January 2012
2 posts
Where I've been.
There is a barn in your backyard. There are no animals inside, no hay. The boards are all wayward, shedding splinters that sun and wind and time have worn down and tugged free.
It feels like there are windows everywhere. With the door shut behind you, you get the feeling that you are inside the stars or something, light shooting onto your skin from tiny holes in so many...
December 2011
9 posts
Prompt #3
Write from the point of view of a freshly scrubbed floor.
Look down.
Everyone seems to have convinced themselves that I prefer to be this way, which would make me laugh if I could do that, since they all hate what it takes to get me that way.
This is not a clean house, which is what I love about it, and what I hate about it.
When you’re laying underneath someone’s entire life, cloaked in their things, collected carpets and keys lost...
Prompt # 2
The doorbell rings.
Meet.
Happiness is a stranger here.
You open the door, let her in. She never looks the way you expect her to. Covered in mud, or in clothes that don’t fit, or anachronistic in dress, like an alien who studied the wrong era before attempting to costume herself as a commoner.
You didn’t know you were running a bed and breakfast but her fingers on the doorbell set you in...
Prompt #1
Open a book of poetry to a random page.
(Go to a library. Or search for Frank O’Hara or Bukowski or William Carlos Williams on your computer. But jeez man, buy a book of poetry for next time.)
Read the first poem you see. Don’t cheat. Don’t re-flip, or pick a new one. Respond to the poem.
“Dear, though the night is gone,
Its dream still haunts today,
That brought us...”
– W.H. Auden “29”
On W. H. Auden
On wanting to tear out this page because my writing, like so many of my reactions, is imperfect…….
Well, he wrote a poem called “29,”or probably it didn’t have a name, and this editor said, “well, they go in this order,” and so they numbered everything, so now this poem wears a numbered badge like a title, unearned and unasked.
Well anyway, what I want to know is,...
July 2011
4 posts
The Nursery Tree.
A nursery tree no longer lives and breathes, which is sad.
When I inventory past conversations, words passed between myself and people who wanted to know me, or who didn’t want to know me but had no choice, I seem always to used the trees that surrounded me as defining markers of my young life. My memories are mostly dappled with the shade lent by the limbs that hung low and high...
Pulling the Roundest Face.
We’re nearing the midnight hour.
The witching hour. That eerie moment caught between peace and terror. Our bodies are simultaneously at rest, pressing the last of the day’s energy down into mattresses or floors, and at alert, flinching with every snap of a twig, every whisper of a spider’s legs across a windowsill.
Time has spent its last go round the face...
Lost? or Found?
David Brooks wrote a recent column directed at recent college graduates, or at those who were trying to understand our quandary. He surmised that part of the confusion stemmed from our nation’s obsession with finding a passion, following a dream, doing things that allowed us to open up the book of self-discovery. We are a generation who’s been monitored, directed, encouraged and...
May 2011
3 posts
Middle, middle of.
I’ve been flip-flopping all over the place this week. Maybe you can blame it on our May, which threatens to leave my freshly planted cucumber seeds to rot in soil that’s too cold and damp for growth.
I should have checked the Farmer’s Almanac, I know. Amateur gardener alert.
In actuality, my capricious mind owes its uncertainty not to the weather but to all this stuff...
Ode to Mama.
I come from choice stock. Here I am, swimming through the morass of “what am I doing here?” with the rest of the world, having just taken a dive into what everyone wants to call the real world. And I’m relishing it. While I’d like to take some credit for my delectation in such a foreign frontier, I won’t.
I was made to be this way by the remarkable woman from whom...
Mt. You
I drove into you as a mountain today.
You grew in front of me, flat and craggy, catching the 10 o’clock light. Your fingers were gulches of green taming the red rocks. Soft and weathered and outstretched, asking me to scramble up them, holding on to the wrinkles of your knuckles until I was sitting in the palm of your hand.
Someone once told me that the mountains here in...
April 2011
2 posts
Just a little column.
Though I deal in discourse all of my days, I’m still bewildered at the weight a single word carries.
Of course, there are sound bites and catchphrases broadcasted by the demagogues among us that were built to elicit emotion. But on my mind is a word that lacks the intent, one that has no view to marketing an ideal or changing a mind. It’s a throwaway word, really. One that we...
Gasp!
There are moments as you are moving in an itinerant way, walking the dog, riding your bike down Olive Street, cleaning last night’s dishes, when you glimpse fleetingly the sketch of your life.
