Favorite stove burner

Molly Fisk asks what stovetop burner we prefer, and how do we brush our teeth, things which we never tell anyone. I’m a hard left front stovetop burner lover. It’s almost politically ingrained. I brush my teeth up front and center. The molars are in the wings, but my eyeteeth see everything. Corn is eaten in a circle, or more like a möbius strip circling back on itself. I have only two pair of shoes with laces. They rarely come out of the closet. I prefer to walk barefoot whenever possible. Socks are optional. To make up for Robert’s shoelace balancing age test, I have perfected the flamingo stance of dressing. Only occasionally do I fall over, hog-tied by my knickers and jeans. When I do, it’s spectacular. Things which I never tell anyone.

In the orchard

The inside of the fig, a crimson surprise with seeds like inverted thistles. Why does the fig tree wait so long to bear fruit, what does it dream of during those decades of silence? Is it because it blooms inside out?

We rejoice when the Banyan tree of Lahaina, a relative of the fig, sprouts new leaves after the fire, the roots run deep, despite being at sea level. Resurrection after the fire. Drinking the sea. Our mother.

We wait on the shore, the murmur and surcease of waves reminding us that everything is repeated.

That everything is repeated.

The way the citrus trees bloom despite the drought, gives me hope. Meyer lemon blossoms, like prom corsages of gardenias set fruit, small blessings to see us through the duration. The lonely sun rests on the horizon and waits for night to fall, ushers in an endless carpet of stars. The deer nip off the new buds of the Matilija poppy, despite its narcotic lethe.

I am enamored by the way the tomato resists the knife, so like our own skin, it too bleeds onto the plate, waiting for oil to drizzle a golden storm across its slices.

Love’s winged kind winter‘s naked trees, flashes of sunlight as the red leaves of the pear tree riding the wind, the orchard tucks in, waiting for spring. 

I remember listening for those nights when the roses followed the orb light, a siren call as we turned towards darkness, the end of summer when the mold begins to spread across the leaves of squash, hollyhocks and tomato, nipping, those sterile flowers in the bud, unseasonable flowers, unformed fruit. 

The tomato imagining life upside down. Once my uncle brought us a hanging planter tomatoes growing up from the bottom of the pot, as if it could right of the world’s wrongs.

The last time I began to write from memory, it robbed me of voice. Such saboteurs of DNA. What we inherit, remnants of our past, a gateway and a base reset. Why we write.

UNSEASONABLE RAIN

The pale summer sky is cloaked 

with an unseasonable beauty of thunderclouds, 

ladened with promises of lightning and wildfire.

We hold our breath, pack our go-bags, and hope for rain.

The Perseids whisper of distant light in the northern quadrant. 

I imagine angels imposed on the levity of the sky, 

and think of the inevitable promise of the grave, 

how the pretenders and believers alike 

eventually succumb to that final darkness.

Don’t they know the story is a run-on life sentence?

8/16/23

BRÓN TROGAIN, SUMMER’S END

Fading August light, 

the clattering of bay leaves. 

A sharpness in the air.

These are the seeds of memory, 

the mountains painted blue,

the hayfields of stored sunlight.

The waning moon sings of despair, 

and the wild iris by the side of the road

slumbers toward winter darkness.

The sky shrugs its shoulders,

covered in a shawl of clouds.

The thunder answers

with an empty promise 

of late summer rain.

8/9/23

THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

THE ANTHROPOCENE AGE

So much language is lost in the labyrinth of the throat. 

The face you see in sleep, iridescent in the air 

like the memoirs of ghosts at a banquet, 

recording the remembered past. But your face 

is a map of sorrow packed in a carry-on suitcase. 

Did the mouth lead you too far astray? 

We are all drinking from the same ancestral river, 

dissipating the dream, waiting to be named. 

The indigenous women of the desert held stones 

at the back of the throat to belay their thirst. 

The poetry of negligence lays down its burden at the gates 

of the old cathedral, prays for divine intercession. 

I swallowed small stones and tried to hide 

the obligatory ephemera of my mind from everyone. 

Who shattered the 4th wall, a 2-way mirror staring into the sun?

What is riding whitewater on the river of memory? 

What about the storyline, the cast of characters? 

