Monthly Archives: March 2017

Snap

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Snap

You flavor my memory with common tastes: Spam and corned beef hash.
You wanted to be the common man, but you were anything but.
The bold aggression and the subtle feminine sweep of what you formed—
beautiful. Your hands never clumsy as they sculpted wood and stone.
Metal bent and melted into beauty at your touch,
and colors lifted the wings you gave them.

I floated, also–– too independent to be formed by you,
but still uplifted that a man like you could love me.
It validated something in me—those hard choices I had made
because I listened to something vivid in myself I had not yet found a name for.
Dreams taught me. And synchronicity.
I had always wanted to be a wanderer­­­­—to try to quench those yearnings
that had haunted my daydreams since I was a child.
I cut the ties that bound and wandered West to find you—stable man
pinned by your wings to obligation all your life.
Instead of pinning me down, you wandered with me.
The gypsy life of making and selling art. The easy camaraderie of that circus life.
The vans and wagons circling every weekend in a different convention center parking lot.
Nights pulled into the woods or by the ocean.
Short nights in transit, parked in neighborhoods where we’d be gone by six.
The song of tires on the road, Dan Bern and Chris Smither. Books on tape.
Pulling quickly off the road to lug a dead tree or a well-formed boulder into the van
or to engineer its route up to the roof,
so we returned home as heavily laden as we had departed—
bowed under by the fresh makings of art.

The texture of our home life was silver dust and wood curls.
Its sounds were the stone saw and the drills and polisher.
The heat of the kiln hours after it had lost its art.
The fine storm spray of the sandblaster,
the whine of drills and whirling dervish of the lathe.
The smell of resin, redwood, stone dust, paint.
The sharp bite of metal. The warm bread smell of cooling fired clay.
Every bit of my life was flavored by what you loved––what I loved, too,
our interests merging so completely that for awhile
we had no separate lives, but one life welded end-to-end.
These remembraces are not organized or filed.
They flutter into my mind like hidden lists blown off tall shelves.
That life now a scrapbook of the past with certain photos plucked out
to be tucked under bedroom mirror rims or carried in wallets.

Snap. You put yourself into my mind.
Snap. Another memory follows,
and I am an old woman replaying her life.
Snap. The creak of the tortilla machine across the street in the early hours.
The loud rush of the surf, the rattling startup of a motorcycle.
The raspberry seed between my teeth,
the scent of the dog’s bath still on my hands,
sand gritting the sheets
and art projects taking over every surface.
Snap. I am me, looking for the next adventure.

 

Below photos snapped a few minutes ago. Proof of the tale.  New projects.
Click on first photo to enlarge and see all photos.

 

 

The prompt today was vivid.

For Christine: Nugatory

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After my poem that made use of the word “negatory,” which Christine Goodnough questioned; she challenged me to write a poem about the word “nugatory,” which I admit, I had to look up.  This is the result:

Not Quite Heaven

All the streets of purgatory
are lined with words like “nugatory”­­­­
that somehow just aren’t used quite right
so share the sinner’s sorry plight
by going to an “almost place”
before they reach their state of grace.
They’re obscure words you nearly know.
You aren’t quite sure, but even so,
you use them in a sentence that
does not work right off the bat.
You see that folks are looking wary,
then consult the dictionary
to find that you meant “Negatory,”
which completes your little story
better than its near-homonym
that’s left you looking rather dim.
The lesson, wordsmith? It’s absurd
to go ahead and use a word
you don’t quite know the meaning of.
You cannot merely push and shove
any word into a place
and think that you can show your face
in realms wherein the erudite
correctly scribe and speak and cite
words in their proper domain.
So please, don’t misuse words again.
Take it easy, just go slow
until you find a word you know.
“Almost there” just doesn’t do.
Be a gourmand. Avoid word stew.

Negatory: having the nature of negation, negative.(Much beloved by truckers.)

Nugatory: of no value or importance. Useless, futile. (I admit, I had to look it up!!)

 

 

 

 

Last Leaf: Flower of the Day, Mar 4, 2017

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There always has to be a last leaf.  I’m still up in the air about whether I want to be it or not.

Please click on this link for the full experience! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlRZ9eT7l

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/leaf/

Cee’s Challenge: https://ceenphotography.com/2017/03/03/flower-of-the-day-march-4-2017-tulip/

Fancy Words

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Fancy Words

Don’t we adore fancy words? Don’t we love to use them?
Still, it is annoying when some choose to abuse them.
When “geddouddahere” would do to tell pests when to go,
they use “begone!” to banish them in words more rococo.

Their need to parlay simple words, I fear I find most gruesome.
A tasty meal’s not good enough. They see repasts most toothsome.
While we argue, they asservate, assiduously stating
things that all of the rest of us are fine with just debating.

They see themselves as bon vivants, most clever and most charming,
They complicate the simplest words at rates we find disarming.
A lady we call beautiful, gorgeous, lovely, cool,
they find pulchritudinous. Where did they go to school?

