The Cauliflower's Last Known Whereabouts

General Vegetables

Following the turnip’s visit, the kohlrabi left a mysterious message in the soup, which the radish found and gave to the head lettuce. The rutabaga came up with a shocking explanation for the chard’s recipe and what needed to be done. Chard agreed to the trimming, but the procedure did not go well, leaving his stem on the line. Spinach returned to himself for a moment when the melon took him to the compost pile. The cucumber concealed the cauliflower’s whereabouts from everyone. The cucumber found the cabbage trying to cover her tracks with string beans and had a chat with the pumpkin, when the onion entered and overheard them.  The beets were stricken when arugula decided to side with watercress. Coming up: Goat cheese offers the beets the support they need.

Reading at The Book Cellar

This will be the fourth or maybe even fifth year that Suzy, the owner of The Book Cellar, has invited me to read at the store during National Poetry Month.  Each time there's been a variety of poets on the bill, but always I am delighted to share the stage with my good friend, the amazing writer Richard Fox.  This is one of the readings I look forward to from year to year, and I'd love to see folks there.  I'm busy reading kid's books for a committee I am on for the American Bookselling Association, so I've not been composing a lot of new things, but in the fairly short time I'll have I promise to read at least one brand-spankin' new poem along with some oldies.

I walked in Rosehill Cemetery today. Well over 80 degrees in mid-March, and the robins were delighted, the crows were calling, two hawks circled, and the lion stoically looked off into the distance.

Notes on a Reading by Jeanette Winterson

                                                                                         (photo from the Guardian)

I saw Jeanette Winterson read from her memoir tonight. She was jet-lagged, witty, intense, and could answer a question like "Where do you get your ideas," with a three paragraph spoken essay that was cogent, entertaining, and meaningful.  Here is what I wrote in my little notebook as I listened to her speak. Much of the longer phrases are direct quotations, the individual words are all ones she used:

I was like a flare. Disaster. Phone booth.

  Copper--plate handwriting.  Loomed up. Uncarried

child.

  Shut yourself up in your grief.  Duffel-coat.

I was selling my story against hers--part fact, part fiction is what life is.

When you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend. I thought

the measure of love was loss. Gap. Opening.

Version. Silence, burden, grave. Wait

until the dead were gone. Promise

  box. Words become clues. Both of us endlessly

ransacking

     the house.  The night bus. Coarseness

for my own sake.  Secrecy. Brilliance--unravel

     it. The words are there. How

do we make sure we are people worth knowing?  To say

that art is a luxury is to say that being human

   is a luxury. Begin

with a sentence and go on.

Orpheus

from the stairwell of the Hyde Park Art Center:

 

Orpheus, Descending

The Vault of the Sky Exactly the Color of the Knitting Woman's Yarn

I need to get back to writing again, not only because when I go for too long without writing my legs ache ad I start feeling like there's something missing in my life, a sense of unease, a dissatisfaction unnameable until the moment I say, "Oh, I haven't been writing," and I know exactly why I am unsettled.  I also need to get back to writing because I'll be reading soon with Richard Fox and Brandon Will and they are both very good writers so I want to have something new to read and impress them.

This is just a post to say that I found this in my notebook, dated Feb. 11th and it proves that I am still writing, even if I did not very clearly remember writing it. Sometimes that's why I like keeping a notebook, to discover how immediate a moment was for me a day or year or decade ago, and briefly inhabit that moment again.

The woman one seat ahead of me on the train has hair made of equal parts silver strands and black; she is knitting; a ball of pale blue yarn is in her black backpack. I cannot see her face; I wonder if her expression is placid as she knits with thick and wrinkled hands. I was going to say that the yarn was the color of the sky but then I thought, no, that's just the poet talking, and I looked out the window at the snow, the bare trees, the ice on the river. I looked up at the sky, clear after yesterday's modest bit of snow, and indeed the vault of the sky was exactly the color of the knitting woman's yarn, exactly like that.  Now I'll probably feel compelled to say something like, "the woman on the train, the woman seated in front of me has yarn in her black backpack she is knitting the sky."

 

 

Snowfall at night and the Streetlight

So much going on right now--busy at work, my father very ill, so I have been traveling back and forth from Chicago to Detroit quite a bit--I am tired of being worried about him all the time, but I sure want him to be here on the planet so I can worry about him.  I'll get back to regular blogging at some point. Until then I am grateful for the snapshot moments of beauty: the first real snowfall, and being out walking in it.

Ten Sentences I Wrote Across the Pages of an Art Magazine

So I am getting ready to move into a new place, and I'm trying to get rid of a lot of stuff in my place: books, clothes, magazines, etc.  I have a lot of art magazines I brought home from work over the past few years--to get full credit from the distributor, a bookstore only needs to return the cover of the magazine, so I was able to take a lot of coverless magazines for collage and so forth.  I have a long history of stealing sentences from art magazines, but sometimes I leave sentences behind, written on ads and images from exhibitions.  I tend to think of these sentences as springboards--a position to dive from and write my way into something (and then back out again.) Here are ten from one magazine, written down so I am free to recycle said magazine and not move it to a new home two blocks away. Feel free to borrow a springboard if you need one.

1. He was terrified of waiting in the airless glass room.

2. When she thought about her mother she often became anxious.

3. The suspicions never end at the bus stop on Broadway Avenue.

4. I wondered if it was time to bring out the bucket of nails.

5. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever allow myself to feel that rage.

6. At night the river was made of black glass.

7. Sometimes it's best to sit on a stone bench, and think.

8. Ever since she was a little girl she wanted to marry a man with the head of a bird.

9. The sight of his blood came as a relief: the body continues to be a factory.

10. I'm still working out the way to seal my heart off from the far greater world.