Knocking From Inside

Cold weather

2012-01-27T14:43:00.000-08:00

It ain't over.

Last year the first camellias in our yard broke bud in December; right at solstice, which fell on the 23d. This year, not a sign of red yet.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

At Latourelle Falls

2012-01-27T08:26:00.000-08:00

the plunge pool's thunder is blinding.
The whiteness of the foam
rings in my ears. The cold spray
is metal in my mouth, clean
smell of fir forest
tingles my skin. Every window
of my body opens wide
and the world dances
through them all. What I hear
I see. What I feel, I taste.

My body is all windows
and all are open.
My body is windows
without glass
without frames
the world winds through them like a silver ribbon
through needle's eyes
through openness
without frames
windows without glass
open

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Relative Motion

2012-01-26T12:50:00.001-08:00

The Red Queen thinks
you can keep up with the world. She thinks
if you run fast enough, it's just
like standing still.

Breath is life
only when in motion. Motion
is relative. Hold your breath
too long, and die. Stay in one place
too long-- The world lives only
when changing.

The secret is to invite, not command
to be open, not to clutch
to breathe, not hold breath.
Let the world turn.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Acacias

2012-01-24T18:22:00.000-08:00

Rain, rain, rain; rain soaks the soil, runs down the streets, overflows the gutters. Rain soaks through my skin and saturates my tissues. I've grown soft and water-plump as the worms that crawl the sidewalks, flooded out of their dark homes.

Men dying in the desert hallucinate from thirst; I hallucinate from water-intoxication. I see acacia branches scribbling thorny blackness against the swift furious dawn. There is no dew. In an hour, the dust will be hot enough to smell and the resting lions will search for shade. The ground will burn my feet under the leafless trees.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Sacred and Profane

2012-01-23T15:58:00.001-08:00

These lines in sand, these rings of sidewalk chalk
supposed to set off sacred and profane,
separate the holy? I maintain
that all such boundaries are only talk.
All things are God's: bright bird and rotting mold,
towering pine, dull dirt and shining sea,
carrion maggot and glittering gold.
My tender flesh is kin to solid stone.
The sisters of the sap in every tree
are blood and breath that flow through living bone.
Come down the beach and read our history where
a broken wave reshapes the rocky land.
Salt water merges into golden sand
and at the edge, a popeyed fish gulps air.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Dragon Year

2012-01-23T08:04:00.001-08:00

"So what's your sign?" My kinship is: with boats
that race to scarlet drums, their oars like legs
on water-centipedes; with kites afloat
above forbidden cities; pearls or eggs
encysting essence; rulers of the flood;
warden of temples and pavilions;
source of a pigment that resembles blood
which painters use, and call vermilion.

The zodiac's a bracelet hung with cryptic
charms called constellations, symbols worn
like ruts into the path of the ecliptic,
to which Western horoscopes adhere.
My heritage is elsewhere. I was born
in nineteen sixty-four: a dragon year.

Happy New Year!

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

RIP

2012-01-20T12:57:00.000-08:00

Etta James passed away.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Let Me Write

2012-01-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Let me write in many books.
Let me write my pages in the Book of Love
Oh, let me write
let me fill many pages in the Book of Love.

Let me write in the Book of Truth
let me write what is true
let me not damage my pages
in the Book of Truth.

Let me write in the Book of Emptiness
in the Book of Silence
Let me write emptiness
let me be silent
let me be silence
empty

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Hermitages

2012-01-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

The Card
Carrying a lantern, he looks
sadly down from the height
where once a young man danced
with a white dog. Age
regards the folly of youth. Solar joy
has shrunk to lantern light.

The Thrush
all winter
quiet under the bushes
waiting for spring
and brief solitary song

The Crab
Heavy, heavy the house
only big enough for one. Big enough
to cover one rear.
But it never lasts-- every year
a new one must be found.
Bigger, better
heavier weight to drag.

A humble nest, a stolen shell, a rude
hut in remote locale: is solitude
defined by contents or container? Don't
these images of isolation shunt
the seeker down a dead-end track? It's true,
it's difficult to hear the silence through
the noise and jostle of the "madding crowd."
Or so we claim. God's voice is just as loud
in city alleys as in desert sands.
His face is written large by human hands.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Leafy Branches

2012-01-18T13:53:00.000-08:00

I walk away and leave my cares behind
me, drifting on the surface of a stream
like leaves that fall from branches. In my mind,

the water-song is solitude defined:
the perfect peace I touched once in a dream,
once walking. Could I leave my cares behind

and live, a desert anchorite? A kind
of hermit (thrush or crab), I'd seem,
a leaf upon a fallen branch. Remind

me: what's the answer that I hoped to find?
Was this the way I purposed to redeem
myself: to walk away and leave behind

the things that burdened me, an empty rind
from which I'd sucked the juice? The gentle gleam
of water leaving, falling, undermined

the banks between which I had felt confined,
dissolved the weight and murmured a new theme.
I walked on, carrying my cares behind,
the shade of leafy branches in my mind.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Help, Listening

2012-01-18T11:17:00.000-08:00

I can't help listening
to the upstairs voices.
I can't help hearing--
she says it was all a mistake,
a gorgeous mistake
with ugly consequences.
I can't help listening.
A blockbuster went off
in her sugar-baby uterus.
It was like a molasses flood,
brown and sticky, she says.
I can't help hearing.
I stop my ears.
I can't stop listening.

--another word salad poem
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Finding the Beloved

2012-01-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

At the top of a steeple
At the bottom of a well
In the hearts of people
In the tongue of a bell.

In a dreaming ocean
In a dying land
At a railway station
In the palm of my hand.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Jewel

2012-01-11T07:20:00.000-08:00

The brightest jewel I have ever worn--
a dragonfly that settled on my foot--
was redder than a rose upon a thorn.
The brightest jewel I have ever worn
was red as matador's blood on a horn,
more brilliant gem than any pirate's loot.
The brightest jewel I have ever worn,
a dragonfly that perched upon my foot.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

One Thing, All Things

2012-01-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

If you knew this river
truly knew every fish
from egg to fingerling to hook of white bone
every iridescent scale
every bubble white over rocks
every rock
the history of every rock
from fire to salt
every boat broken
on every rock
every jewelbox of a dragonfly
If you knew this river
from spring to sea
every rapid, every calm pool
If you could describe the motion
and the reflections
and the stillness
you would know
one thing
If you knew God
you would know
all things.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

2012-01-06T15:35:00.000-08:00

I walk out into clinging fog--
I'm wearing it like second skin.
In obscurity, be vigilant
in clarity, be mindful.
Sounds like something from the Art
of War. I'm on my guard

against self-appointed guardians
who like to keep us in a fog
about what constitutes Art.
Beauty may be only skin
deep, but in your bones and mind--
wherever it is your soul is on vigil--

you know the truth. These invigilators,
enquirers, inquisitors, purport to guard
us from corruption of mind.
Exactly what that means is foggy
but I'm convinced the real skinny
comes from the horse's mouth. Art

is no-one's sole possession. Art
belongs to those who keep vigil
in the deep watches, when the skin
crawls with intensity of self-regard.
When dew falls and freezing fog
surrounds the watchtower. Who don't mind

the chill and damp. Whose minds
are focused on the rising moon, heart-
shot by arrows of silver fog.
Whose eyes shine with vigilance.
They are standing guard,
not against, but for truths beneath skin.

If in danger, save your skin.
If ignorant, feed your mind.
In the first case, be on guard,
in the second, study the Art
that is longer than life. Your vigilance
must first pierce your own fogs.

Guardianship or vigilance,
words for the mind, words for the heart.
Fog bites bone-deep, but spares the skin.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

January Reflections

2012-01-05T09:46:00.001-08:00

This morning's light was so intensely blue
it was like walking underwater. Each
day now sees a little more of day.

I found myself incapable of speech,
half-dazzled and half-drowned, a fish on land
this morning's light was so intensely blue.

As I lay gasping on the daylight strand
a dreamer hauled from sleep too fast to wake
I found myself incapable of speech.

What hook had caught me, what strange sportsman's take
I was, I could not know or even guess
as I lay gasping on the daylight strand.

