SAHM

I hunt poetry in the rhythm of family,
     Heartbeat of a home,
       Syncopation of life,
         Crescendo of triviality,
           Ebb and flow of want, need, have.

I am the besieged city,
the forgotten tribe,
the lost ark.
I am the laughter of a fool,
       ignored,
       belittled,
       hushed.
I am the wisdom of an old woman,
       ignored,
       belittled,
       hushed.
I am the abandoned generation,
     fallen in the crack between an acronym and a simulation,
       smothered in the fold
       that is the present
       in the tesseract.

It's no good as a script, they said. Too much punctuation, and no soundtrack.
You lost us already.
Too many words.
Too small a budget.
The effects are terrible.
It borders on ridiculous.
Next, please.

Station stop. On time. Doors open.
Closeopenclose. Openclose. Open. Close.
Can we make the next one?
Arrhythmia of the world.
Next time, kids.
We can wait.
Now, what page were we on?

Hold Only Breath

There is a sweet relief these days
To let the others speak the words,
To watch the sun turn into ice, and ice to rain, and rain to snow,
And not to put them in the prison of my mind,
Not cage the wild ideas that hiss at me and fly
And hold them in the sweaty palm of my control.

There is no ready turn of phrase
To hold the things that I have heard,
Enfold and capture all these dreams, these tears, these smiles, these things I know
And yet do not know: all the me I've left behind,
A self so fragile it will crumble if you sigh,
So giant that I cannot seem to see the whole.

Saxon Braid in Undyed Wool

If I could look back on the years
in the same critiquing way
that my fingers check these stitches--
Could note the nubs and notches,
the patches and holes,
Knowing that if I wanted
I could unravel the wool and redo the rows--

Would I?

I watch my fingers bind the final edge.
Feel the bulk of it,
Stretch and tug and smooth and look again,
Look and look again and feel again like
I can't bear to put it down.

But would I?

And my silly heart beats faster.
I always say not to play what-if's.

And still I am tugging and smoothing.

the dropped stitches
the poor tension
the irregular threads
stretched thin
bunched up

Over time, I tell myself, it will all wear in.
Those little things, no one will notice them.

Except me.

And all the while, I know I will be writing this down, writing these words,
Asking my self aloud for the first time,
watching my own heart spill out on this page,
watching my own letters scrawl
faster and more
blurred...
as they are.

If I could unravel it and do it again,
fill in the holes
straighten the rows
even the tension

Would I?

Yes.
No.
I don't know.

Yes?

as summer passes

these days give so much
in their too quick hours that I
breathe wordless in them


The summer has gone by--too fast, as always.
Fall. I love fall.
School. I love school schedules.
Gardens. And canning. And the timeless beauty of the task of saving the fruits of this season to feed my family for the winter. I never feel more the glory of being a wife and mother than in the fall, as I preserve those gorgeous healthy summer days in jar after jar, and wash the blankets, and stack firewood, and fill holes in the cellar walls, and build foundations, and .... oh, wait.
But I do love it.
And obviously, I haven't been on here often.
Autumn has a bad habit of leaving me speechless.
And my husband has a bad habit of leaving me computer-less now that the semester is fully under way.

But today, I have a computer, and a few minutes of blessed silence, and to prove that I have been thinking of this page for weeks, though I had no time, I shall put up a few pictures, in no particular order, of the past few weeks' worth of busyness, that I took with each of you in mind.

Summer apples.

Pickles. Dill ones. Tons of them.



SUNY Potsdam kindly landscaped their campus with crabapples, and every few years there is a great season with more than enough for everyone. Except, only my family is crazy enough to put a sheet under a crabapple tree in the middle of a college campus and shake the trees and drag home the loot. Makes a gorgeous spicy jelly.




Does he look ominous? We got an hour of happiness out of him:

stuffed with plastic bags, with jingle bells tied in his tail.
Anything to keep a very busy one year old occupied.

The makings of tomato sauce.

And...afore-mentioned one year old. One and a half, rather.

(No longer quiet right now, by the way).

And because the silence is gone, I must end this post prematurely. But I will come back. The "magnetic poetry" words are back on the refrigerator, and as they arrange and rearange themselves over the days, I have no doubt that inspiration will slowly resurrect while the leaves die and the cold cozy days return.
My best to all of you out there.
May your whiskers be long and your whiskey golden.
Or something.