Who will be last one standing with one foot in the void? 

The clock is hungry but the numbers of darkness 

are always too late to see the the precipice or the void.

We are counting down the days and the nights 

marching towards the harvest of death. 

Solar flares reach into the darkness 

disabling all the motherboards. The alpha 

and the omega of the Anthropocene Age. 

7/12/23 Write On! with Susie Terence (take two).

In one man’s republic

In one man’s country there is a potter’s field littered with poets, and the trains run on time. There are trees laden with fruit and horses prancing in a parade, while a president is perpetually shaking hands. But all those green pastures, the republic of poetry lies fallow, because in reality, no one ever adopts the poets. The unaknowledged legistators of the world, the keepers of truth, flee to safer borders. They are often first on the hitlist to that undiscovered country. The poets of Chile, of Iraq. Now, Ukraine. The idea of a republic is an old notion bandied about until it slithers back into the black hole of dictatorship. From the toga republic of ancient Rome to the black shirt of Il Duce, to the jumpsuit of the Orange One, the journey continues. I think of Ukraine holding fast to its identity as the new and improved USSR tries to swallow it like a despotic python. Mother Russia was always insatiable, unable to assuage its blood lust, absorbing and stripping cultures at the speed of tanks, or cossacks rumbling across the tundra. How can I write about what was lost? And to think of our own republic of senators, in clandestine backroom deals, war profiteers selling out to the highest bidder. There goes democracy. We, the people, are the ones that suffer, and so it goes. I admit I only watched the first day of the Jan 6 hearings. I can’t bear to witness any more, opting for synopsis, if only for peace of mind. Does that make me unpatriotic? I know this isn’t a poem, it will never be a poem. Yet I write because there is no hope of resurrection, nor will those plump images and juicy verbs come to my bidding. It is nothing but imitation. The labyrinth of music holding onto the past, is choosing you whether or not you are ready for it. And hidden in the folds of the lair of dreams, are things left undone that cannot be fixed, nightmares that resurrect at life’s end. In the trap of memory, what is in force, is not what I imagined, yet here we are. In the republic of the artist, we wouldn’t have to beg for money, or tighten our proverbial belts, thus girding our loins, and not go down for the count. The republic of the heart is a labyrinth, with a policeman on patrol, searching for truants. And hope is a name looking for its heartsong, to escape on the wings of a bird. This is the first dead bird among many, feathered fragments of silence resurrected in the bookstore of dreams. That candle guttering in the library is a dangerous weapon of mass distraction.

6/15 Write On! Susie Terence workshop

All in a day’s work

It seems a poet’s work is never done. Poets are always analyzing everything, searching for the exact right word or phrase to describe things. For example, driving down the road this blustery morning, I saw something luff and waft in the breeze. Thinking it was a bird, I slowed down, only to realize it was a branch, but it wasn’t a branch, it was the tip of a branch. And in that moment I realized how much we keep searching to get closer and closer to that moment when we have the aha, the moment of Epiphany. That moment when you know that you have chosen the exact right word to describe what it is you’re seeing or feeling. Or include the philosophical level when you go back to layer or imbue a poem with meaning. But you can’t kill the baby in the process. 

Sometimes, stacking image after image after image creates meaning in the reader, but other times we have to strife with, or settle for artifice to ensure that it is understood by all. Well not maybe by all, but by the reader—whoever the reader is. Take care of the reader. Something I always tell my students. It was so funny to hear one student saying it back to me when I was teaching. If we get a new student in the classroom, I will sometimes have students catch the other students up by explaining what it is we do. In this way I can tell if I am reaching the students and if they are retaining the information. 

It is rare that I get a chance to dictate to my iPad. Because usually I do not have the clarity of mind to focus in that way. And I think of how poetry has a home in my brain making it much more pliable, making it possible for me to talk to a machine, in order to write a poem. Truly, poetry is the mother of all arts. And then some.

Back in October, 2017 while driving to Sonoma County to meet or friend, Kathleen Carr, I was broadsided by a jumble of words tumbling fourth, and having no paper and having no iPad, I grabbed a marker and on the side of a zucchini box, I scrawled the poem as it came, fast and furious. But I waited too long to transcribe it, and couldn’t read some of it. The juxtaposition, the leap from idea to idea is interesting. I have no idea what the poem was about, or what prompted it. I just know that sometimes when driving down wild backroads, words speak through me. And I am merely the scribe.