The days grow longer now. I wake and bless
the sun's return, the promise of the year.
What hook had caught me, what strange sportsman's take--

awake, I laugh at dreamers and their fears.
This morning's light was so intensely blue
with sun's return, the promise of the year.
Each day now sees a little more of day.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Severance

2012-01-05T09:26:00.000-08:00

"A Hair perhaps divides the False and True." -- Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat, Fitzgerald trans.

A hair; the thinnest thread, a strand
of silver spider-silk; a line of thought;
a deep imaginary scalpel-slice
across the meat of everyday. Believe,
the world is not impeccably precise
and doesn't draw the lines a surgeon's hand
should trace. Dividing false from true must leave
some ragged scar, a foot chewed off when caught
in metaphysic ankle-trap.
And still
you see them pass, the seekers. They know well
what cost they'll pay-- the sacrifice of all
illusions, scalpel, scar and fleshy veil
alike. Tightrope across the great divide,
sever that stretched-out hair and step-- outside.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Solstice Light

2011-12-30T15:18:00.001-08:00

All night I tossed and turned with dreams of light
and woke with early morning's gleams of light.

Remember how, in summer's darkless days
we woke and slept in blazing streams of light?

But winter swallowed up my memories
of light, digested them to memes of light

that sparkle in my tumbled-blanket thoughts
as dust motes dance in falling beams of light.

Solstices suspend the year, a crown
of days that hang between extremes of light.

Basso profundo, treble flute: the tones
that frame a symphony on themes of light.

The year falls ragged from my windowsill.
God hems the sky with silver seams of light.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Solstice

2011-12-22T08:20:00.001-08:00

Arrived at work late this morning: it was 8 AM and the sun, the first sunrise after solstice, was just lighting up the downtown skyscrapers and the upper slopes of the West Hills. I went upstairs to the cafeteria, whose picture windows face east, and soaked up a few minutes of light. Now it's uphill all the way to Midsummer.

Last night we went to see Tintin. Tintin wasn't a huge feature of my childhood (not like Lord of the Rings: yes, I've been swooning over the new Hobbit trailer, and yes, we saw it on the big screen last night), but I'm fond of it nonetheless. And what an excellent movie! Can't remember the last time I had that much fun. I always suspected Snowy was really the Brains of the Outfit, and it seems Spielberg agrees with me.

Wandering around Lloyd Center before and after, we ran into not one but two former co-workers of mine; one was attending the same movie. Much as I'm not fond of malls in general and indoor malls in particular, Lloyd is a good place to run into people.

December has been almost completely dry, foggy at night and frosty in the mornings. Our quince saplings have finally, grudgingly, condescended to allow their leaves to yellow. I suspect they're responding to the daylength rather than to the actual weather: after all, they're native to Central Asia and officially cold-hardy to some ridiculous figure like 20 below zero. Put your ear to their slender trunks and you can hear the howl of Kazakh wolves racing the December winds across the frozen steppe.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Annunciation

2011-12-21T08:04:00.000-08:00

A glass and steel womb
hangs like an ornament
from the low-slung belly of the year.
The baby's heartbeat fills the room,
fetal thunder on the monitor.

Overcome by fatherhood, ape-like Uncle Joe
wipes his eyes furtively
on the end of his bowtie. Drag-queen Aunt Mary
affects unconcern.

But she's the one working on the album,
swinging her stapler like a man driving nails! Maybe
she's seen the future.
Maybe she's heard an angel whisper: Noël
Noël.

--another word salad poem

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Items accepted...

2011-12-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

Fault Lines Poetry accepted "Her Name" and "My Mother's Olivetti" for their inaugural issue, spring 2012. Also "Pleistocene Relic" will be included in the "Phoenix Rising" sonnet anthology. It's up right now as a sample poem.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Hubert

2011-12-08T11:14:00.000-08:00

Hubert Sumlin, 1931 - 2011
In memoriam

Spoonful of water in the desert sand
Smokestack lightning shooting out of his hands
Guitar lead in a Chicago band.

Boy aged six in a southern land
Played his axe and he played it grand
Cut his teeth on a Chicago band.

Red rooster walk with his tail all fanned
Back door man with his back door stand
That's what he played in that Chicago band.

Willie and Wolf made the Chicago brand
Radio carried it to foreign strands
Hubert's sound in that Chicago band.

Guitar man with your guitar hands
Walk on down to the Holy Land
Play devil blues in Heaven's band.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Lines on Notes on Lines

2011-12-06T12:38:00.001-08:00

What disciplined care composers devote to their lines
when passion would scatter black and white notes from their lines!

Feet shuffle dusty roads in the dawn, drawn
by the swinging of chapel bells in their cotes, on their lines.

The words of the duet are tragic; love, loss and despair
but the singer's voices distill ecstasy, remote from their lines.

Wind keens in the bay, flute over rhythm section:
slap of waves and creak of rocking boats at their lines.

Invisible panpipes echo from rocky, untenanted hills.
No-one is there to dance but tethered goats on their lines.

Have you heard my people singing the old freedom songs
as they stood in the rain, waiting to vote, in their lines?

Perched on the glass insulators atop a telephone pole
a meadowlark spills music from his throat down the lines.

Old women at sunset, faces wrinkled as dried apples
hum soft ballads, the stories that life wrote in their lines.

Drunk on the lyrics of Hafiz and Yunus, I make
a song to praise God out of quotes from their lines.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Up-Speak

2011-11-25T19:02:00.000-08:00

You hear it in each line-- the upward lilt
that turns a period to question mark
and draws the eyebrows into quizzic tilt.
A statement needn't end in some gruff bark
but certainty is crippled by the curve,
the ghostly serpentine of up-speak. Level
out that sentence, gather up your nerve:
assert some confidence and shame the Devil.

A thoughtful speaker (soi-disant) inflects
a statement with a falling end, a sound
of purpose, showing gravity and ground.
It's said, the deadly rising circumflex
suggests self-doubt wherever it is found.
Or maybe that's what everyone expects.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Silences

2011-11-25T17:41:00.000-08:00

Daphne, pregnant and cursed to silence
by the relentless sun-god of past summer
wandered into a winter grove

where gray-brown naked figures struggled
against encroaching cold, clawed weightless light
from the pale sky with black boughs.

They seemed barren, skeletal. Yet at each twig's tip
a fleshy swelling, packed with soft tissues
crumpled, folded tight as a baby's fist

and sheathed in tough translucent scales. Every
fingertip was pregnant with flowers and leaves
of the coming spring. Daphne's fingers

pregnant with words she dared not speak, swelled.
The nails burst, bled. Secrets unfolded
from the ragged fissures, lifting her arms

into the sky, sinking her feet
deep, deep into earth. Mute, Daphne wrote
evidence of Apollo's crime on every leaf

but no-one read them. A hundred books,
a thousand books, a thousand women
in a thousand groves watch as their testament

is gathered back to the blind earth.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Drums and Gongs

2011-11-22T10:32:00.001-08:00

The rain comes down like kettle-drums and gongs
declaring war. Like soldiers, raindrops fall
and gutters overflow with marching songs.

I can't imagine what ancestral wrongs
are righted thus. What cloud-bestirring call
makes rain come down like kettle-drums and gongs?

It's difficult to guess what grudge, so strong,
could capture water's heart in vengeful thrall,
make gutters overflow with marching songs

and rivers roar like surging, angry throngs.
Poor dryness, made to stand against a wall
while rain comes down like kettle-drums and gongs--

a firing-squad of droplets-- helpless, longs
for days of summer sunshine. (Don't we all?)
The gutters overflow with marching songs--

no. That vocabulary just belongs
to human hearts. No cause political
makes rain come down like kettle-drums and gongs
or gutters overflow with marching songs.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

My Mother's Olivetti

2011-11-15T21:34:00.001-08:00

taught me to type
just as a difficult horse
makes a good rider.
It was massive and intricate,
like a Wurlitzer organ. I wrestled
with the keys. When I struck just right
the tiny cast-metal letters
banged the platen, loud as horse's hooves
trundling the carriage ahead
with stoicism more Slavic or Germanic
than Italianate.

Olivetti's out of business now,
couldn't muster enough obedient coin
by marketing their ironclad Merrimack
in the era of mice and monitors.
Horse and buggy in the land of the automobile,
only my calloused fingertips remember
your staggering staccato gallop.

