Blind Curse

On this modest break, I'll be stepping away from blogging to focus more time and energy on writing poems. I'm on a productive streak, and I will do whatever I can to keep it going. I'll check back in here when I've written the next Pushcart Prize-winning poem.

Today I also received my contributor copy of Kansas City Voices, Vol. 14. This issue contains a lot of impressive poems and artworks, and I'm honored to have one of my own poems published inside. If you like supporting artists and small presses, consider buying a copy for someone you like. If you hate artists and independent publishers, please buy a copy for someone you despise. The spite will really come through when the despised person opens his mailbox to your angry parcel.

As we push forward to comfortable and joyous family gatherings, I hope you'll appreciate this poem by Simon Ortiz.

Happy Thanksgiving.

"Blind Curse"

You could drive blind
for those two seconds
and they would be forever.
I think that as a diesel truck
passes us eight miles east of Mission.
Churning through the storm, heedless
of the hill sliding away.
There isn’t much use to curse but I do.
Words fly away, tumbling invisibly
toward the unseen point where
the prairie and sky meet.
The road is like that in those seconds,
nothing but the blind white side
of creation.  

                    You’re there somewhere,
a tiny struggling cell.
You just might be significant
but you might not be anything.
Forever is a space of split time
from which to recover after the mass passes.
My curse flies out there somewhere,
and then I send my prayer into the wake
of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls
one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.

- by Simon Ortiz, from After and Before the Lightning (1994)

Mojo Pin

"All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful."

This is a way more articulate sentiment than I could produce right now (or ever), but it speaks to a certain sense of ennui/dread/wonder/distraction which currently occupies my head. These are the final lines of "The Bight" by Elizabeth Bishop, and are also the epitaph on her headstone. I visited it once, but I can't seem to find the photo I took of her grave. All I have is an image of this tree across the road.

November 2015

Anyhow, when I was on my wild Greyhound trip back from visiting my friend Rose in Chicago (hi, Rose!), I listened to this Jeff Buckley album a lot. There was a bunch of night lightning in the western sky over Illinois, and I caught a calm twenty minutes of sleep to this music. Then a fight almost broke out at the bus station and our bus broke down in rural Missouri, but the adventure was worthwhile.

- "Mojo Pin" by Jeff Buckley, from Grace (1994)

Reunited (A Little Lost)

My frenzied life marches on without respite. I'm back at Wellesley, working the alumnae reunion and generally goofing off. It's a lot of fun, but I'm still a little out-of-sorts. The alums are all fascinating, and I'm glad to have an opportunity to interact with them. I even got to meet the big sister of my Wellesley big sister (at Wellesley, during first year, every student receives a "big sibling," whom is an upperclass student interested in being a mentor/friend/good influence on a younger student). The whole thing has filled me with warm fuzzies and a feeling of extreme luck.

But because I haven't taken a lot of photos recently, here is a great little song by Arthur Russell, a wonderful musician who worked with the likes of Phillip Glass and Allen Ginsberg. He died from complications of AIDS in 1992, at which point he was still fairly unrecognized and poor. As is often the case, his music has become exponentially more popular since his death, with lots of re-releases and demos and alternate takes finally seeing the light of day, including this recent one, Corn.

I want you to hear this.

- "A Little Lost" by Arthur Russell, from the posthumous album Another Thought (1994)

Fillmore Jive

1. Malta was complicated and full of sense and the most clear blue water I've seen in my life and fairly friendly people and very bitter people and cheap food and crumbling buildings and the most disgusting tap water I've ever tasted, which I was told was "not fit for drinking" but I drank anyway because I'm hardcore.
2. I feel completely detached from my brain right now, moreso than usual, I think because I haven't had a good night's sleep in quite a while and need to take a day for myself to sleep and rest and housekeep and worry less about everything, which I'm beginning to do again as a result of the sleeplessness.

This song was all I could think of to post, because it's all I ever think of when I'm tired. It's also probably one of my favorite final songs on any album so far.

- "Fillmore Jive" by Pavement, from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)

Janine

A strange and lovely love song, recorded at The Knitting Factory:

"If you were the Baltic Sea and I were a cup"

"Janine" by Soul Coughing, from Ruby Vroom (1994)