I scribe, scribble, scribe. A scribe rights, a child scribbles, scrawls poems.

CPITS workshops, Jane Hirshfield, Dan Levinson, Jessica Wilson

“It is important that awake people be awake.” Stafford
Poem Is Small Kindnesses by Danusha Lameris

Writing Prompt:  On left side in a vertical column:  5 -10 concrete nouns.  Make them different from each other.

On the right side of the page, do the same vertical columns - 5-10 abstract nouns.  Any school subject, any emotion, ideas…Things you can’t touch.

In between each two words in both set of columns, write the word “OF”  Should give you a set  “coffee cup of science”  or switch order “science of coffee cups”

Pick one of these sets or constellations of words that excites you and begin a piece of writing.

On left side in a vertical column:  5 -10 concrete nouns.  Make them different from each other.

On the right side of the page, do the same vertical columns - 5-10 abstract nouns.  Any school subject, any emotion, ideas…Things you can’t touch.

In between each two words in both set of columns, write the word “OF”  Should give you a set  “coffee cup of science”  or switch order “science of coffee cups”

Pick one of these sets or constellations of words that excites you and begin a piece of writing.

You have roughly 10 minutes.

Freewrite 1

In the mirror, grief waited
patiently for light to surrender,
and for the darkness to follow.
Its silvered tongue spoke of the past
when women plumbed its depths,
scrying the future from the dross.
I was once one of those women,
living in the USSR, one winter, waiting
for a glimpse of the future.
And now here we are.
The old beveled mirror, someone’s discard,
silver scratched off the back,
faithfully reflects the light, sharpens its teeth,
while I measure shadows crawling across the room
where containment is equal to life.
The banshee wailing at the door, is hunting again.
So many fallen, I do not know where to begin,
or how to comprehend such grief.
My pen is mute, filled with darkness,
my hand speaks of loss, trying on other dreams
in the mirror when I am not looking.
The clock is writing down the calendar of days.
We grow used to the genteel confinement.
It becomes our familiar. We become inured to it.
Yet the world rages on, a lethal stew of protesters,
AntiFa and AltRigh boiling in the streets
as if naming it could quell the civil unrest.
Tearing down statues of oppression
and tearing down what was once good—
there is no filter. It is all fodder for the rage that burns.
And we sit in our towers watching the wind
bending the tall grass to its will
as the ashes of the dead ride on the breeze.

Next Prompt:  Write down some things that people might actually say.

Next, write down 1-3 factual statements. Simple sentences that are true. For example: “The earth is round.”

Last thing to write down:   one question.

Cheating is allowed.  Change any elements. Write a poem which is someway relevant to your reality (and unreality.) Write a poem that has actual spoken words or dialogue in some way in it. Be aware of the typographical possibilities as well as the possibilities of how many ways there are to work dialogue into a poem: in passing, as the main way the poem moves, or something in between, or a momentary breaking of the fourth wall. Optional: include a fact, a question, or both.

Model poems:

The Act by William Carlos Willams

In the Desert by Stephen Crane

A Note on ‘Iowa City:  Early April’ by Robert Hass

[from Citizen] by Claudia Rankine

Table by Edip Canceler, translated by Richard Tillinghast from the Turkish

10 minutes… Write a poem which is someway relevant to this moment in your reality (and unreality.)  Write a poem that has actual spoken words or dialogue in some way in it. Be aware of the typographical possibilities as well as the possibilities of how many ways there are to work dialogue into a poem: in passing, as the main way the poem moves, or something in between, or a momentary breaking of the fourth wall. Optional: include a fact, a question, or both.

Freewrite 2

Where to even begin? The mind wants answers,
and some are satisfied with any answers
that will do, no matter how impossible.
People are grasping at straws as if they were liferafts
in the deep end of the COVID pool.
Lemmings flock to the beaches, as if to find the answer,
the first terrestrial “I am” ever uttered.
I want to tell the gobies and the mudskippers
there’s been a mistake, but I’ve said it all before
in another poem, long ago, when I was someone else.
As we look down the hind site
of that long barreled gun of time,
we can’t even imagine anything else but this moment,
frozen, in the perpetual now.
Each act takes us farther from ourselves,
and what we once held to be true,
makes us re-define our lives with a new timeframe,
so that we can barely remember
anything other than now.
What is happening to time?
As we speed headlong
towards our own extinction.