--another word salad poem
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Barefoot Muse anthology

2011-11-15T13:47:00.000-08:00

The online journal Barefoot Muse has reinvented itself as a POD press, but remains a champion of metrical poetry. As one of its first products, it's bringing out an anthology, Best of the Barefoot Muse. Poems from this blog will feature.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Winter

2011-11-14T08:09:00.000-08:00

Last week it was light when I woke up at 6:30, the gift of Standard Time after several weeks of getting up in the dark. This morning it was dark again. Heavy rain clouds were hoarding morning, carrying it on their backs like the pools of water on a kappa's head.

Friday morning it was fall: crisp air, fog, brilliant leaves everywhere. By Friday afternoon it was dark and cold, that damp, bone-biting chill that Portlanders know as winter. I've seen seasons change overnight before, but never in the middle of the day.

Now the trees are nearly stripped, and the leaves coat the sidewalks with sodden brown mush. They're talking about a chance of snow by midweek. Five weeks to solstice, then the long upward turn of the year begins again.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Toward Winter

2011-11-10T11:03:00.000-08:00

Summer is the season of desperation,
riots and burning cities. Spring;
burgeoning life, mass movements, hope renewed across
barbed-wire frontiers and lines on maps.

The politics of autumn
are thrift and endurance, spinning cocoons
out of raveled sweaters, dead leaves gathered
into beds beside heating vents.
Clouds hover like full trays of plates, white on gray,
held overhead and poised to tip, spill rain over the edges
if the waiter's wrist should weaken.
Heavy with water in a season
of occupations. Like water, crowds
part, flow, absorb force,
pool at the bottom of a downturn--
weight is a form of power.

Fall is a season of seeds.
Fall is a season of collapses-- remember November, 1989
when the wall came down?
Water can weaken foundations,
leave walls poised to tip, spill over
fall
fall
fall.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

NaNoWriMo: what I learned

2011-11-09T10:04:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not doing it this year; I have a guest post up about it at Write Anything.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Topaz

2011-11-08T12:43:00.001-08:00

The predawn sky is lilac. There's no fog
and down the rain-wet sidewalk, hand in hand
the usual couple with the usual dog
come sniffing for a latte. We demand
so much of life, ignore the little gifts:
the orange edges of a leaf, a cloud
like crimson ribbon, overcast that lifts
above a city's sleepy morning crowd.

Broadway runs east, but there is no horizon
behind the hills: the vista's lined with trash
and soggy leaves. The rush of auto wheels
drowns out the silent shout the sun gives, rising.
High in downtown towers, windows flash
like square-cut topazes in frames of steel.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Industrial District

2011-11-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

sparkles at night, an earthbound
constellation. By day, trains
snake through it moaning
for their glory years. Pigeons fly
under the high-arched freeway
bridge; in and out of
broken warehouse windows;
over the beep of backing semis,
clattering forklifts hoisting pallets;
among the blackberry tangles
that cover waste areas
faster than fire can burn.

Kingdom of pigeons and
loading docks, noisy and
drab by day with gray-smoke
feathers, silent glitterbox
by night: flanked by flowing
water and grain elevators,
piers like fingers combing
loot from the river: this is land
that remembers swans in
flocks that blackened the sky.
A hundred years from now
it'll remember the trains

and after that, the trucks.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Dream of Flying

2011-10-31T19:21:00.001-07:00

High on a hill above the city
I dream of flying.
I dream of flying with yellow leaves and red leaves
with ragged clouds and sunlight.
Over water-meadows and sumac thickets
I fly with wild geese.
Housetops fall away below me.
What tenuous tether keeps me
from the beckoning sky?

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

You Bring Out The Moon Maiden In Me

2011-10-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

The exercise: Write a poem titled "You Bring Out The _______ In Me" where the blank should be filled with something no one would ever actually use to describe you.

You Bring Out The Moon Maiden In Me

the swirling diaphanous ice-glittering gauziness in me
the vaporlocked vacuity, the astronaut's air-gauge reading zero in me
the ethereality, purity, asynchronous inconstancy in me
the shining sphere of healing quartz, fortune-teller's globe of glass,
gibbous green-cheese Gibson girl in me.
Meet me at the dew point and I'll jump
into your gravitational well like Ophelia in the river, I'll shine
with reflected light and a suicide's glamor. Captive satellite,
willing slave in Newton's chains, I won't
even wobble you on your axis. I'll wane uncomplaining
and wax asymptotic. If any stars or starlets should dare
to look on you, I'll stand in front of them--
that's called occultation. I'll be a cult of one.
You bring out the silver-sickle cat's-claw midnight magic in me
the star-sequined indigo-rayon high priestess robe in me
the rhinestone-tiara champagne-blonde pageant princess in me
the true-blue spoon-June New-Age new-moon moon maiden in me.
Be my strong-armed Apollo, my hot-rocket Armstrong,
walk all over me.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Suffering for your art

2011-10-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

Another guest post at Write Anything.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Carefree

2011-10-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Oh, do you remember the long-lost Octobers
we smoked cigarettes and we practiced profanity
as childhood went by, adagio...

Don't you think adulthood was poor recompense?

Death and taxes, the unwelcome certainties
that never disturbed us down under the bleachers
down under the bleachers where we sang sha-la-la.

--another word salad poem.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

uttermost blue

2011-10-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

this is the uttermost blue
a cloudless day in late October after
rain has washed dust and soot away and seamless
from horizon to horizon, single shade
of uttermost no
smear of cream or copper haze

all the gold red flame fall candles
pumpkin rinds, ripe honeycrisps, chrysanthemum bouquets
only make uttermost bluer
and bluer than oceans
or vats of crushed shellfish or new jeans

there is no blue
bluer

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Her Name

2011-10-16T16:42:00.000-07:00

We lost the taqueria on the corner
to La Migra. You know,
the INS. Always keeping us safe
from illegal aliens.

That corner bar was a drug house
for years and years, full of
home-grown dealers. Shots at night,
strings of police tape.

When the Mexican family came they scraped out years of filth,
painted it brilliant colors, sold blue corn and empanadas
wired money home
and fed me cheap burritos.

I miss that lady.
I never knew her name.
I never asked
her name.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

With Yusef on Tu Do Street

2011-10-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

Written in dialogue with Yusef Komunyakaa's Tu Do Street.

you were born
pushed through the membrane of your mother's skin
the caul clinging to your face, outlining
hidden features. It took a war
to reveal.

Hindsight is second sight. I look back
to the year of my birth, my parents
black and yellow like the couples
on the wrong side of Tu Do Street.
You looked forward
saw me
reached
through the membrane
through the tunnels
crawled, tunnel-rat, fell, father
naked and newborn
into my arms.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

OPA Conference

2011-10-16T16:35:00.000-07:00

Got home from it earlier today. The theme of the conference was "witness poetry." Two very fine poets, Veronica Golos and Bette Husted, each led workshops. Will post the poems I produced shortly.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Midnight at Normandale

2011-10-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

11:57 and it's dead out on NE Halsey, up away from the seedy glitz of Hollywood and not out as far as the sleaze of 82d. Boring as hell on my beat, so I pull into the street by the dog park just to sit for a minute.

The park officially closes at sundown, but you know how it is: there's no locks on the gates or anything. Who'd want to go there at night? Someone, apparently. There's a man leaning against the fence, and even by moonlight I can see he's not some homeless guy looking to crash under the picnic table.

I sigh and get out of the car. Let myself through the double gates. Metallic clunk sounds echo off the silent houses across the street.

"Sir, the park is closed."

He looks at me, very calm. "I'm sorry, officer. I'll leave in a few minutes."

I fold my arms. "What brings you here, anyway?"

"Them." He points.

There are flickers of movement, quicksilver shapes slipping in and out among the fir trunks, the shafts of moonlight. There's something wrong with what I'm seeing, but I can't quite figure it. "You can't bring dogs here at night."

"I didn't bring them. They just come."

Activity swirls toward us and breaks apart. I see the dogs: a rangy Dane mix, a couple of shepherds, a Lab, a maybe-coon hound, a few I can't guess. They're all silent, no panting, no barking, no thud of paws on the ground. They're all colored moonlight and mist and they cast no shadows.

