a botanical term for a dead organ held onto by a tree – I’m thinking leaves here. Going over Bluett Pass where the larches turn golden in fall and now, given their marcescent leaves (needle clutches) from last year, look messily brownly dead, the new needles, present already in the larches in Seattle’s Arboretum, not yet emergent. Oaks are big on marcescence, as are lireodendrons. There is little visual beauty to marcescent foliage. Think how witch hazel blossoms have to compete with brown clumps of last year’s leaves. No wonder many send out such compelling sweet aroma you savor with eyes closed.
Blog
“Walk Opened Memory” now live on Vermilion Writing Prompt 7!
All the 2021 POPO cards to me, hurrah!
My Heart Is
Alan Gurganis story title snipped from The New Yorker. Yeah, I’m pretty proud of this one. Here’s the accompanying poem:
My Heart is a Snake Farm
for Alan K.
Oh Alan, I’m lying,
and neither is it a lonely hunter,
pit of vipers, thrush,
nor is it buried in Venice.
Maybe it’s a safety friend
like my son-in-law
at the Children’s Museum
in Santa Monica, protecting
those coming close, circling,
and skipping out the door.
Collage for Collage’s Sake
Quinn, 12, my grandchild, and I were walking through the neighborhood. Quinn picked up the “I’m a musical Neanderthal…” scrap off the sidewalk. “Do you want it?” I asked. Quinn is an artist and had dibbsies. ” “You take it,” Quinn replied, handing it to me. I pasted it to this card, and off it went, layers of gel medium protecting it, to another poet in another town. I parted with the rabbit off the front of a card I sent Jim’s mom years before she died. The rabbit is famous, from the Lady and the Unicorn series of tapestries we saw together at the Musee de Cluny in Paris even more years ago.
News From the Noosphere
Bill and “practice”
What I do is stumble, so I’m comforted to think stumbling might save me. And to practice, no matter the worries of the work not being enough, the craft lacking, or sinking or drowned. But putting one word in front of the other and carrying on.
Handmade cards to me
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.
Humanities with Lucia Perillo
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.”
Mortal Doors
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!