This morning Larry pointed out an article in the paper about a robotic arm. The woman in the picture was able to get the arm to raise a sippy cup to her lips through thought. She thought the command and the arm raised the cup.
“How can it do that?” I wondered.
“I don’t know,” Larry said, “but it’s certainly going to energize domestic violence.”
It feels like someone is removing days from the week! But here it is again, my turn to send a poem out. I am choosing this one by Seamus Heaney:
A Kite for Aibhín, after ‘L’Aquilone’
by Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912)
Air from another life and time and place,
Pale blue heavenly air is supporting
A white wing beating high against the breeze,
And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon
All of us there trooped out
Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,
I take my stand again, halt opposite
Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,
Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.
And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,
Lifts itself, goes with the wind until
It rises to loud cheers from us below.
Rises, and my hand is like a spindle
Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher
The longing in the breast and planted feet
And gazing face and heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and – separate, elate –
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.
Seamus Heaney
In the last years of her life, when my mother began forgetting things, one of the first things she forgot was my father’s name. When I reminded her, she dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “He was a detour,” she said. I couldn’t help feeling a little miffed that she could dismiss her 29 years of married life so easily, and by implication, my brothers and me. But in her vision of herself, her real life, the 20 plus years she lived as a therapist on the 21st floor of an apartment on West End Avenue in New York, began after she left my father. “My best decade was my 50s,” she said decisively. Those were the years she left marriage, the suburbs, her job teaching at CCNY, and bought her apartment.
I have a photo of her then, in a flowing ethnic dress, her eyes sparkling, and one she particularly loved of her paragliding off a boat in Mexico. She had shrugged off the constraints of the 1950s, her children were grown, and she was a practicing psychotherapist in a world of intellectuals. She had been to Esalen and worked with Fritz Perls. She had a hot tub installed in her apartment, she had a “group,” and became well known in her field. I think she must have been an excellent therapist, and the stories several of her former patients told at her memorial back this up. Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about an online journal, maybe called Radically Accessible Poetry. The poems in the journal would be anything I wanted to publish. The only criterion for publication is that they have an immediate impact. Of course, I would be the judge of that. It’s a tempting idea because so much poetry seems unavailable–that is, the content and the expression leave me unmoved. And there’s something particularly depressing in reading one presumably sincere effort after another and feeling so little.
In any case, Radically Accessible Poetry (or RAP–what’s a journal without an acronym?) might include poems like the two I mentioned almost a year ago, as well as longer poems. Most poems would be short, though. For one thing, short poems are less demanding and therefore more accessible, and for another it’s easier to find good short ones than good long ones.
As I don’t want to start a whole new website for RAD, perhaps I’ll just assume my poetry entries here are the journal. Interesting that the flyer for WIlliam Stafford’s reading was from a May 8th in the past; too bad he’s not with us anymore to read poems like this: Continue reading
The prose poem is a medium difficult to describe–a paragraph? a story? a reflection? It’s shorter than a story, but not in short lines. It should make you catch your breath the way a poem does, I think. This one, by Robert Hass, does everything it should: A Story About the Body The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” 
Continue reading
Forty-two years ago, we spent the summer in a little town outside Dublin with our then four-month old daughter. Larry would mostly take off during the day, which left me lots of time to become friendly with the curious neighbors. Mrs. Daryshire had the baby and me over for tea one day, and I loved her scones. I asked her for the recipe, and she said–like a true home cook–oh, no recipe, dear, just a little of this and a pinch of that. Eventually, she let me watch her make them. I recorded the ingredients and measures as best I could while she did. At the end, she threw a bit of flour into the bowl and rubbed it around to gather the bits of dough that had stuck. Then she went out and threw this to the chickens. I was deeply impressed with the organic efficiency of it all, not to mention the scones.
Now, so many years later, I make my own scones, throwing the remnants to my chickens. Continue reading
Last year I read at the Falkirk Center in San Rafael with four other poets as part of the Marin Poetry Center’s Summer Traveling Show. I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the event was, and was glad to be part of it. So this year, I’m doing it again:
Thursday
May 17, 2012
7:00 pm
Readers:
Karla Clark
Andrea Freeman
Stephie Mendel
Maggie Morley
Meryl Natchez
Leah Shelleda
Host: Rebecca Foust
Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission Street, San Rafael
Okay, so it’s not really in a circus tent. Falkirk is a lovely Victorian with commensurate grounds right in downtown San Rafael. I don’t think I’m reading any pastry poems this year, but will bring something tasty for everyone to eat to go with my poem “In Praise of Fat.” We read for 10 minutes each, and at least last year, it was an intriguing mix, some laughs and some of those sighs a really good poem can elicit. Come hear for yourself.
We finally got a small freezer and put it in the laundry room right across from the washer/dryer. Of course, it immediately also became a repository of clothing. This is problematic, as the lid opens.
When I came home from LA, I went in to do my laundry and noticed a sign:
It made its point.
In March, the labyrinth was looking great. We were eating greens and herbs from it daily, and spring flowers were beginning to bloom.
Two weeks of rainy weather, then sun, then travel, produced a dramatic burgeoning! By the time I got home from New York, the paths were overgrown, and all the greens had gone to seed. Continue reading
From that same issue of Poetry East I mentioned earlier, I came across a poem by Thomas Lynch, another poet new to me. His day job is listed variously as funeral director or undertaker, a thought-provoking trade for a poet. I imagine it keeps him grounded. In this issue of the magazine, each poet writes a note about the poem. Lynch has a section about how he composes when he has writers’ block and concludes with this:
“Truth told, this multi-media approach results in remarkable disappointments–poems of such abundant mediocrity that I burn them or affix to them the names of poets I dislike and post them to The New Yorker. Continue reading
Poems (mine and others), recipes, garden tips and ?s, my particular sense of humor, & MacGyver-type solutions to common problems. That's what you'll find here--and I hope that's what I'll hear from you. I look forward to your comments, Meryl Natchez.
