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