OMG O & O

     May I just come out and say it right there.  It rocked. The Opening of Odes & Offerings.  36 poets/36 artists. Some hung out to collaborate, some never met until last night, some didn't show. Though the newspapers forgot to mention it, and the catalogue of poems got ever so slightly mashed, and my friend Robin who is the reason I moved to new Mexico after I met her in 1969 in a Chicago Heights school, the Cottage Grove School to be precise, got robbed at CVS parking lot by Sunflower Market,  and my throat practically fell off from meeting and greeting folks, it still rocked.  I am so sorry Robin,  Thanks for making the effort to come to     The Opening until you got robbed. Glad you got your phone and credit cards back. These really are becoming desperate times, sort of post-Apoplectic, I mean friends are being robbed at knife point in Chimayo where before there was only break-ins while we were out.

     All of this is why we need acts of extreme beauty, which this show was.  Not beauty as in the surface, or my mother's Beauty Shop, but beauty as in connection, community, celebration.  I have a new thought. Just once.  On my way back from Florida  at the Dallas airport I ran into the ever gorgeous Anne Marie Garcia on her way to Costa Rica.  When her gate got changed we were scooped up by the playboy of the carts that come through and say, "Move away, a cart is coming. Beep beep beep."  Anne Marie was even making the beeping sounds.  She asked if we were supposed to be disabled to get a ride, and though I did point out I have a maybe broken toe and elevated my foot, I also realized that we were handicapped, I know that isn't a PC word, but for this purpose I need to use it.  I realized we were handicapped by Extreme Beauty. I am going to tell everyone that I am compromised in this way. Last night was a big part of it.
     Tobie-who-is-here-on -Sabbatical understands.  We are both total devotees to beauty, even thought beauty has gotten a bad name of late.  I'm sorry, my mother had a beauty salon and I was dressed and educated by the money she earned in beauty, raised by beauty, answered the phone for beauty, and took out its rollers and pin curls. Last night I raised my poems to the sky to show my mother and father, right there in front of whoever was left in the Gallery After The Show.  Oh, the show.  I got a bit off track.

     People seemed really happy and excited about it, mostly.  I want everybody to come back, spend some time with the poems which will be in catalogue form, look over our books of poetry.  I have to admit, I smuggled in poetry.  I have become a beauty smuggler and the artists were my accomplices. Someone who shall remain nameless even though he is the ultra handsome and cool partner of someone else who shall remain nameless, said that poetry was made accessible.  I think not having the poems easily there created a magnetism and longing for the poems.  When do we stand out in public and long for poems?
    Come back, public and newspapers and people not invited or juried in.  Come back to beauty and longing and the Poetry Reading Room we set up, comeback to your own work and not being included or being included and whatever creative waves that sets up in you.  Two months, fifteen days left.  Now I get to experience my other thought, the one I had leaving Boston after college in 1969.  The ends of things are intense and you may fall in love or get a boyfriend, or have a sunset as pink and purple as my Uncle Sydney's painting of the mountains that hung in our Pittsburgh dining room.
     As I left Boston, the light was bright, I had boys around me, the guy we called The Sun God because he shined with handsome and another high school boyfriend. I met the intensity of endings.  Here I am again, how to end the poem?  Emily Dickinson said it should feel as if the top of your head blew off. A bit intense for these post-Apoplectic times but I am staring to feel blown away. I want to get back to my writing, to the grandkids, to gardening.  I want to sew more PoemHolderstm and sell them so I can spoil the grandkids in a good way.  I'm a long way from a new boyfriend, but my husband is looking ultra cute in his new SHELL LUMBER cap and black shirt.  End times.  New PL times.  Who could be more appreciative than I have been to serve.  Did I mention that three or four pieces sold and I don't even get a kick-back?

     Come to the show, oh ye masses, and write some reviews would you. Hold onto your purses in parking lots, invite friends to collaborate, take a Sabbatical if only a day or week, and smuggle in beauty when you can. This blog, it turns out, is my ode and offering.  Thanks TJ for setting me up in it.  I am answering the phone to beauty, and texting her handmaidens. I finally have arrived from the Back East where I set out west in 1969, with only my blue VW between me and this vast sky.