Three Alexander Valley School freewrites

CORONA ACROSTIX

Come to the window
Open the heart of the day
Return to the beginning
   where anything was possible
Or begin a new dream where we reinvent the future
Nothing can stop us now,
   only our imaginations where we become
A window into the past, and the future.


FREEWRITE WHAT MIRANDA SAID:

Writing about the unsaid, the unspoken, needing to name it, but afraid to invoke its name. Call it a crown, it was the beginning and the end of the world as we knew it, our crowning achievement, sawdust in our mouths, as we hunker down and wait for a new day, a new language. We hide in Prospero‘s Cave, and can only imagine a brave new world that awaits us. What shall we pack for our journey into the abyss?

THE DESTINY OF WATER

Once I was the clear vision of the spring,
then I became the rivulet building speed,
gathering momentum until the mud filled my mouth,
in my angry dance to the sea where turbulent waters
obscured my path, I raged in my angry dance,
until I could no longer see where I was going,
or grasp what obscure future awaited me.
No bright shining path, no Andean glacier to greet me,
only the scales of strange fish in foreign seas.
I think of Neruda and his beloved Isla Negra,
the place where he felt most at home,
where even in his exile, he always returned to,
again and again, especially in dreams.

5/6/20

AVS freewrites YOUR HEART IS A DRUM, CATCH & RELEASE

YOUR HEART IS A DRUM

Your heart is a drum 

beating in the sky of self.
It wants to find the place 

where thunder sleeps with the clouds, 

where lightning is an idea of its time, 

where we gather our thoughts 

and dream of the night stars.

CATCH & RELEASE 

Catch and release of the day
When you write a poem it’s like a river, 

it’s like fishing. First you approach the pond, 

and then you cast your line into the water. 

You chase those concentric ripples 

to the opposite shores and when you get a nipple, 

you really in your line, hook that fish, 

reel it in, and bring it to shore. 

Then, you let it go.

2 FREEWRITES WITH PICASSO

GOD IS IN THE CRACKS

In a world of no
there is no room for conflagration
astral core samples, the hunger to know.
In the beginning was the crenulation of the brain.
What came first, the universe or the blackhole?

A psalm story
Earth-based spirituality
Dogs speaking from the other side.
Death is an illusion, or so people say
Heaven is a place that cannot be found.

God is in the cracks, a tiny crack
that separates this world from the next.

7/8 of everything there is is invisible.

Your feet know the way to the other world.

You can't just chase the invisible.

There is only one thing we all equally possess,
and that is our loneliness.

Like fortitude, the struggle with the angels,
where would the words go, the strength of mind,
will, or choice, what we represent.
We are here for the the lesson of fate, or of passion,
what arises out of consciousness
and oppression is art. Solely art.


AH, PICASSO, PICASSO

Ah, Picasso, Picasso,
painting is just another way of keeping up,
another way of keeping a dark circle
on the head of the horse rendered
in dappled beauty while the dancers take flight.
On the table, a frugal meal is laid out,
a white potato, an apple. Some wine
for La Celestina.

A scarf, the laying of the brush.
Oh death and las damseilles.
Azure landscapes with two figures.
Every act of creation is too strong
of an act of destruction.

Painting is a form of magic
designed as a mediator
between the strange and hostile world.

Picasso said: it took me four years
to paint a rock like Rafael
but I know how to paint something.
When I paint I feel that all art
is in the past.

Let's go dancing, it's in the cards,
she said, the city folds in on itself.
The sound of an empty room.
After she left, they were thick as thieves
at the circus.

She pulls the self-portrait over her lips,
his eyes follow her every move,
but the viper was just a pipe,
it's in the cards, she said.

A small blue door,
two women running on the beach
22 breasts adrift in the breeze.
Such blue to contend with,
such monumental flesh,
Ruben's women turned to stone.

