It Was Only Two Years Ago

I will never ride this train back from Michigan without thinking of you and how you died--something about the long trip back after identifying your body in the morgue, something about repeating the journey, and all the hours for such sorrow and regret: the golden light of dried grasses in the empty lots of Detriot, how it's a kind of resurrection, the return to meadow.  At the top of a bare tree, a Cooper's hawk stares at military attention--a meal might yet reveal itself. A little later a dozen, two dozen deer bound across a field of last year's mown corn, the white arrows of their tails, maidens fearful of the monstrosity on the tracks, but the swans don't care, each one by itself, swans seen from the window of this train, I am on the way home. In inlets, in silvery pools at dusk they are the illegitimate sons of the moon, come down to this world to sip from our cold waters, which are not the waters of forgetfulness, in fact just the opposite of that.

Exciting news if you are a fan of dogs, and diamonds, and myth.

Cover: tintype by Robert Turney

Diane Wakoski has a new book out from Anhinga Press.  You can read about it, and read some poems here. I'll report back in more detail after I get my copy.  I studied with Diane in the late 1980s, and she has a huge and wonderfully varied imagery collections in her bag of tricks. With some poets you say, "Oh, he's a nature poet---trees again," or "Oh, I get it, she does the gritty urban punk kid thing."  Or, "Ah, yes, those stately images of Iowa farms, that must be the work of Gerhardt Dipthong."  With Wakoski, you might encounter mythic beasts, or kitchen implements, or birds, or flowers, all in one poem.  I will be interested to read this new collection, her first comprised of all new work in over ten years. 

A very very short story...

Okay, this used to be a poem, (and yes it has a dragon in it) but I took out all the linebreaks and submitted it as a short-short to the journal Weirdyear, and the editor there accepted this piece for Weirdyear's sister site Yesteryear.  It's an older bit that I have always liked. I find that as some of my writing ages, I am more apt to be open to radical changes: cutting all the linebreaks, deleting the first seven stanzas, giving a whole series new titles.  I guess it's a lesson for myself, I am always re-learning it: allow writings to sit and age a good long time. Be open to thinking about them in new ways.