One Bad Poem

/0 Comments/in /by

I am getting ready for my Winter quarter classes, beginning on Monday, and wanted to say that I took a few minutes for poetry. So here’s something from another winter. I borrowed the image from The Trumpeter Swan Society website, and it makes me happy simply to know that they exist. swansTRUMPETER SWANS

cattle in the field       sparrows and winter

wrens the unremarkable crows

then the swans      dropping like hail from the clouds

four of them flying

in a long row of long white necks and white wings

dropping over the barbed wire fence enclosing the brown field

the other birds         the cattle

not stopping their grazing not looking up

docile, unastounded at the swans

arriving like news

of another and not yet diminished world

15 minutes…

/0 Comments/in /by

779hourglassI have spent the last few days immersed in family. Busy weekend with kids and church. Then I spent a night in Chehalis with Mom and we went to see her retina and macula specialist in Olympia. I brought her home to spend New Year’s Eve with us. I stayed up until midnight so I could have a toast with Emma, who is grounded (her older sisters were out at parties — I sent them a happy new year text). On New Year’s Day, yesterday, we drove to Hood Canal to spend a few hours with my sister and her family. I didn’t have time to write more than a few lines in my journal. Mostly, I wrote, “On January 2nd I will be back at work on the novel.” I enjoyed my family, by the way.

So it’s January 2, I’m in my cabin. I swear I really did write in my journal — two pages! My Celtic harp CD is playing. But I just discovered myself playing Spider Solitaire. What’s with that? I’m going to go into the house and get a bowl of cereal with blueberries. I’m going to put another load of clothes in the wash. Then I’m going to come back out here, set the timer at www.e.ggtimer.com for 15 minutes…and I’m going to write. I’ll set it again if need be, and — who knows? — maybe I’ll get lost in the work.

Wish me luck.

Happy 2013!

Barrow Street

/0 Comments/in /by

fall winter 2012 074Lazy days. School doesn’t begin for another week and we’re in serious vacation mode here. Seeing friends, eating the cookies left over from Christmas. Playing Life. Finally making the Gingerbread House that no one could find time for earler.

The new copy of Barrow Street arrived in my mail just the other day. It includes my poem, “Vows,” and a host of other poems that play with language, like this one by Bertha Rogers:

ON THE ROAD

This owl raptured after this muskrat,
seized, ripped off, this bony November day,
the water rat’s greasy head.

And did the rat grasp what great angel
had taken his body up
eyes riding past hooked blue beak,
beneath roof arched like a church’s,
and down mortality’s red craw?

A car, wheeling south, completed the act,
ravished the owl right out of light.

Better than sex, this aborted hunt,
more satisfying than owning the wish, granted love
the diurnal abuses wrecked upon each other.
Better than mercy better, balancing all,
this blinding end, glinting, quick death.

I suppose what I love here is the “roof arched like a church’s,” the “red craw” and that luminous last line. Another poem, “Pigs” by Brian Barker, has an opening image I love enough to steal: “jigsaw puzzles for the damned.” Like the jigsaw puzzle on our table, which is not for the damned (I hope) but only for those on holiday break.

“Make good choices!”

/0 Comments/in /by

cabin1As my daughters go out the door, I often call to them, “Make good choices!”

Small, good choices add up when you’re trying to accomplish a goal. I find in fact that they are the only way I ever accomplish anything. It helps to be a little single-minded. When my goal was to get ready for Christmas, I had to write a list. I had to go shopping. I had to stock up on wrapping paper and bows. When my goal is to go to the gym, I need to put on my gym clothes, even if I’m not sure when I’ll get there. If I want to do laundry, it helps to be in the laundry room.

Same with my writing goals — the primary one being, right now, to finish the novel rewrite. Being in my writing cabin is a good first step. But being in my cabin isn’t enough. I can’t check my email, pick up a book, write aimlessly in a journal, write a blog post. I have to actually have the novel on my lap. I have to have my eyes on the words. It helps to read aloud. It helps to have a pen in my hand.

Lately, it hasn’t been going so well. I haven’t been making those small, good choices. I haven’t been single-minded. But I keep showing up, and I keep picking up the notebook. I’m having dinner with a friend tonight who just finished rereading the first fifty pages. That’s a good choice. It will help to have some conversation around what she noticed. She’s a screenwriter and she helps me to see the scenes in a way I don’t quite see them on my own. It will help, tonight, to not watch four hours of Veronica Mars before bedtime. It will help to go to bed early. It will help to get up early.

“I’d love to lose 20 pounds,” one of my daughters said to me today. This was just after eating licorice rope and a candy bar. To lose weight, you have to make small, good choices. To write a novel, or a short story, or a poem, small good choices are the only path.