Solstice Joy

}⸰ɷ⸰{

Want to bring all of the spark and growl you’ve shared with such finesse

to all those we know, and all those we don’t, that they might stir it into

a large batch of the sweetest chords, maybe John Fahey’s Christmas Medley

and from the roots of the tallest trees cast out throughout the land,

Here’s the thing! It happens now, and now, and now, and now…..and it never gets finished

Get with it and laugh, we’re allowed into this life by no small miracle and the rehearsals are over

}⸰ɷ⸰{

G. Keillor/ MPR News Q Podcast

A copy of A Christmas Blizzard sets near the wee-tree with care, yet another joy that lies ahead this week.
Sugar-plums are dancing!

This Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ podcast, from 12/09/09 is live from the Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church in St. Paul, Mn.
Keillor shares about his recent health scare of a minor stroke while brightly meandering towards the storyline of his newest book A Christmas Blizzard.
Timeless delight with GK edge, from Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ

Contribute $$ while there for this sweet service if you're able.

Terra-formed

~

From The Blue Room

A Red Shouldered Hawk in Friday repose at the back of the Berry Petroleum building in Bakersfield, Calif. Berry, was a successful Klondike gold miner with an interesting history. I've more digging to do.

The bird likes the place!


Terra-formed

Fall goes on never getting round to winter

Daily battalion of yard warriors

are blowing leaf beds

and raucous unlikely blossoms

circle wind cracked trees

~

My coffee's cold

sweet and dark as the view

spangles of ice glint from air-conditioning units

while the furnace won't, yet

bubbled asphalt slows the plastics and aluminum man

who's chilled and wrapped, moving

beneath an ancient order of Turkey Vulture

and parrots, squawking their garish circles

Climate confusion melds the unlikely

in this stratified desert city

Remarkably, it seems to keep working

moody repose this december night

From The Blue Room

The Woman in Red (The Rose Tunic)
by Tamara de Lempicka

A Great Dame in Repose ~ Thank You Grandma

From Thanksgiving '09

We came in battalions,
traveling for miles
generations of Us
An outward extension of
your love and ferocity
gathering round the myth
and reality of you

And, there was food and a great deal of warmth.
Many layers of it.

What an Embrace!

From

A delightful fur and feathered beast enfolds us in Southeast Alaska mid-Nov.'09.

A Spinning Break-Away

*

Deep snow against my legs asking

a higher step then I'm used to

I'm watching the little spindly

legs of the sheep girls,

the goat-sharp tails fan

ahead of the sheep.

We stride hard to make the most

wonderful slushing noises. Every part of this body

begins to sing; arms 'n'

thighs-belly, shoulders-chest. Cold

backward chills rush my

nose. This hairline exposed, warm

moist breath pressing,

trim ears. Remind me I'm alive

Raven, who cart-tumbles

black ebony bone pressed

against the bruised blue sky. I stretch,

twirl big boots and heavy rain gear, the dog

can't tell which is laughing.

The forest

or me.

A Routine

Still in the habit of checking with the stars at night and hearing my wishes made.

♨ Help me to know the heart of life on Earth
♨ Touch all that is living at this moment with the spirit of all that has ever lived
♨ Make it easier for me and my kind to stop and listen silently to the voice of grace

Then, I read what the muse has left for me to shape my thoughts around before trying to sleep and finding a dream.

It's a habit.

From Alaskan In The Hinterlands

Missing

Tonight, I find myself missing.
A tepid air hangs closely
dampening the place where my feet
should be touching the floor.
I peer over the tops of my knees
toward the place below
and find an opened void
That's when I learn, the I
that I was, is no longer here.

I'll keep looking.

The Garden ~ by Mickey Revenaugh

There’s always been a backyard garden at 321 Oleander, from the day we moved there in 1968 and our Mom planted Swiss chard along the brick wall where the previous tenants had created a bed for decorative shrubs that never took root. Perhaps they got discouraged by the intense arid heat of the Central California summers, but that never stopped Mom. In no time, that Swiss chard grew as tall as she was and its bitter boiled green leaves found their way onto our dinner plates night after night.

Mom had one full-time job as a social worker and another full-time job trying to keep us kids in one piece on her own, but she always managed to keep a garden growing. Three kinds of tomatoes, sage, snap peas, and cukes. Hollyhocks to the eaves of the house, four o’clocks on the side, hens and chickens, an army of irises. After we’d all grown and gone and she’d retired, Mom’s garden got more and more elaborate, its pickable sweets and gewgaws the delight of visiting grandkids.

That’s what made the tangle of empty pots and weeds in the backyard so disheartening after Mom broke her hip. Taking turns caring for her, we’d look out the back window at the desolate patch of brown and see only loss, decline. It was a relief that first year after her fall when first summer turned the whole town sepia and then winter left the surrounding croplands fallow. Just wouldn’t have seemed right for things to go on growing when our Mom was struck still.

But when spring came around again, our eldest sister couldn’t take it anymore. She paid the guy who cuts our Mom’s grass an extra fifty to come back with his Rototiller and turned the dead garden into a blank soil canvas. Then she headed back to Alaska for a month’s respite with the parting words, “If you feel like thinking about a garden…”

Our little brother, now a grown genius, had the first shift. Knowing that hydration is destiny in the Central Valley, he created an intricate homemade system of underground soaker hoses and multiple faucet heads so the whole 10 x 40 tilled bed could be deep-watered with one turn of the wrist. He also transformed Mom’s various abandoned garden decorations into planter boxes, trellises, and dividers, all ready for the plants to come.

It was my turn next, and I tackled the task with my two favorite tools: a computer and a credit card. I made a more-or-less to scale diagram of the garden with icons for various plants – red circles for tomatoes, mottled green ovals for zucchini, sticks with smiley faces for sunflowers – then posted them on Google Docs and asked my siblings to help plot out the plants. Then I hit both the local nursery and Home Depot for a cornucopia of seeds and seedlings. I was used to gardening in my over-shaded New York yard and believed in having back-ups to back-ups because half the stuff would never even come up anyway.

Actual planting was guided by our middle sister, the only one of us who’d ever grown a serious garden in a climate like this one. She’d even co-gardened with our Mom as a high schooler way back in the day, so she knew about things like planting the various vined things apart from each other, and when to put a paper plate under the head of a cantaloupe.

We all had a part to play – with Mom bemusedly supervising from her bed on the other side of the house. We’d bring her the updated plan printouts and empty seed packets, seek her advice on the relative merits of cherry tomatoes vs. beefsteaks. (Plant both, she advised, so we did.) Once the seeds were in the ground with their careful markers and water system had its test run, there was nothing to do but wait.

Within a week, there was very little brown left to see on our garden canvas – things were sprouting like crazy. Within a month it was clear that every single zucchini seed had taken root and was competing to produce the biggest leaves, the most blossoms, the fattest vines. The seed tomatoes were in a race with the store-bought plants to see who’d put out the most fruit first. Sunflowers shot up 4 feet, then 6, then 10 and 12 by mid-summer. A riot of cantaloupe turned the makeshift trellis into a mountain of green festooned with perfect melon spheres. A forest of dill bumped up against two kinds of basil tall and bushy enough to be mistaken for a fragrant hedgerow. And we all agreed that the standing too close to the pumpkin patch was hazardous – the vines were growing so fast it seemed they could wrap around your legs before you had time to move.