Odes & Offerings Eve

     I believe this is considered the Eve of the Opening for Odes & Offerings, a collaborative art event where 36 poets sent me four poems and then I worried about all the poets I didn't invite and even more about the ones who never even blew me off, just didn't respond, and the 36 artists who were juried in, not by me, but by people who didn't include a few of my best friends.  That collaboration. It is the Eve even though it isn't 6:00 AM yet and there was barely a calendar listing in The Reporter.
     I am pretty sure the Reporter has it in for me, perhaps because I am over sixty and long-married and live next to my chickens.  They have never even mentioned in two years that I got to be PL and serve the city in ways visible and invisible, not once. Maybe they have an anti-poet laureate policy or had a friend they thought would have done a better job.
     Maybe they got wind of what I have been saying about their Dan Savage column, that though I know from my very hip bi-sexual and tall friend that he only talks about consensual sex,  and have considered her response, still, some of the kids don't need free access to some of his topics.  I lap it up like yogurt, but only in an over sixty, long married, living next to the chickens and two turkeys sort of way. I am the grandmother of three and I occasionally feel that Dan Savage should run his column by the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers or the Pope.  Not that I am bitter that The Reporter featured a really interesting tattoo artist's history of the swastika, a piece about Steve Reich's "Different Trains" which is a composition I adore, and my friend Jeremy's show which I will go to, and barely a calendar listing for the 72 artists involved in this show. I want to go on record here saying that I am a big fan of tattoo art, I really am, and speak out for it at many public occasions.  But I am also a pretty huge fan of poetry, and that is why I got the idea to have it smuggled into the visual arts. Come on you art-centric city, cut us some slack.  I think perhaps I am not behaving well, representing my city. Maybe it is what happens at the end of a two year tenure, or, as a friend said, racing for the barn.
     I am really just back from Florida where the highlight of the trip besides the beaches, the food, the lap pool, and perhaps breaking my little toe was Shell Lumber.  My brother took me there.  He is nine years my elder, but I sort of caught up, and since my childhood he has known what I love.  He bought me a doll with nylon stockings from his summer job money, got me my first library card, and took me to a frat party when I was nine. Now he and I are both grandparents and both love hardware stores.  The thing about Shell Lumber is that they have about three city blocks of lumber,  They have wood with names you never heard of and so they have the pronunciation right on the tag along with $11.50 per foot.  My favorite thing was the molding display which was beautiful and covered an entire wall.  I loved the shapes of it, the skinny and the fluted, and I did document on my cell phone which I don't know how to use, being over 60, rural, and married so long we each have our areas of expertise. So, try to image how beautiful this molding, only the ends mind you, is.  There is a certain old school eros in beautifully displayed lumber.
     That is how I feel about poetry.  It is the non structural part of life, the part that covers over the seams, connects the wall to the floor, and is totally useless except for beauty. There are crown moldings and cornice, dentil, egg and dart, and the ever popular rope molding.  I think they correspond to poetic forms that decorate the cracks.  My brother and I delighted in the bustle of the Floridian bros,  and he bought my husband a SHELL LUMBER cap. I talked non-stop, the entire week of my visit, at the pool and at dinner, about this art show.  My brother and Carol even gave me a check to help document the event.  My friend Tobie-who-is-here-on-Sabbatical (that is her name) suggested I use the check to buy an outfit for the opening. I might swing by St. Francis de Paws thrift store and see if they have anything that is not too hardware looking.  Oh, The Reporter did mention me once when my book was voted one of the Best of Santa Fe,without me lobbying anyone to do so, a common practice.  They listed me on the un-cool side of their coolness spectrum. I kid you not, as my 9th grade teacher was wont to say.
   Well, the turkeys need to be fed and I need to see what practices Dan Savage is condoning and explaining to the uninitiated this week.  The paper is feeling pretty thin.  I am sure they were just on a poetry intolerance diet, like all my friends who eat no wheat or dairy. I promise I will not sneak into town and peek through the Community Gallery windows.
   

Blog of my heart

I am two weeks behind.   I am not cut out for this pressure.
Speaking of pressure, Mike seemed to fix the water which was turned off at the source, our well and pump.

I am not convinced it is fixed, something about red roots.  But I digress.

