Adopting Tails

I am waiting, impatiently, to adopt a new dog. It's crazy. I've filled out dog adoption forms. Now the refuge place is checking all my references, calling my vet, seeing if I'm worthy to care for a new dog. They raised their eyebrows when I told them about my seven cats. They wondered if perhaps I had reached my limit.

I began to feel bad. A little nutty. Then I drove out into the country with my 15-year-old dog Stella to see our farmland vet. She was running late. Some dog patient had to have emergency surgery for an enlarged spleen. The size of a basketball! A real Indiana dog! Everything in Indiana has to be related in basketball terms.

So all the dogs and cats and their owners sitting in the waiting room got chatty. The conversation, of course, ran to the dogs, and cats. One person rescues Huskies. One person rescues Rat Terriers. Daughters and sons attend Purdue and study animals! Everyone has cats. Lots of cats. 15 cats. 20 cats. Abandoned cats fill the yards and barns. I felt almost cat poor. We all have our cats spayed or neutered, but there are always more!

Eventually Stella and I make it back to the exam room. Stella has a growth that must be clipped out of her ear. They muzzle her and do it quickly, with no anesthesia, because she's just too old. Driving home I feel better. Not so nutty. Just another animal lover doing her thing.

Today I'm still waiting to see if the animal refuge organization agrees.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Q. Okay. Have you ever been diagnosed with any sexually transmitted diseases?
A. No, I have not, but let me tell you for the record, that I was raped while I was married to my husband. This happened -- it happened at the time that I was -- well, I met one man in particular, but I got raped by three men at the same time and that's what made me decide that I did not want to cheat on my husband anymore.
Q. Did you ever meet with any women that you sought to find via a Craig's List posting?
A. Yes.
Q. Okay. And was the purpose of that meeting to engage in a sexual liaison?
A. In my mind, no, it wasn't. I was curious. Did one ultimately lead to it, yes. I, however, did not do anything immoral. I did not do anything illegal. I did not ever do anything in front of my children. And I've since repented for my sin and I am leading my life as morally as I can possibly be leading it at this time.

An Outtake - Mark Doty

From Still Life With Oysters and Lemon

"...Why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it? A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection; we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for a home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other side is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world."

In Memoriam - Muffy Dog

We said good-bye to our beloved lab Muffy yesterday.

She was a great dog who loved swimming in Lake Superior.

Sometime next summer we'll scatter her ashes on the lake shore.

The 2010 Suggested - Dorianne Laux

Quite by accident, I seem to have fallen into a routine: The almost-weekly glimpse of a female poet. So be it. This week I'm reaching back to 1994 and What We Carry by Dorianne Laux.

Laux is a tender/tough poet, sensual and yet sensible enough to be restrained. Two poems set side by side in What We Carry perhaps will illustrate what I mean.

Enough Music

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive,
and we've talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it's what we don't say
that saves us.


Kaleidoscope

I remember sex before my husband
as a vague, vagrant landscape
of taller, darker men, all thick hair
and hands, the full lips of the rich past.
And sometimes, when I'm taking a sidewalk
full tilt, my heels chipping
the glittering cement, I feel their eyes,
their sweet lost fingers
tugging at my clothes -- the one
who fell behind just to watch me walk,
to see me as a stranger might,
then caught up to catch
a handful of my hair, turn me around,
pull me back into his bodies deep folds.
They all come back, tenacious
as angels, to lean against me
at the movies, the beach -- a shoulder
or a thigh pressed to mine, lashes
black and matted, and always
naked, clean and pure as souls slipped
glistening from the body's warm wick,
like my husband's fingers when he dips
into me, then lifts them
to his face, heavy with glaze, the leaves
crowded against our window, shivering.


Thanks again to Liza for a great poet recommendation!

Starting...Now

Friends, the long haul of winter is upon us. If you live someplace sunny and/or warm, I don't want to know. Someday I will join your ranks. Unfortunately, today is not that day. Today I will build a fire and get back to writing. I might wear fingerless gloves. I will definitely complain.

Tonight is our last night with Jocelyn. Tomorrow we take her back to O'Hare where she'll fly out to California. It's fair to say we're all jealous and proud. We'll see her again during spring break, but over the holidays she applied for 30 different conservation internships for the summer, hoping that something will come through. Her top choice: working with the sled dogs at Denali National Park in Alaska. More than likely we'll have to do the traveling if we want to see her. Jealous and proud.

