Bittersweet

Can't shut up, poems overflow me.

 

Spare Room

Heather Ross Miller 

Stacks of shoe boxes, the shoes

don’t match the boxes, nor each other.

A sin to keep something you 

don’t wear, my mother’s

clear voice reminds me.

She was a little woman,

and so freshly blonde,

she could have been Nordic.

But she was always cold,

huddling toward a cookstove

or a fireplace, no matter

the season.

 

Shoes, I keep shoes,

my shoes, my children’s,

and now my grandchildren’s.

Filling this spare room

with their skips and hops,

my slowing shuffles

as directly toward death

as my mother’s toward

some spare left over

warmth.

 

We sought to save things,

I think, warming ourselves,

shoeing ourselves, hoping

for a good fit.  O sinner, o,

believer, spare this, spare this.

 

The beautiful game without mercy, you know it.

 

Mercy

Heather Ross Miller 

 

The game you play with no mercy no mercy no mercy.

Bases loaded, batter will bunt, bring some home.

The guy on the mound waits, smells leathery sweat

on the hide, on himself, horse and man, horseman.

His arm a mine field.

The catcher’s glove winks 

like a laser, here here.

 

Somewhere thick trees crash, 

white ash the best, or Canadian maple.

Old horses die, give their bodies to be bound

and stitched.  And when these meet -

in one blinding hit,

in a summer blue sky -

it hurts your eyes.

 

Circulatory, alimentary, 

whatever it takes to nourish

and maintain, blood, food,

person to person, passing

and re-passing, sustaining

the game, 

you play.

Soon legends rise 

and multiply into continents

of imperfect clouds,

promising you a perfect lie,

your perfect prize.

Mercy, mercy.

 

This is mighty loose, I think.

I've always admired the "studied imprecisions" of Bishop when she kind of throws up her hands and goes, "Well, I don't know what it's like, but it's something like this." Hard to do and get right.

 

THE UNIFORM OF A MAN MY AGE

By Franz K. Baskett

Shorts that are too long for me,
The suspect Tommy Bahama shirt
In chiming colors, Sperry Topsiders -
No socks – smart phone, Wayfarers on,
I set out on the Saturday Errands:
Groceries, the laundry, the drive
Down Dickson to the Post Office
Where I see others in variants
Of the uniform of a man my age.
Clever T-shirts and expensive sandals.
Protective coloration. In line,
I notice many logos of a polo player.
Priority mail for this and no, no stamps.
Thanks, Frank.

People expect things of us. Certain things.
Predictable things. That by now we will
Have finally made all the right decisions,
Seen the big picture and bought into
The common vision that everyone
In their right minds has. Everyone.
So, no Neil Young T-shirts or cut-offs,
Excessive adornments, underwear
With clever sayings or the black flags
Of anarchy. Who's to say they're wrong?

The slow drive home. I do that more often
Than I used. Drive slow. Look more. All
These colorful beetles and their grim pilots.
And home. Goods all stowed. The TV -
My companion – automatically turned on.
But out in the garden, I think suddenly
It all has something to do with the box turtle
Stalking around my roses head up, legs out.
Not startled when I pick him up and see
The chewed shell around his tail. It happened
A long time ago. He's fine. Yet I cannot seem
To divert him from his trip across the parking lot;
Something in the grove calling to him.
Handsome in his mottled shell, head high,
Not looking either way.

 

Did your mamas have a whatnot shelf? Place for china shepherds and souvenirs.

 

Whatnot

Heather Ross Miller 

Seams straight down the back,
her teal blue gabardine coat, quick
rub of lipstick, hair-thin blond halo, 
good to go, my mother.
Her world, a great big husband,
a little girl.  Things she could bathe
and kiss and keep, things to cook
and serve on china plates, a life
like a magazine.
But there he was between another
woman's legs.  And there the little girl
fell out of trees, breaking her arm. 
Alarms shrilled, the magazines spilled
off the coffee table, and she got left
with what was real, the wild
faithless charm of it.

Still she dreamed for some noiseless, seamless place,
kitchen nooks and three-piece bedroom suites,
the little girl playing a piano, the man staying
beside, and a whatnot shelf gleaming full
of her sensible trivial joy.

 

Out of our league

by Sally Jo Sorensen

Never mind the kid was freckle- faced         or batted left
beneath close-cropped hair color         of a barn swallow's belly
turning mid-flight in  our mid-June          Midwest prairie air       
never mind the fancy school out East       or syllables  he creased
each time he spoke            or how he slouched a little  more
each time you saw him      walking by the river
with our town's old hag          who'd lately  trimmed her hair.