"He loved it here," says the man. "I never see him around the house, but here, sometimes..."

The Lab trots toward us, tongue hanging out. His paws don't disturb the fir needles or the churned-up sand, but as he gets closer, he takes on some color, a dark blond. And I have to turn away, because I can't bear to look at the face of the man beside me.

"Sorry to bother you, sir. Have a nice night."

"You too, officer."

12:05 and it's quiet out on NE Halsey. And you know? I kind of like it that way.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

To Sea Again

2011-10-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed we went to sea again.
Our upstairs bedroom creaked and rocked in gale-
force winds. The sheets (you know that sailor-men
call rigging sheets?) spread wide, storm-driven sails
across a universe of rain and sleep.
White water crashed against the bows, the rise
of thick blue blankets over feet, the steep
swell of billows against lidded eyes.

Toward dawn, the wind died down. A gentle draft
sent feathers from our pillows drifting round
the wooden planking of our bedroom-raft.
The window murmured with the dying sound
of storms and waves and shipwreck; I
woke cradled in a cloudless sky.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Dialogues of Brightness

2011-10-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

The day was overcast

but the moon nears full.

We conduct dialogues

of brightness.

Between the caterpillar

and the moth's shadow:

becoming

and being

Between moss

and summer-brown grass

there is a dialogue

of brightness

of things seen

and unseen

living

and beneath the earth

darkness

brightness.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

"Our Vines have Tender Grapes"

2011-10-07T13:00:00.001-07:00

our grass is dry
full of yellow stars and rockets
drowsy with bumblebees.
In the distance, Mt. Hood floats
above a horizon of haze.
Firs tower over us and in their shade
even the wind is stilled to a whisper.
Hammocks sway like tethered boats
promising at any moment to break free
and drift, drift into that same blue distance
rocking the dreamers to the creak of ropes.
Dreams billow like sails
reaching for sky just glimpsed
through limbs and needles overhead.

Later the dream-fleet disperses to home ports,
sails shrunken to painted canvas and scribbled sheets.
Other dreamers will fit these boats
with their own sails.

Plein Air, Columbia Crest Vineyards, Underwood WA

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Plein Air Anthology - 2011

2011-10-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

is now online here. They published both the poems I submitted, contrary to what the entry form stated.

Oh, well.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

The Melancholy Dane

2011-09-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

It's not safe to fall asleep on the couch at our house. You might wake up to find something like this sitting atop you.

He seems strangely pensive.

"I just can't decide... Ketchup? Or barbecue sauce?"
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Wind-drunk

2011-09-27T12:13:00.000-07:00

No, I tell you, it's the wind made me drunk--
lifted, spun me, filled my pores
like wine in so many cups. Like
a path leading out of sight through the sharp
green smell of mountain firs. Like a bowl
of bronze humming as it's stroked
around the rim.

The world's full of drunkenness
and rowdy singers staggering late at night
toward home, or away, it hardly matters
because they relish the stink of alleys
as much as jasmine perfume. To the sacred,
all is sacred.

But I was telling you about the wind
that pelted us with acorns. I was telling you
how moths leave a sweet smell
when they're crushed. I was telling you
that summer refused to yield
even a trace of ash.

I'll let go of your jacket now.
I have to go
drink some more.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Truth or Fiction

2011-09-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

I have another guest post up at Write Anything.

Fall came overnight: last night we woke up to the sound of rain, and this morning the air is cool, damp, and blustery. Wet leaves blowing around sound completely different than dry leaves: I never noticed that before. Meanwhile the Bad Kitten, whom we've barely seen all summer, has suddenly decided that the warm, dry house is a better place to be than the chilly, soggy shrubbery around the block.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Red Light Blues

2011-09-22T15:36:00.000-07:00

I was standing on the corner, heard a radio play the blues
Standing on a corner, car radio played the blues
I got holes in my pockets, got no socks inside my shoes.

I heard the radio play, the music was sad and sweet
Heard the radio play, I was sad but it sounded sweet
Forgot my empty pockets, forgot about my aching feet.

The driver he looked at me, I thought I saw him smile
Yes, the driver looked at me and I swear I saw him smile
"Well, the music is free, go on and listen for a while."

The stoplight it turned green and the driver pulled away
Yes, the light it turned to green and the blues man drove away
And I thought my heart would break 'cause the music would not stay.

Walking away in the dark with my shoes flapping on my feet
Walking away in the dark and I curse my blistered feet
Starving to death in the city, ain't no music on the street.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Norwegian Brothers

2011-09-21T07:41:00.000-07:00

Deep in the darkest Arctic reaches
where icy windrows clog the beaches
lived a band of merry Nordic thieves
--Olaf, Knut, Sigurd, and Lief.
These were their names. There were no others
among this band of Norwegian brothers.
They fled from justice to far fjords,
their cargo, canned soup and Viking swords.
They hoisted up over slopes of scree
and rappelled down to a frozen sea!
The law was distant. Escape seemed near.
The brothers hoped for life without fear
on a distant strand where sunlight ebbed
like retreating tides. But the prints of webbed
toes dug into the soggy sands
revealed the presence of other bands:
frogmen-robbers under the midnight sun!
A battle was lost, a treasure won.
The mysterious fate remains unheard
--of Olaf, Knut, Lief, and Sigurd.

Another word salad poem. Something about these characters intrigues me...

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

OPA Fall Conference

2011-09-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

Coming up soon...

"OPA!" dancers shout.
Poets gather like ravens
on Kah-Nee-Ta's pines!

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Pat Hodgell's new Kencyrath novel

2011-09-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

Honor's Paradox is coming out in December. We got to see an uncorrected proof. It includes several stanzas from "Massacre at Gothregor."

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Season of Wine and Rust

2011-09-16T07:48:00.001-07:00

This is the season that tames the dust
into sedate soil, damp with rain.
This is the season of wine and rust,

clouds gathering like a spreading stain
while grass seeds fall and drive pointed awns
into sedate soil. Damp with rain,

weeds nod heavy over shriveled lawns.
Cats pick broomstraw burrs from their coats
while grass seeds fall and drive pointed awns,

harpoons thrown from vegetable boats
at earthworms rising like breaching whales.
Cats pick broomstraw burrs from their coats,

polish their whiskers, sleek down their tails,
dreaming of spring when young songbirds fly
at earthworms rising like breaching whales.

This season quenches the burning sky,
this is the season that tames the dust
dreaming of spring when young songbirds fly.
This is the season of wine and rust.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

This is very nice...

2011-09-15T18:36:00.000-07:00

A student in music composition and piano performance, at Chapman University, has asked if he can use "Sestina, Inspired by Rumi" as the text to compose a song to, for his senior project.

Of course I said yes. What poet could refuse?

He'll send me a recording some time in the spring. Steve Perry has set a couple of my poems to music before. Maybe someday there'll be an album.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Rocky Butte

2011-09-14T09:19:00.000-07:00

Equinox is only a week away. The shortening from day to day is noticeable. Clouds from the west have replaced the smoke, and temperatures are falling.

Saturday I walked up the north end of Rocky Butte and down the south end. There's a tunnel on the south side, a little 180-degree corkscrew like a hairpin bend flipped over on itself. On the eastern shoulder is a neighborhood of homes perched on dizzily steep slopes, peering out towards Troutdale and Gresham.

The sun was orange; the air was still, and unseasonably hot. The hill is crowned by a small park, a stone wall ringing a plaza and some shrubbery, breached in a couple of places by flights of steps. It was too smoky to see the mountains, but I can only guess that Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams would be visible as well as Mt. Hood. If I were organizing a Portland version of Plein Air, that would be one of the spots I'd pick.

What other places? The Zoo and the Arboretum. The Japanese Garden, the Chinese Garden, Waterfront Park and the Esplanade. The Rhodo Gardens at Crystal Springs. There must be good locations on Mt. Tabor. Private homes along the Alameda Ridge, if homeowners would agree to it. Sacramento overlooking Rose City golf course. Fern Hill Park, out by the old Whitaker site. Leach Botanical Garden. The new plaza and fountain at PSU, on the site of the old Mill St. building. Heck, some of the OHSU buildings have million-dollar views...

I just volunteered to serve on the board of the Oregon Poetry Association, through at least April, replacing a board member who's had to resign for health reasons. Then I have the option to run in the general election. Hmmm...

