It’s here!
Yesterday a big box of books arrived at my house.
One Bad Poem
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. 
TRUMPETER 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…
I 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
Lazy 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.