old

Pinto, paint,

apple-drop gray,

red roan, tunnel black,

stone-eyed

Assyrian chargers,

then a neck,

a river-run shoulder, gone

back to the night

where all the horses sleep,

where I keep

a small saddle.

Book review: A Day, a Dog

2011-01-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

A Day, a Dog

By Gabrielle Vincent

Front Street Inc., 1999

$16.95 hardcover

This book was such a discovery that I remember exactly where I was when I first saw it several years ago. The dog on the cover caught my eye at M Is for Mystery, San Mateo’s great bookshop. I opened it to the first page, and within a minute I had tears in my eyes. By the time I’d finished it (it’s a picture book; it doesn’t take long), I knew that in the name of kindness and of all good things in the universe, I had to buy it. This book is that profound.

In spare, exquisite charcoal drawings, Belgian author/illustrator Gabrielle Vincent begins with a heartbreaking image: a dog being thrown from a car. The dog chases it, but the car speeds away until he’s exhausted, confused, despondent. How do we know a dog is despondent? That is the secret of this book: Vincent’s remarkable ability to depict body language with a few simple lines. We follow the dog through the first day of his sudden, unwanted freedom, wandering roadways, causing a traffic accident, roaming a desolate beach, and finally skulking through back alleys. In the end, Vincent leaves us on a hopeful note (which I won’t give away), and we’re left to draw our own conclusions. Does the dog find happiness? I have to believe he does. It still chokes me up to think about it.

Though Vincent is known for her children’s stories, this book would have disturbed me as a kid. But perhaps with gentle parental guidance, it can be a catalyst to helping children understand their responsibility toward other living creatures. For the rest of us, it’s both a harsh reminder of how cruel people can be and an affirmation that compassion for animals is a gift we can—and should—offer every day of our own lives.

List: Possible Reasons Why My Cat Is Fat

2011-01-29T20:43:00.000-08:00

Is on a “calorie-counting” diet but can’t count.

Does not use rowing machine enough.

Orders out during the day.

Does not want my other fat cat to feel self-conscious.

Blew out a knee while attacking a burglar.

Will not switch to margarine.

Surreptitiously takes bites out of me as I sleep.

Diet pills make him bitchy.

Will only do ab crunches if treats are involved.

Idolizes Glen “Big Baby” Davis.

Father was also fat.

Is depressed about the economy.

Hot Pockets.

Book Review: Lives of the Monster Dogs

2011-01-01T10:48:00.000-08:00

Lives of the Monster Dogs

by Kirsten Bakis

Warner Books, 1997,

$12.99 trade paper

This is not your father’s Frankenstein. Not his Lord of the Flies, either. It’s a little of both.

Lives of the Monster Dogs begins with mad scientist Augustus Rank getting his kicks by amputating and reattaching cows’ legs. (Animal lovers will be cringing for about ten pages, but it’s worth the trouble.) When he decides to build an army of genetically engineered animals, Rank chooses dogs for their loyalty and unthinking savagery. He finds a quiet spot to carry out his research—an enclave in the frozen reaches of northern Canada—and spends the next few decades constructing a small army-in-training of highly intelligent dogs. And then he dies.

That’s when the Lord of the Flies part begins. The dogs are trained to walk upright, wear clothing and prosthetic hands, and speak English through voice-synthesis boxes. Without the charismatic Rank to lead them, the dogs realize that they’re basically slaves, and they rebel against their human captors—with spectacular success.

Then, in a wonderful twist, the liberated dogs find their way to Manhattan, where they’re instantly embraced as celebrities. They take up residence at the Plaza Hotel, are featured in a Vanity Fair photo spread, and throw lavish parties for their enthralled fans. The media and public are so fascinated by these exotic, erudite creatures that they’re willing to forgive the dogs of their bloody past. But there’s trouble ahead: The dogs’ genetic engineering is breaking down, and one by one, they’re reverting to their natural doglike state—an “illness” the sophisticated dogs find shameful and terrifying.

Bakis covers a great scope of ideas here: what is human, what is celebrity, and whether we’ll ever be able to navigate the ethical dilemmas of manufacturing living creatures. The resulting novel is a melancholy and entertaining fever dream—thought provoking, highly imaginative, and highly recommended.

Would You Like Some Advice With That?

