wild card

The sky looks convincing this morning
I may walk out into it
and pull the wildflower card

caviar

My mom is coming to visit, which is great. I will gladly vacate my room for her. She used to sleep in the computer room in the cellar because she didn’t want to walk up two flights to the attic guest room. Plus there’s a place to smoke in the cellar, which she did/does. She can’t smoke in my room but she’ll enjoy better surroundings, including a windowful of wisteria. I’m even considering putting up wallpaper, which will freak my husband out. Ha ha!

Whenever my mother comes I make a book order at Amazon. She sent me her itinerary yesterday and despite the limp euro I made my order. I really do have a small hill of books at home I need to get to, but what the heck. Here’s my list:

The Door by Magda Szabo - This doesn't sound like something I'd usually read but I was sold on a few good reviews.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke - I've always wanted to read him, and put this memoir of his mother's suicide on my list a long time ago. Looking forward to it. The book, I mean.

Awe by Dorothea Lasky - I've read a couple of her poems and really enjoyed them. I hope I will not be disappointed. I hate that.

Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort - ditto above

The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas - I probably found this in that senseless book I love to hate, "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die." But really, this book sounds like the prototype for "Lark and Termite," which was a disappointment. Except of course this one sounds like it doesn't suck.

How German It Is by Walter Abish - I asked myself if I really needed this. Probably not. Then I read the first page (on Amazon?) and decided that actually I did.

With Deer by Aase Berg - I had better be blown away, that's all I can say. But really, I'm part of a poetry group at Good Reads and this was recently reviewed, and it sounds different and new and worthwhile.

The Poetry of Surrealism by Michael Benedikt - ditto above with the blown-away clause

pepper

I was at the dermatologist today. I’m supposed to go every two years to have my moles looked at, being unable to keep track of them myself. The doctor hoped I wouldn’t be chilly with my clothes off, but being a puritanical wasp, in fact I was kind of warm with embarrassment. This is absurd since my dermatologist is also my gynecologist, and her examinations have gone beyond the surface of my skin.

At least today I was allowed to keep on my underwear. I lay down on the examining rack and was prodded left and right and flopped over onto my belly. I was reminded of playing “Hänsel” with my son, how he used to lie on the couch while I “cooked” him – smeared his back with imaginary ketchup, sprinkled him with pepper, or tenderized him with karate chops, then pretended to scoop up little chunks of him, and told him how delicious he tasted.

My doctor did none of that. But she assured me that also I have been generously sprinkled. Browsing around with her cold little nitelite microscope, the doctor exclaimed, “Frau Sloat! I have counted over 100 moles!”

song of the day: watching the detectives

Spade

I read a review the other day of The Flight of the Intellectuals, a book I must admit I’m not all that piqued to read. It’s basically an attack on intellectuals who support Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan. I’m out of my depth on this subject but I relished the excerpt quoting the author, Paul Berman, contrasting the words “fascist” and “totalitarian.”

. . . ”Finally, Mr. Berman believes in straight talk and insists we use words like fascist to describe some Islamic ideas rather than totalitarian. Why? ‘It is because totalitarian, being abstract, is odorless. Fascist is pungent. To hear the emphatic f-sound and those double different s’s is to flare your nostrils.’”

Try it at home.

to the fly on a crying jag in my kitchen

what's wrong
what's wrong
what's wrong

dear desire

I've been busy in my room building a new continent. It's a modest one, with a peninsula and range of shady mountains. No housing has gone up, meaning the envoys who come bringing news of far away shouldn't stick around. From my desk, there's a lovely view of a lake that spreads out like a soft ballroom. Above it, I've hung my favorite photo of Ingeborg Bachmann - a young woman, rowing a rowboat towards the shore.

airspace

Since the ash cloud cleared, letting the poor ocean have back the headlines, my package from America finally arrived. I won a book at Good Reads called Why I Hate Straws, which looks funny. I also got Columbine, a Jim Kweskin CD, and a pair of earrings. My mother slipped in a Teen Vogue for my daughter and a baking book, too.

She enclosed a note on Columbine:

"Dear Sarah,
I ended up using three bookmarks when reading Columbine – one regular, one for the index because there are so many names and it can’t be read in a few sessions – the last for the section entitled NOTES as to where the author got his sources. This book is the most horrific I’ve ever read.
Love, Mom"

She left the bookmarks in for me.

disaster tourism

I’m reading Every Man Dies Alone, a story set in Nazi Germany. It’s about a couple that launches a show of anonymous defiance after their son is killed in the war. I know many people who love WWII and holocaust stories. Because they’re so dramatic. Because they’re so good guy/bad guy. Because they’re so goddamned sad.