There are more words in my head and my heart that want to be in these lines; probably one of these days I will add to the poem. For now, here it is: and as usual, I can't think of the title. It will come to me some day....I hope....

We called the earth
our mother,
The wind our father.
We sang the words,
and whistled, and laughed for freedom;
We laughed with love of dreaming,
of one another:
We missed the tears in his murmurs,
the sob in her breath.

We realized when we, silent,
stood by our children
And loved with so much anguish,
such helpless passion,
Our hands were his, caressing,
that could not hold them,
Her arms outstretched for her children,
but empty till death.

no one ever said
how lonely my heart would be
when it beat alone

Something about lamplight in the twilight:
I don't know what, just something.
Maybe I really am a hobbit.
Country roads and green leaves and sleepy birds.
And lamplight.

Just something.

Yours Truly

I am grateful most
Not that you are handsome,
Even though you know all too well that you are,
Not that you are the lover of my dreams,
Though you know you are that too,
Not that you are the father of my children,
Born and unborn,
Not that you are the hard-working husband
That comes home to me every night,
Not that you can take me to heights and depths of my soul
That I never knew existed,
Not that you call me your whiskey girl
And your sweetheart,
Not that you love to wear a flower on your lapel
And suspenders that button on,
Not for every little smile and scowl and temper and tease
And touch and movement that makes you mine, all and always mine,

But most that when we were younger
And before you were mine,
You respected me,
And that before I was your girl
I was your lady:
For that I am always
Most gratefully
Yours.

Still Naive

But why would they?
All of them.
Toppled like ninepins.
How am I different, or how was I missed?
We started together,
All clean white and shining,
Courageous sweet sixteen, and never been kissed.
And now I glance backwards
To look for my comrades
And stop in my tracks and the tears freely flow.
Why didn't they tell me?
They knew I was there.
I'd have carried them through in my arms had I known.

Diaphane

For a moment, when she turned her head,
The bursting leaves on the elm tree

Were cherry blossoms instead.

And I wonder now, she later said,
If maybe they were as happy
As I, that I'd been misled.

I thought they broke the mold

John Berberich over at SLAP passed along to me their latest challenge: a poem a day for all of April. As I lay in bed late last night fighting the stomach flu for the second day in a row, I found three random lines, and congratulated myself drearily on being ahead for one day. Well--um--yesterday was the first of April, as I realized this morning, so I was not at all ahead. Oh well. At least I wrote one for yesterday then, right?

The same devilment's
In the unborn brother's kicks
And that four-toothed grin.

it's just today

There are some days in life when poetry escapes us--the words are there inside, seething and confused, and we can't put them in order at all.
I don't like the poetry that comes out on those days--troubled, ugly, unhappy. Today has been one of those days; but I don't want to share that.
Instead, I will follow William's lead and post a visual poem, snapshots of things that have been beautiful today, little moments that save me. They are taken on a tiny camera; they are not a photographer's work by any means; and they may mean nothing to anyone else: but at least I know that I tried, on a pretty much no-good day, to contribute a little beauty to the world around me.

The Fine Art of Fermentation

We are like sauerkraut
Or cheese or wine.
We keep on growing while the world goes on.
Come back from time to time to check the brine,
Inspect the mold, and stir the bubbles down.
The age will do us good. Just let us rest.
The bubbles rise and fall while you are gone,
The veins that grow the bluest are the best.

I'll tell you when it's time to paint the town.

unfinished thought

it's not that his smiles are any less charming
just because he uses them to punctuate
the joyful buckings of a healthy little body
at three o'clock
on monday morning

Of Watercress and Less Important Things

Thanks to ursprache for somehow inspiring this train of thought.

The other day as I lay half-awake
I realized that for at least two days
my life had not ventured further than the mailbox,
which is right next to the front door.

And that really, when it came down to it, I was just fine with that.