All summer we harvested zucchini the size of small children, tomatoes by the bushel, herbs, melons, even a cucumber or two. Although the carrots only grew a couple inches long, their greens came up past our knees. The pumpkins were huge way before their time, and a few mated with their squash cousins to created pumpkinis (or zuchkins - we were never sure which). We set up a Free Veggies stand out on the front sidewalk near the foot of the ramp we’d built for Mom when she’d first fallen, back when we were sure she’d be tooling around with her walker in no time. We’d bring each new astonishment to her bedside and say, invariably, “Can you believe this came out of YOUR garden?” She was the only one who seemed not the least bit surprised.

Now another autumn is upon us, and the Rototiller guy has come and gone again. The abandoned weed patch that became the mother of all gardens is now a rich brown canvas once again. Like our Mom, it’s ready for whatever comes next.

321 The Slide Show Late Oct '09

A tour of 'Thursa's place.

If you click on the image, you'll be led to an album. Find full view in the upper left hand corner of the page/ click and you'll be let into the theater; hey, a front row seat!

Intro to Kenya News and WBUR's Here and Now ---

Today, The Blue Room is proud to share Kenya News, a source offered via BBC's West Africa correspondent Will Ross who's recent report from the Turkana region of northwest Kenya was featured Oct.5 with WBUR's Here and Now and can be heard as a podcast there.
Both The Kenya News and WBUR's Here and Now, with host Robin Young will be regular feeds on the Hinterlands page accessible here through the Blue Room.

Here and Now is beamed to the Monastery in Bako via XM Radio channel 133.

Featured today is a piece by Micah Bochart after his travels in Africa just before the recent chaos erupted there.

Reckless, Like Churchill In The Garden
September
2007

Reckless, like Churchill in the garden.

Pen pressed to paper, as the story goes, cutting up the empire into units of glib aesthetic, saying here’s Kenya, here’s Uganda, here’s Nairobi, and the price of that swell-looking map coming down hard in borders and stations and the sundering of tribes.

Coming down hard in the Masaii divided, to the north Kenyans, to south Tanzanians. Here one, here the other.

Like power coy and migrant. A history in throes.

And me tossed between them and packaged as a witness, and seeing them in body. Two tribesman handcuffed together in the back of a pickup truck in the mountains of Tanzania. September 15. 2007.

I’d just come down off the mountain. Meru, that is. Fifteen-thousand feet. The fifth tallest in Africa.

I was exhausted and diseased, four days into a fever, and still I’d climbed the mountain, still crazy enough or stupid enough. Still stumbled about in that lunar extremity, up from the jungle, the misty treetops, up from a grazing giraffe that for once traipsed close enough to feel like a beast, like the corporeal creature it was.

Up to a summit swathed in fog, view zero, then down again with Godwine my guide, never less than ten steps in front of me, a rifle strapped to his back, his English sketchy, my Swahili falling short on the far side of Asante, but finding communion in space, in green, in scattered pockets of endurance, appearing here and there, Godwine pausing every fifteen minutes, saying, There is buffalo, there is gazelle.

And parting at last at the base of the mountain, he and I, and me falling asleep in the sunshine, reclined against my pack, waiting for the rangers to wake me when my free ride came.

The free ride I’d heard whispered about but never described, always in the margins since I’d entered the park two days ago, when I’d paid a man to drive me in, and the uniformed gatekeepers assured me of the existence of vehicles with no shillings attached, that would take me back to the highway again with my pocket none the slimmer.

And so I waited, sick but certified, a piece of paper in my hand with Godwine’s signature that said I’d climbed Meru, and shipping out at the end of the afternoon, a man tapping me on the shoulder and saying take it while you can, and me jumping in, without looking twice, into the flatbed of my Free Ride Manifest.

I didn’t notice my company until we’d started down the road, when it was me and the backpack pressed against the tailgate, and three men standing above me with machine guns in their hands, and two Masaii tribesman, faces impassive, handcuffed together at the wrist, and this my ride. My way back to Arusha.

I’d never learn their crime. I’d just stare at them sitting there on the far side of the flatbed, bodies roughed against the cab, their robes smeared with dust, and the truck speeding down the switchbacks, rattling over chuckholes, me sitting at the tailgate and trying to keep myself from sliding forward. From sliding into the muzzle of a rifle or Kalashnikov. And the men above me laughing, and the tribesman staring, and the head of a giraffe watching us go by, head thrust upward from the canopy of the jungle, watching us as they must always watch, the creatures of Africa.

Watching the passage of handcuffs. Borders and stations. All the little units of arcane justice.

Like power coy and migrant.

All reckless.

Like the maps.

--

I was drunk the night I bought my tickets.

I had to be drunk or I’d never go through with it.

I came with my skin and my readings of scripture, Rough Guide and Lonely Planet, the overpriced bibles of the Footloose and Free, propelled trans-
Atlantic by the click of a mouse and a bottle of cheap red wine.

Three days in Tanzania.

Twelve days in Kenya.

My time divided neatly and cutely, five months in advance, an equator’s length away, my body hungry for a plucking up of Self-hood and dropping of Self in a place where Self was altered, in sands that were redder in life than in vision, and outbound at last on the 31st of August, borne on the wings of gas and commerce, a village fed on the price of my seat, the tickets unbought till I was drunk enough to buy them.

So drunk one night that I looked up prices, clicked purchase, sealed my odyssey in non-refundable contracts, and only then headed east. To Kenya. Coming down on the 1st. To Nairobi, which smelled like my grandfather’s cabin, like sweat and woodsmoke and Rudolph Bartell.

I thought nothing else could smell that way, that odor so deeply entrenched in my memories, and now it encompassed the totality of a capital, all the mosques and churches and broken asphalt, my German farmer father twice removed like a misplaced ghost hanging all over the city.

Nairobi.

Seven million people and the railroads that built it and the smell of a cabin in Washington State hanging over everything with not-so-baited breath.

And then Mombasa, on the ocean, and the bus ride down from Nairobi, south and southeast, every mile my farthest, a nine-hour study in elevation lost, shaken, from six-thousand feet to sea-level, down to the place where “Swahili” was born, where the dhow trade surged, crucible of language, Arabic tongues, indigenous tongues, tongues twisted/ coy/begotten, and the bus stopping in transit at a restaurant infested with flies, the way Greyhound always stops at McDonald’s, only now with a nearby sign saying "Mosque," and an arrow pointing the way, and a girl of twelve or fourteen with a shaved head and sandals and a sleeveless blue-jean dress hanging out in the parking lot and making a point of ignoring my face.

She's much too sassy to reduce to a metaphor. Much too vital to claim as my own, and in the service of my point, yet claim her I must. Reduce her I must. The moment is too potent to resist.

Like the young man in Mombasa who asked me to leave.

We met on a landing overlooking the harbor, me there first, and thus incensed by my expulsion, though never questioning the legitimacy of it, and the young man traipsing down the steps at seven a.m. and seating himself on the opposite side of the bench. Saying good morning to me, then asking me to go.

He said "Leave this place, please," and I did, not threatened, just angry, angry then renewed, "his leave this place" like parasites unwritten.

