Too Beautiful

I never left the six acres last weekend, but to be honest, I never left the house for three days.
I was hoping to get a grip, but after the weekend I still didn't have lesson plans, my office was still awry to put it mildly, and I didn't have much fun. This weekend I started the day right, with a phone call, and another phone call, and then I wrote a poem.



Unpunctuated
for WS Merwin

So beautiful today
I don’t know what to do with it
I can’t be outside it’s too perfect
the morning glories are too too without
even ingesting their known iota of trip
The Maximillian sunflowers are poised
to bloom and even that potential is wildly
enticing into too beautiful The dues we paid
After the fires after the wind and smoke the terrible
canyon fires of Santa Clara watershed tears shed
I could cry again today for the world we earned
paid its dues to too beautiful too beautiful
beautiful datura beautiful the Jewish New Year
I am already lamenting I stand naked for an hour
in my greenhouse watching the cereus flower
prepare for night blooming I stand naked before
my shower and after my shower another phone call
from the too beautiful I talk naked on the phone
because I don’t know how to manage today
with how I love too beautiful the note in the mail
from you how I love poets and painters who make
the world shine me I never want to set foot
inside a classroom with no windows
I want to speak poetry to those finches
and to the kale I will tell the kale I forgive the aphids
you are so greenly beautiful I love my body today
because it is the vessel that carries too beautiful
soon departing for other beauty don’t mention
it you say but in the too beautiful death
is already sharpening the scythe its harvest
of the too beautiful a basil scent a mint too many
tomatoes and a glut of cucumbers and I forget
that I know how to preserve I am doing it now

9.17.11

The snake returned

I went to pick eggs today, and the snake was back. I don't know if I even told you about the snake. Our rural life is fraught with adventures. There is a mouse hanging by his claws in the root cellar, a lizard growing back his tail in the garden, a ground squirrel who eats through cardboard to get the bird seed, and a snake who unhinges his or her jaw and tries to swallow our eggs.

We got one picture of the snake and the Wildlife Center confirmed that it is a bull snake. I haven't seen my yearly rattler, so I wasn't sure. Various excitements of la Puebla life include the road washing out at least twice, this year the fires, the rabbits taking over the garden, and giving up at least twice. After I gave up I gave in, and replanted at least two times.

Now I am reaping what I reluctantly sowed. The morning glories, from the small pink ones to the giant Heavenly Blues, have never been so extravagant. I have the look through them out my kitchen window while washing dishes. I want to have my portrait taken in them. I don't want them to ever leave. This planting I have done for at least 20 years and this is the best batch.

Wish I could say the same for my writing, which brings me to the Gift poem. I am teaching my last of the eight week poetry group tonight, and I want to tell them about the gift poem before they graduate from summer into fall, from heat into cool, and from my voice into their own voices.

All the lousy poems I write are part of the writer's life. I write several lousy ones for one okay one, and after a hundred, I may get a gift. You do not need to carry around a little plastic card like Flying Star where I am writing this, and have $5.00 credit on my Frequent Flier card. I have paid my dues and now get ecstatic morning glories, giant kale, basil, and even cukes and tomatoes. I have paid my dues and have had a sweet relationship year, year # 41, I have paid my dues and after 30 years in schools get to be PL for this time in my life.

You know in the fairy tales there are always two smart brothers and the dumb one.
Or the two sisters who tell the king they love him like diamonds and gold, and the simple sister who tells her royal father that he is "as dear as salt?" Well, these two smartie pants are the ones who don't get the prize, maybe like my intelligent conscious mind writing a poem. The simpleton mind at the end gets lucky, wins the love, has the success. That is the generosity of the gift, we have to feed it, sacrifice, throw the bit of dough into the oven, feed the invisible, make the offerings.

So, Mr. or Ms. Snake. Go to it. If we feed some eggs to the snake, perhaps we'll have a few more of these glorious days, the fall cooled down, the rains relaxing us, the garden thrilled that it got to green. Today I put our expensive finch feed and expensive yellow finch sized birds arrived. Where do they line up waiting for the good stuff? Another season in La Puebla and my husband filling in the gravel on the washed out driveway as his birthday gift to all of us.

Being the PL is a lot like this snake. I have my mouth open wide and can't quite get a grip on the egg, but I am persistent. As with my now abundant garden, I do not give up. And I noticed that the smaller the garden, the larger my yield.