Don't tell me    you didn't know   
each time you read    his bat describe
a baseball  to the sky   you didn't know
how far   he'd be out of here.

 

Hoping to hit the sonnet one day. Not today.

 

Skip

Heather Ross Miller 

Before she died, my mother broke both her legs
and a hip.  I thought of the day she first saw my son
skip.  He was two, both of them in radiant good health,
a summery moment, grinning all its open faces.
Look, she said, he's learned to skip.  Then added,
I remember when I learned.  Then going forth 
skipping and skipping, my mother, my son,
my son, my mother.  Then her daughter and his sister
joined around around the white sandy yard
while long dry tails of gray Spanish moss
trailed from the short oak trees.
A breeze bloomed up and we wound down,
laughing, to sit on the steps.  My son climbed
into her lap, my daughter hugged me,
and I sat listening to my mother breathe.

 

Ah, skinny bones, skinny bones. Wish I had skinny bones!

 

Ready, Set, Go!

Heather Ross Miller 

Jack rocks, jack stones, skinny bones, tops
and little red rubber balls bounce out of the pockets
of my mind.  Taking a chance.  Pick up.  Point and grab.
I open my hand to find three shiny jacks, three wishes,
three dooms.  In all the histories of game, play, and sport,
three is the chance you get, onetwothree, readysetgo!
I feel well past my play date, knees, ankles, elbows
grinding bone into glass, only a fanatic would continue.
But that's me, I see, an American fanatic,
full of poems and ground glass, bad joints,
a continuous run-on line, and a great thirst
for the free, loving my friends, giving gifts,
and doing as I please.

Here, I saved these for my grandsons, jack rocks
and tops, things to throw and spin, take chances
on life's skinny bones, and race to win.

 

Neat Project: 7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone

I found this on Huffington Post, but it is on the artists' blog as well. Check this out. I don't know that I could do it, but it is fun to think about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-campbell-and-nicole-walker/7-days-7-artists-7-rings_b_666403.html

7 Days 7 Artists 7 Rings

Or see it here:

http://bekandnik.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/11/

7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone

7 Days, 7 Artists, 7 Rings, is a living, responsive work of art created by Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and poet, respectively, alternate kicking off the current week’s collaborative artist project. Painters and poets, photographers and essayists, musicians and story writers will collaborate to create ongoing, live-made art. The responses will come daily, with artists having only twenty-four hours to respond to each others’ work. Click here to learn more about this project, the creators and participating artists.

. . .

A Painter and a Poet Walk into a Bar...

The transformation and institutionalization of the art world over the last few decades, to be sure, is hardly different. Many artists I know, including myself, have awoken hungover on its well-manicured lawn, littered with Murakamis and MFAs, tended and fertilized by the pre-recession boom. There we go, herded from exhibition to exhibition to museum show, onward and upward as we climb the ladder toward art world heaven.

So it is with a particular thrill that I introduce a new kind of exhibition-- a game called "7 Rings", exclusive to the Huffington Post, conjured by painter Rebecca Campbell and poet Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and the poet will create a work of art to begin the game. Each week they'll then invite 5 more artists from a variety of disciplines --writers, artists, musicians, etc.-- to join the conversation by making a work in turn, just as in a game of telephone. Artists will have 24 hours to respond to a previous artist's work or "Ring". Everyday on the arts page, you will see a new work of art branded as 7 rings.

[...]

Lots of fun, kidney stone and baby together.

 

Sharing Room

Heather Ross Miller 

In the crowded county hospital, four months pregnant
and laboring my kidney stone, curtain between me
and a tiny black woman curled in a question mark,
ancient of days. Her two fat and glistening daughters,
like Presences of the Night, command,
Eat, mama, eat!

The curtain between us sprigged with flowers
and leaves breathes with the heat vent
and I catch glimpses of her rich tar baby face.
She grins, winks, the old eyelid
a hood of mischief, eats not a bite.
Soon she hoods both eyes, and
the more they tempt, the more
she snores.

I lie entranced, pat the easy baby
with both my hands, wish the
spiny stone to pass from us,
wish the Presences of the Night
to depart. And when they do, we sleep
like three spirits, tiny woman, baby,
and girl, sharing our dark ticking heart.