Still, my colleague F. says this book sounds depressing. Most Germans don’t like to read WWII books because they’ve had the moral lesson pounded into their brains at school. They prefer someone else’s disaster, like Vietnam, and here she tells me about the Vietnam vets who weren’t allowed to return to America because they were addicted to heroin. I said I didn’t know that, that seemed odd to me. But apparently her husband reads eagerly on this topic. So whether or not it’s true, I guess most people would rather not have to identify too closely with dishonor. Except Americans don’t avoid VN books, digrace or not, do they? The genre is lively and literary and Tim O’Brien is its King.

Germans are just weary of being the Nazi nation. They’d rather be something else now. I get that, but it doesn’t snuff the fascination. Sometimes when reading a WWII book in the UBahn I hide the cover because I feel I’m insulting everyone. And then I think, you know, you worry too much about this stuff and you’ll never have any fun.

Not that the lovely cover of Every Man Dies Alone gives away anything. When the book came out it was heralded as a literary event. Honestly, it reads more to me like a B-Movie, but not in a negative way. It’s very dramatic, and the good and bad guys are easy to identify.

As an end note, on this day in 1945, Hitler committed suicide. After all that, nothing like dying a coward.

song of the day: picnic

Not the first straw, but the last (13-15)

The first straw was probably when I noticed how she would yawn when looking at herself in the mirror. If she were putting makeup on or just gazing at herself, suddenly she’d launch this modest, puckered yawn, always the same, and somewhat disturbing, as if she were trying to freeze a portrait of herself in a certain pose.

Then there was the time she made out with my boyfriend while I was on vacation. She confessed to me later, saying it was because I was so pretty and she was so jealous of me and I knew this was bullshit but I took my mother’s advice and put the friend over the boyfriend. She was a voluptuous girl, really.

For example, once she asked me: If a man broke into your house and you were naked but had a small towel, would you cover up up top or down below? Without hesitating I answered down below. But she looked at me meaningfully, and said very slowly, I would cover up up top. As if she were a sage, or had just thought a lot –for better or worse- about what drives men wild.

Whenever we would play at being our favorite band, she was always the female singer, and I sat behind her at the imaginary keyboard. She was pushy, but also outgoing and daring, and I liked that about her.

But the last straw was this. One day we were on the phone, and it hit me that she was speaking with some kind of weird Jersey or even Brooklyn accent, her vowels gone all raunchy. I wasn’t sure if it had been a gradual acquisition, or she had just woken up one day and decided it was fetching.

In any case, it was clear to me we’d arrived at the fork in the road.

my monkey's worth

The best thing about finishing a book is starting a new book.
The best thing about finishing a book is finding out the end.
The best thing about finishing a book is finishing a book.

I detect the El Supremo from the room at the top of the stairs

The fabulous thing is I got my own room.
Desk, shelves and computer.
I hung up my Macbeth poster.
I hung up my pipe smoker and the pictures of my dad
and my favorite 9/11 photograph.
I carried the fattest dictionary and best books
into the room like brides polygamous.
I beat the blue rug.
With wisteria twisting outside my window now
in peace I can nurse a pleasant greensickness.
I’ve spent too much time enslaved to the staircase.
Ahoy, my sewing basket says goodbye gypsy days!
That pen that’s been traveling the world
behind my ear now has a place to lie down.

Underlife

Dear visitor,
Today my blog is the bus stop for the book tour of January Gill O’Neil’s Underlife. I liked many of the poems in this book, but I’m going to talk about just one, “Old Dog,” which January has permitted me to re-post.

Old Dog

Sounder! Here girl. Come . . .
He shouts to me like I’m a coon dog
chasing possums out in the fields.

The school’s back lot became a small country where
names were given but not deserved
and I took it and took it,
even laughed with everyone else
at my own black self, suffering like most of us suffered –

quietly. The laughter so loud you forgot homework,
the blue-and-white uniforms, red veils worn in church,
Jesus on a beaded noose in our pockets.

