Five Woman Renga from Salida, Colorado

FIVE WOMAN RENGA – July 2012

Twenty years ago I saw that storefront in Salida, Colorado
And wanted to write on it my poem of desire
Like a message one finger leaves on a steamed up bathroom mirror
A heart, an arrow, paired initials, “I Love You.” MS

No less ready to burst than a thunderhead on a late June afternoon
No less huge than the heart, red and rhythmic, in Salida’s night sky
This Love … LE

I shuffle the sizzling Salida sidewalks, looking into passing faces
full of light and shadow, their sorrows and joys mingled with skin,
knowing each face can only hold so much of either.
My own eyes, caught in the currents of our intermingled lives
spill over into the river that passes us by.
Look at me; I hold an invitation to the circle,
this spiral of love, this safe eddy
in our rapidly shifting landscape. LJ

Who can tell what the heart holds?
My secrets, your need,
who can say what the soul desires?
Our blood mingles,
pounding,
spills,
somehow the skin remains unscratched,
the flesh unyielding. LLR

Come here, curl up with me,
the celestial fireworks have
started –
thunder shakes the house making
everything quiver,
those high-decibel drops outside
big as silver dollars
crash down in a flashy independent
sort of way.
Come here, love, hold me –
let’s float the hidden stream
of our own holiday. BF

a gray house with a turret
cloud-running sky
(view from my bed)
poppies, so intense
red
black stamens
you’ve always wanted
a house with a turret
once again
I’ve traveled a long way to do nothing MS

I am barefoot in this garden of rock and bone
Goddess figure holds court with Potentilla
You are everywhere…
My flute spins breath and blessings towards the moon
river holds the base line
We are woven into this home
no less than the mourning doves that dance in the tree LE

The yellowing of the pine tree in the vacant lot
where the grackles hold court, where the wind
croons to the moon, foretells of dry land and this
shrinking and sputtering around us.
When he goes, I better be long gone,
his stories tucked beneath my shawl,
his grace in my heart, spinning. LJ

View from my window,
this pine a world.
Nuthatches, the grosbeak,
his belly a sun,
white throat of the towhee,
I think back to snow.
Cottontail, striped squirrel,
come morning, long gone.
But first the moon must rise
and turn the lakes silver,
so perfect, so still. LLR

Velvet curtains the color of marigolds
pulled tight against the Mata Hari moon,
we dream of parallel lives, return
to phantom lovers, forge lies
into song to trill at dawn
in echo of robins, so early to rise. BF

Floating up from the aquifer of dreams
I surface in the lane
Of the vast swimming pool
Where hot springs pour from the earth’s core.
Doing a slow breaststroke
I’m almost the old woman I will become —
Grandmothers splash and pat their skin
While
Children dive
For a penny, a lost scrunchie,
A submerged city. MS

Not to mention the village…
its commerce my conversation
F Street my foyer and lobby and living room
Passing eyes share a smile and a secret
This place that defies time, age and culture of consumption
has another name – home.
Please come in … LE

We enter, fold our legs on the open earth,
blessed to be here under ancient cottonwoods
that drink from the river beside us.
We gather to listen, move our bodies
to the rhythm of water over rock
or sit with silence and a blank page.
Open your arms and enter here;
eyes wide and heart rooted deep in each other,
sipping slowly from the quenching underworld. LJ

Slap spray
split stone
splatter skin
tumble bone.
This river will take me
if only I let it.
Tree roots tangle my hair,
granite knifes at my back.
Breathing wet sand, going
under
and under. LLR

What love comes to —
is it only bright hunger and exit wounds,
or sudden delights and shadows
at chez nous, a dreamlike stillness
between — or is it this very day,
splashing into the bookstore
to get out of the rain? BF

This Is The Cosmic Highway
it says on the sign
on Route 285.
I pass the alligator farm
and the UFO viewing station
which looks in disrepair.
And pass a billboard proclaiming
THIS IS EARTH — OUR HOME
a fact which almost seems in doubt
across this great plateau. MS

No one will say out loud “Enough Already!”
Not after searing sun parched skin and eyes, grass and garden
and river was a whisper too low for boat or brown trout
and the countryside burned …
Now great dark clouds drench us daily
but we know better than to say it …
because it is never enough LE