Unwritten, my week of endless pandering. The manic prostitution of salesman and beggars, the bus-stops and matatu terminals filled with people who were filled with goods, in burden and in motive, looking for money and knowing I was good for it, the proof in my pigment and my total aloneness, and me swindled on the first day by a con-man beggar who seduced me with sympathy and his hot-air story of being a Sudanese refugee, one I knew to be false even while he fed it to me, and me handing him a thousand shillings, or fifteen bucks Americano, and now the bane of it all, this man by the ocean asking me to leave, and the girl in the parking lot on the road to Mombasa, and the look in her face and the way she held her body, like she was unwriting borders. Unwriting maps.

And in Nairobi, the National Gallery, on Moi Avenue and Kenyatta Street. The Mau Mau Rebellion in sepia. 1954. The last great rebellion against the British before the loosing of the reigns.

Ten-thousand Africans deads and ten times as many interned, and ninety colonists dead. Ninety in all.

And the soldiers of the Sultanate of Oman, slavers like the Portuguese they conquered, turbans on their heads and rifles in their hands, their feet planted in the ground with a force that exceeded extraction, and Kenyatta’s election, and Independence in 1963, and the history of Kenya splashed out in photos I could photo because the curators let me, and here a statue of ivory, in an abstract pattern, something womblike, and this a sculptor’s dream of how it would end. Apartheid in South Africa. Dreamed in ’89. The magnitude of resistance and survival.

And me there in September.

2007.

And in three months the election, when Yahoo! News featured its photo of a Kikuyu in a white shirt and a white hat, a machete in his hand, and a wall of fire behind him, his blow coming down on some unseen skull, and this the image for which Kenya would be known.

--

I was numb when I read the news.

All I could remember were the restaurants and the diners, Kibaki or Odinga on the TV set and everyone looking up from their dinners and watching. Just watching.

And my second time in Nairobi, coming back from the north and meeting a local at the hostel where I was staying, a young man with a pony-tail who was part Kenyan and part German and took me and another American out on my birthday for Ethiopian cuisine, and him talking about the election with all the dispassion and the flair of a talk on Clinton or Romney, and now the man with the machete, and churches burning, and me looking back and wondering how much of what I’d known had gone up in flames. Rewritten again.

Like the women in Naivasha, my age, maybe younger. In blue jeans and white T-shirts and wearing their hair straight and long and loose around the place where their shoulder blades joined.

I’d rode north from Nairobi in the back seat of a matatu, the yellow cab of Kenya, a mini-van with cracked glass and a faulty exhaust system. A hundred shillings to go wherever the hell you felt like going, and I felt like Naivasha, because it was someplace beyond, and so it was four hours of winding roads and rattling glass, a sound I knew would ingrain itself in my head until it was almost as inextricably a part of my being as the exhaust we all kept breathing, and I rode with my pack tucked tight between my knees and my body shoved between a Masaii tribesman and a consultant from Nairobi, my shoulders bookended by a tie and a brief case and a walking stick and earlobe rings, and now in Naivasha, at the edge of the village and the bottom of the valley, the two girls climbing in and sitting on either side of me, and me falling bottomlessly in love with their jeans and their fifty-league freedom but most of all their matching T-shirts and the way our
knees kept touching, and then, later, removed by the space of a quarter of a year and a resurgent Atlantic, I’d look back and find my gaze restored.

An Innocent again. Another gawker of maps. Artisan of the reductive transformation of a nation to a JPEG, Kenya returned almost to the place where it started – a chunk on the globe, a story in the news – and I’d look at the photo of the man with the machete and wonder who’s head he hit, and in my thoughts and in everyone’s thoughts and the thoughts of all the world it was like everyone in Kenya was fair game.

Could’ve been those girls. Could’ve been headless.

Could’ve been Marcus Bushman, who I met a half hour later on the shores of Lake Naivasha, sprawled on his stomach in the grass with a walking stick in his hands, a meager triplet of yards from the water’s edge and half again from the hippo-proof fence.

Marcus, the groundskeeper of this tiny little hamlet of a campground, and me in the grass across from him, talking about Alaska, and Marcus, twenty-something, like me and the blue-jean babes of Naivasha, a man of consummate coolness whom it looked like nothing in the world could rile, telling me he’d like to go some day. Marcus lying barefoot on his stomach in the grass with the hippo-proof fence behind him. Saying he’d like to go some day, and with genuine interest, and saying it in such a way that for once I felt my race had been shuttled to the margins. My nationality unwritten. Marcus doing me the tremendous service of stripping away my colonial background, so that for once, all I was was Alaska.

I asked permission for a photo.

I took his e-mail address down, so it wasn’t a one-way street, and I shot Marcus standing in the grass with the campground behind him, leaning against his stick, and it was Marcus’ picture I’d take in my hands and hold against the one with the machete and all the other Yahoo! shots of a nation gone wild, and Marcus’ picture that would remind me most of the failure of my gaze, my effortless adoption of this model of chaos, and I’d look back on it all and realize I could have done this nation no greater insult.

Reckless and imperial. And all that shit.

Northern Lovliness

While building sitting power towards writing, I'll resort to images of our beautiful daughters, Hannah (near Smaug Mt.), and Merrick

...a serious duo


...and Merrick with Joe...


...and The Micahman and his beloved Large Ones

Arms And Legs Akimbo

I lay outstretched and dripping

moisture from within, pressed to the surface

my skin trickling downward to pool

and cool at my back this heat

slips past thought

a sweeping

touch of airport-light passed

mounds and hollow and blade of fan

cool my tired want again

these arms and legs akimbo

A Myth of Symmetry In Vine

A garden of toys was planted before the inconstant heat of May
alive and sprouting quickly in the deep burnt soil
It was tended and neglected benign growth of mere edibles
now she gives it all away, hollow

A gourd-song from patched painted blueness
her private dance corn-bead down a row
strung past the endgame gone doggishly damp
empty, this inconstant symmetry of vine


Crooked neck and glory morning yellow
yeasty spray of tomato red as mad rose
wrapping the house in ropes of melon that
suspend, soft across the screen door we hang

This inconstant exit from her tangled fecundity




(a challenge of three poems with the word Inconstant)

A Comment In Passing

Writing and loving the beauty of a fragile tale
this old story of love in precarious balance
Imagine the scarlet lichen mist drenched rock and bare
the hunger of un-lived afternoons
made clean by touch
the wind and holy shiver
a shade of anticipation
when appreciation merges with surge
tidal upwelling salty and raw



Images by Micah Bochart 8/09 from a morning's hike above our valley home

Inspirations>>>Mid-Summer '09

Collecting inspirations to share here at The Blue Room, I offer the The Sun Magazine. This fine publication has always held a favorite place with our family.
It's a high quality, fine arts/writing and photography magazine that generally is a cover to cover read. It's been very interesting following it online. The cyber version has kept my appetite piqued while away from my own library and mailbox and as always, the monthly literary themes seem to anticipate events.
July '09 is a fine example.

Then, there's a delightful find -via- The Poetry Foundation where the front story, by Jenny Jarvie, is about the astonishing literary collection of Raymond Danowski. All of us who've spent time and investment honing our private libraries, wondering what might come of them beyond our caring devotion, will enjoy this remarkable story.