The red roots I meant to talk about two weeks ago was the second annual Valentine's Drive-By-Love-In.
Poeple met at Marguerites two Saturdays, made 300 amazing Valentines, ate soup, and read love poems from India aloud. The second Saturday I had a no-drive day when my friend Tobie, famously here on sabbatical, came out to La Puebla with high end Whole Foods soup and we made Valentines all afternoon.

Marguerite set the stage by contacting four area retirement/care/elder facilities.  Whenever I don't know the correct term I throw a lot of words at it.  Marguerite and her  friend Katrina came  up with this idea and I am but a humble servant of its genius and love. Marguerite called each place and we had times on V- Day at Rosemont, Sierra Vista, El Castillo, and Ponce de Leon in that order.  I obsessed about how many Hershey's kisses was the correct amount.  This is in honor of my mother, who didn't obsess, but who handed out kisses at the Jewish Home for the Aged where she went to flirt, dance, and generally cheer up old folks who were younger that she.  At her memorial my niece brought kisses. Love always reminds me of my mother, also aging women, also beauty.  She would be so into this project.

My friend Tobie is on the far end looking festive

                                                

We met at Dulce, my latest cupcake nook, and began handing out Valentines on the spot, especially to the woman whose peaceful morning we infringed on by meeting at her table.  Our first visit was  Rosemont. Tobie drove, which I knew meant for adventure.  Marguerite navigated and whenever she said turn right, my back seat GPS navigator Garmin mind was yelling, "Left left," but not out loud.  This is the difference between friendship and marriage.

We made it there and unloaded our Kisses and card laden car and noticed on our way in that a priest with a guitar strode in quickly to get ahead of us.  Also, there was a school bus in the parking lot.  These were not good signs for our red clad, eight deep, Valentine toting crew.  I'll cut to the chase.  Last year we had a perfectly fine cast to sing our songs, read our poem, and dispense our holiday cheer to, and this year we had two and a half if you count the woman in the elevator. But of course it was made up in quality.  I fell totally for Virginia Stowall who is 102.  She lived in Los Alamos for 60 years.  So much for my fears of radioactivity. Downwind isn't enough. I should move there.  She was showing me how to make a necklace of buttons and had many more marbles than I do on most days.  There was a man in a wheelchair and said elevator lady who said she never had received a Valentine in her life and bestowed many deeply religious blessings on us. We also got to mix it up with the students from the charter school for the Arts and Technology and hear a song from Pippin, a musical I've never seen or heard.

Our next stop was Sierra Vista where my friend Gary Mex Glazner does many an Alzheimer Poetry Project visit and they are primed for poetry.  We got to sing a little, and "A Bushel and a Peck" was another homage to my mom, the famous Beti with an "i."  It was one of their songs too, a client about twenty years younger than I pointed out. Alzheimer's is that way.  There was also a new resident who was active in poetry in San Francisco, a real soul mate.  So, it went very well there and we met for lunch at Real Food Nation, which is just like it sounds, I mean you can order Buffalo or Portobello.
The best part was that Sabrina Pratt and Julie Bystrom from Santa Fe Arts Commission who were my Poet Laureate pals showed up for a real Valentine's surprise.   Plus my daughter, Hope, who joined us last year as well.  We spread Kisses and Valentines to all and hit the road, two facilities to go.

I know you probably have a life so let me just say we turned left and should have turned right.  They were at nap-time at El Castillo, so Tobie zoomed us over to Ponce de Leon with a promise to return to El Castillo aprés-nap.  Tobie liked the looks of El Castillo and was contemplating signing up for a room, but she hadn't met her Valentine yet.  At Ponce de Leon there were three women at the piano doing sing along.  We had a time slot, but we just had to wait it out, baskets of hot throbbing Valentines in hand and Hershey's Kisses, both dark and light and Hugs, melting in out pockets.  Tobie tried to give a man a card and he wanted to throw away what he called this piece of paper.  She explained it was for him and he couldn't quite get it in his pocket, so she helped him.  At which point he asked for her phone number and assured us his wife was dead, either a few months or years.  After we sang along with the three women who had matching Valentine's scarves, each tied in a different style, it was my turn to go.  I read them poems, we sang our hit, A Bushel and a Peck, and distributed cards.  I give my performance 2 and 1/2 chiles (that's out of four chiles as anyone who reads our local papers knows). One sweet moment was Helga speaking Portuguese to one of the residents she knew.