I happen to recall lines from Anna Ahkmatova:

"I don't know if the day is ending
or the world is ending
or if the secret of secrets is inside me again."

Gratitude for My First Job Revisted

I am at the main branch of the library still digesting lunch from Santa Café with Anne Valley-Fox and Stanley Noyes.

When I was longing for poetry in any form, volunteering at my kids' school, John Hyson in Chimayo, coolest place on earth to send out kids and presided over by Julia Hudson, I met these two folks. I had nothing published, or maybe a poem in the New LIfe News, the newspaper of the food co-op.

This is circa 1981. Stan Noyes was the literary person at New Mexico Arts Division where we had a wonderful and serious Poets in the Schools program where the real poets, including Arthur Sze, Harold Littlebird, Anne V-F, Jimmy Santiago Baca, John Brandi, Jim Sagel, Miriam Sagan, Judyth Hill, and I think Mei Mei Bressenbrugge all worked. They called it PITS. It paid something like $60 a day, and then $100. Big bucks for an artist beginning.

Each year fledgling me would apply to Stan and New Mexico Arts Division. Two years I got rejected, and kept on volunteering with John Hyson and the kids, made a book of their little Chimayo poems on copier and construction paper covers. By the third time I applied, Stan took me on, though I had little other experience than volunteering. I got work at two schools, Capshaw and Alameda Middle Schools and with my first income from poetry, put a down payment on a stove. It cost $500.

I am still working as a poet-in-the-schools through New Mexico Culturenet though I am happy passing it on to the young poets, the Slammers, the up and coming. The other poets from the above list of PITS poets in Stan's coterie have gone on to be life long poets, win major awards, work tirelessly with children, and two of us to be Santa Fe Poets Laureate, Arthur Sze and I.

We presented Stan with a Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, a small and grassy roots tribe of which I am co-president of the Board. We wrote him an award check for $500. I think, no, I am sure it is the same $500 I originally got paid, circling and spiraling around above Santa Fe and the minds of children. Today Anne and I took Stan out to a nice lunch, my birthday lunch as well, and presented him with a plaque that spoke to our gratitude for what he gave the literary community. The plaque is handsome, by Cirrelda Bryan, and has a big THANKS. It is a way that we hope he remembers how much he has done for all of us, not to mention the countless school kids who got to work with the likes of John Brandi and Jimmy Baca and even me. His work is still rippling.

I told Stan a story about finding a poem written by an Alameda kid, Joe Ray Sandoval in about 1982 in David Gonzales' English class. I kept it as I did a few good poems. Joe Ray has gone on the be a performance poet and write the full length movie, Spoken Word. He didn't remember writing poetry in middle school, but I sent him a copy. Stan commented that it is very important to influence kids when they are young. Just hearing him say that took me back, dreamtime, to being at his home and being trained a bit in what works in the classroom.

I want to pass on what I know about teaching writing to kids. I want to pass on gratitude for when there was federal money in the arts, and to Stan Noyes, and to the poets who have kept on the sacred path of writing and giving. I have gratitude for Alex Traube who made his own PITS program, based on the old one which also employed him as a photographer, as well painters, dancers, potters, muralists, sculptors. It was called The Artist in Residence Program way back when.

All sorts of Gratitude, and Happy Birthday to me. Glad I got born and got to have this day.
JL for the PL

Less Cool Every Day and Loving it

When my book, The Singing Bowl, got voted #3 in Best of Santa Fe issue of The Santa Fe Reporter it was cause for a small rejoice. I wondered who had voted for my poetry book, mentally thanked them, and rushed downtown on the day the Reporter came out to see the posting. Besides the award listing, they created an interesting continuum for some of the winners. It ranged from Less Cool to Uber Cool. Guess who was #1 on the uncool end of the spectrum? The same one who was called "Sir" in the Reporter office, the women who would be celebrating her Beatles Birthday, as in "When I'm Sixty-Four."

Now lizards are cool, snakes are cool. I am decidedly mammalian and less than. I am happy to be warm, and my three children and grandchildren are happy than I am less groovy and more grandmotherly. I once said that there was nothing unsexier on God's earth than to be in Safeway with a kid in the grocery cart seat and a bottle of prune juice in hand. Now I have proved myself wrong. There is one thing. Color it grandma. Even Poet Laureate mixed with Grandma is a challenge.