Today, I was also given a grand treat by friend and fine writer, Terry Collett. Terry introduced me to the classic photography of Julia Cameron. This is an example of her tremendous portraits taken in the mid 1800's. Expect a feature article comparing her soft focus work to contemporary photographers such as Sally Mann, and Patrisha McLean.



The end of July brings us closer to the high peak of summer where many of the best afternoons and evenings are spent drawing, exploring good books and writing our own creations.

Tuck away in a shadowy bower or nook. Stay attentive and enjoy!

A Backyard View: as above so below

The lower basin has begun to cool
An hour before dusk the mercury droops toward the lower registers
Block after block of over-watered lawns still simmer
a blanket of condensing vapor infant tule fog

Come morning the ancient desert sun an over ripe tomato lingers late over tepid coffee

Our pensive blue crescent will rise quietly mid-day
She's taking a break from the work week schedule and
scans the anniversary news
Beached for now with a bruin's belly promise she'll steadily gather girth



I'm down here watching from below
working the plot
for Grandmother's winter garden



Though the thermometer read 103 degrees, the squat little fellow ran determinedly, back and forth across the flat expanse of front yard.
The neighbors didn't take notice. Even old Mr. del Papa was watching the moon landing on TV, under a steadily spinning fan.

He knew the basics of what he needed to do.
Bud had taught Barry to hold the string close to the kite, lift your arm above your head and run like hell, till you feel a tug. When the tug was steady (providing you could muster up enough breeze with out falling over), let little sips of string, slip through your fingers, an inch at a time.

Sure wish to heck Bud were here now. He's tall enough to stand over on the McLanahan's side. Lift the kite way up above his head, so a guy can start with some height.
He'd be coming home soon, now that he was through with the Navy.

Gotta get this damn thing flying!

Tess stepped out onto the porch and watched the youngest turning a brilliant, sweaty red, back and forth, grinning at his older sister with that look.
She grinned back and sat on the stoop, carefully, so as not to burn the backs of her bare legs.

103! What a glimpse into Hell!

Things had been kinda awful for most of the year. She hadn't been able to feel enthusiasm since the move down here, three months ago.
But she hated showing how sad she really was. Mom was working so hard trying to get her feet on the ground.

Still, the steadily growing gloom inside was beginning to work Tess over. It was so bloody hot! Going outdoors took an act of sheer courage. But she HATED being In-doors.

Aw, Hell! Look at that little guy! He's gonna croak!

Landing on the moon...very scary and very cool. Mom had even borrowed a portable T.V. to watch the event. Tess could hear the fearful excitement building in the newsman's voice. She pictured everyone around the whole world huddled around a billion TV sets.

Everyone on Earth! All holding their breath at this very moment.

Ha! And here were she and Barry! Trying to get a kite up on this dank, sweltering day.

Perfectly perfect.

"Hey buddy," she hollered.

She hadn't heard the sound of her own voice in eight days. Neither had anyone else. Barry stopped in his tracks, staring at her, startled and immediately thrilled. His look bore straight into her eyes, trying his four year old best to keep her engaged.

She smiled again and nodded her encouragement.

That odd swimming sensation began. It was visiting her more frequently. Late nights listening to the radio when she couldn't sleep, Tess would lie in the dark, staring at a candle, listening to the distant trains switching cars. The rattling chains from hell. She found them good company in her present state of mind.

At times, this thing, like a gentle blather of wings down deep in her groin, would tickle it's way up towards her belly button where a horribly annoying itch had persisted for days.

Barry's eyes were now burning brightly.

Both grinned at each other. He then spun about to resume his running effort.

Watching Barry, Tess felt the low tingle ignite into a flame searing a path up past her throat. A dry, power-ball of tears torched everything else away and came blasting out, towards the little spruce tree that marked their new boundary.
When Barry reached that far end of del Papa's yard, a sudden stiff breeze snatched the stretched piece of paper and ripped the raggedy-tailed kite free from his sticky grip.

To his astonishment, up it soared!

Through the open door, Tess heard, "Houston, we have touchdown!"

"Thank Goodness!", she remembered to breath.

The Get-up and Go

Rearranging routines is crucial for being housebound. Though I'll probably live long enough to eat these words right off the screen, mixing things up semi-regularly has gotten me through many years of isolation and a few of being outright housebound.

Being one who needs a change of scenery daily, I've taught myself to make that occur even if I'm trapped within the same four walls.

As a kid, it used to be that moving every three years pretty well did the trick; about the time you got settled in and your turf well established, it would be time to up end it all and begin anew.

I starved for deep connection to place. Finding a partner who's identity was sunk into the core of the planet (and the cosmos); parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, all in the same distant county, was a certain boon. He valued the farm stock heritage from which he came and wanted to begin his own legacy...but somewhere other than amidst the old family ties. Perfect!


We worked out our partnership and built a fine home and family in the hinterlands of SE, Alaska. Enough wilderness in our surroundings to keep my wanderlust fed for perpetuity.

However, twenty eight years later, the circumstances in my life (over these last two seasons), have drastically changed. The story of how these two veins come together is falling into place and I'm pecking away at a telling that hopefully will be of interest to others.

Today, for your adventuring pleasure, I offer a wonderful site.
Coupled with the Writer's Almanac each day, and listening to the creativity of A Prairie Home Companion on the weekend if I can catch it...(Garrison, dear friend, I missed the big 4th of July event. Damn! How to be in two places at once. We had a very good time though, drifting down the Chilkat), with these things combined, most everything at this end of our equation is keeping afloat.

I'm off with the cart to gather groceries for The Mazoo and I today.

It's terribly hot...I think I'll bring the computer and nest a while at Barnes and Noble. I'll be able to get a few character sketches while I catch up with the Surreal Circus at Gather.com. I'm helping there as a moderator/student, kind of a summer internship. Maybe helping to grease the literary gears of a few others as well.


Poet.org, and with this introduction a collection that is divine.

Enjoy!

The Bridge

Beringia called and you responded, but I was to go first
I hoped to hear the landscape moan, join the ancient song

Nellie Chinik won your heart and had you digging her potatoes
then cast her spell and offered you an amaryllis in exchange

“Fully occupied with growing--that's
the amaryllis... If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!”

You wished to know your own edges again
and saw them past your feet overlooking the bay

Fey morning, window darkness
Golovin lay, this side of the changeling a
Fata Morgana, dancing between a rock and a hard dawn illusion
or the illusion, set to conspiring from a hard drawn conclusion

“If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus!”

The chilled horseman’s star-ship? Nay.

It was the mammoth in the living room
who moaned from the distance
of bridges passed




The cuttings are from "The Métier of Blossoming" by Denise Levertov. Enjoy the entire poem from Poets.org

Also, a reference for a mirage known as a Fata Morgana from Wikipedia

The Traveler

I knew somehow you'd finally see me.

I've been singing from this open location for thirty-five years knowing that my song was not quite the right combination of notes, not quite the proper cadence to catch your ear.

But I've studied closely.
I've listened each season when you and your musically inclined flock pass through our forest echoing from treetop to highest bough.
Our children would fall asleep late summer evenings counting your spiraled melody and tale. Or, I'd be out very early, in the garden's cold mountain dawn. First one song, then another would peak above the river's spill, telling me of Joy.