Picasso said: Art is never chaste.
A nude in the garden, and green cats.
Portrait of Dona Maar
the hands, tuberous clusters.
Weeping women in red dresses.
Art is that which makes us realize the truth.
Said the weeping women.

A cat and a bird, an unequal war.
Art is something of the senses,
a weapon of self defense against the enemy,
the symbolization of women
in the studio in Algiers.

Picasso said: painting is stronger than me.
It makes me want what it wants.
Oh the Women at Dachau and the Minotaur,
finally the Minotaur, the bullfight,
the disembodied horse, a goat skull,
an empty bottle, the candle of war,
and of course, Guernica,
that is the dissolution of life, of art.

transcribed and revised, 10/17/14
 

When in Rome freewrite

When in Rome, and… an elipsis following a trail, breadcrumbs for the birds. A trick? When in Rome, the idea is to follow the customs of another culture. The culture of birds following a trail, the trap, or the Trojan horse? The cat, anticipating fresh meat, wiggles her haunches like a track star brandishing her cleats. She waits, anticipates trajectories and potential outcomes. Don't tell me cats can't plan ahead. The successful hunter requires mathematics and timing. The cat is a quantum dancer ... Oh, hell the breadcrumbs have led me astray. I am following a cold trail because Rome wasn't built in a day, nor did it fall in a day either. The system continued on for hundreds of years after the fall with no one at the helm, I might add, sort of like today. The politicians fiddle and burn, and combust at absolute apoplexy. We follow the Spanish customs and then look at what happens. Yeah when in Rome, it never left us. We carried the Capitoline burden into the second millennium without missing a beat. We are our own Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Moors simultaneously tearing down the infrastructure of our civilization well shoring up the bastions of hope. When in Rome, do as you would, and to others. To the other, take those aphorisms and drop kick them over the fence and let them drown in the pond of regret and despair.

11/5/2010 Writers' Group

Bucket list Freewrite, Tobey Kaplan, Montara Middle School

Bucket list Freewrite

I want to see the northern islands
I want to go to the Isle of Man,
the Outer Hebrides, the Aran Islands.
I want to see the graveyard of kings
on the Isle of Iona, and the Holy Isle ofArran.

I want to see Thailand before I die,
the place where the tsunami scoured
fragile atoles, the resurgence of palm trees,
leaves clattering in the wind
I want to bask in the sun of down under,
snorkel the great barrier reef,
see the gardens of fish bloom
in technicolor splendor,
sit beneath the Boojum tree
and admire its strong adaptation
to desert sun and drought.

I want to live in a house in the country.
I might get a cat, maybe some chickens.
A house if I don’t have to take care of it daily.
I’ve already done that. I’d grow a garden,
watch the tomatoes ripen.
I’d eat raspberries right from the vine
I’d beat the birds at their own game
for breakfast.

But I woke up an hour too early today
and I thought I was late for class
so I listened to ancient music,
Uillean pipes in the morning mist.
It took me off. The clock stood still.
Time slipped away.
I was trapped between worlds,
transported to the otherworld
where time stands still
and life is always in the moment.

4/11/08
Montera Middle School

Interruption, freewrite

Interruption: not to interrupt as in bury but to erupt like a volcano. Pyroclastic chaos. The sunrises and sunsets these days are lurid fan dancers of flaming color. The volcanoes on the other side of the world, on the other side of the hemisphere, are belching forth and the sky is a flamethrower of passion. No tender pink peach and mango hues, but raging carmines and crimsons like women in sequined red dresses. All eyes are on the night sky. No rosy-fingered dawn but entranced firewalkers on the hot coals of morning. We hardly know how to keep contain all this beauty and so we haul out our cameras to capture fleeting glance at this immorality of color and  maybe even an immortal lady in the red. You interrupt my sleep and  haunt me with your vermilion veil stretched across an indigo night. I am at odds with all this color and I cannot just sit and watch. I want to paint the sky and auroras of color—whether Australialis or Borealis, I'm not choosy. 

10/5/2007?

A POEM FOR MT. ST. HELENS 1980

Here the dawn breaks 

like a dancer veiled in vermillion.

Here it arrives in crimson clouds 

arranged against cerulean skies.
It swirls and leaps in fleeting colors 

until we are dizzied and all out of breath.

10/5/2007?