 

such a scheming kid, the only way to survive

 

Woman Born

Heather Ross Miller 

I'd rather go with Daddy, get the Hershey Bars
to keep me quiet while he razed the ABC.
Then ride home watching him break open
his bonded booze, chocolate tufting my chin,
the two of us rotten with pure old sin.

If I'd stayed back with her, she'd droop
in her floweredy slip-covered chair,
the one matching the sofa - she sewed
those, you have to know, on her cheap
machine from Sears, needle breaking,
the tension always tight.  But all right now
because she had everything to match.

That seemed to be the catch we never got,
making everything to match, getting not
the same as making.  How they puzzled me,
blurring around like warm syrup on a plate
of pancakes, watching the cold butter
disappear, lifting sweet breakfast to my lips,
swallowing health, knowing it had to come
back out next day, my necessary filth.

 

Trying something funny, to wash away all that bitter angst I wallowed you in.

 

You’ll Never Fuss With a Muckenfuss Truss

Heather Ross Miller 

Everybody knew the slogan spread on
the east side of the old Badin Pharmacy,
its bold yellow paint peeling the bricks,
grimey moss packing the cracks.

So when Pudgy Fry offered us
his tongue-twister in spelling class,
after all the pipers picking pecks of peppers,
all the seashells selling at the seashore,
we had no trouble recognizing it.

Pudgy spat it out okay,
which was a lot for Pudgy,
being squat and double-chinned
and so agonizing shy.  But Miss Thing,
our cute substitute, not quite believing,
made him say it again. And this time he couldn’t,
fumbling all those esses and u’s
and really mucking the muck.
We convulsed and shook
until Pudgy Fry dissolved
into a stack of spelling books.

Years later, wracked with spines
my kidneys would not expel,
I yelled it out to ease my pain,
and took some bodacious comfort
in the luscious fuss and truss
of Pudgy’s old Muckenfuss.
So:  Hear me, Pudgy: 
You’ll never fuss with a Muckenfuss truss! 
You’ll never fuck with a Mussenfuck fuss!

 

You must say Bee-AT-triss, the way she said. Genuine poetry.

 

The Poet at Two

Heather Ross Miller 

Beatrice put a wrinkled black glove
at the foot of the stairs I dared not cross.
It was her hand, you see, surely told
to fly up and hurt me, her skinny fingers
and agile thumb pretending to drowse there,
rich and soft as an old chewed prune.

Afternoons, buried in her shelf of bosoms,
quick dark heartbeats thrilled my ear
as she read each shuffling word, Hickory
Dickory Dock.  And how the mouse ran
up the clock and it struck ONE!
and down he RUN!  While through all
her bountiful flesh, trembling tumbling,
Beatrice summoned black gloves of Africa
to drum and thrum until soothed, I moved
from the small white rooms of myself
and turned loose.

 

I think Jim Harrison and Adam Farmer would recognize each other.

 

Adam Farmer

Heather Ross Miller 

He never knew his cradle name held such portent,
that his mother gave the same as God, oh, by
the sweat of your brow, earn your bread.
And so he did, sweating and earning until
he lay dead in the long ell-house he'd made.
I can recall his sweat one hot day the wasps
tried to sting us at his little country store.
We walked there to get sweet straps
of coconut candy, brown, white, and pink.
Adam Farmer watched us dodge and swat
the hungry angry wasps, then came out
to show us, Children, you want them wawsties
leave you be?  Just get you some sweat
and throw it at'm.  Watch me!

He scooped his old right hand into his deep
left pit, pulled forth to fling at the wasps
his God-given sweat, and they flew,
hating the stink of Adam.  And, and,
to this day the chewy coconut still coasts
pink and awful down my throat.

 

National Poetry Day October 7

OK, this is just a goofy thing, but they say poets are neo-Luddites, and I always like to find things that prove that wrong. I got this note today from a group I've been affiliated with for a while, called Future of the Book (futureofthebook.org/blog is the more interesting start page).

It really only applies to people who play on Twitter (which I do), so if you aren't into Twitter, no worries. My own play in Twitter is on many levels, but there is bleed-over on all of them.

It's the constraint of playing with only 140 characters that appeals to both the poet and the journalistic headline writer in me. During my time at CNN Headline News, for two and a half years, I wrote the 128-character "headline ticker" on the afternoon shift, basically with the job to read everything in the world and generate about 200 headlines a day that rotated in a "wheel"-- while also cycling in and out of breaking news. So, being a perverse type, I also used to entertain myself by writing some headlines in iambic lines, embedding literary allusions or puns, etc.