I am calling this year The Official Happiest Year of my Life. I think since it is in the past I won't get into trouble with the Evil Eye, that pernicious and omni-present ojo malo of Latin and Jewish cultures. It was last year, ojo malo, so don't think I don't know you're watching me and things are less perfect this fiscal. Honest. What with stocks, sticks and stones breaking my cool bones, the droughts and fires, and death hasn't stopped counting coup either. And remember, Santa Fe Reporter Staff, I was young once and if you're lucky, you will cool down gracefully.

So, in honor of my Big Beatles Birthday, another stab at happiness. Here is the poem I wrote.
I need you to snap fingers with a 4/4 time as you read it.

Now, one - two- three- four snap snap snap snap and GO!


GOODY TWO SHOES TWO * A SONG LOOKING FOR A TUNE

Patti Smith cut the cuffs off her shirt
I would never do that, I would never do that.
Our friend Webb went AWOL from Vietnam
we hid him out. Now, I would never do that.

I hitchhiked to Harvard Square
while my bug was in the shop
Marquis de Sade was there
against an Ivy League backdrop,

Now would you ever? Time passes
people move around a lot and end up west.

Other people were dancing rock and roll
I was peeling the bark from a Ponderosa Pine
I was giving birth in a three-room house
with no running water and a full moon bass line.

Would you ever do that, would you ever?

The parrot ran off with the day
I would never do that, I would never do that
The magpies were making raucous hay
Their tuxedos and tails, their noisy ways

My mother was paying the bills, and soon
she’d be selling the shop. The photos
of movies stars would fall . All would
vanish from the Carlton House Hotel.

I said, Hey Lovey Dovey, yeah I said,
Hey, Lovey Dovey. We’ve been married these fast forty years
with our burgeoning bourgeois frames and our bank
roll in your back pocket.

I’d never do that, You know I’d never.

Bob Dylan was passing through but I never got
his name. Janis Joplin would soon be through
and nobody called her tame. I put on my goody two shoes
and stared out the window in flame.

I gave birth to you and you and you
and nobody called out my name. I was Mama
I was Joanie, I was Jane. I wore out
my Goody two shoes, I was wild and then I tamed.

You were tame and then you got wild.
Three times I handed you a child.
Just check it out, over here, all alone
It’s Paradise without a throne.

Six acres and my last good nerve
Patti Smith came back in a huff
I rolled up my shirt cuffs. I deposited notes
in the bank, gave myself a third chance.

The small coyote howled, the computer
ran out of ink. The latest was just a child
with a heart as deep as the sink.
I can’t stop finding the joy,

even when the meanings run out.
The evening was alive, it was evening’s turn
to shout. I won’t ever do this
I won’t ever…I said Hey Lovey Dovey, hey….

8.8.11

Friends and Gazillionaires

I know that if you are like me, you are probably sick of hearing about my hijinks and exploits of the Poet Laureate life. Sick of all the wonderful appearances I have been party to, sick of hearing me say I rocked them on the Plaza for the Fourth of July pancake breakfast, sick of my excuse that I have five planets in Leo which I translate as five planets in Ego. I am sick of myself, usually and on a daily basis, but I am also rejoicing. Who is this energetic woman who has now been mistaken for a man not once but twice in a week? Who is this poet who sometimes goes on stage with her skirt tucked in her undies (wear good ones)? And why isn't she sending work off the major literary magazines? Is it because she is still trying to coax a bloom out of her flowers who have pretty much all given up, except the morning glories? Is it because she is in mourning for the fires that burned the canyons and now the black ash in the Rios which the fish can't survive? How can she think life is a joy and a poem when all of this has just transpired her neighboring watersheds?

I think I got some of my questions answered this week. My friends and co-conspirators at Tres Chicas Books went to the big city, Albuquerque, for a radio interview on WOmen's Focus and a reading at Acequia books the following day. I think you can hear the interview with Carol Boss, July 23 at noon for two weeks on KUNM.org. Check it out. But even better, check out friendship.

