Blue Vox

"The poet doesn't so much disappear into the poem as become the poem. It is a concentration of faculties, of everything you are or hope to be, and at that moment you have a focus not only on your conscious life, but your unconscious world, and it is as much an expression of your whole being as is conceivable."
— S. Kunitz, The Wild Braid, p. 98



Blue Vox

Dwelt in a shed
by a cabin
on a cliff
by that river
pierced with songs of blackbirds
hanging sideways on cattails

She came in a brown cloak
fourteen years old
disguised as an old woman
clothed in brown
homespun
At daybreak
she knocked on the brown
shed door
black iron hinges
wood scratched light in places
sturdy despite years of use
They had come before, these leavers of "babies"
but in two hundred years they had seldom left humans
Brought under cover of darkness,
wrapped in blankets
they had brought
honor, pride, purity, truth
He never asked questions
Always cared for his charges like children
when cities burned
or upended tables and broad red tempers
arms like limbs of oak and
shouting like thunder
threatened to destroy them
They always came at night
edge of dawn or
just past dusk
when in summer the frogs'
throaty longing swelled upon
the river
She brought her voice that night
when Venus hung pure in azure sky
knocked and left
a swaddled parcel crying
The note said:
I don't know when I'll be back. Please care for my child.
She departed into the blackness of the wood
Of course they came for him—her—it—
They came on horseback and at
the sound of them
Blue Vox carried the beloved to the river,
set the child in a basket,
pushed the basket
out from the reeds,
into the current:
You'll be safer out there.

© April 2009

4H on Paper

Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

— Unknown




May, 2009

Recently took a morning training to become a 4H leader. I'm not going to be doing much except having my name show up on a piece of paper and to teach some fiber-related stuff at the kids' school this fall. Living in the city I didn't know I could ever be involved in 4H.

There were about eight or nine of us there. Some were 18 or so who'd spent their youth as 4Hers. Some were parents. Some were teachers.

When I was a kid growing up in an upper-middle-class suburb and riding horses, there was always a sense that 4H was a little below us. This training was such an eye-opener for me. The kids who were there taking the training were capable already of running cattle farms or teaching younger kids to ride. I felt all this shame well up realizing I'd essentially looked down on these people. Crazy ideas that get put in the head when one is young and I don't even know how those ideas got in there. A good thing to recognize and to remedy.

I truly missed out. 4H is so inclusive and so supportive of not only achievement but of the person.

There's a lot of information that gets circulated to 4H leaders about events going on in Maine and New England. I signed up to receive this by snail mail. I already have received huge envelopes of information I don't really need. This is going to cost them something--email is so much cheaper....

Frog Eggs

What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.


— Stanley Kunitz, "Touch Me", in The Wild Braid, p. 95


April 2009

Yesterday while riding our bikes we came across a pond with frogs in it. Amidst the reeds were large clutches of frog eggs. We headed home, collected buckets and net, and headed back to the pond to collect some eggs.

For several years I've been wanting to hatch frog eggs or nurture tadpoles for a few weeks and then release into the wild. As a suburban child in the 1970s mid-Atlantic we would search religiously in the clear pools of water that formed in the orange clay after a rainstorm. We were looking for the tiny black tadpoles of toads to keep for a few weeks until they sprouted legs. So much of the wild was regarded as dangerous; the massive river a few miles away was polluted. Having the opportunity to really observe something pure, young, wild, and alive was a cherished experience.

After returning to the pond by car we collected the eggs and ample pondwater to fill the aquarium purchased a few weeks ago at Goodwill. When we got home, we placed the aquarium in a temperature-appropriate spot, poured in the pondwater, and very carefully transferred the eggs. We're raising our kids to respect all living things—no bug-killing, no keeping crabs in a thimbleful of water in the sun at the beach— a fact which prompted the lecture today about not poking the frog eggs with a stick. They are alive.

Last night we had dinner with another homeschooling family. We proudly shared our excitement at finally scoring some frog eggs. Well, it was quickly pointed out that what we did is now illegal in Maine, a point that would have been well-driven-home were I on the internet this year. Apparently, someone else like me posted a basic question to one of the homeschooling email lists about handling frog eggs, unleashing an email firestorm.

No more bragging about the frog eggs.

That Empty Inbox Feeling

"The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience."
— Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid, p. 103.





April 2009

Jeff is gone to Florida for an airshow. Left early this AM. He never used to correspond much when away and that always bothered me. But now I don't have that empty inbox feeling. We keep in touch by five word text messages (probably only one a day) and that will be enough.