Tenderfoot Mountain, points the way,
to our cosmic road, anchors us to home and river.
Yesterday, shrouded in torrential rains
with arms of lightning plucking Pinyon
one by one from the Mosquito range,
we dismiss the thirst, are briefly unburdened.
Morning’s clear blue sky, a gift.
Great white clouds build castles on the horizons. LJ

These mountains
named for bugs (Mosquitos),
birds (there’s Quail, that’s Ptarmigan),
when I came here from ocean,
all this jumbled, broken, jagged gray
just walled me in and made me even smaller.
But then I saw the gulls plunge
from the peaks to high and hidden lakes.
And then I tasted salt and knew
that this, too, would be home. LLR

Divination by the crossroads in my palm
brought me to a river valley –
unceasing wind
stakes me to the rocks,
my doubts whisked away
by its four-directional broom,
the future steeps in
tea leaves at Cafe Dawn.
How fragrant, this sip
of unknowing.
BF

if I was unkind
it was just
to memory —
hummingbird moths —
knowing
I leave tomorrow MS

all afternoon
the sky has rumbled
crying wolf again —
I tell myself a story
full of wet paw prints
interwoven with ours. BF

Lightning sizzles midnight sky,
silhouettes blue spruce
beyond the meadow
where fireweed clustered
and long ago, you loved me. LLR

Electric blue morning
the air, still and fresh
long shadows of the trees
reach to touch one another.
Here I am …
o p e n i n g
like a flower. LJ

Realizing my reckless wonder
keeps me still
That beauty distracts
… is an opiate
I pry myself from this Buddha rock
and return to work LE

***
This is a free verse renga or linked poem written by five women poets in the Salida, Colorado area. In order of appearance:

Miriam Sagan thanks the Colorado Art Ranch for her residency in Salida, summer, 2012. She runs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College and is the author of over twenty books.

Lawton Eddy lives, works and plays in Salida. A poet since childhood her work has been published in an anthology of high school poets, The Mountain Gazette, Colorado Central and a collection of poetry by River City Nomads with whom she performs the spoken word whenever invited.

Laurie James writes poetry to weigh the natural world and define how it has shaped her. She has been inspired by many poets and the great Western landscapes she travels. Born and raised in Montana, she is a 40-year resident of Salida, where she mixes her metaphors in view of a struggling lone pine and the wide-open changing sky.

Lynda La Rocca is a freelance writer and poet who lives in Twin Lakes, Colorado. Her third poetry collection, “Spiral”, was published in 2012 by Liquid Light Press of Lafayette, Colorado.

Barbara Ford lives in Poncha Springs, Colorado, due west of Salida. She is incapable of imagining life without poetry, the Elmer’s Glue of the Cosmos. Every week she reads the poetry of the world aloud on her radio show, which live streams on khen.org, 5-6 p.m. Mountain Time.

Miriam’s Well Is In Hiatus Until August 1

Anna Garforth

The Plaza Restaurant is Open Again!

When Hope and I walked in we burst into tears–so long since it burned and so wonderful to have it back. Things change–and in Santa Fe that often means the disappearance of well-loved places. But not in this case!

Green chile meatloaf. Coconut cream pie. Yes, it is back!

Photographs by Hope Atterbury.

KITTY BURNS FLOREY on Diagramming Sentences

By KITTY BURNS FLOREY

Diagramming sentences: what, after all, is it good for?
Well, for one thing, it’s obvious that it’s good for stirring up controversy. The more than 300 comments (and close to 100 personal e-mails) in response to my last post, “A Picture of Language,” ran the glorious gamut from “love it/taught me to write/thank you, Mrs. Wengler!” to “ridiculous waste of time/confusing/who needs it?” I was delighted to see that 400+ people can get passionate in print about the subject.
But questions remain. Once we have mastered the arcane skills diagramming requires (prepositions on slanted lines, gerunds on little staircases, etc.), are we better writers? What does diagramming sentences teach us besides how to diagram sentences?
I would answer: It teaches us a lot. First of all, it illuminates points of grammar. When constructing a diagram, we focus on the structures and patterns of language, and this can help us appreciate it as more than just a vehicle for expressing minimal ideas. (If language were good for only that, OMG, TMI, RUOK and their ilk would fill our needs.) When we unscrew a sentence, figure out what makes it tick and reassemble it, we interact with our old familiar language differently, more deeply, responding to the way its individual components fit together. Once we understand how sentences work (what’s going on? what action is taking place? who is doing it and to whom is it being done?), it’s harder to write an incorrect one.
Diagramming is basically a puzzle, and — as we all know in this age of Alzheimer’s awareness — puzzles keep our brains working. An attempt to tame a really complex sentence can oil your brain, twist it into a pretzel and make it do back flips. One reader of this series expressed a desire to see a diagram of a sentence — any sentence — from Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl.” The following example, which is from book one, chapter two, perhaps supports H.G. Wells’s crack about James’s style, comparing him to “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost…upon picking up a pea…”:
The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion — or indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, aesthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/taming-sentences/?ref=opinion

