Spring Cleaning

Max dog wasn't lying. The squirrels are sneaky. Yesterday, they started cleaning out their nest in the hollow of our maple tree. First, they brought down some nuts and buried them in the yard. A while later, one of Max's dog bones came hurtling down to the ground.

Gardening

Kathrine L. Wright is worth keeping an eye on.

Snow Drops

I wasn't hopeful, but they were right where I found them last year in the park, encased in snow.

Downy

This guy was just hanging upside down from the suet for the longest time, not moving, so I went out to check on him. I admit I burned the last suet batch and it hasn't been a favorite, but thus far it hasn't killed anyone. Anway, I thought maybe my cooking had caused avian injury. Whatever it was, he recovered. But he did let me walk right up to him and snap a few pics before he came to his senses and flew away.

Other Eyes

(But there's always work...)

A. He was outside attempting to paint some eyes on a statue for me my children bought me for Mother's Day, and I don't want anything that doesn't have eyes. He put the eyes on her, and when I went out to look at it, it would startle anyone what he drew on her face.
Q. What was it?
A. It was the eyes, they looked maniacal. He didn't see that. "What the hell is wrong with you?" His almost every move troubled me. I followed him with my eyes. I was scared inside my heart. I had to observe him.

Reality

Fantasy

Writers' Group News

Chris is up for a Wednesday night workshop at her house next week, April 2nd, 7-ish. I'll send out the e-mails. The Wednesday group hasn't met in awhile, so it's time, it's time...

Otherwise, we'll meet April 11 & 25 at The Chicory.

We need to settle on a name, like, now. Search your memory banks for whatever we discussed earlier. Come April we need a name!

And now, a brief word from our sponsors:

Woo-Hoo!!!!!

Mike is hogging all the woo-hoos!!! From his blog:

"I was right! Just barely. Baby was born March 22 at 00:00:00 am. Kinda in a daze, will put a picture when I get a chance. Stella Clare, 7 lbs 3 oz. Woo!"

Easter

We had a very nice Easter. We cooked and played and listened to music all day. I didn't read a darn thing, but worked a few Sudoku puzzles instead, took a walk, emptied many gallons of sap from our maple trees. We had the first taste of fresh maple syrup on our pancakes this a.m.

However, earlier this week I did enjoy this poem that arrived in the mail. I hope DDL has luck compiling more of Herbert Scott's work.

The Song the Assassin Sings

The knife is a prayer
the flesh answers.

Kneel, an old woman
planting tulips.
I come to bless you.

The isolation
is so beautiful.

To live outside,
to be an alien
in this skin,

to be perfect
beyond your belief.

If there were some other
god I would know him.

By Herbert Scott

Sleeping Woman, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy Press, 2005.

Tenebrae

(Very much a work in progress, more thought than poem, I think - obviously, therefore I am...)

One created invisible friends.

One built a house in a tree.

One buried itself inside another,
then asked the other to leave.

For God so loved the world.

Each according to their needs.

Who created whom?

God wept

or was that me?

A Guide

You'll need to click on the picture in order to be illuminated. Thanks to my cousin Jennifer for this. I believe I have found a good example of a nidus. If I slapped the title Nidus on this baby and gave the definition I think I'd have a pretty decent poem. Oh, the possibilities. Let's sit back and be nostalgic for the fifties again. Wouldn't that be fun?

Words

Found a cool word today in my court transcript work:

From Hyperdictionary.com

Nidus - a nest in which spiders or insects deposit their eggs.

- a central point or locus of an infection in an organism; "the focus of infection."

Synonyms - Focus

See Also -focal infection, hornet's nest, nest, point, wasp's nest.


Unfortunately, I have no place to use it today, but I'm sure eventually it will come in handy. I still remember the day I learned hubris. I was so pleased.

Theorizing Again

I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale for Sally's class, which I absolutely hate, but I am enjoying the theory. Yes, yes, I know. You absolutely love the book. How could I even think such an absurb thing? I don't know. I've been known to hold stranger opinions. Anyway, some theory to contemplate, argue with, whatever.