Through some really rough breaking news days (I worked there from 9/11 through the tsunami), and even on some ordinary days, I came to see any day's tickers as a collaborative "Poem of the Day," and I started saving them as records of historic days, or just various "day-poems." Those of us who worked the ticker had a running contest for non-breaking news days, for the most clever or punny headlines, so I saved those too. It really was all too too much fun to be had as a grown-up, except for days when my dyslexia would reverse sports scores. 

Some folks in Arkansas even noticed when I put Jim Whitehead's obituary on the ticker (obits were common ticker items, so I wasn't doing anything that would get me in trouble). Slugged it "Poet of the Local Man."

Anyway, here's a Twitter thing, for those who want to play!

Subject: A Poem for National Poetry Day

For a few days either side of National Poetry Day, October7th, if:book london’s Director Chris Meade and if:book associate Kati Rynne will be gathering in tweets, emails and posts and shaping them into a very special poem on the theme of home for the digital age.

Entitled HOMEPAGES, the opening line of the poem has been supplied by award winning poet and poet-in-residence, Daljit Nagra.

For those on Twitter, simply use the hashtag #homepages and follow @ifbook.

Daljit’s opening line is:

My sofa wobbled with laughter beneath me

What next? It's up to you!

log on here now and help write a poem for #poetrydayUK http://www.facebook.com/l/4c134j7F2HcZ1WdpZ2ezrOMtyLA;www.ifsoflo.ning.com or tweet us a poetic line about #homepages

My daddy was a bush league pitcher, got hired in textiles and in aluminum just to throw a baseball. Gone are the days.

    

Baseball on the Radio

Heather Ross Miller

Daddy listening, leg slung over the arm of his chair,
cigarette ashing a long gray tube, his hair standing
up in a mop, just washed, smelling like shampoo.
A swing and a miss!  Noise explodes from the radio,
people hollering, booing, and he's cussing and cussing.
I love this Saturday baseball, Daddy smoking and cussing
and drinking bourbon, Mama in the kitchen frying
hamburgers, slicing onions strong enough to kill us.
And me listening, soaking it up on the Olsen Mills
rug we saved our woolly winter rags to send away for.
Now, time out on the mound, and Dizzy Dean praises
the hound dogs he used to know in Lucas, Arkansas,
how they'd run a course in the woods until they had trees
just full of mean old coons, then raise the most joyful noise. 
He declares, That's when I knew there was meat in front
of them dogs, boys!

And that's when I knew I had the holiest family
stuck in a dip-shit town, listening to spiritual baseball
on the radio, listening to cussing, to frying hamburgers,
to slicing strong onions joyfully, all of us glistening
like the sweet precious blood of bourbon!
while 'round about me shone
the glory of the Lord.

    

The flip side of that open door poem.

   

The Busy Dead

Heather Ross Miller

My husband's ghost tears through here every morning,
quarter of seven, on his loud-ass motorcycle, that damn
Honda thing he was so proud of, even though it spun
out from under him, nearly broke his ankle, had him
hobbling for a month.

Sometimes I think he's tearing right up the stairs,
through my room, then down the stairs again, an
avalanche of sass.

This a man who survived Pearl Harbor, never liked
guns, yet rode with fire and power between his legs,
a perfect meld of man and machine.
I mean to get up and stand by the road
like old Delilah in front of older Samson,
tempting all that noise and velocity.  I mean
to make him stop.  I'll say, Do you know
we've got grandsons?  Should be enough.
But then, oh God, I'll miss the distant drone,
the growing roar of a motorcycle delivering
his upstart ghost to my desperate door.

   

I'm only posting this to make you laugh...

Not. Serious. Very silly little free-write that kept wanting to shape itself into stanzas, but this really isn't a poem so much as it is silly word-play that made me giggle. I've been way too embarrassed to post it here for a while now, except that it can be fun to share a goofy laugh now and again. Doggerel Anonymous!

    

Don't Try, Just Say

New poems are coming!
New verbs and nouns, participles
and some rubber nipples,
exploding cigars.

Scorched earth the old poems.
The old terse lucidity. Thick with
humidity, ring around the moon.

New ways to say things,
like blue-green and green-blue,
different and the same.