The Plein Air anthology should be out some time in October: I'll post the link, and the 5th Plein Air poem, at that time.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

The Poetry Society of Michigan

2011-09-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

gave me a second place in the Sonnet category for "Ruby-Throat" and an honorable mention in the Nature category for "Upstream" in their fall contest. Both poems will appear in the fall issue of Peninsula Poets.

In other news, Science Poetry including "Truffle Shuffle" has gone to press; Pirene Fountain's Japan anthology including "Stranded" is in proofing.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

At Dawn on Broadway

2011-09-09T10:20:00.001-07:00

westbound cars carry
orange highlights on bumpers
as if fleeing fire

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Advice from One Romantic to Another

2011-09-07T16:13:00.001-07:00

They think you have to suffer for your art,
to make it great. You need to sob out loud,
to rip the vessels from the bleeding heart
they think you have. To suffer for your art
is de rigeur. So play the starving part
and milk the pity oozing from the crowd.
They think you have to suffer. For your art
to make it big, you need to sell it loud!

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

To the Sax Player at Waterfront Park-- 9/7/2011

2011-09-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

You were the perfect soundtrack
for wading barefoot on brick, in fountain water. Mood music:
does that diminish you? Would you prefer
the spotlight at Dante's or the Roseland, swaying crowds
sucking on your brass? Of course you would,
who wouldn't? Artists know these things.

Well. If you don't make it someday
I believe it won't be for lack of effort.
Mellow brass and well-worn keys attest
to hours of practice. Yeah. You could be the best.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Now, You Don't

2011-09-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

This morning, in a doubled flash of sun:
from black glass windows on the Coliseum's
front; from elevators outside one
grey concrete parking structure; now, you see 'em
said a voice of orange light and steel.
Some harbinger of metro-revelation
helicopter-hovered to reveal
a secret hidden at the light rail station,
sunk in gleaming copper rails or hung
from metal trusses. Glass-roofed shelters framed
a view of urban vistas. Call it tame,
this metal wilderness? On every rung
of ladders left to stand against a wall
a bucket balances before a fall.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

One Green Square

2011-09-06T19:07:00.001-07:00

One farm among those that fill this valley
with apples, cherries, lavender,
flowers of every hue.
One square in an Afghan of many-shaded green
laid in the lap of Mt. Hood
with the river flashing through it
like a silver crochet hook.

Once, this valley was a river of fire
now hardened to stone.
Once it was ripped open by floods the size of mountains
now, bathed in the smiles of tolerant glaciers.

These flowers cover ancient scars.
These fruits grow from the bones
of old catastrophes.

I want to gather them by the bucketful.
I want to carry the seeds
to every battleground of the new century.
I want to turn each killing field
into one green square.

Plein Air, The Gorge White House, Hood River
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Ash

2011-09-03T16:40:00.001-07:00

That east wind is brutal. Hot, dusty
reeking of smoke. Dead leaves
race along the westbound streets.
The tail end of summer is curled up
and burning in the hills. Sheets of smoke flap
across the sky. Pigeons rise
in short troubled arcs. Auguries are poor.
Pray for the firefighters. Pray for rain.
My skin is freckled with ash.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Speedos

2011-08-31T09:10:00.000-07:00

Last night at the Vancouver Barnes & Noble poetry series, one of the featured readers was Crystal Williams. She gave us a fun exercise: made us list all the words we associate with beaches. In a few minutes we came up with about 50 words.

Then she said: "Now write a descriptive poem set at a beach-- without using any of these words."

Here's my attempt:

Speedos

It's all about guys in Speedos.
Sleek bronzes, silhouetted against a colorless backdrop--
drab, textured substance underfoot, gray clouds, gray Pacific, gray smooth rocks,
smooth, rock-hard abs glinting with oil
and not so much covered, as outlined by Spandex.
Perched up there on his wooden tower while
little old ladies walk past with their eyes on the ground
as if
the hollow mineral forms left behind by mollusks with bodies like old pencil erasers
could compare with the young David on his throne!
Well. I came to enjoy the scenery.
As my grandma always said
"Ain't no harm in looking."

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Pictures from Plein Air

2011-08-31T09:09:00.000-07:00

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Flying Soft and Low

2011-08-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

Wind, water, fire, stone: their voices
fill the Gorge, length, depth and breadth
except lee shores, sheltered from the noise.
Wind here is muted to a whispered breath
and little wavelets kiss, embrace the pebbles
under the generous shade of spreading yellow
leaves. Fall already marks the maples
but this breathless air is summer's final spell.

Five cormorants, the totems of this shore
fly soft and low across the water. Not for them the soaring
heights of hawk and eagle on violent updrafts.
They ply the river's face with humbler craft,
soft wings and silent voices. Stone and water
speak tiny secrets here. They call me "Daughter."

Plein Air, Pebble Beach, Stevenson

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

"Stone-iferous Pine"

2011-08-30T16:46:00.000-07:00

Hood River is a town whose sloping streets
are steep as roofs. We're resting on the stairs
behind the library. The distant fleet
of parasails, down on the river, flares
and dips, a flock of brightly-feathered swifts.
Today you bask in sun and mild breeze
Hood River, town of waterfront and cliffs,
but you have known the winds that shatter trees
and chose to build your city art from stone.
Beside us, there's a sculpture: twelve-foot cone
of chiseled slabs, evoking palisades
of raw basalt-- or fruit from monstrous pines,
gigantic trees of stone! Or so the sign
reports. It might be dangerous in their shade.

Plein Air, Georgiana Smith Park, Hood River

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Turbulent Interfaces

2011-08-30T16:45:00.000-07:00

Here on the rim of the bluff
I am above the tops of ponderosas,
eye-level with turkey vultures.
Vortexes of river smell
spin up from below.

Wind pushes me back from the edge,
pushes east. Water flows west
tugging the surface
into rough chop flanked by freight trains
and freeway traffic. Wind surfers race back and forth
like brilliant dragonflies.

I'm on wild land
inside an urban growth boundary.
Behind the hill, at a ragged fence
scrub oak and coyotes meet vineyard and dogs.
This interface is turbulent as well.

Boulders poke out through the long grass
like knuckles of giant hands
clutching the cliff edge.
They're covered with lichen.
They've been here a long time
in spite of turbulence.

Plein Air, Friends of the Columbia Gorge property, Mosier

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Plein Air, etc.

2011-08-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

(On a side note, I have another post up at Write Anything.)

Plein Air, 2011: five poems in two days, written at various sites in the Columbia Gorge. Grueling.

Actually, the idea is that you visit five sites in five days. This is for the benefit of the painters, who presumably need more time. But 1) I can't really take three days off from work this time of year and 2) all that driving is expensive and no good for the environment. So I don't try to keep to the schedule. This year, one of the sites was on a property owned by Friends of the Columbia Gorge, a local conservancy group, and we weren't supposed to go there unaccompanied, so I had to hit that one at the scheduled time.

It worked out very nicely. Todd, Calico and I left home yesterday morning around 7:30 and got to Mosier around 9. From there we went to the White House, a farm, vineyard and orchard just above Hood River on Highway 35. After that, downtown Hood River; the focus this year was at the marina, but we ended up in a city park just below the library. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon and night with friends in Hood River.

This morning we headed across Hood River Bridge to Gorge Crest Vineyard, a winery in the hills above Underwood off Highway 14. From there, down to Pebble Beach at Stevenson. Then across Bridge of the Gods and home. Tired, but much refreshed by the magnificent scenery of the gorge and the company of friends we don't see often enough! (You can see the list of sites and all here.)

Notes: Fire danger is extreme east of the mountains right now. It was exactly two years ago that the Microwave Fire broke out just west of Mosier, while I was participating in my first Plein Air. (That spawned the poem that eventually got published in Windfall.) Mosier's fire chief showed up at the Friends of the Gorge site and was-- quite rightly-- unhappy to find cars parked in long grass. Seems there wasn't good communication somewhere between the fire department, Friends of the Gorge, and the Plein Air organizers; no information was passed to the group about fire safety.

The White House has hosted the official first day of Plein Air several years now. The poem I wrote there yesterday is very different from the one I wrote two years ago, "Wine Air." I'm at a bit of loss to account for it, as the place is very much the same, the weather was similar, etc. I must be different somehow.