Meanwhile, back at El Castillo, they were awake and gathered and singing along with a karaoke duo.
We had lost all but Tobie, Marguerite, Maureen, and me by this time and who could blame the deserters, not I.  We are glad we hung in though, because it was the piece de resistance, which is French for four chiles. I read my love poems and then Gertrude Stein's "A Very Valentine," which I was reading everywhere. Gertrude lived in Paris and died in 1946 so I missed her by one year:
Very fine is my valentine.
Very fine and very mine.
Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.
Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and
mine is my valentine.

Joan and Woman I danced with on the Plaza

Marguerite and Joan

Marguerite asked me to read Stein again, and I did and I swear it had so much more feeling and depth.

I always got Gertrude, but I super got Gertrude by the end of this adventurous and love filled day.

There were four outstanding people at El Castillo. One was the wife of a man who'd had a stroke. Again, young looking, and she just stood by her man radiating love.  She told me he liked to write.

There was another guy who, when I asked if anyone had memorized a poem, recited a bit of Kubla Kahn to us and said he had memorized the entire poem.  There was the woman who I danced with Fourth of July on the Plaza and who sent me her family history. And, there was Marvin, who kept telling me he was very old and when I flatter-guessed 83 said, "No, 104!"  

When I was incredulous he showed me his tee-shirt.  It was made by students from Santa Fe Prep for him.  But here's the kicker.  Where was he from?  Los Alamos.   I am definitely moving.

Sew glad you asked

Dear Blog Followers, all nine of you,

You have not heard from me for weeks now, though there have been several blog worthy events. There was the snowy morning I taught eleven kids at Tesuque Pueblo day school when their teacher, Elisabeth, told me one boy wrote, "I used to be an Indian, but now I am an Ipod." Elisabeth Keller took a class of mine at age 17 and does wonderful poetry with her bright eyed kids.  I always feel that when a teacher really has poetry in the curriculum an angel gets bifocals, or an Ipad in this case. We had a brisk and brilliant poetry morning.

Then there was going to Indian dances at both Tesuque on Christmas, with my friend Tobie, here on sabbatical, and by myself to the Turtle Dance at Okay Owingeh which I do almost every single year.
I look down the row of 130 men and it just seems to stretch into another time zone, say 500 years ago.
A friend was saying she at first felt like a voyeur at the dances and now feels comfortable.  I know what she means, I used to feel outside, and now I don't feel separate.  I am in my role as a white haired woman in a black coat, hands in pocket, looking up for an eagle because there was one last year or the one before.  I fit in the picture, am at home, not that I am part of another culture, but that I populate this place after nearly 38 years standing here on December 26th, year by year. Like the Chanukah candles I light, the Charlie Brown tree I decorated that makes my family laugh, and the applesauce I make for the latkes every year, it's my holiday tradition.

I did lots of great things this season, made me glad to be alive here, every day, glad.  But why you didn't hear from me is another story.  It's sew so.  It's so sew.  I almost hear the word cute forming on your lips.

What captured my creative energy this year was sewing.  I had to make two quilt squares for the twins, Jessica Knight's third and fourth child.  Jessica who I have known since she was 8 months.  Jessica whose kids have the hippiest names of all of us, Zen, Rain, Zia, and Rey. And, and, and, she lives on an army base in Florida, and her husband is in Afghanistan. I ask, any Jews on the base, and she shakes her head.  So I make her two quilt squares for our fabulous Chimayo Baby Quilt tradition,  36 years at least and as many baby quilts deep.

And then I couldn't stop sewing.  I still can't,  My table is never clear enough to eat breakfast, especially when Michael was gone eight days, and I was in a sewing frenzy.  I wanted to leave my Mayor, David Coss, and my Santa Fe Arts Commission folks, Sabrina, Debra, Julie, and Rod with a Poet Laureate gift they wouldn't forget.  So I had the idea of poem holders, a poem typed into a potholder.  It has long been my idea to merge poetry with daily life, make it the bread and hot soup poet Etheridge Knight says it is.