Today, on this purgatory of a cloudy day,
I stare blankly into an open meadow from my desk
as wind kicks up dust and memory;
more so, the chance to recall
a small morsel of a boy and his big mouth

and my harsh resolve to talk back,
even if it’s nothing more than this,
a romp through a few stanzas.
I am grateful for that old dog of memory –
for what it lets you keep
and what it lets you throw away.

Of all the things I like about this poem, what impresses me most is the grace with which the poet handles the topic. Thirty or 40 years ago, the situation addressed here was called “getting picked on” – it wasn’t called “abuse” or “bullying,” now punishable by a jail sentence. I could launch into a tirade about how folks today should get their shit together and stop calling themselves “victims” every time the cashier shorts them 4 cents at 7-Eleven. But I’ll restrain myself, because here is a person who “took it and took it” and could have ended up lynched like Jesus in stanza 3 but instead shrugged it off, an act that these days seems to demand superhuman effort.

Those last two lines killed me. The speaker gives the occasion what she considers its due, tossing it in the garbage where it belongs, and all that without showing her claws, without loosening a sluice of expletives, without malice or really much trace of resentment at all. So while this poem is a personal triumph, it’s also an ode to reason, balance and sanity, and it’s also a great long raft of fresh air.

In her review a few days back, Donna Vorreyer said the reader would find herself in these pages. The poem went for me beyond the points I’ve mentioned because some decades ago in a parallel universe, I was the one white girl in my grade school class. I kept a very low profile and put up with my share of taunting. I remember being followed home one day by a clutch of kids who had a chant that started “Black is beautiful / white is shit / if you don’t believe….,” and I have to say I’d forgotten all about that, and maybe there’s a poem in it somewhere and please god may I emerge as gracefully as January has.

Information on previous and upcoming stops can be found here.

What the Thunder Said

The shopper up ahead has a boatload of groceries. The shopper up ahead has forgotten the Kleenex and runs sheepishly to Aisle 5 to grab them before all his items have been tallied. He has also not weighed his bananas and has to leave the line for that. The shopper has a ketchup bottle without a price and the cashier must leave the retrieve a different one. The cashier scans the ketchup twice. By accident.

Ineptitude is one thing. More annoying is the supermarket king. He’s in line behind you. The king could be a queen, no matter – what matters is knowing that the supermarket king is the most important person in the whole world. His getting out of the store is a matter of life and death. He cannot believe the hold-up, and needs to register his astonishment, which he does mostly through incomprehensible grumbling, punctuated by heavy sighs and snorts of chagrin. Unless someone hears his lament, he will morph into a frog and not be king anymore.

Do not respond to the groaning. Do everything possible to avoid eye contact. One sign of acknowledgement and the king will inflate like the Michelin Man and you will be sucked into the negativity which passeth all understanding. . .

my funny valentine

There are a lot of body words that turn people off. I’m thinking nostril, for example, or gland or scrotum. But there are also body words that people love for their beauty, maybe, or their comic charm.

Ankle
Wrist
Nape

Waist
Thumb
Pinky

Fingertip
Instep
Elbow

Pulse point
Lip
Brow

Eyelash
Eyelid
Knuckle

Calf
Palm
Tush

Derriere
Hip
Cuticle

Muscle
Navel
Cuspidor

Ivy

Somewhere in or around chapter six in the history of vegetation, some of the darker green gets tired of how the moss sits pouting among the lowest stones. It gets tired of grass and of dirt and the too careful architecture of trees. It gets bored with the dull stumpfoot bushes. When it has had enough of whining, it decides to try something wild, something sly and inextricable.
It decides to do something skyward.

my current address

S. Sloat
P. 293 Jude the Obscure
1895 Christminster
England

“Save his own soul he hath no star.” - Swinburne

Notes on Succulence

It struck me this morning in the buttery cut
roses, exo-petals tinged with the brink
of wilting, scent a carnage tucked

in weakening, mittened fists:
nothing ever gleamed like this.

At noon I felt it in the apple’s soft spot,
smelled it in a slosh of vinegar.

After work I saw it in the soap froth
caressing a row of raw necks at the barber shop.

It brims in the props of Flemish still lives.

Not to be confused with opulence
or corpulence. Not to be hoarded
in a purse lacking vinyl lining.

It stews the first drop of decay
whose fissures splay like frost,
unseen beneath the headiness,

under the vulgar, the creeping rot
for which the war was fought.