Same fluidity. Rampant liquidity.
Cash out securities. Piss it
away. Fried. Hide. Just let
the words flow again. Let
magic blow again. Weave
with your pen.

Blog fog. Jog it all loose.
Seize the caboose and
then hitch a quick ride.
Tramp. Scamp. Trickster
and vamp. Poser with cramps.
You know what it is.

A trigger. A town. A man
who goes down, plays you
like a horn, won't stop till
you scream. Mean jeans.
Tight and falling down.
Ass crack popping out.
Is that a tattoo?

Shit. Split. Try to gather
it. Then we can begin.

    

Moscos del Mid-Atlántico

by Alex Christensen

I'd rather have the Big Dipper in front of me
than a bipdigger of friemenies.

Yo muy preferiría el Gran Carro antes de mí
que una brodbingnag de inamigos.

Yo preferiría tener la Osa Mayor delante de mí
que unos moscos del mid-Atlántico.

I'd prefer to have the Great Bear ahead of me
than a case of mid-Atlantic chigger bites.

But perhaps you would not
have this confusion. Listen,
all you jackarels there
will be no boutadoubtit.

  

Does Poetry Matter? - A fun discussion we can take up here too

Link: Does Poetry Matter? - Paper Cuts Blog - NYTimes.com.

Fun discussion on the Paper Cuts blog at the NYTimes. I thought a few excerpts from here might provoke some thought and interesting discussion from our perspective on here.

Chris

Does Poetry Matter?

By GREGORY COWLES

Sometimes the planets align and you start seeing the same idea discussed by different people everywhere you look, as if your brain had stumbled late at night across a niche cable station broadcast by the universe itself. For me lately the show has been all about the relevance of poetry, as in: Is poetry relevant? Even among poets there seems to be a nervous consensus that it’s not.

Writing in the latest issue of Poetry magazine, for example, David Biespiel argues that “American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political and public life.” He suggests, a little hopefully and a little bitingly, that this decline in significance stems from a lack of political involvement. “The poet who engages democratic dialogue and political life is the renegade,” he writes, “while the one who lives on the margins, settles into tenured existence or remains committed to engaging only other like-minded types has aligned himself with something that in its best, purest and most satisfying form is bourgeois comfort.”

Covey inspired me to write a mean little love poem.

  

The Bones of Tennis

Twirling the racket, bounding the court
in smooth soles so as not to mark the asphalt,
you surprise me. I don't like tennis but you
want to play, so we do and I'm no good.
I think about the girls you played with
and wish upon them arthritic knees,
distorted knuckles, every thin bone
of ninety-year-old hapless crones.
Such pictures they sent: strapless,
sunburned hussies I must admit
all natural, no collagen, no silicone.
Still, God, they could play this game
with you all day when what I want
is rest in the shade and wave flies off
the children sleeping on our blanket.

  

Paper Dolls and Other Creatures

by Kathryn Gessner

Fragmented by a rash of deaths both near and far,

I reach beyond the driving rain to the woods beyond

in my mind, a forest walk straight up to the waterfall

where cold air plummets down the ridge.  Though

it is here in my kitchen of memory where I sit,

rummaging among blue metaphors that just don't

do the trick.  I cannot find

the snapshot I want,

Prefontaine in his summer shorts in my backyard.

Once I slipped into the gym, photographed all the boys

in their shorts playing basketball, serious tones

and competition fierce, a healing exercise for one

lone broken heart.  I cannot find those photos.

Maybe Kelly still has them in Michigan.

Maybe they were left in Springfield, Missouri.

Maybe my mother sent them to the garbage collector

in Pennsylvania when she sold the house.

Could be those snapshots decompose in a New Jersey landfill.

A storied life path, all too short, brings me here.

I listen to coal mining songs on the radio.

Interpersonal like the exchange of outfits

in my paper doll collection, pressing the stickers

down on the mannequins flat on the dining room table.

I am using the last couple of skirts

pasting them on the models

trying to remember

what did we ever talk about

then?

 

South Seas

One game I keep playing,
half a ledger short
on my side, in the red--

on his side, a house,
leather furniture, some kitchen knives,
karma--

I don't want the stuff back.
I want sex on the beach
with a mystery man

an even keel
a water boatman
one good dream
on the Chesapeake--

I get, one night,
mosquito netting beneath
the full moon in Sihanoukville

when the costs on her side
escalated--

a fourteen year-old girl
chased down the dark beach
by a mob of teenage boys
who left their footprints
right there in the sand
before me,
the surf still washing in.