When we actually met, I was close enough to hold our presence within, as though breath shared between us. And you didn't fly off, anxiously busy to be away, more as though you would have enjoyed staying longer and said, with a glance, that perhaps we'd find each other again.

Maybe some wet rainy day in the fall when being close would provide needed warmth.

I'll keep singing until then. And watching; listening.

If not Santa Fe...

Barstow...
"when we'll turn
the calendar to the wall
for a few brief days?" Ted McMahon

We'll stay up late listening to the trains,
and when the robins sing
we'll wonder about the midnight sun, My Love.

Then, I'll drive to The Grand Canyon and we'll walk
back into the history of the Earth.

A Change In The Weather

The land's been dry since the melting of all that snow. They say it's been the hottest May and early June in a great many years but I've been gone away watching the old one grow much older so I really can't relate. Now that I'm back, I'm frankly thrilled to find summer means business.

This afternoon I was indoors, hidden from the mosquitoes. They were so thick out there that to stand in one place for a few moments can attract hundreds, ("Let go of the hose and walk away! Ade! Let go of the hose and walk...away!")

I found myself watching the green treetops, fingering the overcast gray. They were tickling the underside of cloud cover. Tiny breezes. Not enough to waft away the buzzing clouds haunting the screens, but enough to make all visuals beyond the windows purely hypnotic.

I splayed my insides open a little further (been locked down such a long time, you know, staying still for the frail and elderly), and when I did, the breeze seemed to gather a little.

"Hell, widen up baby". The breeze snuck right on in through the parted window, across my belly, up into the opening parts of me, over my bare shoulders and down my back.

I thrust my chin upward and listened to the river clawing away at the banks. The score performed is a roiling symphony that when combined with robin song and that pervasive buzz at the screen, well, the sounds can just slide down into your veins. I let 'em have their way.

You know, I could tell without even peeking, that the breezes were picking up steam to perform a tiny miracle; a sudden dampness made every hair tingle.
The silver-dollar flat splats on the red steel roof were the tapping of as many raindrops as there were mosquitoes. The stinging nettled winged ones were backing off a little, shrinking and swirling into their myriad damp enclosures.

As the cold wet gift from heaven let spill its blessing through out the parched forest and across the river flat. A sharp, surprising, inhale reached out from below my navel.

And then the smell.

Oh the smell... a sweetness indescribable.

Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay 6/6 & 7 '09

San Francisco's many and varied neighborhoods are where my younger siblings and I spent sporadic early seasons emerging in the big city when we visited our Poppa, Dick Revenaugh.

I recently arrived there on a Saturday morning via Amtrak at the famed Ferry Building, on lower Market St.

The day started by crossing paths with acquaintance, Aniko from Gather.com. Walking and talking, we quickly touched on cyber relationships, the wild ride of parenthood, and the challenges of marriage amidst transnational citizenship, (Ade as student on that one, just trying to fathom logistics alone).
We parted feeling like friends and I hope we get a chance to see each other again.

I headed back up Market street, destination: The Herbst Theater. Garrison Keillor was giving a reading from his delicious pink volume of 77 Sonnets. The evening was a benefit for the 826 Valencia Scholarship Program.

Hoofing with bags heavy enough for a small burro (who was off grazing elsewhere), I arrived at the famed City Center early enough to change into evening attire and mosey up to Max's Opera Cafe for Silver Dollar potato latkes and the piano bar.
Perfection!
So was the man in the red shoes!
High in the balcony and removed from mid-center by a few seats, I was tucked-in nicely enough to slip out of my black linen heels and drift into an advanced state of delight with the voice and imagery I've come to desire on a daily basis (now, not to gush but...!).

The tall man with the feathery eyebrows, perched casually. Placed in the middle of a faded Persian carpet, the stool, a microphone, and the poet opened an intimate space for everyone there. With Rich Dworsky as his piano accompaniment, they had the place lit. Silvery heads and imaginations glistened all around, as did "the youngers" present. Those holding romantic, poetic rompage in high regard were satisfied by the end. Keillor had again offered us beauty; the chance to love and to laugh.

Afterwords, I kept company with the full moon in all the old neighborhoods, walking and exploring memories throughout the rest of the night. I found nearly every location where we'd visited with R.L.Revenaugh as he nurtured the pulses of cultural change from his salon-type living arrangements.

I also found the building where I'd rented my first shared apartment. It was there I recognized I wasn't ready for the city as naive eighteen year old. I was yearning instead for the wilderness that I'd find a year later in Alaska.

Dawn was welcomed with a few good cups of coffee on Lombard St. at Mel's, the original drive-in burger joint. I took the time for a diner style breakfast and enjoyed the warmth, a place to read and people watch, before starting the day.

The elegant Marina district curves down to shoreline. There I found The Fort Mason Center. This old military post is now home to summertime art programs and year round cultural events. The waterfront location provided a gorgeous nest in the sunshine to watch the goings on, write and snooze.

I was joined mid-day by another Gather friend, Granny Janny and her pal Becky. We spent a lovely time getting to know each other at The Greens Restaurant. We then went walking through the six or seven blocks of the Union St. merchant's festival.


My Roman Holiday was a definite kicker. I'm looking forward to another installment on the return to Mazoo and Bako.

But for now...the sweetness of HOME!

Tonight, For The Robin Hour

A return to the nest via a circuitous route.

I doze and walk the streets of San Francisco looking for a spirit that I recall from years gone by; the long tall lass who found her young womanhood months before she died.

After dozens of city blocks, around 3:30 AM she finally spoke to me from the corner of Sacramento and Pierce. I sat across the street with her for a while, shadowed and cold amongst elaborate concrete landscaping. We were listening to the full moon and early summer wind. The startling Victorian across from us still demanded homage, as much, I'm sure, as it did before our mid 70's earthquake.

I was bundled and bleary, alley cat alone. She was dead and ethereally appealing. We spoke of her sensuality and how with her quickened smile and rapier tongue and wit, she would probably have owned a fair portion of this town by now, had she lived.

She laughed at my sentimentality and how I'd had the old lady verve to deck myself out that night. Penniless and alone, in linen and black heels I'd draped my ideals towards a lover who'd only ever know me by poetic extension. All that heat and tension instead produced an obnoxiously loud car full of sotted young men, being pulled to that moment as if by some unseen force.

I quietly bid her adieu and scurried away from our perch, slipping in and out of the shadows. As I tottered away from that hallowed corner, I hoped their hollering over stolen, captive moments with cameras, tits, cocks and asses would allow me to melt back into the obscure gray, gratefully unnoticed.

The Night Wind kept asking for movement. We spun and whirled through dawn. I held tight to the vision of a white sheeted heaven, laughing, liquid warm lovers, poetically entwined.

While Waiting; A Little Song

Dawn begins where I've laid nights before
thinly pressing roof lines for sky beyond
night door wide open to cool, rug, mat, floor
Fair youth, call gently your memory's fond

Folded street silent, a distant train clangs
chorus of cricket metered divine
note of your presence within me still hangs
light tempered touching silvered dry mind

bone frame extending moist lift from the air
fresh hunger stirs traveling, east at my feet
coiled at base line unwrapped tangled hair
exploring toward sunset my corn-silk blue sheet

Dove stills our yard, buff tailed, alone
collared spot-feathers, your pink-eyes shone

Written Into The Score/ added to and revised Tues. May 19, '09

This morning, a fine radio interview that I'd like to share in some capacity here...

