Of the 48 cards that came to me (I signed up for two groups,) these are the handmade 9. Another card was made by the poet, but only the glue no longer attached to the front art survived the trip from her mailbox to mine. A month of purpose and daily practice, a lesson for the rest of the year.
Oh! Lucia Perillo’s poems, so cranky and earthly. “Postcard from Florida” (from Inseminating the Elephant,) ends with two little girls on a wooden bulkhead on an estuary with a hose trying to get manatees to drink: “singing Come to us humanities//and oh see how they do.”
Love, solitude, greyer and greyer weather. Sunrise is near 8 am, sunset way, way, way before 5. Optimism requires more sunlight. But look at the bright bruises on the picture side of my postcard from August 2021!
In “The Way In,” Linda Hogan writes that the three ways are: dangerous, wounding, and beauty. On my walk through the arboretum under 520 and around the Marsh Island and Foster Island catwalks, I stiffened to brave the tunnel , which always felt dangerous. It is gone, so my walk yesterday was all sunny-ish fall afternoon dying leaf red and yellow beauty.
Home, so pleasantly cool. Today’s pleasantly cool and raining on the day of the Hunters Moon. (American sentence, Mr. Ginsberg.)
Talks/fiction readings two nights in a row: Lauren Groff with SAL followed by my dear friend Kip Robinson Greenthal interviewed by Elizabeth Austen at Elliott Bay Books, both remotely from our living room. Shoal Water has taken 35 years to see publication, thanks to Kip’s tenacity and the strength of the story.
The shoe with rose and dance card in it I cut from a very old advert for hair pins, the yellow door with path I’d saved as dream entranceway in a file folder for years. And here’s Larry Ferlinghetti signaling me through the flames!
“And language? Rhythms/of echo and interruption?/that’s/a way of breathing.” wrote Denise Levertov, who lived the last part of her life at the south end of Lake Washington, with a view of and poems about Mt. Rainier. Her poem title, “Looking, Walking, Being” pretty much sums it up for me – alive on the move.
And language. And Kaveh Akbar last night, first SAL Poet of the season read at Hugo House. We watched remotely, still feeling unsafe in crowds. He celebrated the Bushwick Book Club composer/violist/singer Alex Guy and past Youth Poet Laureate and author of “Motherland” Bitaniya Giday, as his first on-stage act, so that I liked him from the get-go. He read from “Pilgrim Bell”, his second book, stretching a leg back, lifting up on his toes so that he loomed high above the mic, twirling his amazement of thick dark hair. He conjured, sang, lamented, pled, questioned, in English and the Farsi he said he does not speak, magical and affecting. Not affected. I will never think of the punctuation mark the period at the end of a sentence in the same way. Did I mean to declare? Demand through imperative?
Once again, I spelled Emily Dickenson’s last name wrong, but with intent to do right by her work, making postcards and writing poems at the rate of two per day through August 2021. Threatened fish and noxious weeds, map and compass rose. Can’t argue with the truth of those. Friant Dam above Fresno, Mendota Dam south of Merced in California’s Central Valley, fire behind the ridge above our cabin in Chelan.