Watermark

Bell

[I'm on vacation. This was originally posted Wednesday, 25 August 2004]

MP3 File

once I imagined the bell
all the rest came easily
the young man in the burgundy coat
lilies tolling their scent in the garden
pale moon over narrow streets, it all
dreamt itself into tall dark trees
shivering with sparrows and wind

the wind in the shutters
the nervous courtyard
something sacred at the altar
the pale child in her ghost dress
the book with its gossamer gilded pages
its thin black-pebbled cover
this docile child, butterfly wings

the old man bent into his cane
shuffling, shuffling, the pale moon
it all came quite easily, then
the moon walked into the mountains
the stars fell the old man fell
the lilies dropped their thick petals
the young man became a branch

scratching, scratching the window
the shutters opened their louvers the fan
making its ocean sound it all became
lightness and bright stripes on the wall
morning morning and I step into the garden
thick slow beat of pelican wings
into a cloud of pale moths

...in the garden

[I'm on vacation. This was originally posted Sunday, 02 May 2004]

Blue clematis bells; their white tongues.

Woke early, slept, woke, slept -- finally up at 11:00. The angelique tulips are open; lilacs are showing their color. Just now, at mid-day, there's a soft breeze in the garden. I am living in realms of sleep, half-conscious, beneath rustling leaves.

While sitting in the garden with K., a kestral flew in, landed in the dogwood, flew out. After recovering from her shock, K. said, "I suddenly felt like a rodent."

I cut my nails in the garden, L. having told me that ants have some use for the clippings, calcium, perhaps?  I wait and I wait, but the ants don't come.

Alice Notley in The American Poetry Review, May/June 2004: 

I think the poet becomes more and more of a shaman, getting older, in the sense that so much happens to one, and there's nothing left but the poetry function, which is a healing, ecstatic function, as much as it is anything else.

The LifeFlight helicopter flies over, very low, very fast; there is no time to waste.

Cat Dancing

[I'm on vacation. This was originally posted Friday, 11 June 2004]

". . . women who practiced it were labelled as evil witches and burned at the stake along with their cats.Indeed, it seems very likely that it was women swishing their brooms in front of cats in order to excite them to dance so they could join them and attain "higher states and magic cures", that led to the absurd notion of witches riding aloft on broomsticks with their cats."

      From  The History of Feline Dance at Dancing With Cats.

This highly informative site also includes such gems as:

Feline Dance Classes:  Do I need to attend dance classes before I try dancing with my cat?  How do I find a cat dancing class?  What should I look for in a cat dancing tutor?

Pre–Dance Exercises, including the most excellent simple purring technique

Dance Tips from other cat dancers

A Discussion on Music for Cat Dancing

privacy & exposure

[I'm on vacation. This was originally posted Tuesday, 27 January 2004 ~ one of my first posts]

This process of building websites, and doing an online notebook, raises for me issues of privacy and exposure – how much to reveal? What really is the interest of the (unknown) audience? & when may I name names, and when may I not?

Is the reader knowledgeable enough to realize that poetry is fiction, that the poet is only sometimes the speaker, and sometimes not?

Putting it all out for the whole world to see, even if the world is not looking. Does one want the world to look?

Feeling the need to justify, to explain. After so many years of cautious aloofness (or perhaps shyness; it looks different from different vantage points) to set out my inner life on colors that add light instead of diminish it.

& so much an internal life – short on adventure and anecdote. Who but me cares that the falcon was in the garden today; the flicker at the feeder? Filling up my tiny garden with their large bird selves. Or that I am up in the night, needy for sleep, but unable to track it. Listening to my dog chew his bone.

No light in the sky tonight – first quarter moon, they say, but I can't find that, either.

Building a life from pain and small-moon nights; from sparrows and finches and box elder bugs. The things one notices in the day, and in the wide night hours.

Looking for the dark (or the light) that will fold one in.