“Piquant” they use religiously, though most of us denounce it.
Yes, we agree it’s pretty, but we just can’t pronounce it.
Slow music is andante, dark closets are aphotic.
As they rave on, each alloquy tends to get hypnotic.

What the rest of us get rid of, they alleviate.
They do not use contractions.  They don’t abbreviate.
They’re intent on gamboling while we’re just being silly.
They see the landscape undulating. We just find it hilly.

Forsooth, they have no wherewithal to get where they must go?
We’re all willing to chip in. We hope they don’t go slow!
They are extremely irritating, though they do not know it.
It’s not easy dealing with a friend who is a poet!!!

Parlay?  The prompt of the day is parlay?????

Wilma Millette: Artist Share

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Canadian artist Wilma Millette tells stories through collage and mixed media art, using found objects, old ephemera, photos, and other treasures from her “junk collection.”

via creartfuldodger — Discover

Hibiscus

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Posted for Cee’s Flower of the Day prompt.

Desire

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Version 2

Desire

All those nights of passion, those years spent in desire,
we were tightrope walkers, balanced on a wire.
We never knew from day-to-day which of us might fall.
Never knew for certain if we’d both be there at all.

Desire in the meadows under shelter of tall grass—
in our youth we never knew that it could pass.
We had it firmly tethered. It could not slip away.
It curled in loosened coils around us as we lay.

Desire in the morning or in the afternoon,
each time we fell into it, was over all too soon.
Then life leaked in to wash the passion from our day.
We balanced, raw and vulnerable, wishing it could stay.

Desire in the darkness was easier to hold.
Something in the shadows made us wild and bold.
But when the morning beckoned, we left each other for
all the business of the day that lurked outside our door.

Heartbeats built the passion that footsteps cruelly bore
away so pulses of the night became the stuff of lore
as our desires migrated into memories
just beyond our fingertips, too distant now to seize.

Note: If sung to the tune of Suzanne Vega’s “Gypsy,,” as per okcforgottenman’s suggestion, sing the following two-line chorus after every verse: (Anyone want to think up an original tune for this?)

Oh, tomorrow, wrapped up in today.
we never know the dreams that we will throw away.

 

The prompt today was desire.

“I Imagine” dVerse Poets, Prose Poetry

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I Imagine

I imagine one more holiday.
My mother sits at a large picture window
looking out over a broad beach,
watching dogs fetching sticks.
Then, because she cannot help it,
she takes her shoes off to walk through packed sand.
I imagine her sighting the offshore rock
where puffins nest.
I imagine footprints—hers and mine
and the paw prints of the dog—
someone else’s—
who joins us for the price of a stick thrown
over and over into the waves.

My mother could count her trips to the beach
on one hand,
and most of those times have been with me.
Once, in Wales, we sat on the long sea wall
under Dylan Thomas’s boathouse.
A cat walked the wall out to us,
precise and careful
to get as few grains of sand as possible
between its paw pads.
As it preened and arched under my mother’s smooth hand,
its black hairs caught in her diamond rings.

The other time we went to the beach
was in Australia.
We stayed out all afternoon,
throwing and throwing a stick,
a big black dog running first after,
then in front of it,
my dad sleeping in the car parked at the roadside,
my mother and I playing together
as we had never played before.

My mother and the ocean
have always been so far divided,
with me as the guide rope in between.
I imagine reeling them both in toward each other
and one more trip.
My mother, me, a dog or cat.
Wind to bundle up for and to walk against.
Wind to turn our ears away from.
Sand to pour out of our pockets
to form a small  volcano
with a crab’s claw at the top.

So that years from now,
when I empty one pocket,
I will find sails from by-the-wind sailors
and shark egg casings,
fragile black kelp berries
and polished stones.
The bones of my mother. The dreams of me.

From the other pocket, empty,
I will pull all the reunions I never fought hard enough for—
regrets over trips to the sea we never made.
And I’ll imagine taking me to oceans.
Walks. Treasures hidden in and hiding sand.
Someone walking with me—
someone else’s child, perhaps,
and a dog chasing sticks.

Note: I never took that last trip to the ocean with my mother, but I think of her every year when I come to stay at the beach on my own, and this year in particular, every time I throw the stick for Morrie and every time children come to play with us. Here is a link to my favorite photo of my mother, plus other stories and poems about her.

Written for the dVerse Poets prompt, Prose Poetry.To play along, go HERE.

Thursday Doors, Mar 2, 2017

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The vines surrounding the concrete pillars in front of this beachside hotel grow up the sides of trees, thus the rounded shape.  Usually they are used as pillars with the tree trunk inside, but for some reason, they substituted concrete.  Neat effect, though.

For Norm’s Thursday Doors Challenge.

Cee’s Black and White Challenge: A or B

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“B” is For:

(Click on first photo to enlarge all and see captions.)

Bubbles,
Brooches,
Baubles and Beads,
Bellies,
Boats
and Bullies!

For Cee’s A or B Challenge