Quiet here lately. Work deadlines with more to do than the time necessary to accomplish them. 18 months with little billable hours. Now a salary and 60-hour weeks. Hrrumph. I like being busy, feeling productive, but I do miss those other kinds of active days, when I made my own arbitrary deadlines and did just what I wanted to do.

That lull sounds good in the paragraph. But the stress of not having income is not as leisurely as it sounded. In fact, I had to strike the word leisure from my draft description.

Leisure is such a wonderful word. So old, with such a sense of class distinction, although I am sure that it was never applied to the lower classes, except as a dream or a rare holiday. I like this version of the noun: unhurried ease.

* * *
I’ve new work in the world — one of my prose poems found a home at Right Hand Pointing. It’s based on an overheard conversation. Love those bus rides.

* * *
Sent out a flash-memoir piece tonight. We’ll see how it lands. I’m glad to have the drive to fuss and fiddle with it. I do like flash.

Flash. That’s what I need.

* * *

My tattoo is one year old tomorrow. :-)

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My Early Girl Isn’t

She went in May Day
a healthy start
now 55 days past 60
she’s just blushing

We only have 23 days
until mid-September
when summer is over
if past history is evidence

No one knows
if we’ll have homegrown
BLTs this year

* * *
What a sorry summer this has been. Ah, at least there are no floods or droughts. My inconvenience can be replaced at the farmers’ market. No one has actually died, to my knowledge, for lack of homegrown tomatoes.

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Crease the leaves
moisten your cracked lips
there are no silk worms
and we aren’t in the mythic forest
the garden hose is kinked
it frustrates the spray that can’t wash
dusty cars, abandoned
to bird shit and road tar.

All those tender plants
you shook their roots
pushed and pulled
by wayward jet streams
blown off course
left us longing for early spring’s
errant pineapple express.

Now there are only zeroes
after zeroes in the rain gauge
skippers and their ragged edges
float around baked
zinnias and the ground is too dry
and too hard to weed.

* * *
A little dark, oy! The subconscious does it’s thing, the way I write to Worlde words (I write the words in some kind of order down the middle of a page, and then weave the poem from word to word).

I’m sure my fellow poets at Big Tent Poetry have come up with their own method. Go here to find them.

Related posts:

1. Talking to the past is as good as reading fiction
2. rearranging vocabulary words
3. what did you say?

Orange flip flops decorated with sequins and beads
stiff woven soles made in China, shipped to USA
picked up in a seconds store in August

Transplanted to Oregon I forgot how hot summer is
in the Valley of the Sun and needed two new wardrobes
one for walking back and forth during shift rotation

One for machine twilight sounded by sighing machines
and light, light, lights that blinked status
of a family’s universe, breathing just a little

Easier than you did, shipped from Pinetop
to Scottsdale in a fixed wing, nine days
of up and down and down and up waiting

You’re in Pinetop even if you only have half
a heart so I keep the gaudy flip flops
near my bed for the next emergency

* * *
Needs a lot more work, but is a draft response to Cynthia’s prompt at Big Tent Poetry this week (about possessions). Find other responses here.

Just over four years ago my mom had a major heart attack. She’s still alive but frail. Has 50% heart capacity and a plethora of other health problems (she’s always been sickly).

As you can imagine, I quickly packed for Arizona when I got the call and ended up needing both cooler clothes (such as sandals) for the heat and warmer clothes (such as thin hoodies) for staying with Mom during the night shift.

Related posts:

1. day of the dead & nablowrimo
2. rearranging vocabulary words
3. this clown is not quite on prompt

Related posts:

1. wordless Wednesday
2. wordless Wednesday
3. wordless Wednesday

I’m going through my recent poems to find something to send to my critique group. There’s but one recent poem. (One!) Other candidates are not recent and are in need of revision that I can’t make in time to get to my kind readers.

I have been writing August poetry postcards and have been mailing them (not exactly on schedule, but am currently caught up). But these postcard poems aren’t much of anything. I’ve been a shy about sending them to the recipients (yes, you can imagine me sneaking up on a squat blue mailbox), much less having the gumption (moxie) to ask for my critique groups’ time in mulling them over.

