Umbrella Manifesto

They do not realize

that we are really spiders.

Even when they see our webs


with something trapped in them


or our delicate legs


or even our egg clusters.


No matter how sophisticated we appear


lush and romantic


evocative and fragile


or stately and dramatic


our hearts are savage steel springs!


Robert Frost glimpsed the truth of us.


We lurk in unexpected places


in vast throngs.


Some day we'll make our move...


in rain


in sun


by sea


by air!


We have allies.


We are masters of disguise.


We are both great


and small.


We are legion


and our day is dawning!


Image credits:
we are really spiders by Nea Smyrni; our webs by GrimaPP; something trapped by san san; delicate legs by Neke Moor; egg clusters by Nancy Horowitz; sophisticated by Adam Lambert-Gorwyn; lush and romantic by Sabrina Olivetti; evocative and fragile by Renee Russell; stately and dramatic by Jade Colley; steel springs by Celal Teber; glimpsed the truth by Felix Starcea; unexpected places by Jake Levin; vast throngs by Charles Wilson; make our move by Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo; in sun by Cecile Geng; in rain by Rodolfo Clix; by sea by Rodolfo Clix; by air by Lucretious; allies by Emre Nacigil; disguise by Karunakar Rayker; great by Ana Schaeffer; small by foxumon; legion by Rita Mezzela; dawning by Cat Norris

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Foremother poet: Winifred Welles 1893 – 1939

Written for the "Foremother poet" series on the Women's Poetry listserv: all poems here are by Winifred Welles.

Climb

My shoes fall on the house-top that is so far beneath me.
I have hung my hat forever on the sharp church spire,
Now what shall seem the hill but a moment of surmounting,
The height but a place to dream of something higher!

Wings? Oh not for me, I need no other pinions
Than the beating of my heart within my breast;
Wings are for the dreamer with a bird-like longing,
Whose dreams come home at eventide to nest.

The timid folk beseech me, the wise ones warn me,
They say that I shall never grow to stand so high;
But I climb among the hills of cloud and follow vanished lightning,
I shall stand knee-deep in thunder with my head against the sky.

Tiptoe, at last, upon a pinnacle of sunset,
I shall greet the death-like evening with laughter from afar,
Nor tremble in the darkness nor shun the windy midnight,
For by evening I shall be a star.

From her first book, _The Hesitant Heart_ (1919): the phrase “knee-deep in thunder” was the title of a novel by Sheila Moon, what we would now call a YA novel, which I read when I was very young and which is the thread that led me eventually to Welles.

I can find very little biographical information about Winifred Welles. Her last book, _The Shape of Memory_ (1944), published posthumously, includes both a foreword by William Benet and an introduction by friend and fellow poet Louise Townsend Nicholl. From these, we learn that Welles was born in Norwich Town, Connecticut; throughout her life, her poetry would reflect New England country or small-town life and landscapes. She married Harold Shearer (I can't find the year) and lived with him until his death about a year before hers; she continued to use her birth name, at least in her writing. No children are mentioned.

Among other things, Welles wrote part of a novel about Emily Dickinson, which was finished after her death by Laura Benet and was published under the title _Come Slowly, Eden_. She was a friend of Kenneth Slade Alling and she and her husband shared a house with Elinor Wylie. Welles' life must have been permeated with poetry at almost every turn.

Four People Reading

This is a quiet, beautiful event,
Four people reading poetry together,
Two men, two women, each in turn intent
On one old volume bound in sober leather;
Fixed in one trance four minds all different,
Like various landscapes in one lovely weather.

Not with stern drumbeats in one rhythm bound,
On some incredible, brave march proceeding,
Nor in a dance, carefree, with scarves enwound,
Could they seem closer, happier, more unheeding,
Than in the spell of this one poem's sound,
Spoken by their four voices gravely reading.