One thing leads to another.  I have a lot of friends.  I lived here so long and I am what they call in my home-town of Pittsburgh, "a people person."  In other circles they may call it a best friend slut, co-dependent, desperate, driven, a can't say no sort of people person.  I keep thinking of another person I love and haul out the sewing machine.  I was keeping track up to about 35, then I lost count. Do I get to write off fabric as a business expense?  Does the fabric store know that I am using their wares for poetic purposes?  Dare I tell them?  It's a tricky business and please don't ask for one, I am running out of my good nerves into some other sort of nerves.  I love you, I swear I do.  I just haven't written a blog, or a poem, or a thank-you note to my family. Forget cooking.  I have been sewing.  Anything that comes between me and my potholders is a great inconvenience and annoyance.  I must get a grip.

So yesterday was the culmination of sewing when we made two quilts with a cast of I don't want to count how many.  It went well. The kids didn't melt down until about eight hours in.  I bet this is our 38th and 39th quilt all in all.  Potholders, at least that many.  But I didn't count the row of Turtle dancers, trying not to be so OCD, and I am not counting my potholders, quilts, best friends, second best friends, poems, or days left as poet laureate.  I am not counting the 167 more PL days, you may be, but who is counting? Not I.  I am too busy sewing.

Sample poem for  Poem Holder:

How was the holy born?
Inside my place, part heart
and part angel. Air then air
then time. Watched bread and
shadows fell from winged ones,
over the clothesline, whip, whip.
I stayed even-keeled a day
or so. That was the holy.

Poetry Pedicure

I had a great time at my grandson's school, Joan and the Giant Pencil with Jeremy Bleich, hot off his fabulous music composed for Circus Luminous.  We performed for 75 4th graders and five teachers.
I felt rather high after the great kids and questions and the fun of reciting poetry to children, and so I decided on a pedicure, my second in the birthday series of cash from my dear sister-in-law, and third that I remember in my life.  You may know that my mother had a beauty salon for forty years and I spent many a day there.  Manicures I recall, the pink slip of soap in the molded dish.  The colors I got to choose, heady for a girl.  I always get a whiff of mother when I enter a beauty emporium of any kind.

Once, when my mother visited my writing workshop Alexia LaFortune said to her, "Beti, my Jungian analyst said the beauty shop is the last temple to the Goddess."  My mother, not missing a beat, and not know what a Jungian anything was, said, "That's nice."  She also responded promptly to Natalie Goldberg who asked her if she was a feminist.  My mother reported, why yes, she was the first woman on the Pennsylvania board of Cosmetology. Also, she let operators wear Bermuda shorts to work on hot days.

So here I am, toes in the water, the only one in Linda's nails.  There is a Vietnamese soap opera on the TV and lots of conversation I haven't a shred of an iota of a clue about.  I had told the kids that morning that poetry is written in many languages and cultures, all over the world, and read them poems from Spain, New Mexico, Chicago, New York, and the Pacific NW.  I said to Jenny, my person of the moment, isn't it amazing all the languages?

The next person to come in the nail salon was Francine, a woman who had taken my writing class
twice.  She sat next to me and I told her this was the real experience, sitting next to a friend, our feet in the hands of strangers, mine the woman called Jenny (note: that was my Hungarian grandmother's name, surely not her original one either) and a young man called Hung for Francine.  The weird coupling of privilege with pleasure is comfortable to some, but not to me.  I wandered off to let my toes dry and I overheard Francine saying the nicest things about me.  When I came back to chat with her she had found out that the man doing her pedicure was a poet.  His real name is Dzukaka and he could not be published in Vietnam since his poems are political. Poets don't make money, he informed me, and so this was his livelihood.  He asked me if I worked full time at university, and I don't. I asked him if he knew any poets in Albuquerque where the van of people who work at Linda's commute from, and he said no.  There are, according to Hung, 10,000 Vietnamese in Albuquerque. Hung began writing at age 10, is now 28 and has been in the US 12 years. He wrote about 10,000 poems.  I am wondering if the number 10,000 means "a lot" as in 10,000 joys, 10,000 sorrows of Buddhism.

He recommended the Story of Kieu, the most famous poem in Vietnam and 300 years old.  You can look Dazukaka up and see his blog in Vietnamese.  I also found a site, "How Vietnamese are You" and found out I'm not so much Vietnamese, but I do share a sense of humor.  We talked a bit about the difference between personal and political poetry. He finds the personal boring.  I mentioned PEN, and organization that is international in scope.  Who knows if his poetry is strong, since I don't have even the flimsiest pink soap of a clue and Google translator may not be enough here.