It is truly amazing. I have two friends, Renée Gregorio and Mirian Sagan, who feature an excellent driver with night vision, and women who are as free with money at restaurants and clothing stores as I am. Both of these qualities are great, but not as amazing as friends who listen to all of my plaints and worries, love me anyhow, and give me advice and perspectives. They have even come to realize that I am almost always right. Que milagro! We had a blast and laughed non stop. I had to come home and recover from laughter. I highly recommend finding friends to support your art, publish your work, and run off to a big city with at least once a year. Friends bring joy and endorphins, I know it. Hint: it's good to have younger friends. Not to be ageist.

For one weekend I needed to forget about the US Budget which is ridiculous and any of us could solve in a heartbeat if not for greed. Do you know that greed causes the same bio chemistry as addiction? Do you hear one single gazillionaire say, "Let's experiment with altruism. Let's share. Let's just kick some green ass with our financial clout? Let's end a few wars, divvy up the profits, look at taxes as a privilege of our success." You blog readers know by now that I am an altruistic Scrabble player, and I am watching my husband, who is an altruistic carpenter, and has helped about five people move this month. This includes storing or adopting various things, from a full sized loom to two miniature horses. We have wandering Jews and two Crown of Thorns (altruistic and ecumenical), aloe vera galore, bougainvillea, A combo wine rack.plant stand, a large painting of a woman with two sabertooth tigers which takes up our entire guest room, a Maori mask which hangs over the TV and makes the news look cheerful by contrast, and a Norfolk Island pine which obviously never heard about what happened to our last two Norfolk Island pines.

Anyhow, I hope my second and finale year as Poet Laureate, not to keep dwelling on how cool and groovy it is, I hope this year is of use to people, that we get gentle rains, that my poetry isn't all way too occasional and derivative, and that we are still friends at the end. I have over 500 Facebook Friends, but they have never driven at night with me or heard my stories more than five times. This is the week of my 40th Anniversary. I think our marriage has a fair amount of altruism, screw Ayn Rand. I hope living a life in poetry has purpose and increases endorphins. Viva la PL, even if it happens to be, just briefly and fleetingly, me.

And finally, we have ten days guys for the budget, get it ungreedily unstuck, get it TOGETHER!!

Becoming a Man

Today the woman at the optical shop said,
"And how may I help you sir?" OKay, so I didn't put my lipstick on after the swim, and my hair was pulled back, and I only had on one earring, and my glasses were so stepped on at the Española pool that they were practically vertical. But really, have I crossed over? Has that hormonal shift taken place and I am now not afraid of becoming my mother, but my father?

It's true, once before at their country club locker room, Betty who was a red-haired I Love Lucy locker room attendant and friend of my mother, Beti with an "i," Betty said of me,
"She's Harry! Isn't she exactly Harry?" I am Harry. I have his olive skin, his white hair,
his height and weight almost. I am swarthy, but I don't have his golf swing, his taste for martinis, and his palate. In fact it was this very father who told me I'd never have a developed palate.

What I do have is lots of lipstick, earrings, and necklaces which I will never leave home without. I may resort to ruffles. I have books and an ear for a poem, and I liked dancing with my dad, we'd say out loud, "one, two, cha cha cha." I end up buying new glasses with a red pin stripe and hope it wasn't an impulse buy. The glasses on my head where cracked and scratched and I need to see, even more than be seen.

Upon coming home I see that Charles Simic has just written a small book of essays called Confessions of a Poet Laureate. It is only available as an e-book. I find both of these facts disturbing, to a man of my gender. I wanted to write that book, and if he wrote it, why can't I hold it in my hands. he also wrote poems called My Noiseless Entourage, and entourage is one of my words. My thunder is being stolen.

The good news is that the clouds are building in a gentle, not menacing way. We need the rain to quench the fire not to flood the denuded 140,000 acres. It's hard to be as in love with a landscape as I am with New Mexico as seen form our house. Especially hard since we had a solid two months of wind, followed by a month of fires, flames you could see for weeks of it.
I would go out back over and over, and watch the flames. I felt intellectually devastated myself, but it couldn't go into the emotions. It felt sort of stuck there between my throat and my heart, I think I only cried twice.

One morning we discussed, what if the plutonium burned. Would we leave or just leave slowly by illness? The bad thing about pouring yourself into a landscape and making such a sturdy home, is that it is just as temporary as a day, as a life. We all know this. Yet watching the sacred lands of Pueblo people burn night after night brings another time frame.

