Without even meaning to, she’s gone underground,

the face whose curve you shaped with your own hand,
fugitive, a sullen stranger’s you’ll never touch the same way

again. Still, you keep brushing and braiding, separating
the strands and binding them together again, as if they were

a rope by which you could hold her, tethering her to your body
as she was once anchored and fed, your blood hers. Before

she got big enough to cross the street without looking back
to catch your eye. When you were still everything she needed.

1. Had a good, productive day at the (home) office. Killer cramps meant I didn't feel like a human being until around 10am, but thanks to the miracle of technology (if we don't understand how it works, does that mean it's magic?) I still started working before 8am. Of course, now I feel like I need to get just one more thing done before I can go, er, home.


2. I've lined up an editor for my new first chapbook. This is good because it'll never get published unless I have deadlines. I can has deadlines?


3. From our email exchange about the book:
   

   
   ME: I'd like to get it out before December and the holidays -- it might make a nice gift to some folks, unless it's super-tacky to send off your own poetry as a gift.
   
   HIM: I don't think it's at all tacky - either that, or I'm the tackiest mofo around.
   

   
   
   


4. I'm leading the annual open circle of the Women's Sacred Circle at First Parish Cambridge (UU). This is, I believe, my second or third year on the leadership council for the group. Our official church liason/fearless leader has been in the job for about three years. No one wants to take it over from her (especially me) because it involves sitting through interminable Program Council meetings where they debate things like where the table for the group raising money for the thing should go next Sunday. She's very happy, however, that I've taken over most of the planning of the actual open circle. We only open to new members once a year. Usually we get a pretty sizable number of newcomers in October, but not everyone stays. It's always a challenge making sure everyone feels welcome. By the end of the year, we all know each other really well. But it's only this year that I really feel like I'm deeply rooted in the group. It's like all kinds of family: sometimes they annoy the crap out of you, but you still love them.



5. Army Guy, mellowtron, and I went to see Neal Stephenson read from his new book Anathem last Saturday. The Harvard Bookstore put it on -- in my church, because my church is just that cool. I was the first one up in line and asked him a question about Snow Crash. In the back the book, he mentions that the book was originally conceived as a graphic novel and I wanted to know whether he'd ever done any other collaborations. In short, no.
   
   The crowd was super-nerd-a-licious, which made the premise of the book (a monastic "mathic" order that studiously avoids exposure to ephemeral technology in pursuit of more eternal truths) that much more apropos. Behind me, kids were talking about Facebook and Netflix. Ten years ago it would have been about iVillage and About.com.
   
   Two great questions: one about some kind of nerd religious movement called "The Singularity." Apparently, some dude is predicting there will be a Rapture of the Nerds, where we all transcend our bodies and upload ourselves into entirely digital spaces. Sounds about as likely as Gabriel blowin' his horn and the dead rising up from their graves. What I want to know is, who's going to maintain the servers? The rest of us, I guess, who'll be stuck behind reading old books and playing with ham radios.
   
   Best question EVAR, though: "If you had to choose just one, would you teach your children to type or to write cursive?" The poor man was stumped. For a minute. Then he chose cursive, "on the theory that handwriting recognition will improve enough to recognize cursive."
   
   My cursive is completely illegible. Of course, so is most of my printed handwriting.
   

My generation really came of age as poets in the early 1970s, and while women were starting to write in great numbers in that decade, what Judy Grahn has called the "strategic decision" of separatism on the part of many women poets actually reduced the number who were participating in scenes that included the likes of me. If nothing else, this had the short-term impact of reinforcing the maleness of some scenes.

-- Via Silliman's blog, which seems to be a bit of a rainmaker in the small poetry press scene.

Nothing captures the truth

Nothing captures the truth of the image:
            the luminous quality
            of the center of the pitcher
            and the glass in the morning light,
     that particular color of off-white/cream/not-beige-lighter-than-beige/linen
the linen of the curtain draping
to the floor, the shading of the drape
that you learned how to evoke all those years ago in the classroom
in the early light with charcoal
the classroom with the geraniums struggling in their pot by the window,
the window and the rusty bannister that led to the roof
although no one ever went out there,
we were bent over our sheets of paper,
first with permanent marker so we learned how to draw a line with confidence
and then with the charcoal and the pastel
and the trip to the sideboard where the hairdryers lay waiting
for us to finish off our washes and dip
our watercolor brushes for the next thing,
the colors mixed
                painstaking
but never quite right

and your camera, your camera phone now,
none of it ever captures the truth of the scene you try to capture,
the cherry blossoms set to bloom but not yet, not yet,
the startle-surprise of the first green buds
under the still-lowering sky
and now weeks later, those same buds wafting out a scent
you think is cinnamon but no cardamom but no
         something familiar but certainly not of this place
and the yellow flowers multiplied you recognize now for jasmine
jasmine from the incense stick, the scent packed across mountains
and cities from trucks and forklifts,
packed powdered and tight in boxes within boxes,
bagged and bought and sold
and placed in a fireproof receptacle and lit
and here blooming before you at the end of someone's driveway,
someone who planted a garden they haven't had time to weed
nothing will capture it
                       or the swans gliding majestic
over the surface of the pond,
which itself changes every day
and no one can capture the way the sparkles glint in the light,
moving, like the swans, majestic,
oh they try yes they try but nothing
nothing captures it not even words

Frances Donovan
May 1, 2008

Maeve offered him even the pleasure of her thighs
- From the story of the Cow of Connacht and the Battle of Cuchulainn

And here at long last the body, its window cracked open at the helm
[...]
stay here all you broke-down
visions, supernumerary impulse-buys and over glutted infomercials of love, stay here
betwixt and between Restless Leg Syndrome, TMJ, discretionary income and the oft-extolled pleasures of the drug-free life, O boggy and efflorescent self, self of root cellars and forgotten tinctures, of mud and excrement and loam, but still at long last
the body, the non-body nearly arrived, relentless, full-throttle toward the irreparable
becoming [...]

See full text here (second item on page)

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch--
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour--where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Rita Dove

What the Dead Don't Need

No need for shoes, of course, or closets full of empty
dresses. No need for the shade of trees or the approval
of parents and friends. They don't care about the objects
of this world: a new computer, a house overlooking
the sea. The place they occupy may or may not contain
a window to all they've left behind. We, the living, think
of them without knowing who or what they have become.
Ghosts? Dust? Butterflies? Wind? Other mysteries--
puberty, sex, childbirth--are the business of life, and
anyone can tell their story. On the matter of death: only
a closed box and the silence of earth or ashes. When my
daughter was small, my disappearances behind a blanket
or a curtain seemed permanent. How could I exist if
I was not visible? When I returned, she was grateful:
laughter and kisses, her hand on the roots of my hair.

- Faith Shearin

Return to the food
return to the window before you:
single curtain side frame
shingled roof and brown brick building
		street between
the street always moving
still at this hour
never still

Return to the frame
Mind wanders
		maps
			peregrinates
unstuck from time
from the breakfast table
skips ahead
to the next bite of toast and what to spread on it
	butter
soy spread	
	margarine		sweet fruit
		banana
mashed peanuts
		acne
red Morse dash at the parting of her hair—
does that mean she is unmarried?
smile at the bag boy/
			grown man
hand him the green canvas/not canvas to contain your food
land of plenty 
penniless
	return
to the bite of toast in your mouth
this moment. here.
release the next. cars shush through the
windowpane,
		the eyes
of your limited spaceship
return
	to the bite of toast in your mouth
to the hot brown liquid
in the heavy porcelain
warming the palm
of your right hand

Frances Donovan
March 9, 2008