IN THE MOUNTAINS OF CHINA

IN THE MOUNTAINS OF CHINA

In the mountains of China
An apricot holds
the architecture of sunrise
in the rosy blush of its flesh.

Last in line, photographs,
a doorway from the past,
breaking the silence.

Architecture of sunrise
the firebird of the alps awakens.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

The wild northwind

When the wild north wind blew, my horses would dance and skedaddle down the fire roads as if death were on their heels. They became unpredictable in flight with leaps of fancy and sudden swerves that left in my heart and stomach abandoned by the side of the road, or caught in my throat. They imagined fierce creatures chasing them, they took the bit between their teeth and ran harder still. Their hooves beating a staccato on the hardpan earth by the lake. Inevitably gravity was around the corner in the form of a cliff, or low hanging branches. I don't know how we survive childhood. But those horses, once they had run their course, were weary with a savage grace and they had a lightness of step, a new glint their eyes. And I realized it invigorated them. Perhaps they felt more alive at that moment, having run a race with imagined death, and won. Descendants of the tireless Arabian, hey held their tails up high to the wind and pranced more like swallows them horses, with nostrils flared, and breaking a sweat and solidly alive. 

(A Bedouin escaping his enemies threw off his cloak in order to let his mare run faster but her tail was raised so high it caught the cloak and he still escaped.)

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

ARCHITECTURE OF SUNRISE (short takes)

ARCHITECTURE OF SUNRISE (short takes)

An apricot holds
the architecture of sunrise
in the rosy blush of its flesh.

Last in line, photographs, 

a doorway from the past, 

breaking the silence.

Architecture of sunrise 

the firebird of the alps awakens.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

The architecture of sunrise

A faint haze across the sun colors the evening light into orange and amber. A shaft of light paints the curbs so red that Niel's afraid to park there for fear of tickets. But the sun's about to set, no police will come. It's as if the fading sun were leaving us with a phoebian gift, painting a picture to be rebuilt in the rosy-fingered dawn. The architecture sunrise splashes against the slopes of the mountains and leaves sinewy beads in the canyons of its absence.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

A nature of the mountains of China

An apricot holds 

the architecture of sunrise 

in the Rosie blush of its flesh.

Last in line, photographs, 

a doorway from the past, 

breaking the silence.

Architecture of sunrise 

the Firebird of the alps awakens.

8/24/2007 Writers' Group

Mice in the garden, freewrite

I felt a sense of wonder as I watched the mice families appear in the garden, mowing down my parsley. Irritating, were they Italian mice? But house mice, like rats come from the far east, they are non-native species. 

Did the Chinese watch the mouse mothers bringing their pups out into the light, into the garden with the same awe, or were they jaded? I watch the pups sniff the flowers and taste everything—knowing that I will have to be the one that puts an end to their reverie. Death too is sacred and so I spend the day watching them, documenting their every move, even when they gleefully eat the poison oats or fall into my trap. 

For though they are cute, I cannot coexist with this vermin bloom, promulgated by a neighbor, who feeds all the birds and squirrels in the neighborhood. The mice line up beneath her feeders and propagate until there they are myriads. There are tiny foot paths everywhere. Gleefully they eat the poison or and run across my traps.

I take photos of mice, the size of quarters and admire them for their sleek beauty. But last night, the traps went off, and I caught Mickey Ratoncito, the stage left character, but the trap caught him by the paws. I t released him from the trap, and he looked right into my eyes and then blinked and screamed. There was no longer a division between mouse and human, we were both on the same with wave length. I put him in a glass house and made him as comfortable as I could. He washed his face and perched up, cute as could be. I promised that I would let him go if he survive the poison and the trap. But he was dead by the time the earthquake struck. 

7/20/2007 Writers’Group

The sacred, a sense of wonder, freewrite

A jaded sense of wonder arises when the sun glints on the bay on late afternoon when the mountains turned indigo, separated by marine mist, and the gunmetal colored bay is a mirror to the sky. When the color of morning feeds to the thick care of afternoon, but at dusk, it’s as if the contrast was sharpened, a clear vision restored from the afternoon, Hayes. This clarity that comes just before dusk is like a sudden inside of wisdom on the eve of death.

7/20/2007 Writers’Group