Wow

I cannot believe it’s been so long since I wrote.

Where did the time go?

If anyone still stops by, and it looks like sometimes a few might, everything’s good in our world. Sierra is 13 now, and going into 7th grade this fall. She is about to get braces, which is a point of much anxiety today, and probably will be till they are in place.

I have been working on refinishing furniture, most recently an antique desk that I’ve been trying to get into shape to paint. I’ve sanded till my hands tremble, but it still needs more work. The colors will be indigo/blue & a creamy tan when it is completed. And it will be my writing desk!

We went to San Diego in June, and saw the sights. Maybe I’ll throw some pictures up here. Mostly the subjects are the aquarium & zoo animals. Rawr!

My brother lives in Kentucky. He has been accepted into the nursing program, the one his girlfriend completed at the beginning of summer. My brother the nurse! I’m very excited for him. Both of us took an awful long time figuring out what to do with our lives. I’m still a little wavery.

My step-father is still hanging in there. He has a terminal illness, amyloidosis, but they seem to have found a way to slow the symptoms. The doctors say he may have as many as five years left to live, if nothing declines. Amyloidosis is a condition where your body starts building up harmful protein deposits on key internal organs.

My grandmother just had a partial cornea replacement, which freaks me out to think about, but the surgery went well & she will hopefully be able to see much better & even read again the way she used to.

I guess that’s it for now. I’ll go see how some old friends are doing.

Place Marker

Feels like I should put something here, cus I hate to think my site has died all the way dead.

No, no; it sleeps like a dormant volcano.

I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month- getting off to the usual anti-productive start of indecision, babble and procrastination. Wheee! … Feels like old home week.

Interesting to me how people who are peripheral to all that deep, dark writing intent seem to be inspired to write. While I vacillate around a pile of disparate words, I’ve received the pleasure of absolutely beautiful writing from others through e-mail & blog entries. None of these people are doing nanowrimo, but want somehow to also make writing a priority for November.

I am much more impressed by their output than my own.

It’s been fun to connect with a few on twitter who are also giving it a try. You can tell the veterans because they gamely dig in, in a low profile way, knowing today’s ideas will mutate & knowing they might lose steam in the middle or drop off & fail of their goal.

It’s the process, not the hype. Someday I’ll learn that. (But the hype is kind of fun.)

Hope you’re all well out there in blog-land. I won’t mention the elections right now. I don’t want to jinx my darling Kitzhaber whose still in a neck & neck race for Oregon Governor.

Hoping. Hoping quietly.

Tell me, if you feel inspired, what projects you’ve taken on for November, the beginning of the gloom we dub wintertime.

Hoping the hearth-fires stay warm for you,
A.

** addendum: John Kitzhaber won! Yay, and welcome back, governor.

‘cus

I want to curl up in your familiarity, which I perceive as safety,
even if I’m wrong. And what if we’re wrong? Hiding under a blanket of you
so we can hang out here on the edge of life, loving and pretending
that it won’t all be coming out cold.

Who am I missing? Who might *you* be missing as I monopolize
your time to stay here and feel safe.

Never wanted you to be a regret of mine, but sometimes
the sky is flat and I’m afraid I know:

Know the motions of detach are coming; know the movement
of these days won’t count somehow, because we’re cheating.

Always was hard to walk uphill
under a wandering sky.

Longhand

What if I wrote a sentence that didn’t end but stretched on and on and revealed something about the human heart, but not some over-reaching universal truth about the human condition, just the particular essence of us, crystalized with all our flaws and struggles open to the elements so that the wind gets in and hollows them out bigger, exploits our crags and irregularities till there is only that pattern, silhouetted for a slice of eternity, like a pock on the pavement.

Pancakes

Ingredients: 1 cup of flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 egg
buttermilk
vegetable oil or bacon fat (not a heart healthy option but more authentic)

Put skillet on burner, heat on medium or just over medium.

Sift flour into bowl with baking soda, add salt, combine dry ingredients. Pour buttermilk over ingredients (just some. No exact amount) and let sit for a couple minutes. Do not stir.

Use a pastry brush to apply vegetable oil to skillet. If using bacon grease, cook pancakes after cooking bacon. Drain some of the excess fat into a container and add to pan as needed.

Add egg to mixture, stir with whisk (bubbles important). Add buttermilk until consistency is about like cake batter. Do not over stir.