2010-12-25T20:19:00.000-08:00

Shopkeepers are wonderful. They sell us soap and batteries, bag it all up with a smile, and then proceed to tell us how to run our lives.

Or maybe that only happens to me.

As a single person, I’m used to getting advice from family and friends, suggestions that I take this class or buy that dress, all in the interests of netting a man. They seem to feel I’ve made a blunder by not getting married, and it’s their duty to help me straighten it out.

But twice now, that well-meaning prying has spilled over into shopkeepers. Once, at a produce store, the man at the checkout stand was weighing my one yam, my one crookneck squash, and my single serving of green beans. He shook his head, looked me in the eye and said, “You need to get married.” Another time, while bagging my items on a hot day, a vendor at the farmer's market asked me if I was heading out to the lake that afternoon. No, I said. She asked if I was married or had kids. No, I said. “Well,” she cheerfully offered, “you might as well go to the lake. It's not like you've got anything else to do.”

Now, I realize these shopkeepers were just trying to be neighborly. But it made me realize that single people are one of our culture’s last remaining punching bags: poor schlumps who have so obviously erred that they deserve—indeed, need—unsolicited advice. There’s probably some patriarchal, Judeo-Christian mumbo-jumbo going on here, but I’m not going to think about that. I’m going to go home and enjoy…the sound of no one talking. The wild taste of a single yam.

WWJFD (What Would Jessica Fletcher Do?)

2010-12-18T12:30:00.001-08:00

My grandmother was crazy about Murder, She Wrote. I used to think that was very grandma-ish of her; it made sense that she’d like Jessica Fletcher, a plucky detective who was roughly her age. And a bonus was that she could follow the plotline without having to see the TV screen—my grandmother was legally blind. So, in my mind, Murder, She Wrote joined The Lawrence Welk Show and Gunsmoke as another TV dinosaur that only my grandma could love.

But one day about ten years ago—probably when I was sick, because that’s when I watch reruns from the ’80s—I happened upon an episode of Murder, She Wrote. I’d never really watched it before, but a guest star caught my eye, some comforting face from my childhood like Ben Murphy or Shirley Jones. The plot was a tidy puzzle, with clues scattered like treasures at a mildly intriguing garage sale. It was fun and soothing in a perverse, murder-y sort of way. I watched another. And another.

Before long, I was a full-on fan—an easy thing to be because that show, a darling of syndication, and was on freakin’ all the time. But I didn’t go around telling people I watched it; my friends were all hyped up on their Sex and the City and NYPD Blue. But most nights found me parked in front of the TV at 7:00 with a plate of burrito on my lap, tuning in to see what tangle Jessica would think her way out of this time.

Eventually I began to think of Murder, She Wrote as a self-contained universe with its own peculiar laws of physics. There, as sure as gravity, the loudmouthed bully always got whacked, the young hunk was accused but always found innocent, and the victim died tidily in the parlor, with a dribble of fake blood on a dress shirt.

But the real attraction became Jessica herself. She handled every twist and turn—every sexist police detective, every ill-mannered eyewitness—with grace, kindness, and aplomb. In a word, she was polite. And as the bodies fell around her and the widows grieved and the families schemed to get the money, her politeness was an anchor that everyone clung to—even me, balancing beans and rice on a fork and thinking about my own exasperating co-workers and family members. The lesson here seemed to be, Politeness may not cure everything, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

I still think of Jessica whenever someone’s rude to me, or when a friend needs a pep talk. I know that the reason she’s wise is because a roomful of writers made her up, but that’s nothing new. In its own way, Murder, She Wrote is like Aesop’s fables, or Greek mythology, or, one might argue, the Bible. They’re all just stories about how we (humans, gods, tortoises) should treat each other. And if the lesson is taught against a background of murder and mayhem, that’s nothing new, either. We humans have always taken the good with the bad, the sweet with the bloody. Such is literature. Such is life.

Poem: The Pasture on Sackett Road

2010-12-17T08:40:00.000-08:00

If I chose to sit, I’d find

a bit of bare grass among

mines of manure flaking beige

under the sun, nowhere

to lean, the wire fence rusted

and slack, anything rigid

forbidden: no pails or rakes,

or let alone chairs. Horses

have a gift for entanglement.