Poetry and Photography This Friday

This Friday at 5:30 pm at the auditorium in the history museum in Santa Fe–photographer Teresa Neptune and I are giving a Humanities lecture on our project “Roadtrips to the Moon.” She’ll be showing slides of scenes from the VLA to Truth or Consequences and other magical NM places and I’ll be reading the accompanying poetry I wrote. We’ll have a beautiful broadside for sale (inexpensive if signed and numbered!)–“I am not Kwan-yin.” Hope to see you!
Free and open to the public.

Palisades

Where was beauty? Growing up in northern New Jersey, it eluded me. Of course there was Manhattan, canyons glittering at a distance beyond the gossamer span of the George Washington Bridge, but nature?
At least there were the Palisades, fifty miles of basalt embankment on the Jersey side, their name reminiscent of settlers’ forts. A strong vertical against the river, once I learned to see I could find their crystalline form–covered in trees and vines and ferns in summer, cracked by ice and frozen waterfalls in winter. Volcanic in origin, at the edge of where a great glacier stopped, carving bedrock.
Recently a huge chunk crashed off.

I won’t see it–my childhood house sold and gone. But I will always admire in my mind’s eye the beauty I found in a place without mountains, mesas, or much look at the earth’s bones–Palisades.

Mermaid Spotted Near Staten Island–from Mattea Harvey

I just got this from one of my favorite New York poets, Mattea Harvey, whose magical work is exquisitely quirky. Wish I could see it–but in any case what a cool idea!
***
Dear friends, near and far,

This year I worked on making a soundwalk with amazing sound artist Justin Bennett for the Guggenheim architecture program–it’s going on for four weekends (starting next week) in Staten Island. You take the ferry to S.I., then go to a kiosk where you get an ipod and go on a 90 minute soundwalk along the shore and into the St. George neighborhood. The piece is called TELETTROFONO and it’s about Antonio Meucci (who invented the telephone decades before Bell) and his mermaid wife, Esterre. Meucci was an amazing nineteenth century inventor who made a marine telephone for divers to speak with ship captains, flame-retardant paint (which he advised using on your underwear) and improved effervescent drinks, among other things. The telettrofono tour will introduce you to his real and imagined inventions, a mermaid chorus, a preset verifiable fact mode, and the story of a mermaid who leaves the water because of her love of how things sound aboveground.

If you would like to know more about the soundwalk, please go here for info and tickets (and an audio preview)!
http://stillspotting.guggenheim.org/visit/staten-island/

And if you don’t live in the New York area, but know someone who might enjoy this kind of thing, please feel free to forward my email to them. I promise it’ll be a unique and wild experience (I don’t want to give away all the surprises…) I hope you’re having a wonderful summer!

xx
Matthea

Basia Irland at William Siegal Gallery

I’ve long admired Basia Irland’s work, which incorporates land art, installation, montage and performance. It strikes a literary cord because so much of it is books–books of cracked earth for drought, books of ice full of seeds, and even a barnacle book encrusted with shells.
Those ice books dissolve, floating away in a river, much as I imagine her sculptural boat of salt might do if put to the test of water.

A strong show of her work is at William Siegal Gallery (540 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe) and is up for the next two weeks.

Fascinating petri dishes line a stairwell–full of vials, seeds, and moon and tide charts. Where are we? Can we grow our own location? How can I read this book that dissolves?

Several years ago, I wrote a poem in conjunction with Irland’s imagery as part of a cycle written on THE LAND/An Art Site in Mountainair. The whole cycle is forthcoming in SEVEN PLACES IN AMERICA: A Poetic Sojourn from Sherman Asher Press, fall, 2012 with a note about Irland’s work:

Salinas

blind, you’ll taste
the braille
of the book of salt
of wave’s slap
or blood
on the lip

great salt flats
     cracked
like glaze (like hieroglyph)

pockets full
     of black stones
     the soil of your
     native land
tossed over the shoulder
     to keep off
     the evil eye
like bread

pink salt core
raised bumps
where is it
safe
to touch?

dissolving letters
in the museum of water

***
Also at the Siegal Galler, work by Joanna Lefrak which features mysterious almost invisible maps incised on plexiglass–such as Treasure Site (Blackbeard) and Black Hole.