Gorge Crest is a relatively new vineyard, with a breathtaking view of Mt. Hood, but you can't quite see the river from there. For the rest, I'll let the poem speak.

Oh, yeah. The deal is, you write 5 poems and send them 2, they pick 1 for the online anthology. I'll make my selections tomorrow evening and post the three I'm not submitting then; after I find out which one's being published, I'll post #4. When the anthology appears, I'll post a link to the last poem.

Sunday Sept 4th, starting at 7 PM, I and others will be reading Plein Air-produced pieces at the Columbia Center for the Arts. And I'll get to view all the art pieces then!

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Frogs With Fangs

2011-08-23T11:46:00.001-07:00

In a bed of reeds, by a cozy bog
sat a grumpy frog, brooding on a log.

He dreamed of excitement and thrilling times
a life of mystery, adventure, crime--

"Pond life is so boring," he said with a sob
"I'll move to the big city. I'll join the Mob,

Along came a milkmaid carrying a pail,
the frog said "Here's my chance! I must not fail!"

Like the frogs of Sulawesi
who stare with bulging eyes
He would fight for Ranid freedom
or die!

Splash in the milk! He thought he was hid
but the next time he hopped up, she slammed down the lid.

"I'm a captive in jail. The arm of the law
is long and strong as a heron's jaw.

"If only I'd stayed on my log in the bog
content with my lot as a… bored frog."

"No, this is my choice. I'm going for broke.
Adventure is worth it, even if I should croak!"

Like the frogs of Sulawesi
who stare with bulging eyes
He would fight for Ranid freedom
or die!

The pail got dumped in a big steel vat
that heated up slowly… frogs don't like that.

From pasture to pastuerized-- that's how milk flows
and over the edge our noble frog goes!

Our hero, alone on the street in the dark
heard beautiful music drifting out of a park.

Like the frogs of far Borneo
who sing both low and high
He would call for Ranid freedom
or die!

Photo credits:
sturm und drang:
bang bang:
the gang: gang, face
up sprang:
with fangs:
went clang:
might hang:
felt pang:
harangue:
said "Dang!"
much slang: vat, frog
bell rang:
who sang:
and of course, Michigan J.:

Extra thanks to Dana Lyons of Cows With Guns and to the McMaster University research team.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

The REM-Sleep Weather Channel

2011-08-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Today the city smells of summer rain,
of steaming sidewalk concrete, humid sweat--
but I anticipate, the rain has yet
to fall. I felt it in my bones, the stain
of cloud approaching from the west to blear
the sky. I dreamed we trekked through canyonlands
where yellow crystals grew from baking sands
and on the flats, we watched the clouds in fear.
Those desert floods are killers.
I awoke
to radios announcing cloudy skies
and cooler temperatures. I'm unsurprised,
for I'd already dreamed the weather broke.
Forecasting weather's difficult. It's cheap
to say: "I can do better in my sleep."

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

The Zen of Fox

2011-08-17T20:09:00.001-07:00

Fox bought the Channel 8 news
reduced it to a pantheon of sorbet-colored talking heads
interspersed with ads for Windex, Lurex,
Timex, Kotex, Pyrex and Purina!
Brand names shotgun-splattered in hi-def
around the utter absence of news--
the vacancy, the void
the jewel at the heart of the media lotus.
OMMMM....

--a word salad poem
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Ramadan: August 2011

2011-08-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

Already summer's greens are fading to copper,
tips of maple branches just brushed with copper.

August days shorten and in reversed corrosion
green turns backward into burnished copper.

Not yet the season of cottonwood gold-flakes,
the sidewalks crackle with foil-thin copper.

At midnight, the full moon hangs round and silver
but in the predawn sky the moon's hue is copper.

Fasting makes my mouth taste metallic.
This is a month that God framed in copper.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

The Oregon Poetic Archive

2011-08-09T16:27:00.000-07:00

now includes some poems from this blog. Check it out.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Thoughts about humor

2011-08-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

Humor is difficult to write. It's one of the most idiosyncratic, elusive human emotions. A humorous (or allegedly humorous) passage is more likely than any other to induce the sort of dialogue that goes: "I didn't think that was funny at all…" "Well, I thought it was hilarious…"

Situations are rarely, if ever, funny in themselves. The humor in situations comes from how the characters react to them. A good case in point is the third Shrek movie (not the fourth one, which I quite liked): "Hey! Let's put the donkey and the cat in each other's bodies for a while! That'll be funny!"

Well... if you saw the movie, you know it wasn't, even slightly. What it was, was a brilliant and thoroughly wasted opportunity to make funny things happen. The slapstick possibilities of a donkey trying to do donkey things with a cat body, and vice versa-- how could they not have written a single gag around that? Criminal. That movie was riddled with similar cases.

Lately a couple of books have come across our table that seemed to make the same mistake: set up a situation with comic potential, and think that they've written something funny. (I'm not going to name names.) I hope it's not a trend.

Conversely, some writers have a positive gift for extracting humor from, on the face of it, the most unpromising situations. Consider the climactic scene of Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel. The town Christmas party is trapped in a church by a party of brain-hungry zombies raised from the local graveyard (thanks to the eponymous character. He really is not very bright). The zombies aren't having much luck breaking in; they decide to distract the folks inside by shouting out some of the deep dark secrets held by the living. I won't reveal more… get the book and read it yourself. Pay attention especially to the dialogue that ensues.

Read my description again. Is it funny? It's not: because all I've given you is the situation. What makes the actual scene funny, fall-out-of-your-chair funny, is how the characters handle it.

Chris Moore's novels also have a weird cumulative effect: I think it has to do with his rhythm. Typically I read through about the first three-quarters of the book going "yeah, yeah, that was funny, that was pretty good…" and then I hit a point where I completely lose it, often over a joke that wasn't necessarily any funnier than any of the previous ones.

Here's a somewhat different approach. Todd's been reading the Iron Druid series; I haven't read any of them yet, but yesterday he read me a passage from the second book, Hammered. The viewpoint character is apparently out for a jog. His mind wanders. He's trying to decide how to handle an upcoming tactical situation. This turns into an inspired riff on Star Trek, with Spock and Kirk as angels sitting on his left and right shoulders, Spock advising caution and restraint while Kirk wants to charge in and kill 'em all… Mind you, as far as I can tell all this has nothing to do with the story, but it's hilarious nonetheless.

But notice that the situation isn't one you'd pick as a potential rib-splitter. I mean, a guy goes for a run? It's his thinking that's funny.

About the only writer I can think of who actually makes situations funny is Connie Willis. (Mind you, this is the same woman who wrote Doomsday Book, "Last of the Winnebagoes," and Blackout. Sometimes I suspect she's a split personality.) "Blued Moon" is a great story, you can find it in her collection Fire Watch. The remarkable thing about "Blued Moon," and Willis humor in general (there's good stuff in Bellwether and To Say Nothing of the Dog as well) is that there often isn't much character reaction.

For example, near the end of the story, the scheming philanderer gets confronted by (if memory serves me) both his current girlfriends and the mother of the girl he plans to seduce-- all of them, through a series of events too improbable to relate here, in possession of written copies of said plan. Just as they knock on his door, Willis changes the scene and leaves us to imagine the well-deserved drubbing that ensues.

Maybe that's what makes it work. Scott McCloud, in his wonderful book Understanding Comics, has a chapter called "Blood in the Gutter." The "gutter" is the white strip that separates panels in a traditional comic page layout: many modern comics have dispensed with it for an "artsier" look. McCloud's point was that comics frequently call on the reader to infer what happens between panels, hence if blood is shed in the "gutter," it's the reader's doing, not the writer's. This process of inference is called closure.

Closure is also what's in action at the end of a story, as in Avram Davidson's very fine "Don't Forget the One Red Rose" (anthologized in The Avram Davidson Treasury among other places). It's sometimes in action between scenes of a longer story or novel: Gene Wolfe especially likes to leave gaps in the narrative that the reader has to backfill. It's closure that supplies the details Willis leaves out of "Blued Moon."