**

I ran across the photos of Justine Reyes the other day. The photograph above is from her Vanitas series, which seemed to fit well with my poem "Notes on Succulence." Thanks to Justine for letting me use this shot, called "Still Life with Fish and Orange Slices." There are some stunning photos in this series, and she has other work up, too, at her site.

Free of Pomegranates

Prick of the Spindle's poetry submission guidelines make me laugh.

"Submit up to five poems in a single document.
General guidelines to keep in mind before submitting your work:

* Make it fresh.
* If it sounds like someone else's work, it probably isn't fresh.
* Speaking of fresh, please no cicadas, pomegranates, or babushkas.
* Have a point.
* We're not ordinarily interested in pop culture.
* Generally, if your work contains words such as "alas" and other archaicisms, we are not the publication for you.
* You're not Ginsberg.
* Five means five. Six is not the new five.
* If you're going to use rhyme, do it right.
* Ways to get your work rejected without being read:
a. Use a lot of unnecessary formatting, like bolding and italics, for no real reason.
b. Use yellow font.
c. Use script font.
d. Make your work otherwise aesthetically obnoxious.
e. Overalliterate."

They neglected to mention you are not Charles Bukowski, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Aase Berg, ee cummings, or anybody else. But that's okay. I'm looking forward to some pomegranate-free poetry.

By the way, if you're interested in reviewing my chapbook for Prick of the Spindle, they have a copy to send. See the right-hand side of this page.

what I'm reading

Over at her blog, Kathleen Kirk has been running a series on what people are reading. It’s really interesting, and inspires mucho booklust, and makes me want to put my two cents in.

I usually know that I’m not all that keen on something when the number of books I’m “currently reading” tops three.

I’m at four as of this morning, having started W.S. Merwin’s The Shadow of Sirius. Of the heap I’m sitting on, this is my favorite. I really love Merwin. For one, he’s gorgeous. I also love how his name resembles “Merlin,” because W. is also a sorcerer.

Merwin takes the most basic materials and finds their power, hammering them until they’re . . . until they’re what . . . something eternal. There’s nothing fancy about his word choices, no overly weird layouts on the page, nothing disturbing about the lack of punctuation. It adds to the stream of the thought, and draws you into thinking along with him. There’s no unnatural posing going on. His approach is simple: he relies entirely on the resonant power of language. He writes often of nature but it’s almost degrading to call him a “nature poet.” Has anyone done this? Desist.

I opened the book pretty much daring Merwin to do it again. Surely there couldn’t be more he could say after The Lice, The Rain in the Trees, The Carrier of Ladders, the translations, etc. He can’t make the tired spring or stone or river into something so deep again, can he? Yes, he can.

But Sirius is the brightest, most searing, most serious star. It can be seen in the daylight.

Whenever I think about the Nobel Prize committee complaining about how caught up American writers are with themselves and their culture - and I often agree with them - I want to shout “NOT W.S. MERWIN! Give HIM the Nobel Prize!” Really, he deserves it. I hope he lives long enough for them to realize it.

spotless every Sunday

My poem "The Man from Sound Effects" is up today at Pure Francis. This journal publishes a new piece every Sunday, which is the end of the week on the European wall calendar, but on American calendars always appears at the beginning of the week. Why is this? This often screws things up at my house.

**

In unrelated news, today is the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. I visited there last Sunday, and it was an enormous experience. Visitors to Germany find it much easier to visit Dachau since it's close to Munich, but Dachau isn't half as well presented as Buchenwald, in my humble.

april 10

Happy birthday to my mom, born in 1936 in Scranton PA to James and Eleanor Decker. She was the second of five children. All fives kids had middle names that began with J (her J was Jean), and my grandfather, a sailor, had their names tattoed in a list down his arm, right next to the anchor.

We took this photo about 5 years old on a summer vacation, but I like my mother's expression and the black & white of it.

Another crippling consequence of the modern positives

Cleaning up, I got all happy and thought about writing an ode to throwing things away, but then I got confused because of the whole recycling thing. Throwing things away isn’t what it used to be. Not the relief of decluttering, of kicking materialism’s ass, of embracing simplicity, learning to live with less, the whole bit. Now you should find new uses for stuff. Even the old flannel nightgown you never wear. You should darn it, spruce it up with rick-rack, make it more appealing and upcycle it into a “vintage” tunic. Not the defective ceiling fan. You should fix it, or let the kids build a jet airplane in the yard with it. Not the even your garbage is safe. Couldn’t you incorporate it in some amazing artwork even though you sucked in art class? Well, you could at least try. That’s the other thing these days. Everybody is an artist. You just need to dig. Boy, I was looking forward to throwing a couple sacks of crap out but now I feel obliged to hide them in the basement. And wear a beret.

electric boots

I took the day off. Pretty quiet week in Europe anyway.
Slept 11 hours, then three cups of coffee.