From her fourth book, _Blossoming Antlers_(1933). Nicholl states that the poem being read on this occasion was “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

Welles wrote extensively about nature, but some of her most interesting poetry takes the form of character sketches. Her fifth book, _A Spectacle for Scholars_(1935), consists of four longish narratives, each about a different person; _The Shape of Memory_ has an entire section made up of character poems:

Mrs. Peabody on the Hilltop

The white road had one shady place, pine-wooded.
Drawn up beneath that scented, glinting green,
The carriage waited and the coachman nodded.
The horses' haunches glistened with a sheen
As glossy as black cherries; heads together,
They drooped, or drowsed, or snorted softly to each other.

Meanwhile old Mrs. Peabody would be going--
Her black silk rustling and agleam with jet--
Up on the hill where wind was always blowing.
Her bonnet snugly tied, its grim aigrette
Prodded the cloud, indignant and impressive.
Slowly she climbed and breathed, calm, purposeful, and massive.

High on the path, where the blown weeds were bending,
She faced dim-veiled valley, hill on hill
In far blue-folded distance never-ending.
She stood alone in solitude, so still
She might have been abashed by beauty, dreaming--
Instead she gathered strength before she started screaming.

Old Mrs. Peabody for some strong hunger
Served as uneasy prison. Never assuaged,
She knew some violence paced in her, some anger
Swung its striped head and glared, too closely caged.
It watched, she guarded. Even at night it fastened
Its molten eyes upon her. Even in sleep she listened.

So to the hilltop, when she felt the lashing
Of the gaunt, primal tail too harsh to bear.
So she would scream, and screaming found refreshing.
And none came through the field to know or care
That Mrs. Peabody was exercising
Her private wildcat, though they made a pair
That almost anyone would find surprising.

Welles challenged conventional morality in this poem and others: “The Love-Child” and “Miss Fitch's Husband”, both also from _The Shape of Memory_, describe respectively a woman who is cast out by her town for the sin of being born out of wedlock, and a married woman who nonetheless lives alone-- “reclaimed/Virginity, stout and intact”-- though her husband regularly comes to visit her. The last poem in _Blossoming Antlers_, “Miss Calkins and the Centaur”, tells of a woman picking blackberries, who is attacked by a centaur and kills it with garden shears.

(excerpt)

Far off, in that high, lonesome place,
Miss Calkins walked along unhurt,
Put on her hat, and wiped her face,
And frowned to see her darkened skirt.
.
.
.
She knelt and drank. She scoured her stains
With sand as fine and clear as glass.
She scraped her shears on those gold grains,
And dried them on the tender grass.

So calmed and cooled, she homeward strolled,
And through the town at forenoon went,
And many met but nothing told,
Being both proud and reticent.
.
.
.
Miss Calkins kept her secret well--
Stately, discreet, fastidious,
She never felt her hour in Hell
A subject that she need discuss.

Only her shelves were not the same.
Where jellies glistened, glassed and clear,
With apple-gold and currant-flame
No somber blackberry gleamed that year.

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Soul Athletes

Strength, yes, the sweet pain of muscles
laboring willing under a load at near capacity
or the ease of gazelle-fleet sprinters
burning blood to deoxygenated darkness—

how do you get there? Practice.
Every day take up the beads and kneel,
sweat, dance to the music of the Name,
wrestle yourself into exhaustion.

An oak-beamed soul bears up mountains,
grows hummingbird-quick in perception
and response, swims leagues over rough oceans,
climbs airless Himalayas on the Moon

after years of daily exercise, grown to the stature
of the mad soul athletes we call saints.

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Traces

I know the passage of my Beloved
by the widening vee of ripples
in the apparent surface of things; the ones that
wrinkle the reflections out of shape
but don't touch the shadows (shadows have depth);
the ones that splash against the rip-rap walls
of solid consciousness with meaningful whispers.

On the distant ocean the tide is rising. River,
waked by an unseen boat, you backflow
ever so slightly in response to the moon. And I
walking safely above the high-water mark
find my feet wet to the ankles.

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Troublemakers

3 Word Wednesday: Opportunity. Quarrel. Service.

they stir up quarrels
making opportunities
to be of service

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Windowsill Rescue

Rainy light, grey-green as underwater,
fading into evening laced with flares of
sodium in streetlights. Something brought her
to the window. Laying down the cares of
family life, economies and juggling
needs against desires, she raised the curtain,
thinking she had heard a sound—of struggling—
or imagined it? She wasn't certain.