From Radio West 5/19/09:

"You've probably thought about how your e-mail and texting and twittering are dividing your attention - and that it's having a real impact on your life.

Beyond the anecdotal evidence, behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher says that "focus" may actually be a biological necessity (ade asks:"this is news?"). Attention, she says, is a finite resource and using it wisely is the key to a more productive and healthy life. Gallagher has a new book. It's called Rapt."

From a site called ARTSOPOLIS (reviewer not identified):

"In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer, Winifred Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions, driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention.

No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn’t. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis, (ade again, "groundbreaking? huh!"),
Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.

Gallagher’s books include House Thinking, Just the Way You Are (a New York Times Notable Book), Working on God, and The Power of Place. She has written for numerous publications, such as Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times."

The interview was dynamite. Gallagher has a wonderful, science based presentation fused with a practicality and personal story that I found quite engaging. I'd love to have an audio recording of the Radio West interview (a podcast would work for others).

Although I'm caught surprised, as an alien from another planet might be, that we are forever reinventing the wheel towards understanding "mind", it seems we humans are cycling closer and closer towards some sort of center.

Ever developing "Home", the one between our ears.

...riding it out, wave upon wave till the interior buzz and spectral connections gently lend toward mend; flush, mend, back-bend, suspend and again to find a piece of what no one else has touched; the tiny memory of star; and hope.

Then the chorus sang with a part well written for your voice alone. Offered as invitation, to accept or refuse. In that, lay-away home... the "Home" of one's own making.

... a place to sing, or dance, depending...

...or choose to refrain from either.


I'm EVER SO happy to have been from an intensely quiet and focused environment during all of my adulthood. My previously fractured heart and brain have been given room to develop gently, and at my own pace.

To Entertain New Ideas ///

"A Roman Holiday"...


The Song Is You.
The way HOME in June, by way of San Francisco.
The Island Institute 2009

Maori author Patricia Grace, winner of the 2008 Neustadt Laureate Award featured in World Literature Today.
Looking forward to learning more about Grace and Maori culture and the similarities to N.W. Coast cultures of the Pacific.

Three weeks ago, I visited with Nora Marks Dauenhauer in Klukwan, Ak. at the story teller's gathering held during the Culture Week celebration.

When she was speaking to a mixed age audience, it was the little kids up front that she was especially connecting with. This revered elder has a spark and gumption I've enjoyed at many potlatches over the years. She knows how to keep an audience listening.

She's led a remarkable life, focused as an anthropologist of Tlingit culture with her husband, Richard Dauenhauer. The two devoted decades to retaining her people's native oral tradition. Their careers are represented in numerous books and ambitious projects.

Nora, a fine writer and gifted poet, told the kids they could write about anything that interested them. Anything! You could tell they were really listening and thinking just what that would be.

The Mountains Behind Me

It feels at times
as though my crush-less shadow
turns to vapor amidst the sleeping sky
a cool, delicate waxy beauty
scenting the air

I am
jetting away from possibility
the possibility of elaborate skin together
here outside our lifetime
away in the surrounding mist

The Beauty of Saturdays

...and so, right in the pleasure of our star blue and sun-shot yellow bedroom, snow dumping with certain April vengeance beyond the skylight, Hic...cup..cupping streams of cyber transmission prompt me to scuff step slide and twirl on the little fuzzy black rug. I'm jazz dancing to my dearest of Saturday's joy.

I hear stories and laughter and the blackest surprise of wonders from inside that coffin too soon. What? No memories with which to wait out eternity?! Fruitless and forlorn we endure and persevere...ya daddy, ya daddy, ya daddy, Ya!

In two hours, damn, so terribly short, I'm reminded of just what matters most. There's a voice purring far away, one who knows we exist, and in that brief time spent I'm included again.

My dear old pal is nearby on the bed tucked up and snoozing and planning his autumnal retirement trip. Winter was long for him, keeping those home fires burning. A '75 BMW, R90 of superior German make, awaits his command Southward. He'll ride off into the sunset. There, there may be new memories for him to gather.

I'm left thinking of red velvet and Town Hall, zuchinni, rhubarb and smoking wild caught sockeye brought in when the Chilkat drops off from summer's crest. My campfire in the strawberry patch competes with lavender midnight, twilight not quite starlight.

Kottke's playing the Deep River Blues and while our own Klehini hides, impossible now to see past warm dumping whiteness, I wonder about bifurcation and joining The Chattaqua.

Hola! Just as Mayberry resumes around the corner, I watch Raven elegantly perch. A newborn spindle legged black lamb dashs across the whiteness. There's two in every family, sometimes more.

(she hopes to win tonight's snow pool to donate to a larger GK cause)

April Fool's Daughter and Grandson/ RLR remembered on the 2nd

Hey Ma,

A fun post Mom, (< click to article).
I still can't seem to wrap my mind around the fact that not a single one of my acquaintances east of the Rockies has any idea of what the sensation of "breaking in" feels like. Dad's right - you can't know humility until you cross an April snowbank in the absence of snowshoes.

I can't help thinking of that time when I was seven or so, when I took off on an early April adventure going who knows where, and doing it solo, and making it about as far as the place where the garden tank would stand before sinking in as deep as my legs were long and being completely unable to extricate myself. How I struggled and thrashed with escalating levels of contempt and catastrophic rage, never daring to ask anyone in the house to come down and help me lest I expose myself to the even greater torture of embarrassment, and finally giving myself away through the sheer noise of my exertion and despair, at which point you and Dad came down, and to your inestimable credit somehow managed to keep straight faces, and Dad yanked me out by the armpits, but did it a little too abruptly, and I came out wearing only the liner of my snowboot, the shell sunk two feet deep in the snow, and Dad saying - with that vaguely sadistic humor of his that gave rise to such good-natured witticisms as the one about saltwater causing one's feet to fall off - that we'd have to wait until June to get the rest of my boot back.

All in all, a great day to be an Alaskan.

I hope you're well. Happy Birthday. And keep up the good work.

Best,
Micah
April 1, 2009 6:35 PM

Where We Might Overlap

That tunic of cloud hung densely, veiling all planes and vertices.
A saturated blue gray tilted more toward flattening white. No angle of lens could lend such precision to form or catch the magnitude.

Child, don't forget how we tracked near the small, quiet, old, and sparsely swift
with wing, tail and quill.

You and I trail across whispered intent, follow likely syncline and marvel that the animal tracks always lead the best route; least effort spent is energy conserved.

For them, energy is hard earned while we have little more skill than desire.

Still, we take pleasure in practicing flight; river far below our four out stretched wings.

To Be In This Moment

(a little food for thought linked in the title and below)

So, here we are.

From On High

Oh, To Be A Sari Clad Satellite

Would I distinguish the myriad messages coming through?

Would I know who was sending, and like an old time switchboard operator, know how to plug in the appropriate connections?

Would I indulge the temptation to listen in, reaping vicariously the joys, thoughts and despair of both the signals transmitted and received?