Not A Political Blog by Devon Miller-Duggan: A look at public discourse and being excellent to each other

Not a Political Blog

I am absolutely easy when it comes to being a political hothead. I revert with light-speed to a knee-jerking, contempt-spewing, Facebook-howling, self-righteous twit frighteningly easy. It’s not a huge deal, in some ways. Most of my FB friends are happy fellow-travelers, so I’m mostly preaching to the choir, and while it’s a dubious use of energy and time, it’s mostly harmless fun to be trading snarky or rah-rah stuff on the network. But not always. I have friends and family whose politics are kind of different than mine–folks I love and respect deeply, even though they’re wrong and/or deluded and/or (aargh. It could happen.) right. But the point is that they mostly deserve better than the spatter-shot broadcast of my political yelling.

For the record, I would like to say that even though it doesn’t look like it, I don’t actually “share” every nifty bit of bumper-sticker rhetoric that comes my way. I actually manage something that’s almost recognizable as restraint much of the time. A lot of the time, for me, anyway.

And there are whole categories of stuff my friends post that is Not My Cup of Tea–mostly inspirational and patriotic and age-related humor–that either doesn’t bother me, or that I like, but am not prone to re-post even though it makes me chuckle or nod or cry. Which is okay, just like it’s okay when folks don’t share the stuff I post.

The thing that bothers me most about my own behavior and about lots of others’ is the lack of civility. It’s corrosive on so many levels it’s hard to list them all. It’s damaging and unproductive and unattractive. It’s also the inevitable product of the free-for-all of a constitutional democracy, though certainly not the best product, and the ugliness of it is a bit out of hand these days. Still, it is sometimes just important to be able to vent–FB’s good for that, as long as folks don’t mistake venting for discourse, which mistake is increasingly common, sad to say.

So it was a lovely thing to see a couple of non-confrontational things crop up in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. The first was funny: a
poster of an intently focused Sean-Bean-as-Eddard-Stark (still haven’t quite figured out the connection, but was amused anyway) with “BRACE YOURSELVES.EVERYONE ON FACEBOOK IS ABOUT TO BECOME A CONSTITUTIONAL SCHOLAR.” across the bottom. Would that it were true. But it does acknowledge that this is maybe the first time in a long time when folks actually seem to be paying actual attention rather than simply reacting. Well, some of them, some of the time. I’ll take it.

And then there was my friend Deborah’s posting. I don’t actually know what her politics are, which is a little unusual, but kind of nice for the moment. What I do know is that she’s smart and thoughtful and that we share a religious commitment. Here’s what she said: “I know my FB friends will have a variety of opinions on today’s ruling. I’m not against a hearty discussion but can we all agree to be excellent to each other? There’s too much heartbreak among my friends for me to tolerate anything else.” Friends who responded, I’m happy to say, either talked about other things entirely (the Colorado fires) or had fun tracking the origins of “be excellent to each other” (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure). They respected her request. Good for them. Good for her. Good for us all.

I’m not making a mushy plea for us all to be nice to each other. There are folks out there I am not prepared to ever be nice to, barring conversion experiences on their parts. And there are folks out there none of us should be “nice” to (kind to, polite to, decent to, but not “nice”–people who spew and spread hatred…of any sort). I’m not sure “nice” would do it any longer–we’ve been so inundated with acid that “nice” wouldn’t make much of a ripple. “Excellent” is probably just exactly what’s needed. In many senses of the word. We could use some serious “excellence” in many, many spheres.

It’s tempting to end this with a chirpy suggestion that we start a political party. We could wallow in irony and call it The Third Rail Party, and its platform could focus on Making Things Work Well, and Being Excellent to Each Other. And how giddily charming would it be for a social revolution to start with a Keanu Reeves line? Fortunately or un-, I’m too cynical to do that. And one of the reasons that I enjoy blogging is that it doesn’t always demand a neat conclusion. So file this one under “just noticing” and we’ll leave it at that.

Wendover Landing Photographed by Matt Morrow