Fire on the Lake

Rose petals fall among

tumbleweeds of dust blowing

into crevices, splitting

my imagination.

I saw fire on the lake flaring,

flat stones skimming

the reflections of flame dissolving

then refocusing.

I want to rhyme, she said.

I want to rhyme with dust,

not roses.

I reach for a bottle

of something but it’s empty,

consumed the night I saw

fire on the lake.

Seth Haines has a writing prompt Thursday – two different videos of the same song. Technically, we’re supposed to write something and submit it to Seth, but I decided to go ahead and post the poem I wrote here.

Pleasantly Disturbed Thursday

It’s been a while since I did one of these, so I thought I see what pleasant disturbances are in the environment at the moment.

First, we have a visitor. Actually two visitors. Our youngest, Andrew, fly in yesterday afternoon from Florida, and last night his girlfriend Jessica flew in from North Carolina, despite the best efforts of Delta Airlines to keep her flights from happening. They’re in for a few days, Jessica to meet Andrew’s family, Andrew’s family to meet Jessica. I’ve been making notes to remind me of all the old Andrew stories to tell her.

My reading has become somewhat eclectic – Seamus Heaney’s poetry, Out of a Far Country by Angela Yuan and Christopher Yuan, You Are a Writer by Jeff Goins, some short stories, more poetry, and The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker. No pattern here as far as I can see.

The writing, well, the writing is still painful. I’m slowly going through notes from the editor and publisher, revising the manuscript of A Light Shining, and then will rewrite it. Completely. It’s means a publication delay but there’s no getting around it. Enough said.

I haven’t done much biking lately, not with the temperature breaking 100 degrees for so many days. It was 103 when I got home yesterday at 6 p.m. I’m hearing of 105 for Friday, maybe a break into the 90s on the weekend. I’ve been watering the yard and gardens like a fool. We have a voluntary “don’t water your grass and gardens” situation in our little suburb, but the suburbs all around us don’t have one.

I had to choose – be green and sustainable and let our grass and all that new landscaping we put in this spring die or turn on the faucets. All the neighbors look around to see what everyone else is doing, and then we all sneak out in the dark early morning and turn the sprinklers on.

Yesterday morning as I rounded the corn of the house to turn the back sprinkler on, I spotted a small black something in the grass. It was a black field mouse, a very dead black field mouse. I don’t like mice, even dead ones. After turning the sprinkler on, I kept going round the house to turn the front sprinkler on. Then I went inside, got a plastic sandwich bag to dispose of the dead critter, and went back to the scene of the death. The mouse was gone. Puzzled, I walked back toward the door, and saw the neighbor’s cat sitting our front porch, looking very satisfied.

At least it wasn’t a coyote. I haven’t seen the coyotes lately which live in our area, so they may have moved on. Which may explain the chipmunk invasion. I’m still trying to figure out what’s been digging in the garden – three places in the back gardens – just enough digging to dislodge the mulch, but not anything deeper than that. Probably the chipmunks.

We also haven’t seen many squirrels lately. We love the neighbor’s cat.

Because of a project at work I’m involved in, I’ve been paying attention to our yard’s bee population. Bees love the perennial Monarda, and our Monarda became a kind of garden kudzu this year. I’ve seen four kinds of bees buzzing around – big bumblebees, small bumblebees, honey bees, and leafcutter bees, so small they look like gnats. (Did you know that most bees – like 70 percent of them – live in the ground? But I digress.)

And it wouldn’t be a pleasantly disturbed Thursday or Friday with some photos of the grandson.s I’m so glad you asked.

At two months old, Caden weighed in at 16 pounds. We call him Michelin Man.

And here’s a shot of Cameron eating Rice Krispies – and it’s the only real way to eat them – with the spoon used for stirring Rice Krispies Treats.

Photographs by Stephanie Young. Used with Cameron and Caden’s permission.

Finish the Intro, Anthologist!

Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist is one crazy read.

It’s a novel. I think.

It’s about poetry. I think.

I know it’s about four-beat poetic lines versus iambic pentameter, a cruel invention by the French to upend what works best in English.

And the main character, a poet and writer named Paul Chowder, has no use for haikus, either.

I’ve read the first six chapters (our assignment for the book club discussion at TweetSpeak Poetry that starts today), and I don’t know whether to laugh or throttle Chowder in exasperation. Finish the introduction to the poetry anthology, Paul! By this time, I could have written it!

And it’s Chowder’s anthology – of poems that rhyme. Or mostly rhyme.

That’s the kind of poetry that isn’t written much any more. Free verse snuck its nose under the tent back in the Victorian area, and then it moved in like some undesirable squatter. An unwashed and undesirable squatter. Chowder can name two or three poems in free verse that are good, but not much more than that.

So he hides out in the barn, doing calisthenics, drinking and eating whatever’s in the refrigerator, musing about the neighbor next door playing badminton, walking the dog, dodging threats from his editor, mourning his girlfriend Roz who’s moved out – and not writing his introduction to the anthology.

Instead, he wants to tell us all about poetry.

And sleep with his books.

And I listen. I read on. Even if Chowder is driving me crazy, I listen. And I read.