Clinging to the ornamental shutter
was a sparrow hatched from spring's first nesting
too soon launched and drowning in the gutter.
"Poor thing, did you think you were a swan?"
She brought the bird in, dried it, left it resting.
When she looked again the bird had gone.

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Faulknerian Specimens

A Wordle prompt from Read Write Poem: leaking, hardscrabble, lunacy, veins, specimens, backward, nascent, impossible, wicked, cadence, crystalline, piggybanks

Streams bubble with toxins leached from mining tips
where there are no fish. The waterscape struggles to recover,
settling in ponds impounded by savage hairless beavers
who roam the banks kicking over leghold traps.

Crystalline lunacy leaks from the veins of Faulknerian specimens,
hardscrabble farmers trapped in impossible circumstances
in backward counties where the wicked cadences
of shaken empty piggybanks spell nascent starvation.

Chestnut forests used to flow over the piedmont but they are gone
blighted and blown like coal dust by harsh winds and swallowed
by the uncaring sea. Disintegrated ecosystem.

Still caught in webs of corporate denial, cover-up and spin,
lives farmed and mined on the steep slopes and deep hollows
of landscapes breeding new harsh resistance.

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Movies I liked better than the books they were based on

It's going to be a short list. Generally I like books as a medium more than movies, and the history of movie adaptations has been... spotty, to say the least. But there are a few, and I thought it would be worth looking at why they were successful (for me).

Joy Luck Club
Interview with the Vampire
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Coraline

OK, from the top: The movie version of Joy Luck Club had a very powerful emotional impact on me. Oddly enough it wasn't any of the individual women's stories that did it, but the framing sequence of the big multi-family party that turns out to be a going-away party for one of the daughters who's about to go back to China to meet her long-lost half-sisters. I grew up with parties like that among my grandparents and their friends from China. That community is gone now: most of my grandparents' contemporaries have gone back to the Wheel and the kids and grandkids mostly moved away. Joy Luck Club brought that back for me.

The book didn't do it, largely I think because that framing sequence was absent-- or not as well developed? I don't really remember the book very well. But I also think the movie was better assembled in terms of connecting the women's stories together and especially the mothers to their daughters. The novel came across as being a series of unconnected vignettes.

Interview with the Vampire-- it's hard to regard that book now without being influenced by everything that resulted from it: the rest of the series, Anne Rice's meteoric career, the whole vampire resurgence of the 90s that has since devolved into romance/fantasy crossover. (Twilight, bleah.) I was intrigued by Interview when it first came out, because it really was a fresh look at a classic horror element we thought was long played out, and it deserves to be remembered for that. But I found the literary device of the novel-length flashback... just irritating: putting up with quotes and nested quotes and constant little vignettes of the interaction between the boy (Daniel) and the vampire (Louis).

The movie got rid of most of that, which I thought was a good move. And, while I'm not a Tom Cruise fan generally, I have to say his Lestat was a terrific acting job.

Frankenstein and Dracula both of course have a long, long history of being adapted for movies. Most of the early films based on these classic novels had little or nothing to do with the books, and while some were classics in their own rights, I'm referring here to the early 90s versions (1992 for Dracula, 1994 for Frankenstein).

To say that Bram Stoker's Dracula was better than the book it was based on is definitely damning with faint praise. Dracula is, by modern standards, tedious and annoying. Stoker's attitudes about women, foreigners and members of the lower classes are downright offensive, and the plot is weirdly inconsistent. Many of these flaws were highlighted in a novel called The Dracula Tape, by the late great Fred Saberhagen. It retold Bram Stoker's novel from Dracula's point of view, and was a brilliant and funny deconstruction of Stoker's Victorian moralisms and other flaws as a writer. Pick it up if you get a chance, used paperbacks show up every now and then.

