Category: Uncategorized

A poem not just for tax season

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

Lat time I was at Squaw Valley Community of Writers I discovered that there was another poet not just from my very small town, but who lives on my short block, seven or eight houses down from me. How lucky!

Here is one of her poems:

Discussing Useful Life at the Tax Depreciation Seminar
While Remembering a Line by David Baker

The depreciable life of a parking garage is fifteen, unless its roof

is the floor of the building above it, in which case it’s thirty-nine.

Office furniture is seven, the stove five and the fax machine five.

But if a machine has its wires embedded in the wall behind it,

so they ease through the wall like veins, it can make that wall part

of the machine, thus five, as if there’s a contagion there, a life-changing Continue reading “A poem not just for tax season” →

New work and old

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry, Uncategorized

I’m going to be reading at the Tiburon-Belvedere Library this Thursday, the 17th, at 7 pm. Mostly, I’m going to read new work. I’ve been writing some prose poems inspired by Carlo Rovelli’s wonderful books on physics. I’m including one here. But you can also see some of my older work (and some interesting work by others) at this site, created by Beate Sigriddaughter.

Here’s the prose poem:

Lying on the massage table at the mudbaths

after 12 minutes immersed in a tub of hot volcanic mud and 12 minutes in a bath of hot mineral water my heart thumps against the padded surface and I remember that I have a heart that I am a thermodynamic system that chugs along with little conscious thought blood in blood out every artery vein tiny capillary breathe in leafy oxygen and breathe out CO2 and I understand with my hot pumping body that we exist in relation to every other thing that we weave together a universe of beginnings and endings in a ever changing reality composed of individual particles that know nothing of heat or up or before or tomorrow that what I call self is inextricable from the body here on this table the flannel blanket absorbing particles of me as I slowly cool the new age music bothering my sensibility like a persistent gnat the laugh track last night on the episode of Friends the forgotten French vocabulary and Pythagorean Theorem the anxieties waiting to swarm when I return to my usual state every encounter and memory since my small hot self emerged on this planet till the engine finally stops and I cool for good and the cells of me transform into earth ash air as my spirit into yours as you read these words

Anyone who writes can appreciate this

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

from an interview with Troy Jollimore, poet and philosopher:

What lessons were most important to you as a student of writing?

I think what I most needed to learn was that the fact that I sometimes, indeed often, wrote things that weren’t very good and that did not mean that I wasn’t a good writer. I had this illusion, I think many people have it, that when you’re a good writer you have a kind of golden pen, your first drafts are wonderful, there is no struggle; the mark of genius is apparent in everything you produce. Which of course is insane! Your favorite writer, no matter who they are, produces lousy first drafts. And lousy second drafts. And slightly less lousy third drafts. Continue reading “Anyone who writes can appreciate this” →

Baby chicks

Posted on by Meryl in Chickens, Uncategorized

I really can’t resist them, so when my Silkie hen began sitting on eggs, I isolated her and let her think she was hatching them. Three weeks later I went to the feed store and bought six baby chicks. That night I slipped out the eggs and slipped in the chicks. I brushed a little butter on the chicks’ feathers to absorb the mother hen’s smell.

The next morning, the Silkie adopted the babies (who were several days older than newborn), and the babies bonded with the hen (even though they’d been born in a hatchery). It all worked just as if they had hatched right here.

I kept them completely caged for a few days, then let them out for a bit. The first thing the Silkie did was leave the chicks and take a prolonged dust bath, as if to say, “I’ve been cooped up for weeks–I have to take a shower!”

 

After about ten minutes of dust bath, she rejoined the chicks and herded them around, teaching them what to eat and where to look for it. She makes the sweetest little clucks when she finds something interesting, and all the chicks gather round. Of course, it also trains me to bring them treats.

Continue reading “Baby chicks” →

Beauty

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

B. H. Fairchild, a wonderful poet, will be reading at the North Berkeley Library on April 18th at 6 pm. Here is a long poem of his that I love. The image of Donatello’s David is mentioned in the poem, so you might as well look at it first.:

Beauty


xxxxxxTherefore,
xxxxxxTheir sons grow suicidally beautiful. . .
xxxxxxxxxxxx-James Wright, “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio

I.