At thirteen, my jeans

were filthy from hours

cross-legged on the ground,

passive in a land

of larger forces, fleck

of blue in a brown eye,

quake of flesh,

hocks and gaskins flexed

in everyday elegance,

a sweltering land

of sweet and grass

and the endless perambulations

of a dozen wise horses,

their tails the flags

of our small nation.

(appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, 2004)

List: Suggested Names for Future SyFy Channel Disaster Movies

2010-11-28T11:35:00.000-08:00

Meteor Smoosh

Super Duper Nova

Asteroid vs. Serial Killer

The Moon Is Falling Apart!

Does It Seem Windy?

Lava Pop

Cloud!

Sunspotstorm

9.1: A Big One

Crikey, It's Hot

Poem: Reading Arabic

2010-11-28T11:31:00.000-08:00

This week we read the words aloud,

their meaning less important

than the work of glottal stops

and vagaries of breath and tongue.

Our teacher translates gently:

Bahyd, eggs. Jhutheth, corpses.

Bass, enough. Nine-to-five words.

If you stare at a letter–say, yaa’–

long enough, it winds away

from sound and word, curls

into a quiet shape:

the shell of a snail, or the spin

of creekwater as it winds down

into the pipe beneath the street.

III

Bowls of letters swell and taper,

chambers fill, half-fill with air.

Body-shaped words fall prone

in sleep, or sit with a cup of tea

on a bench in the marketplace,

pressed in quiet gossip

among a row of ample women.

(appeared in Faultline, 2001)

DVD Review: Lost in Austen

2010-11-25T12:35:00.001-08:00

Over the years, I’ve become a reluctant fan of Pride and Prejudice in all its incarnations. I say “reluctant” because, on the surface, it’s a fluffy romance, the prototype of a jillion stories of star-crossed-lovers. (But oh, underneath—such depth, wit, and barbed social commentary.) So I was surprised to find that I’d missed this four-part BBC miniseries when it aired in 2008. But that’s what Netflix is for.

Lost in Austen’s premise is simple: Hip urbanite Amanda Price (Jemima Rooper) finds that she’s mysteriously swapped places with Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of her favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice, via a little door in her shower. In an echo of Peggy Sue Got Married, Amanda can’t quite believe that she’s been transported to the early 19th century, but she can’t get back and has to muddle through the next few weeks in the strangely familiar setting of the novel she knows so well. (Elizabeth, meanwhile, is marooned in 21st-century London.)

Stranded in the Bennets’ house, Amanda finds that the plot of Pride and Prejudice is just getting underway: New neighbor Mr. Bingley pays his first visit and soon introduces his brooding friend, Mr. Darcy (Elliot Cowan). Amanda, plopped down in Georgian England with her pageboy haircut, leather jacket, and lip gloss, claims that she’s “a friend of Elizabeth’s from Hammersmith,” which the family seems to think is explanation enough.

Amanda looks on in wonder as her favorite novel unfolds, but there’s a problem: Elizabeth isn’t there to meet Mr. Darcy at the first fateful ball. And that flaw in the plot sets other flaws in motion: Bingley falls in love with Amanda, not Jane; Jane, not Charlotte, is wooed by the creepy Mr. Collins; Charlotte threatens to chuck it all and move to Africa; and Darcy has about as much charm as an ingrown toenail. Amanda tries and tries to get the plot back on track, but her schemes spin off more chaotic results. Before long, it’s a mess—not at all what Jane Austen wanted, as Amanda keeps thinking. And how will she ever get Elizabeth back to the 19th century, where she can marry Darcy and complete the story?

The best part about Lost in Austen is that it transcends the parody genre, although it’s funny throughout. At some point, you (and Amanda) have to just throw out the plot of Pride and Prejudice; this story has become a different animal, and old characters begin taking on new dimensions: There’s much more to Mr. Wickham than meets the eye, Mrs. Bennet (Alex Kingston) displays a backbone she never had in the book, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh cheats at cards. Even modern Amanda, who seems made out of snark, shows another side when the question becomes her own destiny and happiness. In the end, she has to write her own novel—as we all do, one way or another.

List: Plausible but Untrue Explanations for Why I Named My Cat “Iniki”

2010-11-13T10:17:00.000-08:00

Named for a Finnish hockey star I once slept with, except I was really drunk, so it might have been that guy from Dallas.

Lakota Sioux for “able to locate and step on lymph nodes.”