Would I, out of devotion to my beloved, always orbit closely or would I spin off regularly to allow chaos to remix the signals?

And would I be self maintaining as I've always been or would on occasion some Earth centered entity send out a little support?

And YES, that I might still catch the drift from my favorite messengers, and, as I have on occasion, be compelled to drop the Sari that I might dance unencumbered in the cool night sky.

(she's left wanting the XM signal...)

Mourning Song

I sit in the old quad of Bakersfield High, out front of Warren Hall. This time it's February 2009 already, and all of the days I spent here as a kid, in a state of elevated darkness, still haunt about in the ashen, dwindling palms.

I turn my graying eyes to the sky and think of you. I wonder how so many miles and tidal surge of lifetimes separate us now. You call to my heart and mind with such consistent kindness and, like all my girlhood boyfriends, I heard you first on the radio.

Back then, in the stifling heat of nights possessed by want and innocence, rocking my pillowed head to the metal collisions; the terrors of purgatory: the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe switching cars; 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 3:30, 3:45, on and on till light. The trains and radio were deep comfort to this girl interrupted.

I didn't know I'd be riding those freight trains two years later, following vision North. That they would deliver me from what was murderously mundane, undone, to the cherry orchards of Stockton. Two million Bings and Queen Anns later we'd pick enough for the old Chevy flatbed. Four months after, it was "get thee" to Alaska.

And there I'd find you.

Boys from your parts flocked to my tavern, we of chess and politics and poetry jams. These kids, high on seine crew wealth and good beer, knew of a new comer, their college home boy, red hot radio. I fell, pell mell and stayed.

Sunlight muscles it's pushy way onto the walk, driving me towards the guarded tracks. Beneath the two train crossing, screaming sounds peal from every neuron. Those shades and memory, his dangle dance, open my throat and the morning fills with song.

That older heart duet; there's something more to be sung.

March 17th, 1963

All from the capital city would come by to confer with the Irishman, the dark one who led their imaginations toward a better St. Paddy Day's parade.
I was set atop the bartop, black hair and sallow skin. He gave me the sparkle of Irish mischief in my saddle shoes and eyes. Poppa had handed me a leprechaun's white clay pipe, the stem so thin and elegant I could only imagine someone as clever as he using it.

I have it still. I use it now to help weave a different story. But tonight my eyes keep closing mid sentence, only to jerk awake with moisture threatening to slip down my chin. The fire's so cozy. And the miles spent to get here have me mellowed.
Perhaps tomorrow...

A Duet

Tomorrow night at this time, I'll have made a nest in some quiet corner of the airport in Reno! After five long months of focused intensity, (as my writer father claimed, "I've mastered the art of sitting"). I can't believe I'm heading home.

Today went according to plan. Assisted help came to be with Ma that I might slip away and spend one last scribbling session at 801 Real Rd. The little house seems happier for our visits. The three giant shaggy barked trees out back, one with the nailed on cross ladder, blew brightly and were full of leaves, dancing as wildly as the fledgling birds calling.

I'd snap this little aging wonder up in a heart beat, knowing it's doomed to the bull dozer. The roof is gone. Blue tarp covers the remains of the simple felt and wood shell now holy access for pigeons. But it calls to me, even in my dreams now.

At first I thought I was being reminded of Ma, she too losing her roof. Or of my not so girlish years and terrible diffuculty spelling, though wanting to write while removed from my life.

But then it came to me that it's also a symbol of the other dearest involvement of mine. I think it stands in my heart of hearts for the breaking down of a wonderful forum for discussion that for awhile was holding the fort for many people during this particularly tough season. I'll have to think on that more.

What ever the case, it feels right there.

It's late and my heart is quiet and telling me to tell someone in the world that for today this mother's use of the alphabet is pooped.

Got the garden in today though. And I've planted something for my brother. it will grow to be a particularly poetic salad, if I keep loving this beginning.

The Older Twin

I knew him. I knew him before he knew himself.

And he loved me before anyone knew I could soak it up yet. When I was still more dimple and black kitty trouble propped in the corner of the couch than real.

Tucked safely but alone, he'd show up there, talking a blue string of energy charged sounds, so rich I had no choice but to be enchanted.

That's when I learned how to turn the tables on him. Shave and a hair cut, two bits. If I could make him laugh, he'd stay close, playing with my hands while yelling tall stories into Ma.

Ma still young and challenged with all that we were and everything else.

She whistled. Beautiful sounds, split into two and dancey.

And those two danced. As much for each other as they did for me. They danced together close by, Mama bending over to be the same size he was, both grinning at me cause they knew I'd start laughing. A black mopped, gummy mouthed belly roar.

I was the dark haired spectre who knew them both, especially him. Cause he was always there.

Until he wasn't.

This was written in honor to my old pal Garrison Keillor, who's just lost his brother to a skating accident.
His fine tribute is linked in the title of my poem for all brothers.

the cloister

...under the low hanging steep incline...holding the brightly polished jewels

It's About Form AND Function

In preparing to travel home to my beloved Northlands, and those there who are my beloved, I'm sprucing up the long neglected Blue Room and Hinterlands sites.

My season away, while caring for our Mother has been educational beyond compare. Much has had to do with learning a bit about this amazing cyber medium.
The Internet is remarkable. All those who've known this forever bear with me.
This year due to captivity, I've dispelled with my "fear of technology". Due to the generosity of my sister Mick and her gift of a laptop (Pewter),I've been able to access the world while housebound with Ma.

I'm beginning to shape my pages to reflect those interests. At Gather.com, I've been a daily participant with writers and thinkers of all persuasions. I'll begin to add RSS feeds to some of my favorites.

This week I'm bringing on board The Writer's Almanac, The Poetry Foundation, and American Life In Poetry. On the Hinterlands page I want to have Bob Edwards podcasts and access to his web page and blog.

If you have any thing you'd like to share, I'd also love to feature other's writing. All genres: literary, news, feature stories, journals. My address is on the Hinterlands page, a clickity clack back.

Let me know. I'd be thrilled!