*
When I was 11 or less, my favorite song was by Elton John.
His real name was Reginald Dwight. Nerd name?

*
My poem "Voyager" was a finalist for inclusion in The Best of the Net 2009. Didn't make it though.
Did I need to know this?
I have a hard time with disappointment.
There's just so much of it.

*
Not to wallow!

*
song of the day: bennie & the jets

for my neighbor, due in may

Why Pregnant Women Don’t Tip Over
-title of an article in The New York Times

Because a single thought occupies the mind of a traveller,
which at each crossroads reappoints itself.

Because the best tool for balance is bulk, and the high-wire walker
leaning leeward prevents the plunge downwind.

Because a lullabye hums steady in the cogs of the lumbar curve.

Because half a hundred hormones stew in the blood and sinews,
dissolving like salt that holds the dhow afloat.

And also clouds assume oddball shapes; yet their progress proves
smoother than any boat on any lake.

Because balloons bloated with helium hover lamplike; over time,
tired, yes, but dragging their strings loyally, royally.

Because the spine is a stack of boxes storing torpor,
even doses of wax and wane.

Because the hillside hangs on through erosion
and the arrowhead’s exposed unbroken.

Because erect is a synonym for sane, for symmetry,
for world-on-a-string.

Because sex makes a swashbuckler of us all
but there’s an anchor called the fetal load.

And as the Scots say when the cup is full carry it even.

In other words it’s not the cowl that makes the monk but how he bears it.

And even your bachelor aunt will tell you
the flophouse is no place for a lady.

Buchenwald II

Death by work – Death by bullet – Death by beating –
Death by roll call – Death by inner bleeding – Death by infection –
Death by despair – Death by strangulation – Death by malnutrition –
Death by exhaustion – Death by electric shock – Death by dogs –
Death by dysentery – Death by torture – Death by asphyxiation-
Death by disgust –

The Perp Walk

Mostly I feel like I should explode. Because there’s been so much prep devoted to National Poetry Month, so many venues established, goodies and treats arranged, board countdowns, prompts, etc., I felt I should just pop open and spread everybody with lemon Jell-O.

I’ve tried it before and succeeded. Tried it before and failed. In the end, I decided, despite being away a few days as of tomorrow, to try the Read Write Poem program and post every day on my other blog, but then yesterday Read Write Poem posted its obituary. So I thought . . . okay. . .

So if I write a poem/draft/rewrite, then so it goes. If not, amen. Hey, just like every month.

I’d hoped to take part in Kelli Rusell Agodon’s poetry giveaway with my chap but I needed a partner book to raffle – a new or “very gently used” book that was supposed to be one that I love – and thinking about that killed me. Give away a book I love? Then I thought I’d fake my love, but started to feel bad, like I was misrepresenting myself. My love! I happened on a “halfway loved” book I thought would do, but it turned out to have a brown stain on the top of the pages, and what is worse than a brown stain?

So here it is first day of Poetry Month, and already I’ve failed. But here’s a nice review of my chapbook, which is a longer version a review Jill Crammond Wickham did a couple months back for Read Write Poem.

I’ll be away for a few days in Weimar, including a side trip to Buchenwald, so happy trails.

dead line

This time we really mean it.
I mean, we really mean it.
I know we’ve said it before.
And we’ve also said before that we mean it.
Yeah, there was that time last week.
And that other time a few days ago.
But we bluff you not. This time we mean it.
No joke. No halfway, wishy-washy kind of mean it.
Nope, we’re behind it 100%.
Doubt at your peril!
This is really it.

Yahoo! Questions

There is a pain behind my right eye and why do I have a dog? Why couldn’t I have been a man like my neighbor who has his own black lab, an old dog, who’s slow, and would he be willing to trade him for my apeshit spaceship? Golden Lady is my favorite Stevie Wonder song, that’s easy, but why are we still in Iraq? Is atheism normal? Why do people tempt death running out into traffic to catch the train? The trains here run every five minutes. Every five minutes near my house there’s a squirrel that wants to kill me and why is my daughter so nice and so nosy? I have eaten an expired egg. When will I die?

song of the day: golden lady

immediately sheeped

Monday so far has been very very small. Small morning, small mind, small public urinal behind the train station. I think it has to do with the shortening of the Rhine. Tragic, really. The Rhine.