I felt again that poetry connection I live for, from the kids, head to foot.  Francine and I met for lunch, her favorite restaurant in town which is, but of course, Vietnamese. Though my friend Robin Reider spent a cold year teaching English in Vietnam, I did my form of travel.  Foot in hand, shiny red toes, a little bit curious and not so patriotic as matriotic again.  Here's my poem for Dzukaka:


10,000 Toes

It's everywhere, the urge
I felt it with my foot
in another's hand, scraped,
painted, like a new car, the odd
and kind pedicure.  I treated myself
to time, my foot as an excuse.

A woman sits down next to me, a friend,
feet she cannot reach in the hands
of a young man.  On TV a Vietnamese
soap opera on loud, perhaps the volume
another language has in our lack
of understanding.

This young man here twelve years
seeking asylum in a city as odd
and kind as Albuquerque.
He is a poet, writes political poetry,
no interest in love and its scrapings,
odd and kind and in broken

language over both our feet, we talk
money and time.  All the while
the show on the shop TV, my mother's own
shop long gone and Vietnam, that war we
protested while death fought death and shriek
of Agent Orange. Fate and geography.

I write of love, uncomfortable, pampered
love.  He promises to send me poems
in a language I can't read and Hung,
that is his name, Hung takes an hour
to complete her feet. After,  she and I meet
for Vietnamese food.  She treats.

My husband joins us.  All the old ghosts,
chuckle in their loud green language
of greed and loss. Now laid to rest.
Loud as soap opera from the past.
Mint, cilantro, lime, a sauce for dipping.
And Hung? 10,000 toes. 10,000 joys and sorrows.

Still PL after all these years

I am counting down, months to blast off into civilian life again.  I am hoping I don't go into a worm hole of depression.  I think I will try to live the PL life after, not emeritus but as Michelle Holland says of me, "Poet Laureate ad nauseam."  I think she is my friend, I think we are laughing still.

I have two PL moments to document, the unseen and hidden.  The first one I was coming out of REI in the fashionable Railyard.  I love the Railyard, it is as close as a trip to the Northwest as I got this year.
It seems sort of Pike's Market/Vancouverish/ Portlandy. Anyhow, I am standing there and a man and his daughter and I start talking.  Somehow, and I don't know how, the topic comes around to me being the Poet Laureate.  Oh, I may have given the topic a gentle nudge in that direction.  And the old guy, grampa to the child, says Robert Frost lived in his old neighborhood.  And we start reciting "Whose Woods These Are I think I know." Between the two of us we get the entire poem and the little girl is awestruck.  She is six and so I give her my just about favorite poem:

"Now I am six
as clever as clever.
I want to be six
forever and ever."

It is by A. A. Milne who is also the Winnie the Pooh guy.  I have changed it to "Now I am sixty."
It works for me.  Anyhow, that was a PL moment and i had a recent one this week that may get away.
It is also Railyard, in the Flying Star.  I am meeting Mike for tea after my day at the Santa Fe Girls' School and his in construction.  As I walk in I pass a group of maybe six women all knitting away, a sweet sight.
I used to knit. I made gargantuan mittens with an orange deer sprawled across them, as if shot and draped across the hood of a truck.  I made a rainbow hippie sweater with a belt for my first pregnancy, all wool, sure wish I had it now.  I made a little hooded pancho for my girl, Corina, golden with a burgundy and green stripe, it looked like football colors but with a fringe.

When I sat down to read poems from the girls' school, the first poem was called "Marvelous Mittens."
The young poet, Thandiwah, had recently written one on turning cartwheels that knocked by very un-hand-knitted socks off.  This one was sweet to and when Mike joined me I felt a PL moment coming on.
I went over to the knitters and asked if I could read them a poem. They said okay, and some one even knew my name.  This is what I read:

Marvelous Mittens

Years before today my great grandmom met me.
Then I'll just assume she knit like crazy.
Light blue yarn flying
cream white dashing in and out.
Her accuracy in hand size is uncanny.
The wool is soft
and fluffs in every direction
Although they seem perfect
for playing and fighting in the snow
they'll get wet almost instantly.
And although she is lost
I feel close to her again
when I wear my wonderful
marvelous mittens.