Pour small amount of batter on skillet and flip when popping the bubbles in batter leaves an indent.

Serve warm. I like homemade jam but my daughter insists upon maple syrup.

A Theory of Breakfast

Everything starts here with the first choice;
how the day will go, be slanted, play out, say
It’s an oatmeal or egg option. The Orange Juice clause
bears meaning unimaginable to the unitiated-
and the hour, oh the hour
there is no comparable meaning to the lunch crews
or the dinner diners, with their restless teeth and aching hearts-

Breakfast alone dictates
how you will go today.
How will you go today?
And if you reach, decide, arrive upon an option
what’s to stop you then?
Why not pick up the phone or
book a reservation or
write an opera or
learn Mandarin or
find it in you
to press another button or maybe
waste the day in a fever of
sex and colored silk?

You are conductor, executioner of Destiny.

So, like, pass the fucking milk.

Tonight I want to Howl down the Moon for you

Tonight I want to howl down the moon for you.

It all got away from me: Time, the body’s particulars,

and things fall apart slow.  I peer out at this gloomy thing

hair limp and singing silver.  Tired face.

It’s like you distracted me from how I’ll never be young again.

We forgot things so perfectly, in our mixed up, happy union

it seemed like simple design: That a feature would hold its smile,

and hair would go moon color,

the body’s shape soften to contain the swelling heart.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Now, though, no though… try not to remember things.

Things in my head I long to just forget

how we folded trusting, limbs tucked under us

believing there was meaning that we met.

And I’m still looking for the pure chronology

Gone, all that context: Hope and time and place;

gone the feeling of belonging perfectly.

The time feels like a trick, a curse, a waste-

*  *  *  *  *

But don’t. Don’t betray your own fidelity

The sun is also shivering overhead.

Cold. Cold and faithful. And disintegrating.

*  *  *  *  *  *

Some day I will scream down the sky for you.

Elucidate my pain, bite air, and shove;

make angels bow in haste to hope’s enormity

and give you back to me, the one I loved.

beast season

When you go to measure the monster,  you’ll find you’re unprepared for it.

The spark of surprise at being swallowed half-way down that

hot, slimy throat, bars your ability to learn.

You’ve brought the wrong tools. You’ll keep trying to apply a system

(while the beast lolls on his back, and hangs his tongue out

waiting pleasantly to eat you. Again.)

.  .  .  .  .

When you go to measure the monster, you have to metamorphosize;

become a girl with unlikely shadows.

Your chest need expand till you can’t bear it, and then some more.

Expel the glimmer-dust & unchoke your mind.

Cough out the rolling hills, the sweet music,

the incantations sent to doomed creatures when they are eaten.

Let the wounds and teeth-marks inform your approach.

You must mold your heart to see cunning instead of compromise.

You must be more monster than the monster.

.  .  .  .  .

It is painful, yes-

but better than dying

fool to a slimy tongue.

what doesn’t kill you…

For once I’m not threatening you with desire. It’s something more sacred than that, but also the need to ease my legs out of trousers and walk across the deep, cold desert on my own.

But it is also revenge. Anger like a hard kernel in the fist of my heart. You’ve sculpted my eyes into new shapes, and they are thinner and less forgiving for you.

The words pour out careless, and everything I used to love gets trapped in a vase, gets shipped to the four corners, gets kicked repeatedly until the energy burns out.

But not the ice.

Maybe I’ll forgive me now. Other people’s tolls: Things they took away, loom so big in the sky, but there’s something left behind. Something harder, smaller.

The arc of the pubic bone,

the screech of rest

the air of festivity when you’re free-falling

but can still pick the destination, within a couple leagues, where

you’ll break the earth with these knees, these trusting knuckles. But I’ll tell you something-

something essential died here.

…

…

I’ll keep walking.

the hard line

I walk this thing with a lack of moral imperative; there is a blame meter that changes from different angles of the dividing line.

Our dreams were never forged to withstand us; they grew cold like the sun in a story-book sky.

So let’s leave them and inhabit the twilight.

Be in this world now, just as it is: Where breath is somewhat difficult, and the ground is wet and hard but intimate. Where the sky is beautiful with stars far too distant overhead.

Coarse throats gulp back their awkward, endless longing.

And you can’t hold love like a diamond, because that isn’t love. Get close and you’ll burn as the heavens burn the stars.

The captivating light becomes a scar.