But Saturday was huge. At an exhibition in Bonn, I fell in love with Erwin Wurm. I did everything he asked. I lay down in a public place and thought of nothing. Balanced a bottle of toilet bowl cleaner on my head and thought about digestion. Climbed into a box.

Wurm is the discoverer of one-minute sculptures. You make them with your body, and then relinquish them. It doesn’t have anything to do with Buddhism. That's one in the photo at right. Oranges.

I stopped to write something down in my notebook. (“The house climbed up to the roof and contemplated jumping off.”)

Museum guard: Writing with a pen is not allowed.
Me: What, in the museum?
Him: Yes.
Me: Why not?
Him: Because if ink gets on the artwork, it won’t come off. There are pencils available downstairs at the desk.
Me: And if pencil gets on the artwork, it’s just as bad if you try to erase it.

I know all about the duty to fight stupidity, but I didn’t pursue it. The exhibition, after all, also concerned absurdity. And he wasn’t being a jerk or anything. Still, you’re not allowed that close to the artwork that you could write on it. If I wanted to damage the artwork, I’d bring my gun, which works from far away.

Anyway, Erwin Wurm. Excellent guy.

Done

When the notebook is full it’s like the tolling of a great gong. BONG! it goes, none too lightly. The notebook sits sodden and heavy and warped. The back cover has fallen off, and the pages run on like a long, hairy pair of knit eyebrows. Boy, there’s a lot of crap in there. You could comb through the scrawl, or you could go bury it in the backyard.

There is something I've been looking for

I feel such hope whenever I walk into a bookshop.
I call this particular hope “Near Eureka.”
Maybe I’ll find the book I’ve been looking for, the book I need.

I don’t know what it’s called or who wrote it or if it’s paperback or hardbound, or if it’s fiction, poetry, art or non-fiction or a big-format book with instructions for building 16 different paper airplanes.

If only I can be attentive enough, I might find it.
It might let me find it.

And that’s why I need time to deep-browse the bookshop, like a cow at pasture.
And that’s why I may end up reading a lot of books.


song of the day: schlummert ein

spring prints

And now a word from our sponsor!
I have some poems coming out in print journals in the next few weeks.

The annual RHINO will publish two of my homebody poems, two of a bunch of poems I’d like to package in a chapbook. RHINO took Steam and sPonge, the latter being about a kitchen sponge, written in the tradition of the wonderful Francis Ponge, a great observer who has brought many inanimate beings, including the baguette, to life. My sPonge begins –
“The sponge comes like a cut of beef, a vivisection rife with pocks and gulches.”

Barn Owl Review 3, out any day now, will publish Unseen, a backyard poem that starts –
“An airplane slices up Sunday
and why do I have to listen?”

Whiskey Island 57 is publishing two poems, Riding Backwards on the Train and To Long Division. I hate long division, and the nightmare returned when my kids hit fifth grade or so, and still hasn’t ended.

As to riding backwards on the train, I personally don’t mind it, but I notice how many people do mind it, and the poem is written from that point of view. It starts: “It’s not unpleasant: perpetual surprise.”

I ride the train every day and don’t mind it, with the exception of the occasional coffee slurper, cell phone chatterer and multiple seat hog. Mostly I like babies, even crying babies, which drop into my life like a surprise test.

Chengdu

Beneath a lean-to teashop,
an abacus clicks in dialect.

On bikes overloaded with parcels,
millions of black slippers spin
into markets, parks and hovels.

Add or extract a body
and the scene careens in unity.

Coal dust falls like pepper,
sticks like echoes, ink, and the talc
of butterflies considered long extinct.

Squat in a bamboo grove
sits the cottage of Du Fu,

master poet of the T’ang,
who wrote everywhere I go, I owe
money for wine.

n.(OFr. riote) wild or violent disorder, tumult, uproar

They don't do verbs or adverbs in dictionary illustrations, and I really must object. I remember being 13 or so and just dying to see an illustration of akimbo, which is an adjective AND adverb and a very cool word. It doesn't seem that hard to depict.

I imagine pinch, point and punch are also easy enough to do, but verbs are apparently tabu.