I’ve gotten a few poem postcards (not as many I have sent out) that I’ve enjoyed quite a bit.

I’m as behind on responding to ideas, prompts as I was the last confession. (Dave, Elizabeth.)

I’ve pictures to post. (Crater Lake, last weekend’s hike.) I’ve pictures from friends’ weddings to post (this is my first priority & tonight’s project).

I haven’t written anything about any of the books I’ve been reading. Poetry or otherwise.

My book stack keeps growing.

I read Reading Like a Writer by Maxine Prose over my weekend get away. Had been on my list for three years. And am so glad I finally read it. It’s a keeper to read again and again.

Just picked up David Shields’ Reality Hunger (fascinating!) because I finally got my copy from the library — or rather would have had not my calendar gotten filled up with work and stuff — so bought it (used, lucky me).

I am halfway through Annals of the Former World by John McPhee — and have been for a month. It’s a slow read and, because I have a lousy memory for technical terms, I feel as though I am being compressed into sedimentary rock as some artifact with a curved spine. Don’t get me wrong. I like (love — I love rocks) the topic. I like McPhee, a lot. But I think I should have read this work as he wrote them, smaller books than took 20 years to write, rather than in the gathered Pulitzer-prize-winning volume. Yes, he has a poet’s turn of phrase. But those are isolated gems in a broad spectrum of technical description. They are rewards for some hard work.

There are stacks of books all over the house. I kid you not. They sing to me, whisper sweet nothings. Trollops! Philosophers!

And I’ve got some local poets to read, one of them (Peter Sears) whose class I am taking in the fall. (Yippee! That should get me going.)

And blog reading — I miss reading my blog list. (I actually read everyone’s poems from last week’s Big Tent Poetry prompt/response. That seems to be a minor miracle.)

And this working full time (which started July 1) has cut into my recreational time, too. It might be the reason I have been so unproductive in my “real life.” It is good for paying bills.

How about you? How’s your summer?

Words. Now I am blathering. But I did mean the last bit. How are you?

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Succulent
mosquitoes find me

Molten……I am hot & heavy
my breath full of iron

They feed for eggs
while I have
none

* * *

I’m trying to do something different — for me — with this poem, which is what this week’s Big Tent Poetry prompt was about.

I’ve been writing narratively as of late. So no change there. But this poem is more direct than usual, shorter (I had aspired to haiku this week — I miss trying to write short-short) than my normal, which is also short. (Some time I will challenge myself to something with some breadth, but not now.)

I’ve also been challenged lately to put more emotion in my poem. I don’t know how to do that. How does one get an emotional center to a poem without going maudlin? I don’t know. But I will keep trying.

Here’s where you can find what other people did for the Big Tent Poetry prompt this week, trying to stretch poetic muscles.

Related posts:

1. work in the world!
2. it’s still Tuesday
3. what did you say?

(Click a few times to get larger images.)

Saturday we hiked a few waterfall hikes that we hadn’t before while on our Steamboat Inn weekend.

Susan Creek Falls feeds the North Umpqua River and is a lovely, easy to get to hike. It’s fully accessible, and by some small gift of chance we had it to ourselves for quite a while. Long enough for me to be able to stare at the falls, with and without my little camera lens. And as I was shooting a picture I noticed (!) a largish frog at the end of the log I was sitting on. A Rana cascadae, or Cascade frog, as far as I can tell, although he was not the least bit skittish. So still he sat I though someone had planted a bronze sculpture, but got up close enough to see his pulse beating under his mouth.

This must have been the species I was smitten with when I was bitten by all those skeeters a couple of weeks ago.

Reward!

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I’m back from a lovely trip.

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We get a chance to visit with Lee Spencer,  the Fish Watch volunteer, which is a highlight of our trip. We missed our yearly with him last year and I’m anxious to catch up to how he has been. We’d exchanged a letter or two the year before, and learned that his dog Sis had died. But I hadn’t followed up since then and am anxious to meet his new dog, which thanks to Facebook I can see:  Maggie. There is sure to be a story.

* * *
I’ve got blog reading and writing to catch up on, and a lot of poetry to read, too. And maybe to write.

Related posts:

1. exercise and disappointment