Saberhagen also wrote the screenplay for Dracula. The movie screenplay stuck closer to the spirit of the novel, but captured a good deal of Saberhagen's critique: I especially like his treatment of the vampire hunter Van Helsing, played to creepy, sadistic perfection by Anthony Hopkins. Gary Oldman's screen presence, never less than intense, is riveting in the title role. It really makes you wonder what Mina (Winona Ryder) sees in Jonathan Harker (played by Keanu Reeves, as a dead fish).

Frankenstein may be one of the most misunderstood novels in English literature. You've probably heard that it's an anti-Prometheus story, a cautionary tale about "things Man wasn't meant to know". It's nothing of the sort. Fundamentally, Frankenstein is about a father who abandons his child, with tragic results.

Kenneth Branagh, who directed and starred in the 1994 movie, seems to be the only director who's gotten this right. Robert De Niro plays the monster-- at the very end, he weeps over Frankenstein's body. The captain asks "Who are you?" "He never gave me a name", says De Niro. "He was my father. He never gave me a name."

Interestingly enough, the press releases for Bram Stoker's Dracula referred to it by its full title. The press releases for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (yes, that is the movie's correct name) referred to it as... Frankenstein.

So, as to why I liked the movie better-- well, when all's said and done, Frankenstein is just not of my time. It's much better written than, say, the original Dracula-- but to my reading it seems slow and overly philosophical, and some of the 19th-century attitudes and mores just don't make sense to someone raised in the latter 20th. While the movie wasn't a "modernization", it also wasn't particularly "period" in the dialogue and the way emotions were expressed, so it's much more accessible. Also, some of the additions to the plot increased dramatic interest and made the movie a better ride for my money.

After the movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe came out, I went back and re-read the whole Narnia series. (Well, most of it. I could not get through The Horse and his Boy-- I had forgotten that book was so racist. Talk about Orientalism.)

You know what? C. S. Lewis was a lousy writer. He condescended to his young audience; his characters were some of the most wooden and unplayful kids I have ever read; his preaching was unsubtle and got more obtrusive as the books went on.

And yet. There's still good stuff in there. Silver Chair is mysterious and terrifying, and what I like most about it is that the characters repeatedly fail-- and then get right back up and back on track. Prince Caspian (I didn't see that movie, BTW) remains memorable for one image: the river god rising from the water to say "Unloose my chains!" Dawn Treader is fatally weakened by continual divine intervention, but the descriptions of the fantastic sights of the eastern ocean are some of Lewis' best writing in the series.

The movie of LWW did a good job of pulling the powerful essence of the story out from under Lewis' flaws as a writer. They stuck quite faithfully to the events of the book, but completely rewrote the kids' dialogues (a vast improvement). The characters, especially Edmund, were much better developed, and generally the writers seemed more sensitive to the demands of dramatic narrative. One small, but typical, point: in the book, the children are told that Aslan is really a lion long before they meet him, which destroys most of the impact of the meeting. The movie writers didn't make that mistake.

I didn't care that much for Coraline when I first read it, and this is speaking as a Neil Gaiman fan in general. It was a nice creepy little story, but the characters just weren't fleshed out enough for me to connect with. Gaiman's kids' books have tended toward a very detached style of storytelling, visible in Mr. Punch, The Day I Traded My Father for Two Goldfish, and The Wolves in the Walls. It works OK in these shorter books, which also rely heavily on Dave McKean's artwork, but in Coraline I really felt that it fell flat.

The movie featured some of the best facial animation I've ever seen. The range and subtlety of emotions featured by Coraline Jones and the other characters was outstanding, and succeeded in bringing the characters completely to life. There seems to be a fair amount of additional material, none of which detracted and some of which I think helped the story a lot. As an adaptation, Coraline was a definite win.

Just for completeness' sake, and because it's recent, I'll say I thought Watchmen was the best comic book adaptation I've ever seen and probably the best movie that could possibly have been made from the original. I still like the original better, but the Watchmen crew did the best we could have asked for.

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Siege

A gaunt bullhide-covered tower rolls
slowly toward the walls of the doomed town.
Arrows skip harmless from its flanks.

A column of armed men snakes behind
the siege engine. Their nostrils fill
with the smell of blood and dust and smoke.