I've written about inference, or closure, quite a bit in the context of poetry, arguing that a poem can be more powerful if it forces the reader to exert this ability, to engage the poem actively rather than just taking it in. Obviously the same is true of prose. Tolkien wrote about the literary effect of "unexplored vistas" lingering beyond the edge of the written work: these fields invite closure to occur. If there are no unexplored areas, either left as gaps within the created realm, or suggested as areas outside it, no closure occurs.

Closure can also be denied to a reader by overly obscure or too-gappy writing. I found Wolfe's New Sun books difficult to read because of the severe discontinuities between chapters, though the story kept my interest in spite of the frustration. (I half think Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand was intended as a New Sun spoof, in that every chapter began with the viewpoint character in some cliffhanger situation; however, he provided flashbacks to explain how the guy got there from the end of the previous chapter. Wolfe never did that.)

This is wandering a bit far from the subject of humor, but it may be relevant in that closure strengthens a reader's engagement with a story/poem/comic. As such, it may be the thing that tips a reader from okay-that's-funny over into rolling on the floor and gasping for breath.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

I'm getting rid of my Google+ account

2011-07-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

And here's why.

When I went to delete my Google+ account, I was asked to take a "why are you leaving" survey. Here's what I wrote:

I write professionally under a name that is not my legal name. I understand that this can cause my Google+ account to be deleted with no notice and no recourse. In addition, I understand that many people to whom this has happened have also lost access to other Google services such as gmail and Blogger. This would be catastrophic for me as a writer and is a risk I'm not willing to take.

I understand that there are problems with anonymity on the Internet; however, I've had this online identity for more than six years, have blogged extensively on my own blog and as a guest on others, and have been published professionally under the associated name. I am not a troll or a stalker. I'm a legitimate writer using a legitimate pen name.

I'm also not willing to be held guilty without even being given a chance to "prove" my innocence. If I hear in the future that Google has decided to be sane and considerate about enforcing Goggle+ accounts, I'll consider restoring my account. In the meantime, no.

For me it isn't even just an online ID: Everyone I've met in real life through poetry, eg. people who've come to my readings, read a poem of mine in a journal or read my book, attended workshops or OR Poetry Society events with me, as well as several members of the Portland Sufi community, know me by this name.

So, for anyone who's invited me to join their Google+ circle: sorry to be leaving, don't take it personally. I'm gone.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Ergot Weather

2011-07-21T10:57:00.001-07:00

July in Portland: gloomy overcast
and drizzle, cool and wet. The rivers run
at record highs, and damn, that grass grows fast--
but soaking seedheads molder without sun.
It's years like this when field-rotted grain
spawns ergot madness, invisible blight
that taints the harvest. People go insane
from eating bread. Sometimes they die of fright.
Sometimes the sequelae include starvation,
hysteria, witchhunts and desperate plots
all from humidity and fungal contagion.
The worst I have to fear-- well, Heaven knows
it's less than lethal. Just unsightly blots
of powdery mildew on a prizewinning rose.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Birth of a Super-Villain: an ode to the blues

2011-07-19T21:40:00.000-07:00

The damn radio is fritzed again.
The only channel that comes in
is full of divas warbling a modern operetta
in some urban dialect.

Let's be pragmatic about this.
I'm an amiable sort, generally--
but I gotta have my blues.
If the only way to ensure a steady supply is to seize world domination
I'll do it.

another word salad poem.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Deep Summer Blues

2011-07-08T10:45:00.001-07:00

Cloudy out, my feet feel like lead
Messed-up song running in my head
City full of the walking dead
Don't you know it's deep summer blues,
deep summer blues.

Lawnmower snarling down the block
Wait for the ring or wait for the knock
Wait for the key to fit in the lock
and let out the deep summer blues,
deep summer blues.

I'd like to ride on the humming rails
with the poets and the hoboes and the nightingales
I'd like to travel through the Age of Steam
with the men who first had the steel dream
I'd like to fly like a southbound goose
away, away from the deep summer blues,
deep summer blues.

Block party band playing in the street
Dogs and friends get together and greet
at the farmer's market where people meet
It's only me with the deep summer blues,
deep summer blues.

Lord, you know it's not what I'd choose
But there's nothing good on the evening news
Sleeping and waking with deep summer blues
Can't dance with the deep summer blues,
deep summer blues…

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Plotting in Poetry

2011-07-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

Another guest post at Write Anything.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Science Poetry cover art

2011-07-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

Pretty, isn't it? I'll post again when the final product is available.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Noir, with Crows

2011-07-01T09:35:00.000-07:00

Corpse
Black feathers swirled around the street
in slow summer breezes.
The dead crow haunted our block for days
moving from sidewalk to street and back
under some mysterious power. None of us touched it
fearing its sable iridescence, like strong acid
would dissolve our fingers
into depthless shadows.
No post-mortem was conducted
but there were theories.

Accident
Crows chase squirrels into traffic
and feed on the bodies. Risky business. Misjudged
speed or distance-- splat.
The mob that gathered up on the water tower
the day before, discussing things in urgent tones--
pure coincidence.

Murder
is the collective noun for crows. Solitary stealth,
the stab to the back, the blow in the dark
is not their style. Some corvine Caesar struts his stuff
before the mob on the water tower-- and they attack
bringing him down. It's a participatory thing,
no bystanders or spectators.

Suicide
A comedian gets up on the water tower,
struts his stuff, gets heckled. Raucous commentary
by crow critics drives him away. He may try
to find sanctuary with a brooding poet,
renounce the stage forevermore. If not,
death by glass. Not by drinking,
by a speeding windshield.

Execution
Avian nations are borderless
but not lawless. Atop the water tower
he stands accused by raucous testimony
from the crowd. There is no defense.
The sentence: death.

Natural Causes
There is no defense among crows
against avian encephalitis, bird flu, Newcastle disease,
or scaly leg. The only recourse
is ruthless quarantine. The flock on the water tower
gossips about plague, like medieval villages
during the Black Death. Every beady eye
is peeled for signs of sickness.
Coughing, he's driven out to die alone.

Audience Noir
Someone buried the victim, or the criminal
and left a stick to mark the grave.
We watch for crows to visit:
a gloating enemy, a grieving hatchmate,
a corvine Sam Spade with a cigarette stub
dangling crooked from his beak.
But though appropriately garbed in black,
they ignore our tropes. We return
no verdict.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Shifted out of Time

2011-06-28T18:22:00.001-07:00

I thought my city shifted out of time this morning,
I saw no faces I knew on the usual bus.
The sky had tipped and tilted over toward storming

and all I saw was new faces on the usual bus
riding toward downtown with half-awake and vacant
expressions. I felt strange to myself. All of us

riding toward downtown, half awake, leaving vacancies
in warm beds and at breakfast tables, came together
in silence, overlooking our mutual vagrancy

from warm beds and breakfast tables. We came together,
a collection of strangers randomly assembled
with nothing in common but the world's uncertain weather.

A collection of strangers, randomly assembled--
well, that describes many teams forged for terrible purposes
like the guys who built the bomb. But we didn't resemble

a team forged to execute some terrible purposes
under a sky full of portents and storm-warning.
More like a shifting heap of windswept debris
I thought, as my city shifted back into time this morning.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Floaty

2011-06-27T07:41:00.000-07:00

An airmail package of
multi-colored canoes
or a flotilla of banana splits.
A drift of paridisiacal feathers
or French-cut green beans
rendered in futuristic nano-resins.
A flock of psychedelic pipefish
or swans migrating
in a polychrome storm--

but look at the delicate and sepia convergence
of their shadows on the parquet floor.

--image courtesy of Magpie Tales
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Stuff...

2011-06-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

Forgot to note that I had another post up at the new Write Anything: it was on Poetic Collaboration.

Also some recent news: My sonnet "Camellias" was accepted for a sonnet anthology being edited by Mary Meriam. "Fluid Boundaries" was accepted some time back for a villanelle anthology, The Book of Villanelles, edited by Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Annie Finch: they have finally found a publisher and it looks like that volume will be out next April.

Science Poetry, including "Truffle Shuffle", should be out very soon, and Pirene's Fountain's Japan anthology including "Stranded" is slated for December release. So all in all, it's been a productive year for me for anthologies.