The Droning of Haikus

The iambs overcome pentameter,

the four-beat line is dethroned.

Chartreuse battalions of syllabled haikus

swarm, and smother, and drone.

Anthology or mythology,

it rhymes for a time, and then,

it sits, embarrassed, and waiting for,

as the French would say, le Fin.

We are discussing The Anthologist over at TweetSpeak Poetry today. You should take a look and see what craziness Lyla Lindquist has dreamed up for the discussion. And tell her I’m still waiting for Chowder to finish that introduction.

Reading Seamus Heaney

I sit by the kitchen window

reading Seamus Heaney aloud

and I almost miss

the hummingbird sipping

the red and blue salvia,

clearly favoring the red,

but I see the movment

first and then look directly

at his fluttering wings keeping

his blue-green body,

a fine honed jewel in motion,

motionless, hovering like

a poem by Seamus Heaney.

I’m over at TweetSpeak Poetry today, with an article on Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize winner and master gem-cutter (poet). The article is a review of his Human Chain: Poems. Please visit TweetSpeak, and let me know what you think.

I’ll also be submitting this poem to Open Mike Night at dVerse Poets. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today.

A.S. Byatt’s “The Matisse Stories”

A.S. Byatt published The Matisse Stories in 1993. Reading the work in 2012, I find it’s aged well.

It’s a small volume, only three stories, two shorter stories bookending a longer one. All three are about color, and Matisse paintings, and how this time we live in is one if displacement, where living by the rules doesn’t apply because we only think they are rules, and when we learn that we find we don’t quite fit, that something is missing or incomplete.

In “Medusa’s Ankles,” an aging college professor becomes a regular customer at a hair salon because her hair is aging along with the rest of her. A painting, or print, by Matisse (largely pink) occupies a gray wall, and that is what first pulls her into the salon. All goes well until the salon is remodeled, the Matisse put away and replaced by photographs, and the owner makes an offhand comment about his wife’s ankles.

In “Art Work,” a magazine illustrator, her painter husband, and their two children depend upon their housekeeper to hold their lives together. Only the illustrator understands the importance of Mrs. Brown; her husband seems determined to drive her away. What the family doesn’t know is how well Mrs. Brown comes to understand concepts of color, and what she does with their cast-off clothes. They are in for a surprise.

In “the Chinese Lobster,” a college professor (also aging – I sense a theme here) has lunch at a Chinese restaurant with a friend and colleague, to let him know that a graduate student is accusing him of sexual harassment. The reader only sees the student through their conversation and the recall of a longish letter she’s sent. The student turns out to be anorexic, likely mentally ill, and is working on an art project that she believes will destroy Matisse (and why she wants to destroy Matisse is at the crux of the story).

Byatt, who’s received the Booker Prize and other significant recognitions, has created three stories in which at first little seems to happen; the plot structures lie within the minds of the characters. But by the end of each, the reader comes to understand that many things have happened, important things that transform the characters’ lives.

Every action, every word, plays a part in moving the story forward. The stories seem almost effortless, like a Matisse painting, but the appearance is deceiving. Each story is like a fine work of art, the complexity hidden behind the simplicity of the storytelling.

Byatt does not leave the reader hopeless, but neither does she leave a sense of hope or even relief. The Matisse Stories captures a sense of the displacement of contemporary life, seen through a lens of art and color.

Separate, Not Necessarily Equal

They sat upstairs at the movies,

we sat down.

They sat at the back of the bus,

we at the front.

At the A&P they had their water coolers,

we had ours; side by side they were

clearly marked White and Colored.

They had their bathrooms,

we had ours.

They had their schools and

we had ours.

They-we-they-we-they-we

separate not necessarily equal

bur certainly divided.

You didn’t ask why;

it just was, until

someone heard

the weeping from heaven.

This is another in a series of poem about growing up in the South, suggested by my friend Nancy Rosback at A Little Somethin’.

Photograph: Trolley, New Orleans, circa 1955 by Robert Frank.

Vive la revolution

We step down from the Thalys

at Gare du Nord, to find

armed soldiers dividing

around us, seeking

prison escapees,

or terrorists, perhaps,

and we find ourselves

in the middle of what

Parisians call En Strike,

museum workers wildcatting

shutdowns, protesting

something, tourists perhaps,

Mona Lisa’s smile hidden

behind locked doors,

the Impressionists at d’Orsay

            suddenly available

            for a few hours, anyway,

we hear a rumor that Versailles

            is open but the Arc de Triomphe

            is not

but we find a small bistro for dinner

and a café for jambon et fromage

and Rue des Martyrs filled

            with small shops

and lunch on top Galleries Lafayette

and a dinner on the bateau mouche

and what it’s like to take the Metro

at 11 at night and somehow we fall

in love all over again.

Vive la revolution.

It’s Bastille Day, and dVerse Poets is celebrating all things French. The above poem is an entirely true story. (I left out the parts about the pickpocket, the visit to the police station, the strike at Charles De Gaulle Airport and the long walk down the Champs Elysees.) Please visit dVerse Poets for more poems about France.