There's a break in the gatepost. The defenders
have riveted bails to it, but they know
it won't hold against the next blow of the ram.

It's desperation time. Men with pikes
and women with cleavers wait inside the gate.
Children finger sling-stones.

At the edge of the field the wolves and ravens
play tag to pass the time. Soon enough
they'll be left in sole possession of the field.

--for Poefusion

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Flat Champagne

The party's come down to
some warm flat champagne.
Did you come around to
the party? Come down to
familiar ground, to
the too-well-known pain
of parties come down to
some warm flat champagne.

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Swallow Feather

Once, in rainy autumn weather
when I prayed in sad prostration,
at my window fell a feather
like a postcard from Creation.
Gleaming blue with iridescence,
pointer to a deep connection
with some long-forgotten lessons,
signpost of a strange direction.

Now I am a summer swallow
in the sky. I wing in soundless
depths of blue above the boundless
seas. A feathered spirit, flying
since the day, when I lay dying,
God passed by and called me: Follow.

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I Come when I'm Called

Original image by Hans Thoursie

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SpicyNodes: Anatomical Carnival

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SpicyNodes: The Curve of the Year

Can't quit playing! I really like this way of presenting a villanelle, but it only works if you have little or no variation in the repetends.

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SpicyNodes: Operculum, Up

This is the most awesome toy. You can explore it at SpicyNodes

For comparison here's the linear version of Operculum.

It's still in beta and there are some things I don't like about it. The editing interface leaves things to be desired, and it's not really set up to represent a poem as a network which is what I wanted to do-- you'll see if you follow from "Pushed aside" to "The soul crawls" that in between there's an ugly piece of link code which you shouldn't have to see. Also, you have to click on a node to expand the text under it, which isn't obvious-- otherwise, I'd have to put all the text into the description.

Oh, and you have to dink with the heights and widths to get it to be manageable on Blogger.

But it's a fun presentation and it definitely challenges me to think about poetry in a different way.

Below is a nodemap version of Up:



It has the same linking problem, but the modular nature of a ghazal lends itself to the presentation.

Not good for really long poems, highly structured poems, or conventional narrative poems.

The one I really wanted to get to work was Anatomical Carnival, but that had just too much network in it.

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Indulge Me

3 Word Wednesday: Deceit. Indulge. Oath.

Indulge me. I am
not deceitful, on my oath:
I just exaggerate.

NB: Violates many of the understood conventions around haiku.

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Up

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Ayub 38:4 King James translation

Where were you when the fires rose up?
Where is the image before it shows up?

Seeds are deep-buried, far from the light,
somehow the shoot germinates and knows up.

Where did the sundial's shadow disappear to?
Clocks wind down and a child grows up.

Tell me if you know the final answers
why stones fall and water never flows up.

Where has yesterday's caravan gone,
footprints hidden by the dust that blows up?

Shopkeepers shut their doors and windows
sun's going down and it's time to close up.

I am dust and a shadow walking
call me, Lord, as my spirit goes up.

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Glory Tongue

Language is a shining universal
tool, the only one that we can lift
with minds alone. It's God's most precious gift
to humankind. Like thistledown dispersal,
ideas spread, to seed the common good
and faithful tongues cry praise upon their Master.
News of need in some far-off disaster
runs like wildfire in a burning wood.

Against deceptive talk and evil slanders,
weigh a loving word, an honest praise
for work well done. A liar only squanders
treasure that's his birthright. Fill your days
with upright speech, with holy stories sung
in language that God gave, the glory tongue.

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Not from Here

I am not from here--
neither are you. We blew in on a spring breeze.
We were washed from the deep places
by an unexpected flood.
God sowed a handful of stars across the earth
and waited to see what would sprout.

When you looked up and thought
you recognized something in the clouds
it was because you're not from here.

When I saw a fish break water and I burst into tears
it was because I'm not from here.

Drunk at the edge of the sidewalk, reeling
from doorstep to doorstep, blinded
by the light of the sky, we're not from here

and we have to learn the language of the rocks and trees,
learn to read the writing on human faces
and the tides of human blood
the churning rhythms of our birth,
are just things we picked up on the way out,
on the way here.