Sunbathing on the patio
Sleeping baby inside
Cold grapefruit juice with the luxury of a straw

My life does not need words like confusificate or tumescent
to describe it.
I talk about other people's lives like that, sometimes.
But mine--well, maybe I should expand my vocabulary.
I'd really like it to include words
like watercress
and gesundheit and chiffon.
Those are good words.
I guess I'm just not quite ready to move on to delving into
the language of despondence and murky sexualism
till I have put a bit more watercress into my life.
I am still stuck at a point
where I clip coupons that I always forget to use,
and covet Audrey Hepburn's timeless elegance,
not to mention her figure,
and wish I could grow red geraniums in a window box
just because they stand for hospitality.
And I suppose I'll be here for a long time
before I ever make it to watercress,
let alone gesundheit.
So be it.
I'll get there someday.
Don't wait for me, though.
I feel like I might come across a few more important entries in the dictionary
between chiffon and confusificate.

Hardcore

And she is hard.
I knew her once.
That night her lips were cherry red.

(I should have written this before,
The day it all ran through my head.)

There's strength, and there's the strong. And then
there's crabs.
You know, with hard-ass shells.
The skeleton is all outside.
Inside, it's all just gooey wells.

I just don't know.
I understand that wearing hearts pinned on your sleeve
Is too much like the children's games,
Where someone snatches, laughs and leaves.

But this--where did it go? and when?
The words are sticking to my pen.
I'd laughed and said, "You're so hardcore."
She didn't smile though.
"I am."

And suddenly my little life
Just shriveled up and ran and hid.
I'd planned to meet her there.
But where's the girl I knew when we were kids?

Candid Shots

After that weekend in Seattle last spring, I found myself spending hours at a time scribbling lists of phrases in no particular order in random notebooks, trying to capture a thousand memories. I keep stumbling across those pages. Sometimes, it seems better not to try to organize the fragments. They are what they are.

Bittersweet
Life is made of pictures.
Plowed furrows flashing by,
Perspective, all angled from the flying shadow outward,
From the shadow of a little enclosed adventure.
Laughter
Loud music
Love somewhere inside.
And yes, I volunteered to sleep on the floor so I could

at least be next to him

within arm's reach.

They say it's always rainy there.
It was sunny for us
Sunny, and purple benches, and purple flowers,
And pictures in sepia tone in little corners of a garden.
Smooth bark that was hard to keep a seat on.
Sunny over in line with the emo kids

in the rain.

Sunniest in that dark basement of a venue,
With hot sweaty bodies and too much noise
That shook the dust from the ceiling.
Sunniest there.
For me at least.

I don't remember any rain, those days.
I still have the key to that place,
And the ferris wheel ticket,
And the band ticket,
And the parking ticket,

the good kind, of course.

Life is made of candid shots.

Awakening

I stand before the closed venetian blinds
With summer morning sun a golden silent promise
Waiting, glowing and awake.
And blurred across my early morning mind
A hesitation, like the moment of a first kiss--
Most important choice I'll make.

...found this in a notebook; forgot I ever wrote it...not poetry, but something...

Old man
Showing me the old town.
Sort of hopeless hope in him.
Proud
A million stories
All true? Dunno--sometimes
Just want to ask if they're imagined. Or read.
Or overheard.
"See this lot? Yup, I own this one and the two across the street.
Bought for dirt cheap.
Know how much I paid?"
No, I don't know.
And I don't hear the answer. Too aware
of the vacant, dead houses, the dead town,
dead and still as a hot summer afternoon
with grasshoppers.
Only it's a warm winter noon.
Too aware of a sort of singing in my ears,
an inexplicable feeling of desperate claustrophobia,
an urgent desire to scream over his endless voice
over his success plan,
over his bitter desire to be right,
not when everyone else is wrong, but
because everyone else is wrong.
Because they are all wrong.
And I can't.
I can't shut him away from me like that.
Because some of his stories are true.
Because once I heard him admit to making mistakes in his life.
Because once he said the only mistake he ever didn't make was his son.
And I love him for that moment, however brief, of humanity.
And so I smile and nod, and try to keep the walls of my world
bigger than this ghost town.
Because the world is bigger.
More alive.
Right?

for seattle last year

mae in april, running headlong
caffeine steps of saturday,
and the world is spinning faster
for the children's games we play
lean your head back, don't be dizzy,
laugh out loud, forget the time
lean your head back in the music,
watch the dust fall down in rhyme
driving wrong way so they told me
gonna miss you kids he said
leanback make thewor ldspinfaster
fasterfa sterrou ndmyhead
don'tforgetthe purpleben
chestrafficstopperscoffeetown
nonoleanyourheadbackfurther
dontstopnowwe'llallfalldown...