I remember when I first rented an office on Ballard Avenue in Seattle for my publishing company. The upper floor of a pioneer cabin that had been moved from the Central District. Two identical cabins that had been moved together, relocated to Ballard's historic district, and conjoined. It was an attic, really, with a window on each end; one looked out on the adjacent sloping shingled roof, where rain fell often; the other, down the side street at old buildings and toward the ship canal.

During the first few days I worked there I had no phone & no internet. I had been working out of the house before that, where I had all these things, and a husband, a cat, a garden, and neighbors with whom I was acquainted. Now it was going to be me in a solitary room with its steep narrow stairs. A hermitage, almost.

Part way through the first morning it became overwhelmingly evident there was no loneliness. No one could contact me, I couldn't read my email, so there was never a sense of disappointment, of being forgotten. An email would only take off part of the edge, but the edge would return: that edge of wanting contact with people, of wanting to be known and remembered. Natural human needs partly and often poorly satisfied by technology and therefore never really satisfied.

That experience is part of what drives me this year. Lonely? Go outside. Call someone or go to a café. The depth of satisfaction in seeing a friend in person—or anyone, really—assuages the loneliness so much more completely.

A Night Out with the Local Italian Supermodels

"Too many gardens I've seen seem to express only one mood or one state of being. There is a dependence, a reliance on the effectiveness, let's say, of a single color, as though it were the only state of being that corresponds with one's concept of the beautiful."

--Stanley Kunitz, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, p. 75


Last night my neighbor and her singer-songwriter sister took me out to hear Kris Delmhorst at One Longfellow Square. My neighbor bought me a ticket as a way of saying "thanks" for therapeutic massage received in the days before the birth of her son. The work helped her sleep and forget for an hour that she was pregnant and she felt grateful, so she offered me a ticket to hear live music. How cool!

Now, let me point out that my neighbor and her sister both look like supermodels. I'm not kidding. Long, classically gorgeous, Italian-American. And smart. And sweet. And ten years younger than I am. So going out on the town with them makes it really easy to pretend that I, too, look like an Italian supermodel. That the dozens of guys staring at us along the way are actually staring at me, too.

But the best part of going out with these two is that it's incredibly fun. One of them is always doing something or saying something that makes the other one break down in hysterical laughter.

I'd always wanted to set foot in One Longfellow--they get all the good folkies touring the northeast--and the show turned out to be great. Kris Delmhorst is gutsy, bluesy, original, an excellent poet with words and strings. She played by herself, and had forgotten her performance clothes, and so was wearing her "mommy shirt" that had food on it. I felt right at home. She blew our doors right off with that voice coupled with all that presence. Like really there. Totally in the moment.

And we did get stared at, and it was fun.

First Night with the Drop Spindle

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.








What began as clover
Steam of
breath in barn
during winter gale
Hay between teeth
Quiet lambing
tonight became

barge rope.
Fought its way out of
fiberness into
inconceivable
clumps.
Clods.
Punctuated by
strands so thin
they looked
like hair.

Sheep 410, of
Wiscasset, Maine,
Please forgive me.
I'll try to do better
tomorrow.



[Copyright © 2009]

Putting Off Yoga: A Bizarre Form of Self-Torture?

Rest quietly in what you know is true. Then act.







April 2009

For the last fifteen years I have been wanting to do yoga every day, and with the exception of a few brief periods have been unable to make this happen. This has been a desire because I know--in my bones and muscles, and from observing older people who have done yoga regularly--that this is a superior way to keep the body and mind flexible and strong as long as possible.

I started learning yoga when I was 15 from a chemistry teacher at my school. She ran a small class in the winter for those of us not involved in other sports. It was a fringe sport, an "alternative" sport, one that merited a room but only a classroom that wasn't in use. Still, we learned a lot that winter. Iyengar yoga. I learned to relax from the immense stress of the long winter in a pressure-cooker private school. I mean, really relax. Like, relax until things really didn't bother me. Relax until the mind was quieter and didn't worry unnecessarily. Relax enough to sleep better so I was more alert when I woke up in the morning. Great life lessons to get early.

Fast-forward fifteen years and there's Carol. Part of of her retirement plan is to take the 6 a.m. hour-and-a-half yoga intensive every morning at the local Iyengar studio. Back then, when I took that class for a month, she had the body, energy and youthful outlook of a healthy 35 year old. She's in her seventies now and can stand on her head.

Despite all this—and despite wanting to—I've been unable to effect a daily practice. Absolutely unable. Every single day I think, "This is what I should be doing. This is what I want to do." Nothing. Not even five minutes. I utterly lack the discipline.

Have you ever wanted something that good for you for that long and put it off indefinitely? I'm beginning to think that living this way is a bizarre form of self-torture.