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Fisherman's Wife

3 Word Wednesday: Allure. Perch. Vivid.

vivid-feathered lures
perch on dusty garage shelves
she doesn't go in

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The Frog Prince's Daughter

How dare you impugn
my singularity. I am a changeling
spawned from a green briny pool, and there is
none like me.

The crisis became acute
in a hotel room. My mother dived
from the balcony, with a jubilant splash
of sticky white

her legs entwined with
my father's, at inhuman angles
and his little gold coronet tumbled into
the deep end.

His fairy-tale kingdom
is no concern of mine, nor her
day job at an investment banking firm.
I dive my own depths.

--words courtesy of Read Write Poem
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Blue Roses

Blue roses lean on garden walls
in some imagined neighborhood
where winter's shadow never falls.

But would I live there if I could,
among the crystal nightingales
where winter's shadow never falls

and I must turn to traveler's tales
to feel the touch of cold and frost
among the crystal nightingales?

Would I not find some hidden cost,
would I not search for changing sky
to feel the touch of cold and frost?

If endless summer trembled high
above the blue and scented air,
would I not search for changing sky?

So I don't think you'll find me where
blue roses lean on garden walls
above the blue and scented air,
where winter's shadow never falls.

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Botticelli's The Birth of Venus

It wasn't really like that, was it?
The ocean groaned and heaved in tidal suck and shove
while you floundered blind toward your first breath
and wailed when the cold air struck you.
Your mother rocked you in her arms--
once, too briefly--
then tucked you sleeping in a giant shell
and abandoned you on the doorstep of the land.

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Spice Shelf

Original image by Richard Sweet
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Spice Bazaar

The spice bazaar is redolent of places
far away, of hazy desert spaces
echoing muezzin's voices saying
"Allahu akbar!", and donkeys braying
as they're strapped into the cargo-traces.

Travelers with seamed and canny faces
share sweet coffee and formal embraces
while they price the goods that they're conveying
to the spice bazaar.

But I'm not in a land of camel-races.
Samarkand's not in these Safeway cases
gleaming in flourescent light. I'm weighing
out an ounce of cinnamon. My straying
odor-fed imagination graces
the spice bazaar.

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Frissons

Halfway through the puzzle
the picture begins to emerge.
It doesn't look like the box cover.

A cough interrupts the perpetual
throb of the generators,
the lights flicker and dim.

They drag the river in grim silence
seeking a submerged corpse. What comes
up in their nets is not human.

--for Poefusion

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Beach Reverie

Drab sand kissed by the cold Pacific,
studded with black basalt outcrops framed by surf
you're not the raw-silk coral beaches
I remember from the Indian blue velvet Ocean

and the lodgepole bent to the south wind
doesn't recall the whispering transparent shade of coconuts
nor do tarry tangles of bull-kelp holdfasts
bring back delicate and poisonous scribbled cone shells

even the salt of this sea is diluted by runoff
and can't match the fierce eye-burn of remembered salinity
bouyant with gemlike fish embedded
one thing remains unending roar and whisper: Come home.

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Two-Needle Blues

I went to the Red Cross, I walked in the door
Checked in at a quarter past four.
I got to the waiting room, there was a line
Sat and waited a mighty long time.
The joint it was hopping, my blood pressure dropping, I knew things would only get worse
It was five after five when I finally arrived in the interview room with the nurse.
I went to the Red Cross and that's where I stayed
It turned into a two-needle day.

They took all my history, my temperature too
They counted my pulse and they passed me on through
With a stick in the finger, a pat on the head
And a seat on the blood-donor bed.
My right arm they swabbed it, with a needle they jabbed it, an air bubble jumped in the hose
“Oh no” said the nurse (and she muttered a curse) “This bag's got to go, I suppose.
Can we try the other arm?” I said “Okay,
let's make it a two-needle day.”