The women loved it and Mike was really enjoying the PL me. The women invited me to join them, every Monday at one.  I don't even know how to cast on anymore.

I couldn't sleep all night, I loved another student poem so much.
Sometimes a poem haunts me all night, and this one by Gabriela did.

What is that in which you ask?
Where am I going?

I am going to the western land,
where my pride and joy both stand.

Yes I am going to the western land.

I am going where the Indians
catch their own hide,
and horses wait quietly ready to ride.

yes I am going to the western land.
I travel by horse not having a stack,
with only water and the clothes on my back.

Yes I am going to the western land.
Yes I am going to the western land,
where my pride and joy both  stand.

Yes I am going to the western land.

I am going to a place where all
men and women are free,
where children dance and play
with glee.

Yes I am going to the western land.

Yes I am going to the western land.
yes I am,
yes I am.


Both poems printed with permission of the poets.

So even in the night the PL is at work.   The local paper had a picture of my back and my long braid at the Española Farmers' Market biggest vegetable and best poem contest.   I like that.  There is a saying I heard about famous people, "The bigger the front the bigger the back."  It's the shadow again, that pesky real estate developer of hidden darkness.

I think casting the enthusiastic gift into community is the biggest help I could give any young poet.
Poetry is the medicine and the cure.  I offer it to people around me even if they don't want it.  Today at the pool an old guy started by complaining about his shoulder, then about stucco and soon we were at The Rapture.  I should have pulled the PL card on him.  Or recited e e cummings, "i thank you god for most this amazing day" or some other poetry jujitsu.  I retreated, leaving a wake of language in the pool.
Poetry is my rapture, small "r."

I am thinking of taking up knitting again.  I need  a back-up plan for apres- PL.

The Calligrapher to the Queen & to Me

I have been teaching at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu since 1991.  Some years I was there only a week, and for many years over six weeks.  In 1994 I happened to be there teaching poetry while another group consisting of master calligraphers was also working away.  I heard that the calligrapher for the queen of England, Donald jackson, was among them. Of course, being curious, I would watch to see what he ate in the cafeteria line and then we crossed pools at Ojo Caliente when both classes were chilling by soaking in iron pools, soda, or arsenic.  I wrote a little series called "In Praise of Calligraphers" and along with my student writing read to the calligraphers at a farewell gathering.

I made several calligraphy friends, Diana Stetson, Rose who made a piece of my poem into a work now at the Books Arts Collection in Rochester, and the famed Mary Lou Cook.  I got to teach a gang of eight calligraphers and assign them a project to work on with their own writing, a skill that scribes often leave to others. Fourteen years passed.

This week I attended a talk by the very same Donald Jackson, in town from Wales for the museum opening of his St. John's Bible project.  For the first time in 500 years he assembled a group of scribes to hand letter and illuminate a bible.  Now, I am not a huge bible person.  I like studying torah with certain rabbinic types but it's not something I generally do.  Donald's light approach to a weighty subject won me over, at the slide show and lecture at the Lensic (thanks Frances McCain and Bob Martin) and I couldn't sleep.  The images from the book of Revelation including the inner horses of the Apocalypse, the Aids Virus, nuclear power plants, and computer generated zig zag lines portraying the human voice got under my skin, as only my skin can be gotten under. Jung's Red Book, also a masterpiece of lettering and imagery though from a very different impulse has been recently published and came to mind.

The next day I proposed to Michael that we actually go see the bible, after the bribe of a lunch of enchiladas at The Shed, red.  And the added promise of a movie afterwards.  He acquiesced and we toured the St. John's Bible show at the New Mexico Museum of History, right off the plaza.  What Jackson thought would take seven years took fourteen.  Six scribes and 1,150 velum  pages later, with 160 illuminations, the ink still drying, the bible is here. Forty pages of it on display.  Jackson said to bring a magnifying glass, so layered and detailed are the images,  Some bear the fingerprints of the artist.

The show, a world class exhibit, you need to sidle up to spend time, and come back for more time. It is displayed in a way that works for me, and encircled by New Mexico photographers from many faiths, black and white takes on sacred space and place.  Two of my favorite of many favorite moments in the show: How to deal with a forgotten line? A little graphic symbol, a bird or a bee, holds the dropped line on a pulley below the text, and indicates where it belong.  It is called "points of return."  In the entire project there were only nine.