Tom is back in school again, too. This time next year he should be a college graduate! With the future staring him in the face, Gene helped him polish up his resume over Christmas break. It looks great. He's hoping to work a cruise ship musician gig for his last summer break. We're jealous and proud and are probably real empty nesters starting...Now.

Now is the time, I imagine, to find some words.

2010 Suggested - Kate Greenstreet

Kate Greenstreet's name has been floating around between my brain synapses for awhile, so I added her to the 2010 Suggested. I'm glad I did. She's the sort of author that makes me want to write, the sort of person I'd love to be in poetic conversation with. She speaks a language that is relevant and comprehensible to my ears. Reading her poetry is like hearing half of a conversation that a person is having with herself, and so there is mystery and subtlety and room for the reader to be a part of the dialogue.

I just finished The Last 4 Things. I'm going to read it again, just because. I could open it to any page and find something I would want to share. Although share is an odd, kindergarten word.

Anyway, from p. 51:

What you feel watching someone be lost for a while.
To bear a light for a person on a dark street.
To set one's dog on a stranger.

But
you see,
I am very old.

And there were eyes
in the wall.

I am not
a magnetic. Surely not. For my sight
dispersed.

If we haven't beauty
or wealth
or even goodness to save us...

Be brave but--
say there was a fire.

We should not shamelessly trample
upon one another.
I said, "He's my brother"?

I don't know why I would have said that.

FGWC - At Last

It's been a long time, been a long time, been a long...

Okay. Let's have a workshop, FGWC. Saturday, January 23rd, 2010, 1:00 p.m., at The Chicory Cafe.

Bring words, oral & written.

See you there.

The First of the 2010 Suggested - Liliana Ursu

The books for the 2010 Suggested are starting to arrive and since I have no self control, or sense of order, I have already read one, Angel Riding a Beast by Liliana Ursu. Many thanks to Liza for recommending her! The suggested list is working out well.

I'm not much for explicating a poet's work. I'd rather just present it. However, I will say this: I greatly enjoyed the personalness of Ursu's work in the midst of a larger world view. Apricots, icons, the cosmos, and her own presence seem to be in balance. Nothing overwhelms; everything participates in the picture of the whole. Ursu writes as a poet in exile, and thus her self-ness cannot take control.

And so here is a poem from the book that I greatly enjoyed.

Playing with the Mirror

by Liliana Ursu

I play with the mirror.
I do not set ships on fire, nor your hair,
fluttering free on another continent.
In my small mirror I try to capture
not my face, red after love,
nor the sad eyes of the icon
in my deserted house in Bucharest.

Here, in America,
my mirror reflects only a stranger.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall
who's the fairest of them all?

"The Moon above Agapia monastery"
the mirror replies . . .

One day someone will hold this same mirror
close to my mouth
to see if I'm alive.
From my last breath
the Carapathian mountains will come,
and the sea at Sulina;
my poems of gold will come
and my poems of clay,
and my young mother
giving birth to me
into blinding July light
into the medieval walls of Sibiu,
and I, giving birth to my own son, roses
buried under the snow.

My greedy lips will touch the mirror
as if in a last, earthly kiss,
an exercise of sadness, tragic and comic
in the innocence of the moment of my death.
I will taste apricots on my lips
which only dew from my mother's garden will cool.
I will feel on my lips
the words of my grandmother:
"Do not pick all of the fruit.
Leave some for winter's birds."

A Breugelian landscape rests quietly in my lap
like a spoiled cat,
while the mirror performs its duty,
and the TV set blares on and on
and I hear strange voices
announce from Venus:
"We have managed to make bread."

Someone in the cosmos
holds up a huge mirror
to see if we are alive.

Open-Faced

What wonderful variety

Knife-and-fork good-traveler
Day-old dainty hollowed out
Shallow half island divan

Fill with any Danish blue
Barbecue mosaic plus deviled
French checkerboard build

Every other row dog-ear
Slices lavish ooze tuck under
Crumbled heap peach nest

Each split pitcher crisp
Celery hearts hot with bottled
Cold with thin sweet spears