They do do adjectives. The dictionary is full of shapes, for example, and I appreciate that. Lobate. Sagittate. Obovate. They don't do relative adjectives, though, like long and short. Hell! The dictionary doesn't want to be judgemental.

Mostly they favor nouns, but generally not those denoting ordinary, well-known objects that most people (who spend any time in dictionaries) are familiar with. The manatee trumps the mouse, and gaff outranks the goat. One of my dictionaries, however, has the octopus , the panda and the oboe, which I hope are recognizable in most households. I can only assume these guys are irresistible for illustrators. Irresistible, period. Speaking of goats, I'd like to see a goatee . I personally love the goatee. If I were a dictionary illustrator, I would argue for the goatee.

I wish they'd do abstract nouns, but they don't. I could use help with despair, harm and marriage.
HELP!

I'd also like to see riot done. And meleé.
They should hire Breughel.

On pages 1254-1255 of my old Webster's unabridged, they've got illustrations for opthalomoscope, opinicus, opium poppy, opossum and opposite leaves. I guess all these are useful. I thought all poppies were opium poppies. What do I know.

As Ms. Scarforo used to say: look it up, people!

i fondly remember smoking

In my mouth
I once planted a star,
a crackling white rifle
pinched between a finger
and thumb, stuffed
and rolled
with sumptuous crumbs.

dictionary neighbors: M

menopause - menorah
mensch - menses
menswear - mental
mercy seat - merde
merciless - mercurial
merlot - mermaid


song of the day: bitterblue

day off

walnut grove

If – instead of Arthur Miller – William Faulkner had married Marilyn Monroe, and then had a baby with her, that baby would be the author of this book.

If Walter Cronkite had had long dark hair and shown a penchant for mauve, he could have been the author of this book.

Reading this book is like licking tunafish out of the can.
It’s like whacking a scoop of chunky cherry ice cream with thong underwear.
It’s like a lactating yak springing from a river.

If a hillbilly married his bastard aunt off in a shotgun wedding to a mythical beast, and that beast was not a unicorn, you’d be on page 56 of this book.

If Orwell had been down and out in the town near the Little House on Prairie, disguised as Mrs. Ingalls, that would sort of say what this book says.

This book will augment your bookshelf.

If you like this book, you’ll also enjoy cutting your hair with an exact-o-knife while sucking the cream from Devil Dogs with a straw.

If you went to jail and a guy called Cheebo bought you for 2 packs of Salems and a bottle of prison moonshine and then raped you repeatedly while watching The Days of Our Lives until you had to be hospitalized, that would about equal the denouement of this book.

It’s like Jude the Obscure meets Dracula on crack.

It’s like Yukio Mishima meets Susan Sontag meets Charles Bukowski in a long series of deceptively lyrical sentences.

The colorful, heart-warming characters come to life, and would nearly jump from the page if they didn’t die in the apocalypse.

If John Cleese had been born in South America and raised among monkeys, he could have written this tour de force with his right foot.

If this book had a soundtrack, it would involve the harmonica.

a pass between hills

Some months ago I took up the habit of sitting in my office chair with my right foot tucked up under my left leg. Soon after this we hired Geoff, who says this position is bad for me.

It is a very comfortable position.

*
Forced to choose between pants and trousers, I’ll take slacks. The word drapes so nicely, so casually. It hangs like the jaw of someone very recently amazed.

*
Tonight our exchange student from Moscow arrives. She’s 14 years old and speaks some German. The school has sent along a list of instructions. “Russians like to eat bread,” it says. “They sometimes have to be cajoled into taking second helpings.”

*
Speaking of cojones, my son and daughter need to be soldiered into practicing piano. I have always been a spoon, at most a ladle. I make a terrible sergeant, but I try.

*
Song of the Day: 70 Million

Feng Shui

When the bridge between east
and evening lies down to die

and the rain drops as freight
unevenly among the doomed,
I decorate my mind with drapes,

untie the silk ropes and tassels
that cinch them back

and appoint my room with jewels
looted from the later dynasties.
I am among immortals!

Still, there’s just so much
one soul can rearrange.

Also the river tires of coursing.
And the earth gets fed up
wth the burdens put on furniture.