Named for the Pacific island on which I did all the brave humanitarian work depicted in the Lifetime movie about me, from which I made diddly—well, four thousand dollars.

Named after my Uncle/Aunt Iniki, who was much more cool after the surgery.

Named for Thor Heyersen’s boat.

It’s almost “Bikini” spelled backwards, except that “Inikib” would have sounded weird, and just calling her “Bikini” would have brought up Barbie connotations. All a reminder of my half-assed “environmentalist” phase.

Can’t spell “Inky.”

Poem: Convertible Women

2010-11-09T20:19:00.000-08:00

Convertible women

know how to knot

the scarves that dance

off the racks.

Their hair laps

in ribbons at the nape

of their necks.

They have friends

with names like Nat

and Barb who swing

slightly on the turns

and suck their passenger-

seat cigarettes

with sage indifference.

Convertible women

meet the wind

and bend it around

their opaque

sunglasses.

They split the air

like red bullets.

All the brown hard-top lives

could flip

and still have something

to save them.

Convertible women

stick their necks

right out.

The wind escorts them

through the stop sign, past

the Chinese take-out

and the carpet emporium

and all the way out

to the dream roads, just them

and sound and sky.

(appeared in Free-Wheeling: Poems About Cars)

List: Most Alarming Things to Cats

2010-11-04T21:55:00.000-07:00

Dishwasher (fill cycle)

Vacuum cleaner

Electric guitar

Man riding lawnmower down middle of street

Whistling tea kettle

Three-legged dog ringing doorbell, pretending to be flower-delivery person, then massacring cats inside

Garbage truck backing up street

Veterinarians running amok with giant Q-tips

Raccoons at back door

DVD Review: Colonial House

2010-10-24T20:06:00.001-07:00

Colonial House, an eight-part documentary, was one of a series of “educational reality shows” that aired on PBS a few years ago. I’ve liked all the incarnations of this idea, where they take modern people and make them live like people did in past centuries, from the gentle 1900 House to the whiny 1940s House and the savagely funny Frontier House.

So, what do we learn from Colonial House? This: People don’t like to be told what to do.

Colonial House’s recipe is fairly simple: Send 15 or 20 “colonists” (ordinary Americans from all walks of life) to a remote shoreline in Maine, add some log cabins and a lot of dried peas, and see how they get along with day-to-day life using only the technology that was available in the 1600s—essentially, sharpened sticks and handsaws.

The story starts out with the plucky colonists, wearing scratchy-looking costumes, arriving at the dusty encampment that they'll call home for the next three months. Their first job is to read their “charter” to find out who’ll be doing what—who gets to be governor, lay preacher, freedmen, and indentured servants. The one chosen for governor is a Baptist minister from Texas in real life, a kind family man with plenty of experience motivating people. But before long, we find he has an agenda: He wants this little colony to be a City of God—the kind of harmonious Christian community that nowadays can rarely be found outside of cults and communes. And right away, there’s trouble.

All begins to unravel when some of the colonists can’t bring themselves to follow the rules that would have governed a 17th-century settlement. The atheists refuse to attend church. The women don’t like wearing head coverings, and they resent having to cook for all the men (no small feat with 1600s technology) while being banned from sitting on the governing council. The indentured servants resent being—well, indentured servants, which turns out to be just as bad as it sounds. And the two African-American participants have their own set of objections to this proto-slavery system, and both leave the colony abruptly. So what starts out looking like a living-museum piece on how to split lumber turns out to be a crash-course in civics.

I can only imagine the producers of the show saw this coming. They decided, after all, that the “governor” would be a real-life Baptist minister. And the “lay minister,” supposedly plucked from the crowd and forced to learn preaching on the fly, is in fact a theology professor. So right away, I’m thinking, “Evangelical Christians running things? That won't fly with everybody.”

And it doesn't, at least not at first. The Bible-quoting leaders are frustrated by their church-resistant flock. They try a few kind words, and they get nowhere. They try force, and they get rebellion. They finally have to throw up their hands and abandon all hope of saving their countrymen’s souls, because the corn needs planting and nobody can work while everyone’s yelling or tied to a pole in punishment. I guess on a remote tip of northeast Maine, with winter already biting at your heels, you either get your priorities straight or you starve.