We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says,
what are you thinking? and I say, beauty, thinking
of how very far we are now from the machine shop
and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons
of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks
and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough
to weep more or less silently at the darkened end
of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning
the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty,
or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again
that no male member of my family has ever used
this word in my hearing or anyone else’s except
in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer. Continue reading “Beauty” →

A Sonnet for Monday

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

Countee Culeen was born in 1909 and won acclaim in academia, yet strongly felt his roots in the world of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s. Here is a delicate sonnet of his, and if you want to hear a truly moving reading of it, click here.

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind, Continue reading “A Sonnet for Monday” →

The exemplary sentence

Posted on by Meryl in Prose, Uncategorized

I’ve been reading Tim Gautreaux’s work for years now, and recently finished his latest book, Signals: New and Selected Stories. His books deal with the everyday travails of the lower or middle class. This excerpt is from a story about a junk yard operator whose life if altered by finding a stunning, jeweled demonstration sewing machine with a needle with the engraved message: ART STITCHES ALL. You can read that story here. This paragraph occurs before the transformation: Continue reading “The exemplary sentence” →

from The Pigeon Tunnel

Posted on by Meryl in Prose, Uncategorized

Larry is reading The Pigeon Tunnel, a collection of memories by John le Carre. Over breakfast yesterday he read this excerpt to me about the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, which made me laugh out loud:

…in 1993, criminalized capitalism had seized hold of the failed state like a frenzy and turned it into the Wild East. I was keen to take a look at that new, windy Russia, too. It therefore happened that my two trips straddled the greatest social upheaval in Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution. And uniquely–if you set aside a coup or two, a few thousand victims of contract killings, gang shootouts, political assassinations, extortion and torture–the transition was, by Russian standard, bloodless.

Innocents and Others

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

The other day at the library, the librarian came up to me and said, “I notice you’re a voracious reader, and I want to tell you about a new feature here at the library, called Your Lucky Day.” This is a  set of contemporary best sellers, set on a special shelf.  Each patron is allowed to take two books from this group out at a time.

innocents-and-others-9781501122729_hrIt was thoughtful of her, and I immediately checked out and devoured Michael Connelly’s latest thriller. I do read, or at least start, many books a week. But often it feels like a vast wasteland. Which is why it is such a delight to be thoroughly seduced by an unexpected gem of a novel. Innocents and Others, by Dana Spiotta at first seems like a book of disparate rather odd stories. But slowly the stories intermingle, build on each other and change their meaning. Together they weave a meditation on  how we communicate or fail to, how we experience visually, audibly. It’s a truly engaging, thoughtful, and intricate tapestry.   Continue reading “Innocents and Others” →

Books that change your life

Posted on by Meryl in Philosophical, Uncategorized

lowellI’ve been reading some essays by C.K. Williams (who wrote last week’s poem). In one essay he talks about reading a book by Robert Lowell, Imitations, which broke open a new way of thinking about poetry.

Imitations was influential and controversial. Lowell took poems in other languages and rather than translate them, he created his own poems in English inspired by them. Many deplored this technique, finding it arrogant and disrespectful. But it definitely gave poets something to think about. For Williams, it “released something in me I hadn’t grasped had been keeping me from moving ahead in my own work.”

How amazing it is that books can crack you open, can shed light into your own struggles and world view. Continue reading “Books that change your life” →

Larry Levis

Posted on by Meryl in Uncategorized

levisI’d forgotten how much I like this poet of California’s Central Valley. He often writes of farming and of his father, a farmer of small means. I think he’d be better known, but he died at 49.

Winter Stars

My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, and with surprising grace,
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand,
And, for a moment, the light held still
On those vines. When it was over,
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always,
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.

I never understood how anyone could risk his life,
Then listen to Vivaldi.

Sometimes I go out into this yard at night,
And stare through the wet branches of an oak
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining
And persisting.

It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them,
In California, that light was closer.
In a California no one will ever see again,
My father is beginning to die. Something
Inside him is slowly taking back
Every word it ever gave him. Continue reading “Larry Levis” →