French Resistance

French Resistance
Micah R. Bochart
November 2007

Le gen d’arme, arms crossed behind his back, tells us with impeccable decorum that we owe ninety euro each for our so-called moving violation, plus another twenty-two for the defunct headlights freeloading their way along the front of our bicycles. Sam’s composure quickly deteriorates, followed by her French. I’ve lost my translator, and, with her, the irrationally cozy feeling that I’m somehow being taken care of, protected against all possible evils in this large and chaotic city that prides itself on the shunning of my native tongue.
Lucky enough, the Frog speaks English, so I talk back. I walk the tightrope between firmness and shameless brown-nosery, telling him we can’t possibly pay the fine, telling him it’s our first offense and he can be absolutely certain that there won’t be a second one, trying all the while to keep my voice steady, to bury the panic that threatens to explode every time I think of what one-hundred-and-twelve euro sums could do to our futures.
Ninety seconds ago, we were millionaires. We pedaled the streets of Paris so fiercely that the Maquis itself would have faltered before us. Back and forth across the Seine, in and out of traffic, from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the walls of the Louvre. Every street and alley our legs could swallow, a montage of berets and public toilets sweeping by on either side of us. Problem is, an empty crosswalk on an empty street with traffic lights so inconspicuous that any God-fearing American would be Godly to spot them is apparently sacred ground to a badge with an ego. Now we’re here, paying for our transgression, for running a crosswalk at ten miles per hour in a pair of squeaky bicycles on an alley without people. Notre Dam looks on from two blocks down the street, and we’re so distracted by the moment that it seems stripped of all its historical enormity, just another witness to this exercise of petty justice.
“I can’t afford to pay,” I tell the cop. “We’re students. This will bankrupt us,” and I’m hoping he won’t end up thinking what so many other foreigners think – that we’re rich and cushioned and lavished simply by virtue of being American.
Strangely enough, it took this cop almost two minutes to correctly peg our nationality, assuming, at first, that we were English. Somehow, I’m feeling like it’s a good thing that our Americanness isn’t screaming out of every pore, but one thing’s for sure: the fact that we’re foreigners isn’t winning us any sympathy points, not from a man who seems like he’ll only be won over by the fine but complicated art of sweet-talking.
I try for simplicity, for the shortest distance between two points.
“We’ll never do it again,” I tell him, but his posture never falters, and neither does his smile.
“That’s what they all say,” he replies, “and as soon as they’re around the corner, they do it again. Ninety euros each. Plus twenty-two for the headlights.”
I’m not exactly sure what causes him to relent, or if you can even say he relented. Chances are, he’d never intended to force the money out of us, though he’d certainly have taken it if we’d coughed it up prematurely. In any case – after begging for amnesty for the fifth or sixth time in a row – we don’t get the response we’ve grown to memorize. There’s no knee-jerk refrain of the money we owe, just a flamboyant gesture down the street in the direction we were traveling.
“Go ahead,” he says, and adds, as only a Frenchman could, “It brings me great pleasure to see you follow the law.”
Relief is tremendous. So is my gratitude, but both are short-lived. By the time we’re on the other side of the Seine – walking our bikes this time, like the Maquis shot us in the kneecaps – all I can feel is frustration that a day such as this could be punctuated with a scolding.
It makes a good story, of course. “American in Paris tangles with cop and sweet talks his way out of bankruptcy,” but I, for one, was happy with the story as it stood.
“American in Paris bicycles the city from one end to the other.”
“American in Paris sips wine by the Seine and praises the power of words.”
“American in Paris watches long-term lover cruise on her bicycle, master of the streets, if not the laws that govern them.”
Lucky enough, “long-term lover” is a writer herself, so between the two of us, we should be able find a headline that suits us.
“Long-term lover” lives near the base of Montemartre in a room of her own, five floors up from the bustling tumult of one of the city’s international districts. It’s a massive modern-art building, structured around the unlikely theme of a naval ship. Though not precisely of a piece with the cozy three-story villas of the expat mythos, the pad gets by, and Sam makes up the difference. She’s managed to clutter her room with books and papers and pens and other instruments of creation, and done it so profoundly that I’ve taken to calling her my Anais, my writer in stylish exile. With this kind of bastion at her back, all she needs is a pen in her hand and no experience is safe. Any event, no matter how trivial or humiliating, can be exploded into adventure, into a study on alienation, on collision of cultures, on how one responds to crises and comes out feeling richer and more delightfully idiosyncratic with each little twitch of the watch.
In any case, we keep on walking, put a river between ourselves and Monsieur Law Enforcement, go trekking off somewhere to watch the new Jesse James movie with Brad Pitt and marvel at the French subtitles. It isn’t until the end of next day that we can really laugh at the event, and by then we’re two thirds of the way down the Eiffel Tower, halfway between the mobs of sightseers on levels one and two, pausing on the empty stairway to admire the mass of metal surrounding us.
It’s a chilly night, chilly and tastefully humid. A wind blows gently from the north, the same kind of wind that almost blew away our ninety euros each (plus twenty-two for the headlights) and there’s a faint layer of mist hovering over the tops of the buildings. From what I’ve seen, that mist could easily be cigarette smoke, because everyone smokes here. Seriously everyone. Old men hang in front of bookstores and blanket their faces in puffs of gray. Fair-skinned women sit with their legs crossed in the cafés and restaurants, monologuing the merits of art and moviemaking, cigarettes fingered elegantly, adjoining lungs unfazed. Algerians smoke against the streetlights and the intricately sculptured walls of the opera house. A man in a helmet and sunglasses sits on his motorcycle, cigarette burning away in his mouth, like a frame out of a Godardt movie, waiting for the light to change. How they make it to fifty I’ll never know, but we’re above it all now, high enough to discourage the smoke from following us.
I’m standing here watching the flickering lights of the city, wishing I’d made it to the grave of Jim Morrison, that in consonance with all the other attractions a short-term visitor to Paris inevitably misses, but find that this moment, as period mark, is beautiful enough as it. Sam stands behind me, at the place where the pillars of the tower just start to spread out: the attempts of a pragmatic architect to beat the odds and build something the wind couldn’t blow over, attempts that would later be criticized as being unnecessarily artistic before critics of next generation label it as an ugly but inseparable part of the Parisian skyline, and perhaps of Parisians themselves.
When I think of the cop again, it’s with an air of pity, because I know Sam and I are thinking of all the wild ways we can violate him with our pens. We’ll take his smile, his stance, his flamboyant gestures. Everything that makes him distinct is about to become our property, discharged upon the paper and rendered wild and defenseless, to the judgments of whatever readers decide to make him their own.
She steps closer, chuckles. I cradle her cheek in my hand, and we stand there together, surrounded by open air and the cold embrace of metal, and the wind, without ceremony, fails to knock us down.

Joanna Macy

I've featured the ongoing effort of Joanna Macy before. Macy is a scholar of systems theory and Buddhist thought. Her decades of work, helping people find inner resources for dealing with global crises, interfaces between social action and spiritual breakthrough. The preface from her and Anita Barrows translation of poet Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours/ Love Poems To God includes this:

"That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or try to escape into private "spiritual" pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and the courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to "love the things/ as no one has thought to love them" (I, 61).
My own stubborn, wild love for the world was summoned, and I learned to recognize it in others, too, in the movements for peace, global justice, and ecological sanity. Rilke confirmed my sense of a deep passion at the core of life itself, which I could come home to, the way sheep come home at nightfall, "the dark bridge thudding' (I,40). I could die into that passion, as into a lover's arms, trusting its ongoingness and its vast sufficient intelligence."

The 100th anniversary edition of Rilke's Book of Hours is vital and relevant. The present moment that we are a part of is designed for change in the world as is Macy's larger work. Additional web information is linked to in the title of this piece.

I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ Walt Whitman

I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday
morn I pass'd the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walk'd the woods at dusk I heard your
long-stretch'd sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard
the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through
one of the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells
last night under my ear.

Oh That Girl!

The deep fissure
up-welling opens
to the sky, mirroring back
the fathomless - touched
by an extended pinky.

Petal Visions Bricolage

Jazz Man Do!

A flood spray of honey dream

our coolest frantic summer play

rose two so delicately together

pink pole goddess read my mad black moon egg

I felt it incubate behind a delirious whispered scream



Winter produced vision at your will

my feet are now shaking me about

producing a forest lather... drunk as sweat

pounding a thousand elaborate wants

blood petals drip their sweet chocolate eternity