"We do not yet have a moral theology that teaches us the aweful, awesome truth that we have the power through acts of love or lovelessness literally to create one another."

"Perception is the foundation to conception. Ideas are dependent on our sensuality. Feeling is the basic bodily ingredient that mediates our connectedness to the world. All power, including intellectual power, is rooted in feeling. If feeling is damaged or cut off, our power to imagine the world and act into it is destroyed and our rationality impaired. But it is not merely the power to conceive the world that is lost. Our power to value the world gives way as well."

Beverly Wildung Harrison in "The Power of Anger in the Work of Love."

Writers' Meeting

Heads up, folks. There's another writers' meeting this Friday, March 21, at 4:00 at The Chicory.

Random Thoughts

There is very little difference between living in Indiana in the winter and having the flu, which is probably why I wasn't totally sure I had another flu bug until today.

It's possible I could alleviate many problems by moving to Arizona. The flu will definitely have a nicer character in Arizona, I'm sure of it.

I'm going to write my paper for Women & Spirituality on lunacy.

If no one accepted your amazing work this week, you're in good company (or bad company, depending on your outlook). "Thanks for letting us see this; sorry to say it is not something we can use, but do wish you the best of luck with it elsewhere." I'm sure.

Just when I was thinking of cancelling my subscription to the Elkhart newspaper, which piles up all around the house without even taking off its little blue plastic cover, the Finlander decides to read it and sees his old childhood buddy is sitting in the county jail for paying someone to beat up the deputy prosecutor and a witness against him in his criminal confinement case. Can you believe they took away his bail bondsman license because of that? Go figure.

High Notes

The work week ended with a final Woo-Hoo for Talia, who has three poems coming out in 27 rue de flerures! Congrats!

Indiana, Spring

(Thanks to Andy for the stolen lines.)

(For Andy & Paul)

There is something about this air
heavy with loam and our nascence

scraping a bedroom window
a skinny row of pines leaning

over a barbed wire fence and the bull
brooding on the far side of the pasture

we had been warned and dared
each other to jump

beyond I promise I won't
do it again.

Run! Run!

Meandering

I've made it my goal to wander more this week. Here's someone I meandered into as I was looking around: Potlicker.

Tua Pulchra Puella

Coming soon at The Salt River Review.

Woo-Hoo III

It appears that Chad wrote his fine article on DDL and the band of thriving writers a week too soon! Today must be golden. There's another woo-hoo. Ryan has four poems coming out in Merge!

When I Came Home

(After Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt)

My father was wearing a backpack
made of stone. Lichen and moss
clung to its sides that left trails on
the carpet as he wobbled across the
room. I don’t like to speak ill
of the dead, but they’re messy and
rather cold. We talked awhile about
the afterlife and what a fucking
nightmare it is being entombed. I
couldn’t remember what he liked to
eat, so I fixed him a grilled cheese
sandwich out of provolone. After he
was gone I remembered he liked eggs
fried inside buttered bread and I had
forgotten to tell him that his namesake
had a reddish beard and was brewing
his first batch of beer.

**

Poem Version of the Fiction Prose

Drier's

Woo-Hoo II

Jeez, Mike's been accepted by Iowa! He says we shouldn't spaz yet, but we have to. Of course, we can't let him go....

Woo-Hoo

Rachel's going to be published in Prick of the Spindle! Congrats and Woo-hoo!

Events

Check out the sidebar on the left for some good events coming up. We're definitely drinking beer at The Hearth this coming Wednesday (thanks Kelcey) and the following week on Thursday there's another Open Mic (thanks Eric) opportunity at IUSB. Plus all the other good stuff. Whatever suits your fancy/schedule...

Next to Godliness

Q. Are you able to take showers and baths by yourself?
A. I can't take a shower by myself, I mean, I can go in there, but I won't come clean.

Last Notification

As though Newsweek will never ask
me to subscribe again and I will be left
pitiful and crying on my living room floor
with nothing authoritative to read and
pictures of Hillary and Barack and John
will be absent from my coffee table that
is homemade and already leaning slightly
to one side but still my life will have no
color or substance or direction which will
lead me to substance abuse and neglect
of my children.