They found me an RN who works with IVs
She tickled my elbow and patted my knees
She marked with a pen where the vein showed up good
The second attempt, she drew blood.
Yes, my blood it was spilling, the pint-bag was filling, ten minutes went by with no pause
The volunteers took me to get juice and cookies and gave me a round of applause.
My arms they are sore, but I still wouldn't choose
to give up the two-needle blues.

What, you were expecting a raw, shocking memoir of drug addiction and depravity? Sorry.

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Do I write like a colored person?

I believe ethnic identification is ultimately delusional and regressive. Yet in immediate daily life, in a "short term" that lasts lifetimes and generations, it can be beneficial, even survival-necessary. Ethnic identification therefore is a game that as humans we are forced to play, forced to collude in. Think of us all as spies in enemy territory, playing roles that hide our true selves, suffering damage for reasons we believe to be worthy.

The game is stacked against us. We have a moral obligation to cheat.

The only way to play this game and not be destroyed by it is to play it consciously and without attachment: like getting dressed for a job interview. We may choose to represent ourselves honestly, or to hide or falsify parts of ourselves. In either case these must be conscious choices, whether impelled by need or by moral principle or some other contextual consideration.

Ethnic identification is becoming less and less clear-cut, less and less useful, and I hope less necessary in an age of increased exogamy. I doubt that the need for it will disappear completely in my lifetime, but then I doubted this country would elect a black President in my lifetime.

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At Waterfront Park

I threw a handful of fallen cherry petals
in the river, and the wind scattered them

in dotted arcs of indecipherable calligraphy
like pale pink ebru on jade paper, or the vast

fingerprint of my Beloved stooping over
the Willamette and touching the water

sending ripples up the banks and making
all the seagulls rise up suddenly screaming

here, here

closer to me than the sprig of blossom
stuck in my hair.

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Onshore Flow

means clouds rolling up onto the sky
like lines of surf onto the beach.
It means falling temperatures
and rising humidity. The triumph
of moss over grass. Centipedes curling
out from under dry bark and leaves.
Earthworms rising to the surface.

Onshore flow means legions of gulls
crowding pigeons off the girders under
the Fremont Bridge. It means morning fog
dazzling from pink to gold, a bus ride
through the inside of a conch shell held to the sun.
Sluggish bees. Geese watching for coyotes
in the water-meadows. Onshore flow means rain.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Poetry submissions

So over the last two weekends I put out almost 90 poems to some 15-20 journals.

It's grueling. I did close edits on most of the poems I submitted, and I read sample poems from most of the journals I submitted to with a critical eye, to see if anything I had written might be a good fit.

All of which explains why I haven't written anything in the last few days. The creative/critical faculties were in full use!

Next weekend's project will be another round of letters of inquiry on behalf of Drumheart. In the meantime, my brain needs to recover.

UPDATE: 3 acceptances from Raintown Review. (I just emailed them my submission last night.) "Funeral Home Coffee" for the summer issue, "Snow and Silk" and "Faust in the Industrial Age" for the winter issue. Alhumdulillah!

UPDATE: Another rapid responder, The Road Not Taken, accepted Chalk Talk, Petrified Wood, Hobo's Door, Water Music, and Thunderbird Poem.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Spring Thermals

are slices of warm air
turning like invisible fan blades
lifting watchful hawks above the grain elevator
under a sky untrustworthy blue
and sliced with hail

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Keystone Effect

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Extra-Pair Copulation in the Solitary Vireo

Alone among the throngs of springtime song
the solitary vireo gives out
his solitary call. It's not as strong
as chatter from the starlings massed about
the spill of seeds in fresh-plowed fields, or flocks
of geese in honking chorus by the water.
Not a song that confidently knocks
at heart's door: still, the female knows it caught her.

The twigs are stacked; the nest is lined with feathers
for the eggs that they expect to hatch.
It seems the solitaire has found a perfect match
to raise his chicks. They'll spend the year together—
be careful how you draw romantic morals,
it's likely that she has mates in the plural.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Smoothie Wizard

3 Word Wednesday: Crush. Knack. Varied.

a knack for crushing
various fruits and veggies
fast with a blender!

Collection available! Knocking from Inside