When like most of us
the clouds have had enough
of bunching up and sundering,

I get on my bike,
circle three times the ditch
identified as best for resting

and fall asleep
head first.

aunt jemima in a bottle

Thursday, sliding into the homestretch, I find is a good day to link together my elongated thoughts. All the time I spent thinking them; all the work spinning them out past the point of what seemed a decent and natural death. It’s not Wednesday and not Sunday. I might be tired but it’s too early to give up. I link them together like a paper chain of dolls. Here’s the drawn-out thought about dangerous dogs with bad masters. The poetry in numbers. The plan I nursed about making a deserved prank phone call: Is your refrigerator running? / Do you have Prince Albert in a can? / The police got your number. . . Like Grandpa Decker used to say when Nana passed him with a plate of too-chewy beef, potatoes, gravy and peas – “I’ll mush it all up together. It’s all going to the same place.”


song of the day: the godfather theme, acoustic

march sunsets

1) 6.07 2) 6.09 3) 6.10 4) 6.12 5) 6.14 6) 6.15 7) 6.17 8) 6.18 9) 6.20 10) 6.22
11) 6.23 12) 6.25 13) 6.27 14) 6.28 15) 6.30 16) 6.31 17) 6.33 18) 6.35
19) 6.36 20) 6.38 21) 6.39 22) 6.41 23) 6.43 24) 6.44 25) 6.46
26) 6.47 27) 6.49 28) 7.51 29) 7.52 30) 7.54 31) 7.55

elsa

I was checking out an actress’s website the other day and her profession was listed as “actor.”

I’m sad about the widespread extinction of the –ess suffix. It clung to female thespians for a long time, but seems increasingly absent. “Actor” sits so awkwardly on women. I’d insist on “actress.” To be honest, I’d prefer to be a poetess, but that died out long ago. Ditto sculptress. And among the –ess words now dying an institutionalized death are waitress and stewardess. By that I mean society seems determined to kill them.

“Hello, my name is Jane and I’ll be your server tonight.”
“Flight attendants! Please be seated!”

Some believe they’re being forced out in the name of equality, but I don’t buy the argument that –ess is a “sexist” suffix. There’s nothing demeaning about it unless you enter the equation with a sexist attitude to begin with. If you google postmistress, you’ll get Wikipedia telling you it’s been dropped in favor of postmaster, which “has no gender quality.” Which is a lie. Master has no "gender quality?" Isn’t it a worse chauvinism to have to give up your true calling for the masculine version? Couldn’t we all change to the feminine version?

I think the feminization of professions/roles is an enhancement of the relevant words, and the shift away is a linguistic impoverishment. Is “Diana the Huntress” the same as “Diana the Hunter?” It doesn’t have to be just –ess; other forms are also lovely. For example, as if the word connoisseur weren’t beautiful enough, think of Sharon Olds’ “connoisseuse of slugs.”

I know I can’t stop language from changing, and luckily there are some words in which the –ess suffix appears fossilized. No one seems ready, for instance, to give up temptress and adultress, which pack more wallop than their male (generic) counterparts ever could. And the -ess is also permanently parked at the end of stately titles like baroness, empress, countess, princess, and the magical professions of enchantress, goddess, sorceress and priestess. If you can break into those fields, your femininity is safe.

Knochen

We're going to see The Lovely Bones today. I read the book, appropriately, on a trip to Disney World about 6-7 years ago. Despite the fact that I didn't want to like it, I actually did like it. Until about halfway through. Then it deteriorated in disneyesque fashion. I rated it "schlock" on Good Reads, but must confess I went back a couple months ago and upgraded my one star to two because I gave the book to my daughter and didn't want her to think I'd given her a book I found stupid. (She's on Good Reads, too.) Honestly, for 13-year old girls I think it's probably a totally cool book. Anyway, I fully expect to dislike the movie, but to cry my eyes out despite my better judgement, because I am unfortunately very susceptible to sap and schlock, being hormonally and emotionally at sea, as only a melancholy, middle-aged, overtaxed, sentimental ex-pat keeper-of-the-motherly flame can be.

Song of the day: Eric the Half a Bee

Fish Heads

I didn’t have any acceptances in my inbox this morning.
But I didn’t have any rejections in there either.
Somebody did send me a WC Williams poem.
THE WC Williams poem, ie "This Is Just To Say."

This is just to say I never particularly liked that poem.
And the worldwide frenzy for it only turned me off more.

Why didn’t somebody send me this poem instead?
Either that or some fish oil supplements.


Song of the day: Raindrops

it's hard to overlook

the lust in slut
the broth in brother
the boom in bosom
the zoo in floozy
those torches in the orchestra