We’ve been down this road before.

You know where to find me.
It’s the house behind the chipped blue
mailbox that no one has bothered
to affix a name or number to.

Writers' Meeting!

Friday, March 7, 4:00 p.m. at The Chicory Cafe.

Something Like That

Q. What did she die from?
A. She was assassinated.
Q. Related to your problems?
A. No, no, no, independently.
Q. How did that happen?
A. I don't know.
Q. Well, was she mugged?
A. She was involved with the wrong people or something like that.

My Six-Word Memoir

No, thanks. I've had enough today.

Inherent?

Well, we had a great time in Sally's class today. We rocked. We spent more than half the class discussing Heyward's ideas about sexual mutuality, whether or not it can even exist in heterosexual relationships. Everyone was talking at once. It was great fun. I guess you could say the sexual energy was unbound. Which brings me around to a topic we just barely touched, the idea of where creativity comes from, whether creativity is inherently sexual. Think about that, now. I suppose Audre Lourde might say yes. And I'll repeat this one quote from Heyward, too:

Sexuality is expressed not only between lovers in personal relationship, but also in the work of an artist who loves her painting or her poetry, a father who loves his children, a revolutionary who loves her people.

And in answer to that question a fellow writer asked me, is that class you're taking Women & Spirituality or Women & Sexuality, the answer is yes. And yes, I think a class on Men & Spirituality/Sexuality is warranted, too, and all the natural evolutions thereof.

At Risk of Beloved

(No, not done. I'm working at the rate of about 1 stanza every couple months on this one.)

We tongue new names,
finger frailty, maim
Parnassian wings.

Rags stream behind
my slice of the eye.

A fact field of poppies
is entirely blind.

Good Stuff

And here's Talia, again, dang: BFR.

Winter Commentary

And what I think about winter at this moment: Musical. I think I'm going to ask Chris & Kennedy's Kitchen to perform this little piece.

Thinking About Clover

I'm still brainstorming for Monday. You'll probably have to endure this all weekend long, or better yet, just avoid this blog.

Carter Heyward, whose theory text "Sexuality, Love, and Justice" I'm exploring below, uses these words to describe herself: lesbian feminist Christian priest and teacher. Here's a couple more quotes I think are relevant to what she has to say and sure to generate discussion.

Heterosexism is a social structure pervasive in our culture and worthy only of being undone.

In our present social order, mutual sexual relationships are available largely in same-sex relationships.

The lesbian relationship, as I experience it, may be mutual, and as such may offer a glimpse into a way of being in the world that is as instructive for women and men in relation as for women and women and men and men. To be a lesbian is, for me, a way--the best way for me -- of being a lover.

Oh, it's going to be a fun class! I'm really interested in exploring this mutuality idea, relationships with less emphasis on the power scheme. We haven't really used the poetry book assigned for the class, Claiming the Spirit Within, but I've sifted through it looking for something that might fit the theme. I've come up with this, a poem I love just for its simple, beautiful lines, the way it does what it does:

Every Fact is a Field

by Elizabeth Seydel Morgan

In the language of science, every fact is a field. -- Jacob Bronowski

It is summer on your father's farm,
South Georgia, 1956.
We are teenaged girls.

Our bare legs straddle the bare backs
of palomino quarter horses
who're muzzling and munching clover,
the reins loose on their golden necks.

The clover is blooming, a purple field
sloping away from this knoll
to a dark stand of pines
that hides half the sun.

We're sharing a stolen cigarette,
feeling horsewarmth against our thighs,
the June air cooling on our moist skin.

We talk so long the sky draws up
the clover's color to its own field.

The horses snort, then shift
Your leg touches mine as we watch in silence
the black pines rise,
pulling this land up and over,
taking us backward into night.

Without a word we rein our horses
and turn their heads, mine left, yours right.

The evening is a fact.
I am still here in its field.

(published in Claiming the Spirit Within, ed. Marilyn Sewell, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).