This all makes me wonder how many people died in the early colonies as a result of bad management. Colonial House shows us that an off-balance colony can quickly tumble into real trouble—food supplies dwindle and the local native Americans, who are in a position to help, are offended by the bad manners and clumsy bargaining skills of the colonists.

And while nothing’s really at stake here—these faux colonists are merely stockpiling supplies to see if they “would” survive the winter, which none of them will stay to see—still, it’s a fascinating look at the complex little system that’s duplicated over and over in human societies everywhere, from Rotary clubs to sports teams to the United Nations. Governing, large or small, is a tricky thing. There’s a fine line between leadership and despotism, and those who get a little power seem to want a lot. And suddenly your goofy, salt-haired fatherly type morphs into a dictator, and everyone becomes obsessed with bringing him down. Meanwhile, banks crash and people lose their jobs and small countries are invaded and soldiers abuse POWs, and…wait, that’s another reality show.

DVD Review: Ballykissangel

2010-10-14T11:30:00.001-07:00

Now deep into my Netflix addiction, I’ve just finished all six seasons of the BBC comedy-drama Ballykissangel.

Ballykissangel is one of those shows that had to grow on me. When I first encountered it on PBS years ago, it seemed like a self-consciously quirky knockoff of Northern Exposure—a fish-out-of-water story about an English priest who’s been transferred to a backwater village in Ireland. The town comes replete with eccentric locals—the rich guy, the feminist, the rubes, the barflies—and, at first, the humor seemed cloying and the accents impenetrable.

But I soon realized that there was much more to Ballykissangel. Once I developed an ear for the accents, I found the show had writers, good ones, who could weave together disparate stories and somehow make them come out right at the end. They could elicit a satisfied sigh from me, or they could turn on a dime and suddenly make me think, hard. The plots are secondary; the main attraction is the relationships that grow and dissolve between the characters—beautifully drawn, complex morality tales of flawed people who, somehow, become important to us. And then, to lighten things up, there’s the occasional flatulent dog, or an automated confessional booth falling off a truck, or the impossibly beautiful 23-year-old Colin Farrell, already with the eyebrows.

The show went through a couple of bumpy patches and jarring cast changes, notably in seasons 4 and 6. But somehow the writers always pulled it off. Just when I thought they were about to shipwreck the show in a morass of slapstick, they’d stun me with a story about alcoholism, or the inexact sciences of preaching and policing, or the twin punishments of grief and guilt. I kept thinking, “How did they get me to care about these people so much?” And that, of course, is what a good writer does.

So bravo, Ballykissangel. I only wish there were more of you to enjoy.

Poem: For Blossom, a $10 Hamster

2010-06-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

Your God will know you

by the slant of your one white spot

and the way you don't cry out

when lifted from your cardboard cage

by the giant hand of a five-year-old girl.

In your two months you already

have become secretly pregnant,

the dials of your soft body

spinning through their complications

in the slave cells of the pet store.

Think, if you were rare, the distant sightings

and cataloguing, your steep and cordoned

habitat, the teams debating your very

existence on that clean pin-top of land.

Instead you, born in a clutch of sisters,

known only by your crooked spot

(though to your sisters you smelled like you

and your name was never Blossom),

here you are sleeping on sawdust

the girl tries so hard to keep clean,

and though she is not your God,

she lays a finger on you late at night

to feel your warm pulsar of breath.

And when the mean boy comes over to play,

she hides your box under the bed

and says you ran away,

her face on fire with the lying

she does for you, Blossom, as if

you were the last of your kind

on Earth, and she

was the only one who knew.

(appeared in Mudfish, 2009)

The Shoe's Tale, Part II

2009-06-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

The shoe went missing again last night. This time there was a clue, perhaps: a hellacious, snarling fight outside my bedroom window around midnight, followed by the smell of skunk spray fired at point-blank range. Today the whole house reeked of skunk, and so did my car -- even though it was nowhere near the fight.

After two rounds of searching, I finally found the shoe this afternoon under the back deck and fished it out of there with my nice swan-neck hoe. The shoe is none the worse for wear -- still gray and stiff and, as always after one of these abductions, laced tight to within an inch of its life. Once again, the intruder stole the right shoe. The left one has never been shoenapped.

Poem: A Parking Lot

2009-06-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

I stayed kissed.