~Kathryn Gessner

I told you games are creepy, but dolls are creepier. I don't have a granddaughter, but a friend who does, told me this jarring little tale.

 

Let's Play

Heather Ross Miller

Let’s play dirty Barbies,
she says. I’m the grandmom.
What am I supposed to say?
She's an absolute five,
and I a not guilty sixty.
Dirty Barbies? I ask.
Yes, she sucks at her little teeth,
and for a minute I think her teeth
are filed to points. Here!
She piles my lap with naked legs,
arms, and alarming pudenda.
Now, she commands, play
dirty Barbies!
I pick up an arm, its hand
has alizarin nails. I try for a torso,
fit in a shoulder, a thigh.
No, no, she sighs, grabs a blond, then
a redhead, and slams them
like cymbals by their hair.
Play this way! And she throws
a doll to each corner, picks up
two naked more and slams them.
Then she signals silence,
and we wait, our lips under arrest,
until I ask, What are we waiting for?
For Ken, she grins.

 

Students ....

I put this up so I can tell a funny story on Heather ...

 

SPORTS

by Franz K. Baskett

When I was young,

Moved by strange desires and female opinion

I went out for football in the killing August day.

Three seasons passsed and my knees

Broke down three different times.

I've always thought that that was dedication

And scars are the best medals.

God, how the girls would squeal!

But the days that a young man puts on

His figured helm and goes to brave strokes

In the field are limited and pass by.

 

I think this is much better:

Standing this way on the first tee,

Cleaning my spikes with a little pick-like tool

My wife gave me and posing with my driver,

Tall and straight, my gentled friends about me.

Soon we'll see each other's mettle

Among these modulate golds and greens,

Each knowing the trick

Here on this bare park course

Is to avoid, at any cost, the young rage.

Swing.

 

    Heather's was the last workshop I ever attended as a student. I had never heard of her, but she had these really strong books and this really asymmetrical  haircut, so I signed up. I was pretty convinced by the time that I didn't really need a lot more schoolin' and I put one of my best on the first worksheet to kinda set the tone. Maybe she'd just say, "You're good to go," and give me an 'A' and I could spend that time working on my golf game at Razorback Park. So we meet and start going around the room and we get to me and I read. I finish and Heather sort of sinks down toward the table with this look of mock concern over her face and says - voice dripping with sarcasm - "How the mighty have fallen."  I blushed to my roots. And then she proceeded to give some very good advice about it and this went froth from me and prospered. It was my first serious publication. Rather like an elder daughter who makes a good marriage. I had to go to all the classes, though, and Heather adamantly refused to take me as seriously as I took myself. Are you as clever with your tattooed students these days, Heather?

Games, cards, saying the sooth, good fortunes for all!

 

Ante Up

Heather Ross Miller

The game is alive and throws
its cards to mock me, dare me,
playing nothing fair.

This hermit's game,
alone and lonely,
stages a sequence,
stages a win,
wipes me out.

I raised my family,
fed them wild cards
and nerve and going for broke,
until I thought us
powerful players.

Now I’ve come to the last move,
I see my children, my husband,
were honest tokens
lost or taken for sport,
and I must chance
a long shot
to win them back.

 

Board/card games always seem a bit creepy to me...

... arising from our common need for fortune-telling. I play and play, still hoping for the lucky card, the winning move. Here are two game poems (below and here).

 

Jumangi

Heather Ross Miller

Paddling through my house
over clear water deep enough
to float a canoe, I’m caught
in a game in a dream with
jungle drums and birds.
Windows lift open, so
if the water rises, I’ll drift
on out. But the sun lifts
instead, so I slide under
moss layered thin
and pale as gauze.
Fiery fish festoon
the stairs while parrots
laugh and out in the hall,
a blue heron jabs his beak
to bring up my shoe.
The canoe and I are
silent and naked enough
to glide and slide
and soothe my house
until it never wakes
and the water laps
and laps and laps -

 

What we've been talking about...

There's a fun site called Wordle that lets you put in Feed URLs (or paste documents, or Delicious usernames) and it will generate an image based on word-use frequency. Since our tag cloud isn't working the way I want it to (give me time, give me time!), I thought I'd generate an image from THIS site feed, from a moment in time, today, to make a found poem of sorts out of all the stuff we've been posting! 

Feel free to go to Wordle and play with it. It's a lot of fun. Click on the image below to enlarge for easier reading.