Secondly, in 1994, and at Ghost Ranch, Donald Jackson acknowledged his dream and did a large collage which he showed to the folks at St. John's in Minnesota and on display here. When I emerged from viewing the show,  I heard that Mr. Jackson was in the cafe, but just then ran into some dear poet friends.  As we talked,  I wanted to be polite and not dis them for paparazzi invasion of privacy to this dear calligrapher. I was not sure I should really harangue him, as they wandered past and headed off downstairs.

I lost Donald and his wife, did some running around the museum and thought, maybe they are in Tom Leech's Palace Press.  He, after all, invited them and masterminded the project on this end.  As we stepped into the Palace Press offices, Tom Leech said, "I was just printing your poem. " Donald Jackson was indeed there with his wife, Mabel.  When I explained that I was a poet at Ghost Ranch from that time, you would have thought I was a long lost friend.  He said he thought he recognized me.  He recalled me, and the poets.  He never had a classical education, was trained in the craft of lettering and so loves poetry from a distance. I read him the stanza of my little poem where he was mentioned. I also mentioned the Rumi line he reminded me of, "Do something huge. Build an ark." This project is valuable not only for the magnificent work, but for the model of a man envisioning and completing.  I felt complete in getting to appreciate Donald in person, and felt the energy reciprocated.

Michael was amazed by the synchronicity.  I was amazed that I wasn't star-struck at all.  It felt the warmth of this encounter, and the fact that we never know what impressions we leave in the world.
We impressed each other, not in the sense of fame or stature, but like wax takes an imprint.  Mabel even gave me a hug.  I know now that was Jackson's only visit to the red mesa and vistas so powerful at Ghost Ranch.  I know that I must risk imposing myself on others, because he was truly happy to see me, as was I to catch them before they left.  Tom Leech too, was glad we met and introduced me as the Poet Laureate.  Just when I thought I had lost my PL mo-jo it returned.  We missed the movie, Shalom Aleichem, but since I was levitating anyhow we levitated over to friends of the Library.  My dear volunteer, Kate Oldroyd, was at the desk and I found three books I had on my mental list.  Three.
Qué milagro.

It was a perfect day for a bookish girl grown bookish woman.  Here's my poem from 1994:

In Praise of Calligraphers

For the master calligraphers gathered at Ghost Ranch

1. Seeds from Persia

and Hindustan.  The poet Rabindranath

Tagore is my calligrapher.

2. Jolly calligraphers eat alfalfa sprouts

and wander through rock canyons

refusing to write one word ghosts speak.

3.  I love calligraphers

who gather and rejoice

in fine mountain air.

They translate the joy

right off the rocks.

4.  When I come back

may I be a calligrapher

with fine hand and wild heart,

with fine hand and empty eye,

with fine hand indelible.

5.  When I wake up tomorrow

the calligraphers will be rejoicing

that morning brings light

to illuminate their manuscripts.

6.  I know nothing about calligraphers.

I have never been married to one.

And my poor penmanship makes

no excuses.  My sloppy hand is glad

that in this world, somewhere

steadiness and an edge.

 7.  When calligraphers gather

poets sleep better

and the axis of planet earth

tilts like a lower case “l.”

8.  A fine fettle of calligraphers.

The Queen of England’s calligrapher

in the hot tub at Ojo Caliente.

Cast a cold eye on life,

on death, calligraphers pass by.

9.  There is a longing I never knew

I had.  Between dancers and hand sewn

volumes, among golden pots and sleepers,

a poet wishes the hand of a calligrapher

could be grafted, gift to gift.

10. At night twenty calligraphers

dream of apples and dry leaves.

Their hands are insured against theft

like Rolls Royces.  The God that writes also writes. 

The Good hand works both ways.

11. Among twenty calligraphers

the only thing that moves

is the foot of a crow.

12. I am stealing looks

at the calligraphers

who sit in clusters

eating custard and fresh mustard.

They live my unlived life, untrod

path down a white scroll of time.

13. Kissing a calligrapher,

I once fell headlong into gesture

And stance, not sure

if I were dancing or the dance.

14.  God bless all calligraphers

and fare thee well.  May your ink ever

flow in the dark fissures of visual pleasure.