This is a more remarkable thing than it sounds because it lacks any sense of try. Normally you are there living, shading the space between two penciled lines, defing the curves of the...
February 2011
3 posts
January 2011
2 posts
The Fear
Wondering why I spend time hiding from what it is I propose to love.
Wondering why it is we all seem to spend our lives doing this. We build a shrine to all the things that turn us on. Or not all the things, but the one thing that turns us on the most. In conversation we sing devotionals, missionaries we of the gospel of our passion.
Perhaps we even take steps...
November 2010
2 posts
Same Legs
How strange that a year should pass. Is that what we mean? That the time itself is ambulatory? That we, those who always want to be concerned with the verb, the going, the doing, are standing rooted. It seems that a clock has been named with the wrong body parts. Those are not hands I see, but legs.
And we. We are frozen, to ourselves.
I am imagining a background...
The Den
We’ve begun spending so much time sitting in a proximate way, loving each other quietly. Five years of space on the books somehow wrote us next to each other on the page and we are happy to be there. We have woven ourselves an autumn cocoon, but a blooming one that heats and stimulates, but also opens and closes and transmutates.
A lung in breath.
We are a cocoon...
October 2010
2 posts
Just to Lose Sad.
Where is sad?
You wake up in the morning, let the dog out.
There is fruit in the refrigerator. Grapes and apples from the tree in the back yard. It felt good to pick them but the flesh is still too cold and it hurts your teeth.
At work, you flirt. You are a tease. You want to be loved. Someone carrying so much toast home in their gums leaves you a note that says “U R beautiful.” You...
In the Headlines
We forget sometimes that the earth is moving. The quotidian rotation perhaps occasionally flashes past the eye of our imagination, but it seems that more often we simply see the things we have moved ourselves. A rock kicked, dirt shuffled. We are trimming trees and plowing buildings, and the sky only looks different because now we can see it. It doesn’t matter that with this consistent...
September 2010
3 posts
To Save the World
If I had a superpower for a day, it would be the ability to resist charm.
Flight, invisibility, telepathy. These are all bottled and uncreative at best; they are only really useful in a few choice situations against a few choice nemeses. Charm resistance would be a life saver, a bank saver, a flushed-with-embarassment saver that every human would find themselves grateful...
Dear Old City
What am I doing here, in this stretched out town? Be a city or don’t. Love me and want me, or stop. But this in between, I can’t take it.
Don’t be so recognizable, so mashed-potatoey and comfortable, with the coffee shops and bike racks that are shaped differently and have been repainted, but are still full of things I know, of smells and tastes my senses forgot they were dying...
The Juggler's Grace
A basic time line for basic space. Basic shapes dividing eye data energy in ways we think we should, she thinks she could understand.
The question, loud looming cloud as it was, remained in which set of angles she might extend the line out from her chest. And of course, there was still thread to be chosen: thinnest gold and silver, hopeful like shards of glass; or thick buttery...
August 2010
1 post
Why should?
Why should the fire die? To me it seems an honest, a legitimate question (ignoring through whispers of wine, the secret, conscious-un understanding) if there is one. They say in science textbooks and so many metaphors that matter is not destroyed.
But what does matter matter?
I want heat! Dammit, I want flame, reaching up to lick the untouched air, not allowing...
March 2010
2 posts
hello old friend.
wow. what a break we’ve had.
they say happiness makes the heart grow fonder, but the truth is, i did sort of just forget about you. please don’t be mad. it’s me, it’s not you, i swear.
the truth is, i was even avoiding my tumblr dashboard. i missed out on all those sweet, useless single-serving treats of photographic delight because really, it stressed me out. i...
February 2010
1 post
i'm also apparently awful at blogging...
be back soon, i promise.
January 2010
16 posts
god i'm so awful at growing up.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-10) →
it's snowing again...
and i had to walk home in it. and it was so nice, although now that i’m cozy, an hour later, i still can shake the red from my nose. but i started making a playlist in my head. these sound like snow. the way it falls, the way it’s soft at first and then wet and cold, or the way it makes you hold on to something (a warm cup of tea, a warm scarf, a warm person) to keep out the cold...
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“es más agradable levanter castillos en el aire que sobre la tierra.”
– edward gibbon.
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“somos, por encima de todo, polvo de estrellas.”
– carl sagan.
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