For you local poets: the Oregon Poetic Voices project is recording Oregon poets this Friday from 1 - 5 downtown at the city archive (1800 SW 6th Ave, Suite 550). Check it out.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Helpdesk Maven

2011-06-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

He was born in Arkansas,
grew up chasing his daddy's coon hounds
through the pine woods. He trained those dogs
himself, with a handful of Cheez-Its
spoon-fed them yogurt when they were sick.

That qualified him for a job
in customer service. He learned to talk
like a character in an old British movie--
a technician from Bletchley Park, one of Turing's lot
who cracked the Nazi ciphers, laying bare
the U-boat routes and telling the public
it was all done with radars.

He sounds so polished.
He hasn't touched a dog in years.
It's all done
with radars.

--another word salad poem
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Wamura Sleeps

2011-06-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

stretched across the bay, his bones
a shining rampart, 51 feet high.

Ravenous waves rose from the sea
crests snarling white, 66 feet high

but turned back from the wall
he dreamed into being, 673 feet wide.

Fudai villagers walk their cliffs
staring down at water 330 feet below

and homes like tiny toys, scattered
on the slopes, a few feet above sea level.

Everyone said it was crazy, a waste
a project that cost more than thirty million dollars

but sleeping Wamura smiles, cradling
Fudai safe through one terrible moment.

From The Asian Reporter, V21, #11 (June 6, 2011), page 20
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Spin

2011-06-21T08:06:00.001-07:00

Happy Solstice. Morning fog: the willows
drag their fingers through the murky shallows.
Water's high with melt and angst. This summer
everyone's on edge. The TV's stammer
can't console, relating royal kisses
to the hungers of the jobless masses.
Shots ring out at night and voices quarrel
while the dizzy streetlights Tilt-a-Whirl.

Spinning helpless, I can't read the patterns:
global vision is denied me. Lecterns
crowned with talking heads, like executed
murderers, confine my views. Refuted
points point inward only. I aspire
to seek the edges of the widened gyre.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Kumquat Lover

2011-05-17T21:43:00.000-07:00

He ignores me.
He's involved in peeling his kumquat
carving the rind into
a 3-D spiral form in the shape of a geisha girl.
Because, he says
"aren't kumquats from the Celestium... I mean the Celestial... you know what I mean..."
waving his hand in a gesture
whose uncolored vastness was a clear indicator
that he did not know China from Japan
the Middle Kingdom from the Floating Kingdom
mandarin oranges from kumquats
or me
from the geisha of his dreams.

-- a word salad poem
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Creating Characters in Poetry

2011-05-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

Another guest post at Write Anything.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Crooked Wings

2011-05-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

It's said, the swallows come to Capistrano
every year to see out winter's cold,
an advent that's been noted in each anno
domini the Mission bells have tolled
since 1812. Their nests, like little huts
of mud, accumulate among the vaults
the quake brought down, above the fallen struts.
They're not concerned by geologic faults.

I fear this state lies too far from the sun
for swallows. Other harbingers must bring
the welcome news that winter's finally done.
The crooked shadow of an osprey's wing,
a feathered scimitar, curves down and by
carving a slice of summer from the sky.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Burning Mountain, Shattered Land

2011-05-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Stand on the slope of a burning mountain
with all of your hope held in your hands
Woman whose heart is brighter than fire
Woman whose home is a shattered land

Stand on the shore of a drowning country
while the tsunami swallows the strand
Woman with bones full of stony courage
Woman whose home is a shattered land

Stand at the edge of the reaching desert
watching the wells filling up with sand
Woman who knows all the lessons of hunger
Woman whose home is a shattered land

Stand and wait for the hurricane coming
out of the ocean to your island
Woman as strong as a live-oak forest
Woman whose home is a shattered land

Holding steady while the earth is shaking
Still I see where you make your stand
Woman who carries the seeds of the future
Woman whose home is a shattered land

--image courtesy of Magpie Tales
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Looking Glass Books, R.I.P.

2011-04-20T12:55:00.001-07:00

If you've been paying attention to local book news, you know that Looking Glass Books in Sellwood closed earlier this year, and Broadway Books is struggling. Even in Portland, one of the most literate cities in the country by most measures.

Support your local bookstore.

I lost a bookstore. Carelessness. I swear
I turned my back for just a moment. What
could happen? When I looked it wasn't there.

A sanctuary full of quiet air
that smelled of… books. That kiss of fragrant dust
I've lost through bookstore carelessness. I swear

I'll never take for granted, anywhere
the privilege of shelves to browse. A cut
could happen fast, when I'm not looking there.

A glass could fall and shatter past repair
and books just leave. The innocence of trust
is lost. My bookstore carelessness, I swear

is history: a page that I can tear
and throw away, a falling flake of rust.
It happens that I'm searching here and there

like Carroll's crew, with thimbles, forks and care.
Perhaps I can't prevent a closure, but
I won't lose bookstores carelessly, I swear.
It happens, still-- but I'll be watching there.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Burnt Toast

2011-04-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

The damn toaster's on the blink again:
bitter smoke stains the kitchen ceiling black.
One day it'll burn down the house
and then you'll be sorry. Penny-pinching old bastard,
I went to school in the same clothes three years running.
I scrape black crumbs and choke on the stink.
Bitter smoke stings my eyes. I'm on the blink.
Pretty soon I'll burn the house down.
Then you'll be sorry.

--for Big Tent's predicament prompt. Or maybe the escape prompt. Possibly part of a series of poems using the sense of smell.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Rabbit Time

2011-04-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

You have seen this. You know it is true.

Wolf Winter gave birth to rabbit Spring.
Naturally she was surprised
but being a mother, she could not refuse to give suck.
Spring nursed with ruthless rabbit hunger
like blowing up a balloon backward. Winter shrank.
Winter disappeared inside Spring
and coated her rabbit gut
like a quivering membrane of silver-violet.
Each of Spring's babies, who were golden-green and numbered thousands
carried a speck of Winter at her heart.

You have seen this.

Spring's babies danced lapine dances and kicked up their feet
but behind each brown rabbit eye
dangled a strand of silver-violet, like a snow-covered cobweb
and every Maypole dance wound them
into a shining skein.
We all dance in rabbit time,
spinning violet silk. Next year
Winter will come not as a wolf
but as a spider.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Word Salad in Flight

2011-04-19T21:35:00.000-07:00

Constance, my ersatz angel
I raided the cookie jar, only to find
you had stuffed it with a plenitude of verbal grotesqueries!

The poems I've written since
have been convoluted, like monstrous pretzels.
A poem can only seat so many words
and mine are all overbooked.

Every flight is full on Air Constance
where lunch is word salad, served
in a big glass bowl.

-- another word salad poem, obviously
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Heartbreak Radio (Love Song for Todd and Pandora)

2011-04-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Nothing but heartbreak on the radio this morning
Sister Eleanor was walking at Fate's right hand
No use to say "woman no cry," Mr. Marley
with the bad days in Ohio coming round again.

Are you there? Nothing but hail and rain today,
the operator couldn't find your number anyway.
Are you there? It should be warmer this time of the season
but half-melted ice keeps running down my dreams.

If I had a guitar it wouldn't weep so gently,
for what it's worth, the numbers say we're not doing well.
So I'll bend my back like a beast of burden
but even under pressure I will not back down.

Are you there? The people are strange and gray
and the rising sun wouldn't hear what I have to say.
Are you there? Together we can hold up the world,
be my pride and joy, I'll be your brown-eyed girl.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

On the Writing Life

2011-04-09T08:36:00.001-07:00

Just to note that I have another guest post up at Write Anything.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Bone Emptiness

2011-04-07T08:04:00.001-07:00

Hail decapitates
the daffodils. The sidewalks
haven't been dry in months.
A week into April
the air from my lungs still plumes
like steam from a kettle.

Slow exhaustion
sucks at each hollow bone
leaving clean emptiness.
The bones of birds
are full of air-spaces linked
to their lungs.

I am becoming a bird
instead of a steam engine.
I am becoming a windmill.
I am a bone flute.
I am air,
I am empty of air.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Reading at B&N Vancouver

2011-04-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

I will be the featured reader at Barnes & Noble in the 'Couve, April 27th at 7 PM. This is a reading series I've been going to for a couple of years now, and it's a kick to be the main attraction!

Collection available! Knocking from Inside