I said god, god

of the glacier letting go,

god that made the mouths

of Connecticut Valley men

strong after all that

rough weather. Hands

in your pockets, I pulled

you in. The air snapped

its ten-degree

fingers. Couldn’t tell

if every crackmoney tramp

in town was yours

already, but then—black sky,

blue stars, naked heat

at the fingertip hollow

of your neck—

that was home,

that was here.

I live there now.

I stayed.

(appeared in Northwest Review, 2008)

The Shoe's Tale

2009-06-10T22:35:00.001-07:00

I have a mystery. Twice now, some animal has dragged one of my gardening shoes off into the yard at night, swiping it from its usual spot on the back deck. Always the same shoe—the right one. I find it in the morning in some far-flung corner of the yard. There are signs of a struggle: The shoe is filthy, its laces are pulled tight so it looks pinched and strangled, and they’re gray and stiff with what I can only assume is spit.

I’ve never caught the animal red-handed, so I can only theorize what animal it is, and why it keeps taking my shoe.

1) It’s a gang of deer who hate humans, and the smell of that shoe just gets their blood boiling. To hell with you humans and your deer fence and your shoe and your shoelaces! We will rip your bloody shoelaces out by the roots! And then we’ll kick down your deer fence and then you won’t be able to put on your shoe so you won’t be able to fix the fence. And then we can eat all the tomatoes we want. Damn, these shoelaces are strong.

2) It’s a cat who is thrilled to bits that someone has left two perfectly good shoes out in the open. This yard is like a land of miracles—the shoes keeps reappearing, always in the same place. At home, the humans are all very fuss-fuss about putting their shoes in a closet and shutting the door. Whenever the cat makes a grab for a shoelace there, it’s a freakin’ national emergency. There was only that one ruined shoe that one time; it’s not like they didn’t have another.

3) It’s a raccoon mom who is teaching her kids how to be clever thieves. The lesson always starts off so well—look here! A pair of shoes!—but then descends into chaos and unintentional comedy as she tries to drag the shoe across the deck and into the yard. Jesus, the noise! This heist will wake the dead. And if she gets busted, the kids will never let her forget it. And then one of them—the little wiseacre—says, “But Mom, what will we do with a shoe anyway?” And she realizes—slowly, but with utter clarity and conviction—that she has given birth to children who have no imagination. But by then it’s almost dawn and they’re all full of leftover Mexican food anyway. They will go home and dream of corn tortillas and small banditos.

The next day I put on my spitty, dirty shoe—that’s why God made socks—and am back in the garden, trying to tell what’s weeds and what’s lettuce. Afterward, I leave the shoes on the porch. In a way, it’s an honor that they’ve been touched by something wild. And, like all of us, they may one day be taken out of the yard, borne off to some other grand adventure. Who am I to hold them back?

Poem: Daughter

2009-06-07T20:58:00.000-07:00

Fortune: You will receive a compliment

from a stranger on Friday

Stranger, was that you

ordering tacos to go

at the long glass counter

steamed with beans and beef,

your daughter in tow,

her hair a weedy lot

betraying her mother gone,

a father with no heart to comb?

There’ll be time enough for chance

in ten or twelve years

when you’re home alone,

Danny Gatton on the stereo,

a bill from her college

a landmine you found

in the mailbox, this black hole

you birthed—every drink

and dollar and man

falling ever in to her.

And you were lost yourself,

a blue star trailing a train of light,

only visible a moment

that night in the taqueria

as you turned—was it

my jacket, my earrings?—

before she pulled you back,

you with a laugh for her,

her hair such a godly mess,

her face so bright

she could burn you alive.

(appeared in Northwest Review, 2008)

Poem: Forgetting the Moon

2009-06-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

The moon climbed into this poem.

I tried to ignore it

but it looked in through the window

one night and woke me up.

It was throwing all this light

and the snow was soaking it in

and if light were a noise,

the whole backyard

would be talking.

Sometimes for months entire

I forget about the moon. The sky

is an empty pail. How

can the moon come calling

when it has so much to do?

Lovers and tides

will not raise themselves.

But it climbed, I tell you,

in through a closed window,

and if that is too much

of a metaphor, I give you also

my heart, that old lady

in her cold walk-up.

Even she saw the moon —

she has windows, too, you know —

and though it didn’t make

the headlines — moon shines in

through somebody’s window —

I wrote it down

so if you please,

it can happen.

It happened to me.

(appeared in Mudfish, 2009)