I have been unable to focus on anything, and so, since I can't write I am going to teach.
I call the class "Living Inside the Questions" and just setting it up has been a challenge.
One question I ask myself is about form, why short, why long, and why followed by a martini.
Why did I never play golf my entire life, when I liked things about golf, my mother,
the grass, the golf carts I adored, and the pretzels in the lounge after.

Wallace Stevens was a golfer, in fac

t when he died and someone in his foursome said something like, "We've lost a friend. And a great American poet." The other golfer answered, "Wally, a poet?" When I die they may say,"Joanie, a golfer?" Or, I always thought she was a girl.
DO you have any secret wishes? Mine is to be published in the New Yorker and I wish someone would send my work out for me. My brother said that he read a book about men and women and how they respond in business. A man given extra responsibilities says he is glad to have then and what is the extra compensation?" A woman just says, "Thank you for entrusting me with this work."

Maybe it was a compliment to be mistaken for a man in the Optical office in Española.
Maybe it means I will stand up for myself, take a swing and yell, FORE!!

thefurrowedbrow.com

My kids came up with a cottage industry for me. I am known as a famous and relentless worrier, despite a line in a poem about my daughter Corina that says, "Worry is reverse prayer." They remind me of that and know it doesn't help. I think I worried from before memory.

Lately the wild fries and drought have given me plenty of fuel for my own fires, and the kids came up with this business. For a mere $4.95 a month I will do your worrying. I don't think it will make me ill, as someone suggested. I think I can keep distance, either aesthetic distance, aerial view, or professional boundaries. Also, i identified with the line in Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery where as the Great Splendini, he said he used to be of the Hebrew persuasion but recently converted to Narcissism. Perhaps that alone will give me the ability to listen, or better yet imagine your worst case scenarios, and then much as the Sin Eater of southern culture ate the sins of the dead, I can digest the worries of the living, and not really care too deeply about you. Only $4.95 a month for the first year.

You understand this would be after I fulfill my Poet Laureate duties this year as it might prevent me for giving full attention to that job. Speaking of which (see how I can bring every conversation around to PL) I am furrowing my brow all week about the Rotary's Pancake Breakfast on the Santa F Plaza tomorrow. I haven't been able to write a new poem, though I have begun about eight.

I suffer from the opposite of patriotism which is not scorn but matriotism. I pledge allegiance to mother earth or Gaia, children, cooking and hearth, and the flags I fly are prayer flags. Yesterday I finally decided to make a tree flag-- we had just heard a wonderful Jungian lecture which spoke about Frida Kahlo, Emily Carr, and Georgia O'Keeffe and lots of tree paintings in the face of the largest forest fire in NM history. So I gave up on poems and with a Sharpie drew a tree on one prayer flag and on the GENTLE RAIN flag covered it with rain drops, a form I had never even doodled. Within an hour we had a torrent and hail, and no electric power for six hours and more rain and the arroyos gor flooded and furrowed more than my brow. Michael was out there in the lightening closing up the kids' yurt and trying to divert the arroyos. The little plank bridge we used for 25 years to walk to our neighbors was swept away. The new renters, Hope and Leland, Monique, lots of our neighbors trying to get home.

So this morning we walked down and by Harriet Smith's house the arroyo cut about seven feet down. It's a mess. We do have a way out by the fire station. Nobody in Santa Fe really knows how it is up north. I spent the morning trying to hear if it helped at Santa Clara Pueblo where 13,000 acres burned. There was nothing on the news, and I realized that I have had the privilege of writing poetry with these children for five different years. I think if you work with children you know the beauty of a culture and glimpse its soul. Last week I was at a marriage feast for a young woman I taught poetry to for a year when she was 12. I hadn't seen her for years but she is so lovely and I took an instant liking to her husband. I have a loaf of bread, round as a face, which the family insisted I take. I took it from the freezer when the power was out. The power is back now. It's still smoking over the pueblo watershed. The birds sing even if they are evacuated. I may evacuate myself to a friend's in Santa Fe for a night so I can fulfill my PL duties at Pancakes on the Plaza even if my rainmaking continues to work. I'd worry all night if I didn't. 10:15 on the Plaza on the Fourth.Hopefully, I will be there, with Giant Pencil.